Over the past 19 months, millions of Americans have discovered the benefits of working from home.
However, while Insider correspondent @AkiIto7 loves the freedom of working from home, she’s starting to worry that we may end up paying a heavy price for it.
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For college-educated professionals like @AkiIto7, work from anywhere is starting to look more like work from everywhere.
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Decades of research have highlighted the dangers of giving people unfettered autonomy in the workplace: Rather than setting their own boundaries, employees often end up working longer and harder than before.
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Ambitious professionals have always worked long hours.
But for decades, going to work at an office placed a physical limit on how long those hours could be.
What changed that was technology — like the revolutionary @BlackBerry.
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Suddenly, white-collar workers could bring their work with them everywhere they went.
With everyone choosing to be available constantly a new norm had formed: one that forced professionals to be available at all times.
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Since then, a succession of new technologies has turbocharged the paradox.
iPhones have replaced BlackBerrys, and are loaded with tools like Slack that tethered them to their jobs even more.
Laptops also allow people to take their work home with them.
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If all the workplace technologies of the past two decades had steadily chipped away at the boundary between work and home, then full-time work from home — enabled by those technologies — finally obliterated that boundary altogether.
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But the rapid rise of working from home raises an important question: How can we create boundaries around work when we're doing our jobs from our bedrooms and carrying our offices with us on our phones?
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In many jobs, limiting your work hours, or refusing to make yourself available on demand, can come with steep consequences.
It's employers, not employees, who have the primary responsibility to set — and enforce — a standard of behavior for remote work.
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If the underlying culture of the workplace doesn't change, people will find a way to get around the rules to get ahead.
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