For the last few years, I have not worked from our company’s office in Morrisville, NC. Instead, I’ve worked remotely, mainly from home. However, I can work any time from anywhere. And, I’ve worked from many different location, even while on a cruise in the Caribbean last year.

Obviously, there are many benefits. Primarily, I don’t have the long time waste and stress builder called a commute. My commute was 45 minutes to an hour. Now, of course, my “commute” is just a few minutes.

There are detriments as well. I don’t see my coworkers face-to-face very often.

But, I’m not as interested in personal pros and cons of remote working. I’m more interested in how it affects us working together as a company. We have had to carefully select tools and systems that allow us to communicate, cooperate, and collaborate effectively, even though we don’t see each other.

(Hmmm… Communicate, cooperate, and collaborate… Three C’s… I guess I did learn something from my preaching classes.)

But, to bring this out of the mode of alliteration, these three C’s all amount to interdependence. As a company, our team works independently but also dependently. We are all interdependent on one another. We can’t hide from one another. Well… actually we can; and it’s easy to hide from each other since we are not sitting in the same location. But when we hide from one another and we do not intentionally work with one another interdependently, then our work as a company and as a team is affected negatively.

Remote work is a buzzword kind of thing these days. But it can be a very effective benefit for employees and companies. At the same time, it doesn’t work for everyone employee or everyone company.

Occasionally, I plan to write about some of the tools that we use to work remotely and discuss how these help us work interdependently.

How about you? Do you work remotely? Have you ever worked remotely? What pros and cons do you see from working remotely?