👻 Snap's remote ultimatum

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Good Morning,

We’re starting off with a home office article from the Wall Street Journal this week, so it’s worth mentioning that the Essentials page, featuring the best products for your home (or mobile) office, has been updated with even more products.

While it covers a wide range of categories, there are always new, innovative products being made to help remote workers in all kinds of ways. So I’d love to hear from you if there’s anything missing from the Essentials page that more people need to know about.

What are the home office or remote work products that you love the most? Reply to this email and let me know!

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Remote Source Job Board

Featured companies:

Relativity: 76 remote jobs
Smartcat: 27 remote jobs
Cerebral: 14 remote jobs

🤝 Find Remote Jobs Here

Need to Know

🖥️ Home offices are changing for the better
Home office setup is beginning to look a lot different. With tens of millions of Americans working from home at least part of the week, home designers and architects have begun focusing more on how to best accommodate remote workers.

One of the biggest changes: people want to be able to comfortably work in different places throughout the house. That means including laptop-friendly seating, video-friendly backgrounds, and thoughtful lighting in more places than just the “home office” room.

Plus, more people now want Wi-Fi that’s accessible from outdoors, in-home spaces that can support colleagues working together, fans that run silently, and wall coverings or upholstered furniture that can dampen noise.

Further, more people are optimizing for wellness within their home office, in more ways than just upping their ergonomic chair game. Treadmills and other gym staples are now more common to see within home offices as people have more time to work out when they’re not commuting. (Wall Street Journal)

📍 Best US cities for remote workers
TechRepublic put together a ranking of the best (and worst) cities for remote workers, factoring in criteria like cost of living, average salaries, housing prices, tech networking opportunities, public schools, and more.

Top 5 cities:

1. Philadelphia

2. Milwaukee

3. Pittsburgh

4. Dallas-Fort Worth

5. Chicago

Philadelphia ran away with the victory in this ranking, taking the top spot for two of the criteria: job competitiveness and quality of life. Lower-than-average crime rates and easy access to parks helped Philly, despite the 3.07% personal income tax rate.

The lowest-ranked city was Oxnard, California, followed by two Florida cities: North Port and Cape Coral. (TechRepublic)

🚨 Mandatory remote work day leads to layoffs
Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler, Jeep, and more, wins the award for worst use of remote work. They issued a mandatory remote work day for hundreds of employers, and then held a virtual meeting in which they announced everybody on the call was being laid off.

Employees impacted were non-union workers in the US, primarily in technology and engineering roles.

Unfortunately, this now means companies announcing remote work days may not always be a good thing. (Yahoo! Finance)

🌍 Remote work is changing Europeans’ city choices
More and more Europeans are choosing to live outside of major cities like London or Amsterdam, opting for what are termed “second cities” like Leeds, Rotterdam, and Stuttgart.

Similar to what we’ve seen in the US, when employees have the ability to work from anywhere, many will use the opportunity to move to cities that will give them a higher quality of life.

Commercial real estate company JLL has specifically highlighted Lisbon and Manchester as cities that are ripe for development, given each city’s influx of remote workers and relative affordability. (Fortune)

👻 Snap issues office ultimatum
The parent company of Snapchat, whose CEO already insisted that employees primarily work from the office, is doubling down on its return-to-office policy.

Last week, they announced that remote employees have 60 days to come back to the office or leave the company.

Even though the office policy in 2022 called for 80% of time to be spent in the office, there were apparently exceptions made by the company to accomodate some remote workers. This recent announcement seems to revoke those exceptions in an attempt to bring everybody back in-person routinely. (Inc.)

🏢 Office occupancy faces remote work “black hole”
Real estate analysis firm Green Street published a note titled “The Black Hole of Office Occupancy” last week, attaching numbers to the well-understood impact remote work has had on commercial office space.

According to the report, “The cumulative amount of office space vacated since ’19 surpasses the amount seen during the dot-com bubble and dwarfs that of the Global Financial Crisis.”

About 25% of office space was available at the end of 2023, which is a historic high. Given long-term remote work trends, it’s unlikely that number will return to pre-pandemic levels for a long time, if ever again. (Reuters)

Stuff We Like

💡 Monitor light bar
An accessory that isn’t quite as common, the light bar is useful for anyone who wants to ensure their workspace is well lit without needing to light up an entire room. Tom’s Guide makes a good case for them and found this one on Amazon for less than $50. (Tom’s Guide)

🚙 Job board: SkipTheDrive
Never a bad thing to check out more remote job boards. The cleverly-named SkipTheDrive board features tons of remote jobs, as well as a page devoted to “micro job” sites like Fiverr where people can find more ways to make money while remote. (SkipTheDrive)

❓ Questions to ask at the midpoint of your career
Reflecting upon past work experience offers a chance to maximize your potential moving forward - and might be especially important given the recently tumultuous job market. These six questions can help you reflect on your strengths, understand your priorities, and point yourself in the right direction for the next chapter of your career. (Harvard Business Review)

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