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This article also has a Czech version.

TL;DR ✨

The world of work is remarkable. It has come a long way from the Industrial Revolution to the present day. It began with people working 12 hours a day, six days a week, and working hours have gradually become shorter. Today, the standard is five days a week and 7.5 hours a day. It is entirely possible that, several decades from now, it will be four days a week and six hours a day.

As work evolved and became more specialized, human activity shifted from the hands upward, toward the mind. In contrast to manual labor, the transformation of work led to the rise of physically capable technicians who controlled things with their minds. Today, work has become so abstract that some people work solely with their minds, without needing physical fitness (people at universities, for example—no offense intended).

Remote Work as a Modern Benefit

✨ 🚀 Introduction

✨ 💼 The World of Work

The world of work is remarkable. It has come a long way from the Industrial Revolution to the present day. It began with people working 12 hours a day, six days a week, and working hours have gradually become shorter. Today, the standard is five days a week and 7.5 hours a day. It is entirely possible that, several decades from now, it will be four days a week and six hours a day.

✨ 💼 The Evolution of Work Over Time

As work evolved and became more specialized, human activity shifted from the hands upward, toward the mind. In contrast to manual labor, the transformation of work led to the rise of physically capable technicians who controlled things with their minds. Today, work has become so abstract that some people work solely with their minds, without needing physical fitness (people at universities, for example—no offense intended). The ability to work purely intellectually is closely connected to remote work. The abstraction of intellectual work has separated the physical from the mental. Today, the world of intangible products of the human mind represents the pinnacle of self-realization. Intangible work brings significant innovation; its products are harder to copy and steal, and there is no need to compete through speed or low prices. Remote work supports all of this. The idea comes from the well-known pyramid with basic research at the top (giving academics their credit back), followed by development, and finally technology, where a new phenomenon is applied in practice.

✨ About Remote Work

Remote work is very natural for people in IT. That is hardly surprising: from the beginning, the entire world of IT developed in a way that minimized the need to be physically present somewhere, for both natural and practical reasons. Something only needs to be physically installed; everything else can be done remotely as long as the machines are operational, connected to power and Ethernet, and have software protocols that enable remote work (iLO, SSH). IT is inherently somewhat different from other fields, but they do have something in common: the world of the intangible. It is a kind of meta-work, an integrative activity that supports abstract processes. As IT began to intersect with and influence other activities, it enabled a similar trend in other fields. It started with the rise of a new generation of jobs that did not exist at all twenty years ago, such as online marketing, copywriting, SEO, and graphic design. It then gradually spread into areas such as HR, sales, logistics, and many others.

🔍 COVID as a Driving Force

COVID was the most significant driving force behind this evolution. It was the first time the world was pushed into the online realm to an almost absurd degree—not naturally, but by necessity. Somehow, it worked, albeit rather precariously. Fields dependent on material work and physical presence then began using trial and error to see whether they too could operate remotely. A good example is the author's friend, who has a band and tried rehearsing together with the other members over Skype during COVID. It worked, but only precariously. It was not until 2023 that the Labor Code responded to home-office conditions. Before commenting on the Labor Code itself, it is worth taking a brief detour to consider the experience of IT professionals who have worked remotely for a long time. The myths and opinions spread by people who were not proficient in IT before they began working in the field can then be challenged.

✨ Myths About Remote Work

✨ 🏠 Remote Work Is a Benefit

Remote work is not a benefit. It is an entirely natural activity, but one that requires much greater self-discipline, far more effective communication, and the will to keep doing it over the long term. It requires resisting temptation. Like any other kind of work, remote work must be learned, and it is hard. It takes decades. Digital tools that substitute for in-person communication are deeply imperfect. On the phone or in a video conference, it is much harder to understand the emotion behind an emotion. In other words, a person may tell someone something, but there is something else behind it. This mental skill is very difficult to learn because of machine noise. Sarcasm can be recognized, but can someone tell whether the person speaking to them is angry or not? Mastering that skill takes practice. There is much greater pressure on the quality of written communication. Over time, a person begins to feel a certain mental isolation as a result of prolonged social separation while working at a machine. The world already understands waiters and other professions. People understand how difficult working with other people can be. They understand why teachers look for adults-only hotels, but there is much less understanding of the exhaustion that comes from spending 12 hours talking to machines. IT professionals generally seem strange to the rest of the world. Does a person have what it takes to belong among those strange people whom the world does not yet understand well enough? Can they cope with sometimes feeling as though their home were a prison—living in a single four-by-four-meter box and knowing only the refrigerator, stove, toilet, and desk with a PC? Remote work also requires suitable conditions (a separate room) and entails additional expenses. A person can save on transportation, avoid traffic jams, and escape the risks of the road. Those are benefits. The rest of remote work, however, is not quite the benefit it appears to be at first glance. It is a collection of additional complications.

