The New York Times apparently has a crystal ball that allows it to see the future:
Remote Work Is Here to Stay
A year after the coronavirus sparked an extraordinary exodus of workers from office buildings, what had seemed like a short-term inconvenience is now clearly becoming a permanent and tectonic shift in how and where people work. Employers and employees have both embraced the advantages of remote work, including lower office costs and greater flexibility for employees, especially those with families.
....At least one industry, however, is charging in the opposite direction. Led by some of the world’s largest companies, the technology sector has expanded its footprint in New York during the pandemic. Facebook has added 1 million square feet of Manhattan office space, and Apple added two floors in a Midtown Manhattan building.
What gets me about this is that the author seems so sure of himself. It never ceases to astonish me how often people react to a temporary turn of events by insisting that it will last forever.
And who knows? Maybe the Times is right. But take a look at the second paragraph above. Apple and Facebook know all about Zoom and flex hours and the benefits of working at home because they've been dealing with it for the past couple of decades. And Silicon Valley is eager to sell tons of new product to enable other companies to do the same.
In other words, the industry with the most experience at remote work and with the most to gain from it—the tech industry—is charging back into old school offices. Perhaps they know something that the newbies don't?
I'm not foolish enough to say that literally nothing will change following the pandemic. Remote work has been slowly growing for years and I wouldn't be surprised if it gets a boost from the forced experience of tolerating it over the past year. But I'm still willing to bet that remote work becomes only modestly more popular, with the vast majority of office workers continuing to work in offices. The downsides of remote work—which get shrugged off when you have no choice—are going to become far more glaring to both workers and employers once they actually have a choice of what to do.
I think we're going to be hungry to be around one another for a while once we can do that freely again.
And it is also true that a bunch of new possibilities have opened up, and they aren't going away. Skills have been gained, opportunities have been perceived. People don't like change, and will often resist unless they are forced by circumstances to change. Covid forced us.
Yes COVID forced the USG to realize what positions could be done full time remote with increased productivity and now Congress is talking about reducing the office footprint of the government in DC.
On the other hand, remote work is a real gift to introverts and agoraphobics. In my office, most work was commissioned via email and phone; deliverables delivered the same way. That part of the company was only slightly impacted by the pandemic.
I have the same reaction when I see these articles. How do these people have any idea how things will be going forward? Office designers seem to have a lot of ideas, but they are not the drivers of these changes. I'm guessing that employers are going to be interested in having people back on site far more than these predictions.
You might be surprised at how much office designers drive (or are allowed to take charge of) office design decisions, usually because the actual staff of the organization that is getting a new office design either (1) does not have the time to design their new space, (2) have been brainwashed into believing that office designers are necessary because "they have the expertise", or (3) both.
What I'm really hopeful for is that it sticks around as much more of an option for new parents. It'd be nice if a lot more folks could work from home while their children are very young (too young for preschool).
Taking advantage of the (probably) lower cost of the floors they are moving into, large companies can afford to play the (real estate) market. Considering the apparent decrease in market value of the Trump Tower (NYC and Chicago, both), Jeff Bezos could make a financial and political "killing" by buying one or both. Think of the reaction at Mar-a-Lago.
What would be even nicer is if we followed the German model - stay home with your newborn for two years and your job is still waiting for you when you're ready to return to the office.
Remote work is a boon for growing companies that need representation where they have not established offices. My daughter does freelance accounting for various such businesses from her home in rural Michigan. It could be a huge solution for the unemployment problem of people living in rust belt communities.
A lot of the work that has been done remotely may be done in other countries where labor is much cheaper. The pandemic has probably helped companies find out which jobs can be outsourced this way.
Too true! Lots of good coders, engineers, and the like in countries with much lower standards of living. Americans would be fools to think only we have the "know-how." With so mnny tech classes in universities being filled by non-Americans, we're knowing less and less in the "STEM" (is it now "STEAM"?) subjects.
This is already happening and has been for a long time Even IT support is moving to India. If management can save money they will.
Going overseas can cause communication breakdowns that can devastate a project, international issues cause complications, time zones create scheduling issues and the quality of the end product from design to production can be a nightmare to manage.
We have done consulting and now work with engineering firms from start-ups to larger companies. They all outsource as much as possible. They base their business cases on limited quotes from overseas and then sell their idea like they can make 400% per item. You get what you pay for. And to really get a quality product to market, can take a significant investment.
IMO the world is changing, most companies are international and will become more so and more dependent on remote work. Be it office pods or from home. I guess some industries will be stuck in the office but more information workers can and will work from home and often do already. Workers from all countries will be needed, it is our job to be sure we are hire able and fit in with the new world model. I watch my kids on their computers, especially during the pandemic and see that the whole world is laid out at their feet.
My daughter works for a medium size east coast company at a small office in non-Silicon valley CA. Her group is responsible for developing the website which has been doing a lot more of the companies sales in the last year. After the pandemic started they were forced to work from home by county health department for several months. The company decided since this group was working from home with no lose in productivity to not renew the lease on the office and have the whole group work from home permanently. Mot of the motivation was to save money on this small remote office. This group has no direct customer contact, so it is not important for them to have an office at which to meet customers.
We will see how long this lasts. I suspect more companies will be flexible about letting experienced employees work from home most of the time, but still require them to come to some meetings in the office. New hires will probably have to come to the office every day like before.
