Here's some raw data for the "COVID-19 changed everything forever" file:
I was inspired to retrieve this data by a short piece in the Atlantic that points out just how badly we smart people have estimated the impact of the pandemic:
Last week, The Atlantic commissioned a poll from Leger, asking Americans to estimate how many people had worked from home during the pandemic....About 90 percent of surveyed respondents who worked from home in August because of the pandemic guessed that at least 40 percent of Americans did too. In reality, only 13.4 percent worked from home in the final month of summer.
There are two fundamental disconnects here. First, white-collar folks routinely forget that the vast majority of jobs—nurses, truck drivers, retail clerks, etc.—can't be done from home in the first place. Only about a third of all jobs are even open to telecommuting.
Second, white-collar folks sort of assume that everyone is like them. If they've been telecommuting, or if they know others who have been telecommuting, then it seems natural that loads of people are telecommuting. But it's not so.
Anyway, we're already down to a pandemic-related telecommuting rate of 13% and the trend is still going down. This isn't proof of anything, but it's certainly suggestive that a year from now the overall rate of working from home will be a little higher than it used to be, but will hardly represent a massive upheaval in the workplace.
Always remember Kevin's Law of the Pandemic: When it's over, everything will go back to normal. People claiming that it will spur a permanent change in _________ are pretty much all wrong.
This is one area where I definitely agree with you. Odds are pretty good we're back to the normal within a few months once Covid-19 recedes, with no persistent changes aside from an acceleration of mRNA vaccines and medical treatment.
I never expected that the working from home 100% of the time would become general (in jobs where it's possible) but I do think firms that were resistant to allowing work from home at all will be more permissive about part-time working from home.
I think some of them will become a lot more permissive of it in the case of parents of young children (especially in a tight labor market), but generally most will require working on site besides that.
I don't think they'd get away with limiting their permissiveness to just parents. That would create too much complaint and workforce resentment. What I do see happening is that the level of permissiveness will (for a while at least) be pushed down to department or even sub-department level.
My view is that the pandemic opened some minds that working from home a few times a week or month is not proof that your are definitely a slacker.
we will go back to normal but with more flexibility allowed in the system.
true...
If you stay away too much, you might lose your desk...and if you lose your desk, you do not exist.
This is a management problem, not an employee problem.
Surprise! A lot of managers aren't good managers. Change the managers in these cases, not the employees. Or fall behind...
just how badly we smart people have estimated the impact of the pandemic:
It's been super obvious from the getgo that millennia of agglomeration effects mean that: A) the work from home boomlet has been massively overhyped and B) the flight from cities has been massively overhyped.
wait...where you the one who bought the skinny house?
where, were--it all sounds the same in Boston 😉
The Law of Laws: all laws are wrong. Applies forever and everywhere. You read it here first.
How many "work from home because of the pandemic" people (subject of the graph) have become "work from home regardless of the pandemic"? Quite a few at my company.....
I would have thought, particularly given the downward trend in the chart, we would want to see the work from home percentage for several months prior to the pandemic and not just the “because of the pandemic” version. Work from home could easily shift from “because of the pandemic” to “because I (still) may” …
There's a lot of push back among workers who can work from home to continue doing so. So many Tech jobs and Accounting jobs do NOT need to be in person. Folks who talk about "not being in person" being damaging to career prospects are looking at it all wrong. If that is the case it simply means management is being stupid and not doing enough one on one with underlings via skype, slack etc.
It will be very damaging to everyone's future quality of life if we don't push jobs into work from home when feasible. It will help with Climate Change and help prevent work time lost due to sicknesses and bad weather and it will get more folks back into the workforce.
"bUt My OfFiCe FiEfDoM!!!1!" - basically every anti-remote manaager, probably
But for real - yes. However, for all the push back from workers... The anti-remote/pro-office/pro-commute/pro-bullshit narrative is being pushed on all fronts: https://ez.substack.com/p/the-pro-office-silent-majority-is
Very Good link. Thank you! I do fear the push back from the powerful might attempt to turn back the clock and there's been many b*llsh*t articles in mainstream news that make one go HUH?
There's a lot of push back among workers who can work from home to continue doing so.
Quite right. So it will ultimately come down to A) how is productivity affected (in some cases WFH might boost productivity, in some cases perhaps not) and B) how badly the employer wants you.
Clearly many workers will continue to work from home, but, A) that trend to my eyes looked to be growing (finally! after many years of pie in the sky promises that were right up there with flying cars and fusion energy) after about 2012 or so; so it's not clear how much the pandemic* will have been responsible for any long term trends; and, B) I expect the most common arrangement will be WFH supplementing office work, especially among the most in-demand knowledge workers. People who simply don't ever go into the office will remain a tiny minority.
*Let's imagine the "back to normalcy" trend Kevin highlights will continue over the next several years and, say, by 2025 WFH is ten percent higher than it was in 2019. I think if that's what we end up with — and it looks like that's where we may be headed — it won't be clear that we wouldn't have arrived there even without Covid19.
Living here in the Silicon Valley tech bubble, my firm and many others I'm aware of are reducing office capacity and are saying they will support a hybrid workplace post covid, where you are expected to be in the office on an as needed basis and work from home at least 2-3 days a week. Of course, this is an industry that is very well suited to this sort of arrangement, but I do expect at least in tech, there will be some level of permanent change from the pre-pandemic days.
It's also going to be a permanent change in the Washington, DC area - there's many government jobs and contractor jobs that can be done from home and will continue to be done from home with maybe 1 day a week in office when the pandemic danger is past.
