Rural remote work benefits

Remote work has an incredible host of benefits. When done right, it can open the pathway to more meaningful, deeper work. It has benefits to both the organization and the employee, especially those employees in rural areas.

I moved to a rural village in northeastern Pennsylvania about a year ago. This wouldn’t have been possible without the ability to work remotely. There are exactly zero software companies here, aside from a smattering of insurance and financial companies working on in-house systems. Meanwhile, I had the opportunity to live at a ski lodge for the winter while working from afar! Talk about a great deal.

Then, when I found an incredible woman who made me want to stay out here, I didn’t have to worry about how it would impact my career. As a veterinarian, she isn’t able to just get up and move like I could. Working remote allowed us to make that arrangement work. Ultimately, love is more important that a career, but why not have both?

These benefits extend to the community as well. The ability of remote work to lift communities isn’t talked about as much as the other benefits, but it may have have the greatest potential to lift up communities that have been left behind by manufacturing. In the era of remote work, anyone can have a piece of the software pie. In the future, maybe even other decentralized manufacturing-based or AR/VR-assisted industries can find some of their workforce in remote areas.

Once you include asynchronous work in remote work cultures, there’s an added benefit to remote workers to have freedom throughout the day to take care of things if needed. I can mow the grass before a storm if needed, then work a bit later to get my projects done. If I had livestock (not yet, but in the near future), I could take a few breaks to tend to them. It opens up a type of living that was previously inaccessible to knowledge workers who spent long days in the office.

Remote work has the potential to reopen rural areas for business. I’m reaping the benefits and I’m hoping others have the opportunity to do the same as async and remote work continues to mature.