A Twitter conversation earlier this morning got me interested in looking at some basic data on remote work in America. The starting point came from Adam Ozimek of Upwork, who surveyed corporate executives and concluded that they were much more open to the idea of remote work than they had been before the pandemic. After all, remote work has lots of advantages.
Likewise, there have been a lot of news reports about people moving during the pandemic, usually from crowded cities to smaller towns where the risk of being infected by COVID-19 is perceived to be lower. After all, if they can continue doing their jobs from anywhere, why not?
Let's take a look at a couple of pieces of data. First off, here is geographic mobility over the past few decades:
The data for 2020 is estimated from US Postal Service change-of-address cards, and the entire chart is only for (a) permanent movers who (b) move across county lines. As you can see, there's been a long-term decline in permanent moves, and even the pandemic didn't change that by more than a hair.
Here is the pre-pandemic trend in working at home, also based on Census data:
This chart is interesting but inconclusive. One interpretation is that despite the fact that remote work has lots of advantages, it's only grown by a meager two percentage points over the course of 20 years. That doesn't suggest an awful lot of enthusiasm for it even though—contrary to much punditry—I can assure you that corporate execs are keenly aware of its pros and cons and have been pondering it closely for years.
A different interpretation is that at 5.5% there's a ton of room for growth since, roughly speaking, about a third of Americans work in jobs that could be done at home. All it will take is for hiring managers and employees to be exposed to it and decide they like it.
These raw data posts aren't generally a place for me to make an argument. They're just places to present interesting data. So I'll just say that this is a good area to keep an eye on to test my basic hypothesis about pandemic behavior: It will very quickly go away and corporate life will return to its 2019 baseline. People don't really want to move, even as the cost of big cities continues to increase, and they've never warmed to remote work despite its myriad advantages. The big question is whether merely being forcibly exposed to it will change this dynamic significantly even though the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked. I don't think it will. Adam disagrees. Come back in 2023 and we'll settle this once and for all.
If big business owners find out that a lot of their work can be done completely remotely, they may be turning to foreign labor which is much lower cost. Obviously many simpler jobs are already done this way.
Pretty much everything than can be offshored already has been (to a first order approximation). There's a bunch of reasons, some involving language, time zones and regulations, why a job that can be done fifteen miles up the road from the office-- my situation-- can't be done on the other side of the planet.
One strange thing I've learned this last year is how many colleagues have second homes (either of their own or some sort of family retreat). Seems like a not-small number of them all have country homes they can work from.
As someone who worked from home for 20 years, I'd guess most people would hate that arrangement on a permanent basis. The toughest adjustment was the first year or two, and after that it did become more routine.
I never wanted to go back to the office because the round trip commute was 2 1/2 hours/day. Savings in windshield time outweighed any drawbacks.
The ideal arrangement would have been an office five minutes away. That would have made it easier to keep home and work separate. But it wasn't an option for me.
I think a hybrid schedule would be a good permanent arrangement for many:
--A 4-day workweek (Fridays are common days off already)
--2 or 3 days in the office, 1 or 2 days work from home
I have a counterpoint: it's too early to tell. COVID still being a thing is likely to have tamped down on moving. I would wait until 2022 when we can see how many people moved in 2021 and early 2022, after COVID restrictions are largely or completely gone.
Does that 5.5% only include those who work 100% from home, or does it also include those who work "mostly from home"?
Anecdotally, it seems like the entire DC nonprofit sector (at least on the administrative side) will be going majority remote on a permanent basis. We've only all been telling our old-school bosses that we could do this for years... To a lesser extent this has applied to those I know who work in local government positions.
On a broader scale, I would expect that most administrative jobs can be done from home on a permanent FT basis. Not reception, not facilities management, etc. And many others (accounting, insurance adjusting/claims, call center, etc.) can be done at least 80% remotely, with only occasional trips to the office needed. So how many jobs in the economy are those?
