Vivian Gleich: Profile of a Remote Worker
Born and raised in the bustling metropolis of Mexico City, Vivian has always valued creativity, both her own and others’. Growing up, she would watch at the glamorous billboards that lined the Mexican capital’s streets in awe and could be found humming along to the jingles that played in her favourite television and radio ads. At the age of nineteen, while still a marketing student at Mexico’s prestigious Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey university, she began working part-time at a local advertising agency. Though advertising agencies were among the first office spaces to incorporate more modern layout designs, the offices Vivian worked at in the almost ten years prior to her switch to remote working still maintained most aspects of a traditional office space.
Over the course of ten years, Vivian worked in office spaces in both her hometown of Mexico City and in Dallas, United States after emigrating in the year 2000. Shortly after moving to Dallas, however, she made the switch and began working remotely.
In the year 2001, Vivian welcomed her first daughter. Alongside her work, taking care of her new family became her top priority. She now had a newfound need to have a better balance between her work and her home life. At the time, she saw working remotely as the best course of action to take in order to be able to keep working and her spend time with her children. She began working from home for the next several years as she found she was easily able to care for her children as while also rising through the ranks of the competitive world of advertising.
After remaining a remote worker for several years, Vivian was faced with the opportunity to return to an office space and briefly worked at the Conill Advertising Agency’s office in the downtown Miami, Florida area before returning to remote working. After having experienced the environment a conventional office workspace and spending nearly a decade working remotely at home, Vivian found that working remotely best suited her goals and was an environment she could more easily adapt to serve her needs.
Benefits of Working Remotely
Being a working parent always presents its own set of challenge. When she first began working remotely, Vivian was a new parent in an unfamiliar country. Working from home allowed her to spend more time with her children than she would if she worked in an office while also continuing to pursue a full-time career. With the technological advances of the modern age, working remotely has become much easier - over time, it became possible to attend staff meetings, have important client interactions, and give presentations from home - and has increased productivity and quality of work due to the greater control remote workers have over their work environment.
Working remotely also allowed her to acquire more clients based abroad, as working remotely made it easier for her to work following her clients’ schedules more closely without being constricted to her own time zone’s normal 9:00 to 5:00 work schedule. Vivian quickly found that working at the same time her international clients facilitated contact between both parties and strengthened both her professional relationships with clients. Better client relationships increased her reputation in her clients’ - and therefore, her employer’s - eyes, doing so from the comfort of her own home, without the stress and hassle of the long commute.
Vivian’s time working in conventional office spaces opened her eyes to it many professional benefits and over ten years working remotely allowed her to experience the pros of remote working first-hand and drove her choice to ultimately remain as a remote worker. As of now, Vivian has been working remotely for several advertising agencies and multimedia communications groups for almost twenty years, including the Leo Burnett Company, Conill Advertising Agency, and Árbol Communications Group.
Drawbacks of Remote Working
The primary reason Vivian chose to remain a remote worker was the work-life balance she was able to maintain in a way co-workers and friends who worked in office spaces were less able to. After working remotely for several years, Vivian chose to temporarily return to a traditional office space while employed by the Conill advertising firm, though she soon remembered how beneficial remote working was to her desired lifestyle. Still, the issues she experienced as a remote worker were some many others experience as well.
For one, the line between one’s work life and personal life was blurred drastically. Working in the same space as her young children became her primary distractor throughout the day. The mere fact that Vivian was working in a comfortable, less rigid environment sometimes proved to be a drawback that took away from her focus on any given day’s task. It’s fairly easy to give into everyday temptations when they are easily available; there’s no one but yourself to judge you or immediate repercussions if you stop working to take a short nap, get distracted browsing the web, or watch television when you are at home, away from co-workers, bosses, and employers.
The biggest issue Vivian has faced in her time as a remote worker is one that is often brought up in the argument against working remotely - the lack of interpersonal communication. Humans are social creatures, and face-to-face communication is an important need that must be met. As with any work environment, we communicate with those in our vicinity. Issues arise, then, when you work alone in your home. Oftentimes, remote workers find that only being able to speak and interact with other adults is through a computer screen, e-mail correspondence, and phone calls or video chat. As a result of almost entirely digital human interactions, a sense of isolation can develop.
