But when your entire team is out of the office indefinitely, it’s a different job.Įarlier this month, Chris Marsh, Research Director at 451 Research, a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence, discussed the crucial difference between remote work and distributed work. He makes the case that newly distributed companies tend to rely too much on real-time communication like chat and video meetings because they don’t have better systems in place to organize their work.Įven before the pandemic upended our lives and instantly changed our way of working, we’d been spending so much time bouncing between email, chat threads, status updates, cloud docs, and files, it was a struggle to keep track of all the details.

You may already be experienced at remote work and comfortable with occasionally keeping on top of tasks from home. There’s the disturbing news, and there’s the added struggle of learning how to work in an entirely new way-at home in isolation from your team. Now you’re dealing with a less predictable kind of chaos. Before COVID-19, the most stressful part of your day might’ve been the bumper-to-bumper commute across town to your office.

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