Industrial revolution to slack: Here's a brief history of remote working

Even since India started witnessing incidents of COVID-19, collaborative software company Zoho has been encouraging its employees to go back to their hometowns and operate from there, if they have internet connectivity. Sridhar Vembu, co-founder and CEO of the Chennai-based firm himself has since been operating out of a remote farm in Tenkasi, a village in Tamil Nadu. Not just that, the company has announced to offer its newly-launched remote work toolkit called Remotely for free to everyone, as more enterprises allow their employees to work from home or remote locations to stop the spread of the deadly coronavirus. While Zoho is just one of the many players in the cloud-based collaborative software space, several advancements in technologies over the past decades have really enabled the workforce to effectively and efficiently work from remote locations.

1760-1840: Industrial revolution created the momentum towards working outside the home

Early 1900’s: Birth of modern offices in America; they gave rise toinnovations such as telephone, telegraph, typewriter 

1968: Design of cubicle by Robert Probst

1973: Physicist Jack Nilles, who is known as the father of remote work, coined the word “telecommuting”. 

1975: First personal computer designed

1979: IBM allowed five employees to work from home on as an experimental basis. By 1983, roughly  2,000 IBM employees were working remotely

1983: Birth of internet

Mid-1980s: J C Penney allowed call-centre employees to work from home. By 1987, number of telecom-muting American grew to 1.5 million

1991: Invention of Wi-Fi

2000: Enactment of the DOT Appropriation Act which required all executive agencies to establish telecommuting policies

2005: First official co-working space created in San Francisco

2008: Launch of enterprise social networking tool, Yammer. In 2012, it was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion

2018: 70 per cent of world’s population work remotely at least one a week, 53 per cent half the week, said reports

2019: Video collaboration software Zoom reports 50,800 customers with just over 10 employees, a 5X increase from 2017

Softwares and tools

Slack: A collaborative instant messaging platform developed by Slack Technologies

Zoho Connect: A team collaboration app by Zoho Corp that unifies people for faster communication and better collaboration

Office 365: An integrated suite of cloud-based applications by Microsoft

Zoom: A video communication software that enables one to attend meeting from desktop, mobile device, or conference room

Google Hangouts: Makes collaboration easy; can hold video conferences and live-stream meetings

Jira: It is a proprietary issue tracking software from Atlassian, which allows agile project management

Confluence: An open and shared workspace that connects people to information they need to build