And a final point: not paying for office space allows for companies to shift expenses to employees. As I discovered when doing my taxes this year, I can't deduct my home office expenses from my income because I am a W-2 employee and am not self-employed. So the office presence that I maintain in my home is not deductible for me, but would be deductible for a business. Same goes for the increased utility cost (between my partner and I, definitely about +$600 for electricity, water, and gas).
And for those of us in nonprofits, it's a big incentive for the nonprofit employer to cut office expenses because there is no taxable income from which the nonprofit gets to deduct the rent expense. I have equity concerns here long-term, the solution for which is that nonprofit employers should probably offer a remote work stipend or other benefit (less than a 5-day work week, for example) to compensate for this shift in cost from employer to employee.
I'm in the DC area too. We've been full time telework for a year now, I'm a Civil Service employee. My job can be done 100 percent telework except for renewing my access card and getting my aging laptop replaced. Productivity and stats actually improved with telework so the bosses are totally rethinking previous assumptions. There is no longer any paper to push, everything is electronic and using external monitors mean I can have a spreadsheet in one screen and the system in another or a skype screen and so on.
Pre_Covid we were all shoehorned into a bullpen where we were NOT socially distanced and we fretted that the HVAC wasn't up to snuff. My agency is spread all around town as we assumed some offices that were a part of another department of the Army and were to be their own agency but Congress then decided to merge them with us. Management wants to consolidate us into the HQ site but before COVID the post fire marshalls said we had too many people per floor. They were also spitballing about having folks be "full time telework" but coming into the office 1 day per week, yet there's not enough parking spaces in the garage and now the garage has pieces of concrete falling with large areas blocked off.
I can't see any way to accomplish what they want to accomplish so I'm going to guess between delays in really being past the COVID dangers and the reality of not enough office space and parking spaces my team will be teleworking full time for a lot longer and maybe even a situation where they will be glad that some of us want to work at home full time.
I'm fortunate that I don't have children and I have a dedicated bedroom for my office. It's a much nicer setup than the cramped cube at work, yes I spent some $$$ for it but I spent it a few years back for both personal computer projects and the one day a week I had been teleworking.
DC is likely a unique situation but on the news they said DC had the highest drop in traffic since 2019 because so many workers are now working from home. They are not going to farm out my job to someone in India for sure but I'm having a hard time seeing how my agency could figure out how to force us to come in a couple of times a week without a huge sacrifice in productivity.
How did you use that much more in utilities? I have a spreadsheet handy with my own expenses and my total electric/gas bill (I don't pay water) for last year was slightly less than for 2019, probably due to having less extreme weather, both winter and summer, last year compared to the prior year.
My employer owns the office space where I would otherwise be working, a fairly large building, so I expect we will be going back to the office on a regular basis since they won't be able to unload it easily as it would if all they had to do was let a lease run out.
How does US geographic mobility compare with Europe?
My view may be skewed by the Bay Area, but I know a lot of people who have made the permanent move because they have been told they don't have to come back in. My old boss at one of the big radio groups said they won't renewing their lease and they are about as far from tech culture mind set as you can get.
I guess the numbers are skewed because the number of people working from home is actually fairly small as a share of the population. In my large company (+10,000 employees) more than half have switched to work from home, I guess. That is big for us, but not large compared to the workforce as a whole.
I've worked from home for over 20 years. It has a lot of advantages, primarily no commute. There are disadvantages as well. I miss out on all sorts of office gossip that actually provides a lot of useful information. People cross paths in the hallway and exchange all sorts of useful information. I can see reducing office time by one or two days a week, but keeping some office time is good for everyone.
There are a number of stories coming out regarding businesses that are going so far as to sell their own buildings. One of the latest examples is DropBox, which just sold its own HQ in San Francisco.
If their actions are based entirely on the idea that purely remote work is here to stay, then I think they're making an extraordinarily hasty determination. We just don't know yet. And getting your own HQ in SF is no small feat. Summarily giving up on it strikes me as kind of astonishing.