✨ 🏠 Remote Work Means Finally Getting Everything Done at Home

Unfortunately, many people equate working from home with doing household chores. For many, working at home means: the boss cannot see them, so they will pretend to work while cleaning, washing dishes, fixing a bicycle, going to the bank, and so on. This is a profound misunderstanding of remote work and its nature. To be genuinely productive, a person cannot do two things at once. Either they focus on work, or they do what needs to be done at home. Washing dishes during a short break away from the PC, or hanging up laundry, may be an exception. If someone lacks sufficiently good communication skills and goes to the bank when they are supposed to be at their PC, it does not look good. They need to communicate it and make others aware of their potential unavailability by placing a blocker in the calendar. A person cannot simply go and do something without telling anyone. These are established best practices. Otherwise, working with them will become miserable for everyone else, and they will soon lose not only remote work but perhaps the job itself. Employers generally do not want to pay parasites who fail to do what they are supposed to do and leave others to finish it for them.

✨ 🏠 Remote Work Means Being Able to Work from the Beach

Because of one unnamed person, remote work became synonymous on the Czech internet with “doing business from the beach.” Certain people, economically motivated by their own business activities, invested considerable effort in creating this nonsense, and many people outside IT believe that remote work can be done from a beach. It cannot. To be truly effective, a person needs not only suitable surroundings—a reasonable temperature and no need to shake sand out of the PC every evening—but also enough peace and quiet to achieve the necessary concentration. Traveling while working is very difficult. A person cannot sit on two chairs at once. Either they work or they travel. If the two are mixed badly, the results of both are poor. The remote-work output is worthless, and the person does not enjoy many sights either. One option, for example, is to travel somewhere for ten days, spend five of them working 12 hours a day, and then travel without stress for the remaining five. But does a person really want to work for 12 hours so that their added value remains attractive over the long term?

✨ 🏠 Remote Work Is Not Physically Demanding

It is—very much so. Everything suffers when a person works sitting down: the arms, legs, spine, muscles, and skeletal system. Producing full-quality work remotely requires not only following the basic principles of seated ergonomics over the long term, but also having the right supporting equipment and taking regular short breaks (to wash the dishes, for example). A person needs a very good chair, ideally at least three monitors, a good desk, regular massages, and exercise at least once a week. Not everyone is able to acquire these skills and habits associated with a different lifestyle. One example: a simple footrest costing a few hundred crowns can reduce the likelihood of needing to visit an orthopedist a few years later. There are many similar aids that a person needs to obtain. Remote work is simply physically demanding.

✨ Amendment to the Home-Office Provisions of the Law

This finally leads to the amendment to the Labor Code governing home-office conditions. First and foremost, setting this out in writing as a particular framework of rights, conditions, and rules is a good thing. In this respect, it is positive, and employers still have enough freedom to decide for themselves whether to allow remote work for particular professions.

• Unfortunately, the amendment is interpreted as a form of employee benefit. As already established, it is not a benefit.
• In addition, the requirement for employers to reimburse employees for electricity and gas is rather demotivating and provides little incentive.
• From an employee's perspective, genuinely working remotely imposes a disproportionate mental and physical burden, and the associated costs are much higher. It is simply not for everyone.
• Remote work can be a good option for mothers on maternity leave, but, as already established, a person cannot do two things at once. It is better for an employee to do at least something rather than nothing, but the output cannot be expected to match what it would be if that person were physically present with an offline team.
• It is therefore possible that employers will also discuss an appropriate salary reduction because of the anticipated lower output.
• It is very positive that a person can request home office when caring for a dependent. This is an accommodating step.

Overall, the amendment is lose-lose for both sides. It gives employers little incentive to allow someone to work remotely, especially when it reduces the degree of control they have over an employee who would otherwise be “under supervision.”

For employees, working remotely makes no sense unless they use their free time to learn a range of habits associated with changing their lifestyle and make a certain financial investment to secure suitable conditions that the employer is not obliged to provide.

✅ 🏁 Conclusion

Even with these negative prospects, remote work will continue to develop over time and will begin to predominate in the future. The author can imagine drivers sitting down at a PC in the morning and, one day, remotely driving a truck from the Netherlands to Bratislava.

! This activity has many points of friction, and without proper education, the field will not develop for the benefit of society but rather for the benefit of individuals at the expense of others.