Vox has a write up on why, with all the advertised jobs, people have trouble finding jobs...Yep, the usual suspects:
https://www.vox.com/recode/22673353/unemployment-job-search-linkedin-indeed-algorithm
It would probably be helpful for that chart to have started in, say, June 2019?
Without "before times" data, it's not clear if 13.5% is high or low or about the same.
My own anecdotal data says that it's the managers who only know how to manage if they can monitor every moment of their minions day because they are themselves paranoid that their every moment is being watched that are the ones who need everyone to come back into the office asap. And it's the managers who already knew what they were doing that seem to have seen productivity increases over the last year too.
Call me confused.
You took a poll - a very UNscientific thing in the first place.
To ask white collar Americans (who aren't very smart to begin with)
How many people they think work from home?
And we are supposed to be surprised by these results?
Thats like asking a guillotine operator to take a head count of........ anything.
"Well we couldn't find any heads to count but we know the results are close - they are 'neck an neck"
Don't forget that there is a ton of anti-remote-work propaganda and pressure being applied by managers. More here: https://ez.substack.com/p/the-pro-office-silent-majority-is
Also, this stat is misleading. If this is "because of the pandemic" and people have shifted from "because of the pandemic" to "because my job is telecommuting now"... like, say, mine... I'm no longer going to answer "yes" to a question that asks me if I'm telecommuting because of the pandemic.
In general, I think you are right that we will not see widespread, fundamental changes in ___________ due to the pandemic, but I do want to offer some insight into what I have experienced as a white, white collar worker in the Finance sector.
I wouldn't say it is underappreciated, but just HOW well the sector has been able to perform (meaning execute its function, not raise its stock prices) with close to 100% of its workforce operating remotely is pretty remarkable. Remarkable enough that I know for a fact many firms (big ones everyone would recognize) will NEVER go back to requiring all, or even most employees, to work 5 days a week in an office ever again.
This has pretty far reaching consequences (within this part of the economy) in terms of what people will get paid, where they will live, how they view themselves as part of a company/culture, etc. I believe there will be lasting changes beyond the pandemic because employees now know they don't have to work in an office every day and, more importantly, management knows it too.
On the scale you are speaking of here, I wouldn't expect it to show up, but within certain pockets of the economy, as others on the thread have pointed out, the shift has already happened and I don't see it shifting back, pandemic or not.
So, none of my working friends, all health care workers, are working from home.
Sure goes to show you who makes decisions and for whom, and exactly who is really out of touch doesn't it.
Some doctors might as well be working from home. I have a doctor's appointment every three months; the doctor checks my latest blood test results and renews my prescriptions. I haven't actually seen him since January 2020.
Change happens. It will be really difficult to separate changes driven by covid from changes that would have happened any way. I suspect that covid may have made WFH a bit more common than it would have been otherwise, and that "a bit more common" will continue for years after covid stops affecting work arrangements, but I don't know how to prove it.
If only 33% of workers, due their job types, can WFH, and 13% of people are doing WFH, that means about 39% of eligible workers are WFH. That's a big percentage of them.
I work at a major tech company in Texas. My office is a massive building, but it's still pretty much empty. I have not been there in months. Financially, the company is doing fine.
I miss going to the office and being around the people there, but if no one is there and you have to wear masks, it's pointless. Vaccines are mandatory now at the company, or you get fired. But still no one goes to the office. After the delta surge is over, and the mask mandate is lifted, this may change.
I still bet there will be a lasting impact from this. Many people, including me, now realize how productive you can be working from home. Also, you get to avoid the commute.
That Atlantic article is fundamentally flawed and this is just bad journalism.
All you need to do is to click through to the subset BLS data and the polling questions to see that Elaine Godfrey's blanket statements are not aligned to the data clearly for her to make such statements.
Making assumptions that the polling and the BLS data are analogous is bad. Using those poor assumptions to make claims of confirmation bias is, well, ironic.
WFH is a snapshot solution combined with a (smallish and sector-specific) trend, imo.
"Snapshot" because how does an organization perpetuate itself over a decade or two on a WFH basis? How do you integrate new people when current ones retire, move on, move up, or the organization grows? To be a *general* wave, WFH has to address long-term organizational problems it presents.
Against expanded WFH in most kinds of businesses are a strong human preference for some face-to-face contact during the day, and (as lots of people point to) management's need to control everybody's day. Both are very powerful forces. Management in particular is not easily reformed.
The net result I can see is that some fields that were already trending that way will continue to-- tech, for example, where WFH can be one amenity on offer along with, alternatively, on-site day care, on-site catering, exercise rooms, and other office-based perks that have become established in them. Choose from the menu.
Other fields, like finance, I could see loosening up a little bit post-pandemic, but ultimately not a whole lot. There's management inertia, and there's also long-term continuity of business (which I think has been completely overlooked in all the WFH hype, as above), plus I'd bet finance is like a lot of businesses where information passes in the hallways and bathrooms and general buzz and that'll be sorely missed in another year of WFH.
In case it doesn't come through, I think all the WFH excitement misses the question how businesses operate on that basis over decades. Long-haul survival as a business is important even in small firms, and WFH presents huge problems in that direction that need to be addressed if it's ever to be a big wave rather than a niche experience.
Re: There's management inertia
In this case there's now 18 months of inertia on the WFH side. And don't discount the possibility that many managers, and even gasp, HR personnel, may prefer WFH for themselves as well.
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