By John Arenas | October 21, 2013

Working From Home Doesn’t Make You a Farmer

Dear Corporate Employees: We’ve been working from home for centuries and are doing just fine.

Due to the rise of technology, mobility, and the global marketplace, most jobs can now be performed as easily and efficiently from a remote location as they can from a central office. Unfortunately, that rule doesn’t apply to everyone.

You might say that farmers are the original work-from-home model. Farmers are required to live and work in the same location due to demanding hours and labor-intensive tasks. Although these are the very aspects of the work that have made farming increasingly undesirable, resulting in the declining number of farmers in the U.S., the principle behind the work model has some similarities to our ideal workplace.

Consider a work day based on the natural cycle of life: Rising with the sun, walking to work, being outdoors and active rather than restricted to a desk, and working as a team toward a greater goal. Your coworkers might be a bunch of pigs, though.

In A Room with a View, novelist E. M. Forster has one of his characters observe, in a wry critique of another’s affluent superfluity, “the possession of leisure is a wonderful opportunity.” The same may be said of workplace flexibility. But as we like to say at Serendipity Labs: being able to work from anywhere is not the same as having a great place to work.