In advertising, the process that takes an idea into a finished product, whether it be a televised advertisement or social media campaign, requires the input and edits of multiple people. In being largely isolated from individuals in one’s field, it can be difficult to receive feedback and constructive criticism from your peers, as Vivian has also experienced.
There is also an oftentimes unexpected drawback to working remotely, and it is in fact one of it’s benefits: the lack of a fixed work schedule. Not being restricted to a typical nine-to-five office job can prove greatly beneficial to one’s productivity in creative fields such as advertising. However, in Vivian’s case, at times her lack of a fixed schedule resulted in her being perceived as a sort of 24/7 worker, clients and employers expecting her to be available at all hours for the mere fact that her desk was in her living room, not in an office.
In Vivian’s case, such issues did drive her to resume working in a conventional office space temporarily before ultimately returning to working remotely, since, at the end of the day, doing so better allowed Vivian to balance her work with her family life. Because of her decision to work remotely, Vivian was able to spend a greater amount of time with her growing family and remain as a full-time employee instead of giving up one for the other as is so often the case.
How Co-Working Spaces Come Into Play
Though each remote worker has his or her own motivations behind working outside of an office, and Vivian’s experiences may not be the same as yours, you may have shared many of the issues she has encountered in her eighteen years as a remote worker. And, like her, you are aware of the issues presented to you but do not want to move your workspace into a traditional office. In these situations, co-working spaces provide an alternative to both working from home and in an office.
Shared office spaces have grown in popularity over the last few years, primarily because they combine the best of both worlds: flexible work hours and convenience with the amenities provided in many offices that are less easily available to remote workers, like free coffee, a place to separate one’s work life from his or her personal life, and a community of fellow remote workers.
As they are centred around their clients, co-working spaces cater to their individual needs and offer a high level of control. Privately owned co-working spaces, as opposed to those run by larger institutions like banks, are available to clients for more hours out of the day rather than just when their parent institution is open - they don’t tend to be restricted by a 9:00 to 5:00 work week. There is also the added benefit of having the ability to utilize a co-working space during the weekend, allowing remote workers like Vivian to get ahead or catch up with more ease. To say the least, co-working spaces offer a perfect balance between the convenience of not having a fixed work schedule with the ability to work whenever and for however long you choose.
Co-working spaces also offer freelance and remote workers with certain amenities that create a work environment more comfortable than a conventional office space yet still offers the feel of an office space, an aspect beneficial to those who may struggle with distractions. Clients of a co-working space are able to come and go as they please and use the space’s many amenities, which oftentimes include access to printers and scanners, free beverages (both hot and cold), a comfortable workspace, meetings rooms and private offices, and reliable and fast broadband internet included the price.
One of the most important, if not the most, and significant benefits of utilizing a co-working space is the ability to interact and network with other people. Remote workers often experience feelings of isolation brought on by reduced human interaction, an experience Vivian is all too aware of. The clients of a co-working space are able to speak to other clients or even the co-working space’s onsite staff, potentially receiving advice and feedback regarding their work while also fulfilling their need for socialization and interaction. Occupying the same workspace can also facilitate networking between individuals, either in different or similar fields, that may otherwise be more difficult or even impossible from an office or home.
With nearly thirty years of experience in advertising and eighteen years as a remote worker, Vivian has accumulated plenty of experience working both at home and in an office space over the years. Though her personal experiences are unique, you may easily relate to the issues she has faced as well as the benefits she has found. While, previously, one could only choose between working in an office or working at home, the rise of co-working spaces over the last several years has provided an alternative many remote workers find far more suitable to their needs and gives remote workers a convenient, more personal place to work that is also better suited to their needs, wishes, and today’s rapidly developing world.
Vivian Gleich has almost thirty years experience in the fields of advertising, communications, and marketing and has spent the past eighteen years working remotely. Her work over the past several decades has been internationally recognized as such prestigious festivals as Cannes, One Show, and New York Festival among others. She is currently the Chief Creative Director for Árbol Communications Group based out of Miami, Florida.
