How To Start Working Fully Remotely In 2021?

COVID-19 has caused a dramatic change in business forever when it hit in April 2020, and yet – you could very well use that to your advantage.

In the best-selling book NYC Is Dead Forever… Here’s Why, the author and entrepreneur James Altucher explained how companies were realizing that maybe they didn’t all need in-person offices. This analysis goes into detail about New York’s storied history as the business hub of the world, and how this pandemic has forced this business haven to change everything about its system – specifically the fields where people work.

Many workers who have been working remotely for years now can confirm that the idea of going back to an office would be terrible. Instead, many remote workers prefer staying at home and wouldn’t mind consigning to this fate for the rest of their careers.

And now with many other individuals realizing some of the perks of working at home, it’s high chances that many people will be looking to work remotely too. Even years after this pandemic is over.

Because of this, we wanted to put together a comprehensive guide for you all: one that can keep you at home when working remotely. Essentially, it comes down to two possible ways: either asking your current employer to allow you to work from home or becoming an at-home entrepreneur.

This guide will dive down and explore both of these paths.

Negotiate To Work At Home

Tim Denning is one of the top writers on medium.com and he consistently earns as little as $10,000 to as high as $25,000 per month.

It’s an incredible feat, though it’s undercut by the fact that he built this up while still working a full-time day job.

According to Denning, the critical turning point for him was talking to his boss about a weekly remote day. This allowed him to work on his side-business and develop his writing brand that now earns him top dollars.

While it might’ve been tougher for Denning back then, it’s going to be a lot easier for people today to negotiate these sorts of deals. Companies are more open to the idea of remote working after COVID-19 spread across the world. They realized that having employees working remotely offers a ton of benefits.

While not every person is on board with the idea, your negotiating efforts should be focusing more on these benefits rather than the general idea of working remotely.

Diving deeper into it, the best way to be selling your employers into this idea is to focus more on the transactional aspect and answer the question “what’s in it for the company for me to work remotely?”

There’s a scene in Mad Men that fits this narrative perfectly. It involves Don Draper lecturing his assistant Peggy Olson about her dissatisfaction about work. In the lecture she protested that she wanted more credit for the ideas she came up with.

“It’s your job! I give you money, you give me ideas!” Don yells at Peggy.

“But you never say thank you!” Peggy bursts out in anger.

“That’s what the money’s for!” Don counters.

The point of explaining that scene is that even though you think it’s a good idea to work remotely, the company probably doesn’t care so much about that. Instead, they’ll care more about what you could be doing for them if you pick up remote work. You’ll find this big time in larger corporations compared to smaller sized companies.

Nevertheless, you still want to keep it transactional and use this knowledge to filter your pitch.

The question we’ve mentioned above will work, but here are some other questions to help:

• Why would they want me to work remotely?
• How will my remote work benefit them?

This same sort of logic works in scenarios of asking for raises as well. The months leading up to asking for a raise, you’ll want to be spending more time on your work to make it look more pristine. This allows them to see how much more work you could do for them moving forward.

You could also take this approach as well with remote working. Make sure you’ve gathered up some raw data with some provable numbers and show the company that you’re capable of working remotely with outcome and results just as good as if you were in the office. On top of that, you’ll also want to prove that you are productive at home as well, which you certainly can do, since you’re bound to be working remotely at the moment if you’re considering this path.

All that you have to really do is prove to your boss that you can work remotely and pull it off just fine.