More than four years after the conversation on remote work began, the focus of the discussion keeps remaining on how to balance work productivity and employee expectations. What’s missing - and what I think it has been consistently overlooked - is a deeper discussion about the role we want workplaces to play in the society and how we perceive work itself.

I mean: do we want workplaces to remain spaces where individuals grow and mature as both individuals and citizens? Or are we content to reduce work to a mere service transaction, where the sole role of an employee is to produce an outcome, the employer is a client and colleagues are simply connections?

Because this is what’s at stake: the dematerialization of workplaces, while making our daily routines more convenient, also risks making us more vulnerable; vulnerability stemming from the fact our sense of community is weakened.

Do you want an example? Just a few years ago, firing staff via videocall was socially unacceptable, with the emotional impact on removing an employee on the rest of the organization carefully considered. Today, it's a more impersonal act, with little concern for the consequences. Companies nowadays know they sever connections rather than ending relationships, making the impact on other employees less significant. If you think there’s no difference on bonding between working in person and remotely, consider the stronger tie created by a handshake compared to a wave from behind a screen.

In short, our lives as providers of “work as a service” as opposed to “work as a community” may have become easier - no commute, more free time, fewer difficult colleagues to handle - but we’ve also become more vulnerable. We are more of individuals and less of a community, with all that this entails.

This topic was explored by Italian author Marco Bracconi in his 2020 book La Mutazione (The Mutation), where he argued that remote work, introduced during the months of the pandemic, should have been viewed like a fire extinguisher during a house fire - worthy of everlasting gratitude but meant to be set aside once the fire is out and life returns to normal. If instead remote work is here to stay, we should ask ourselves deeper questions than just how to keep employees focused during videocalls or the best times in the day to take breaks.

As Bracconi writes: “It should be our instinct for citizenship […] to make us wary of remote work. It should be such instinct as well as the language itself, because 'remote' means distant, while a society is a place where people stay close, not just when they're having fun but also when they're working. […] History tells us that only when people group to work and form a critical mass, they improve their own conditions and the society. When they’re having fun, even if they’re all together, they improve nothing at all.”