Perhaps companies like DropBox are making such sales because they actually do need to raise some cash. But even then, I can't imagine why they don't just do some short or long term leasing of their building.
If I had to take a guess, I'd say that the future for certain businesses such as tech companies will be a hybrid model. I doubt that the remote genie can be put back in the bottle. But, similar to Kevin, I also doubt that human nature has changed overnight (or, in the space of one year).
People certainly want to avoid their commutes. But commutes are not the only facet of in-person work. Speaking from my own experience working remotely for a year, communication has become harder. The members of my dpmnt are drifting further apart until we basically have as many departments as there are people because each person eventually just develops their own way of doing and understanding everything.
Catching up with someone in person, or quickly asking about a topic, is easy. Catching them on zoom or teams or (worst of all) email is surprisingly more time-consuming and difficult. And details become more sparse. I think even the fastest typers find it easier to relate details through the spoken word than through chats or emails.
So I don't personally think entirely remote work is a good idea when it's sustained over time. I suspect that, eventually, a lot of people and companies will come to the same conclusion. And the businesses that sold their own buildings in such a premature manner will to at least some extent regret it.
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> I think even the fastest typers find it easier to relate details through the spoken word than through chats or emails.
Nope. Some of us find it easier to think when we are writing.
In a given day, I interact with people in India, France, Texas, Washington state, Northern California, Southern California, and Pittsburgh. Zoom sucks, but google hangouts is quick and easy, and gets easier when you use it every day. We share screens, we use 'chat', we use video, we share documents where we comments in the margin -- we have a huge variety of ways to communicate. Even when we were in the office, we would often email people who literally sat at the next desk.
Everything you describe can indeed produce a perfectly good remote working environment: but only for a certain type of person. You seem to be that type of person, and that’s fine. But one lesson that has become crystal clear to me over the last year is that not everyone is like you. In fact, I have learned more or less definitively which of my coworkers are good remote workers and which aren’t: some of them take to it with the kind of gusto you describe while others seem to just disappear into what is now the literal distance.
So this is why a hybrid model of future work may indeed be effective: it will ideally provide an appropriate setting for the times and situations that work well for both effective remote workers as well as those who deal with others better in person.
But this is also why it’s so absurd for a company like Dropbox to apparently give up on in-person work and sell their own HQ. They appear to be going strait from one extreme to the other. They likely had too much emphasis on in-person work in the past, and that approach very well might have inconvenienced good remote workers. And now they skip straight over any middle ground and rocket over to the other end of the spectrum where they will base everything on remote work to the inevitable detriment of those personality types that will not take well to such an arrangement.
It’s just obviously hasty. It’s clearly not thought out well enough. And I continue to believe that companies engaged in what certainly looks like reckless decision-making will regret it after the pandemic is finally over.
I absolutely cannot work at home. Too many distractions. I cannot wait to go back to campus and actually do something.
I just want to come out of this with HR departments being more flexible for those of us who have known for a long time that full time telework is what they’ve always wanted and have finally gotten the chance to love it. I fully can admit and see that most people will probably want to go back to the office at least part time. But I really don’t. I’m happier and more productive at home.
In the 18 years covered by the WFH graph, the fraction of the work force working from home has increased by more than half, from about 3.3% to about 5.3%. That's not an extremely rapid growth rate, but it's certainly significant, and fairly steady (what happened in '04-'05?) I expect that the current WFH rate has been high enough for long enough that it's no longer a novelty or an unknown. Managers deciding who can work from home now have lots of data on which to make an informed decision, as opposed to the early movers who had to make decision based on guesses. This may mean that WFH is about to hit takeoff, and expand rapidly, or stay expanded post covid.
Also, you have to have room for a dedicated office to be truly productive I think. My wife has worked from home for 10 years so when COVID hit, I was relegated to the kitchen table. I find driving in to my office 15 minutes away to be far more beneficial.