I've been working remotely about 90% of the time for over 15 years. I've been managing a small IT team for most of that time. There is an office in a city about 4 hours from where I live and I generally go there once a month for a few days. All of my employees live in that city and before the lockdown they generally came to the office but had a lot of flexibility to work from home when they wanted. Since March of last year we've been 100% remote.
We've even brought three new members onto the team in that time period. Well to be fair, one started in February about 1 month before lockdown time. Long story short, there has been no impact on productivity that I'm aware of.
I think remote work is great for most people, but on the flip side, we human beings are still social animals and it is hard to maintain a sense of team cohesion with a 100% remote team. You can do it, but it takes work. To substitute for random conversations in the hallway we started having a daily 1 to 1.5 hour meeting during which we talk about work but also just goof around and talk about movies or whatever for at least half the time. We also started doing a monthly "game night" where we knock off work early and play some kind of online game on the last Friday of the month. This stuff sounds hokey but I think it actually helps a lot to make everyone feel like part of the same team.
The danger with remote work is that people feel disconnected from one another and will start to see their teammates as "other" instead of as "us".
Once people are vaccinated I'm going to start heading up the the "main office" again and make sure that everyone comes in when I'm there. But otherwise people will be free to work from home all they way. We need some contact with each other but it does not have to be every single day.
Long comment. Sorry but this is a subject I have put a lot of thought into.
My team and I have been working remotely for the past year and have settled into a routine. So why not keep working remotely? Here's the thing I can't get past. Right now when we are in a Teams (like Zoom) meeting, everyone is remote, and it's actually quite useful. We spend quite a bit of time looking at data and presentations and everyone had a good view, since it is on their laptop. And everyone is on an equal footing. But once, say, half return to the office, what does that do the dynamic. Will the ones in the conference room be as inclusive of the others? And, absent a special conference room camera, they won't be seen by their counterparts, which in turn, I suspect will lead to the remote people turning off their cameras.
My spouse's work does that. Some work in offices, some work remote. All meetings are virtual.
The thing the office does if provide mental space, on-boarding path, and allows for other events. That mental space is very important for some people to feel productive, and sometimes it's a good way to give them tools and physical space to do it.
It also allows a dynamic place to do other social things. My spouse's office does things like have a specific day for communal lunches, or even create 'conventions' where once or twice a year they all go to the same physical place to have all their meetings and discuss things (and do team-building things).
So there's benefits to both.
Working from home is burning through a lot of social capital that we have banked over the past years, and is not restoring it. I’d like to expand my business to areas where competitors are retiring, but it’s hard to get meetings with people. I used to be able to see them at a conference and make a point of introducing myself.
I think things like conferences and large meetings would still happen, even if people worked almost entirely remotely - at least in the public service sector, and perhaps some private industries that are service-oriented but are tech-oriented, like insurance.
Definitely! My spouse's office has been mostly remote for a decade. They do conferences twice a year to work on what their new projects will be and connect together. There's also monthly all-hands meets (mostly virtual) and weekly lunches.
The key is to only use as much office time as you need. It's not an either-or thing. Some people even work better having an office to go to!
I don't know what is going to happen either, but I wouldn't put much stock in the fact that tech companies are buying up space. I think that has a lot more to do with them realizing that they need a bigger presence in NY than it does with them giving up WFH. At the end of the day the employees will decide. Marissa Mayer tried to get rid of WFH at Yahoo because someone wasn't present in person for a meeting she was in, and the billboards went up the next day in SF trying to recruit away talent that had to now go into work.
I really wish that journalists had to provide references to back up their assertions like we do in scientific papers. It's so frustrating to read opinions like this and not know why the author thinks this. You have to provide a foundation on which to build, otherwise the rest of your argument is a house of cards.
As it so so happens, I've continued working (part of the time) in an office (with very few other people around), and I've also continued attending grad school, throughout this last year.
It seems clear to me that neither my office situation nor my educational experience will return entirely to "normal" any time soon (certainly not all of a sudden).
But it also appears obvious that we cannot continue with purely remote options indefinitely. Remote options have their good and bad sides, so they should remain an available both for work and school. But the drawbacks have become quite clear to me: at work there is a growing disintegration of my department as everyone grows ever more "remote" from one another. Is that at least partly due to management's failure to keep everyone united even when we're separated? Certainly. But that's kind of the point: not every manager and not every employee is cut out to be constantly remote from their job. It'll suit some, not others. It's just not for everybody, certainly not all of the time. Same with school: it's been fine for me to do zoom classes for a year. But the classes have grown increasingly silent and filled with black (zoom) screens over that time. My own anecdotal experience shows a few people who can stay engaged with classes over zoom, and the rest sort of show up but seem increasingly dis-engaged.
I don't know how anyone who has actually been "at work" or "at school" over the past year can say that the remote model is now permanent for everyone. That just so clearly has not been my experience at all.
I'll be darned if society doesn't require social interaction, face-to-face, to maintain a society. Likewise, there is no workplace culture if there is no workplace for people to interact, and the common bonds that bind us become frayed to the point that they disintegrate entirely.
"What gets me about this is that the author seems so sure of himself. "
Sort of like the ones who keep beating the Robotic Apocalypse In Only 10 Years drum?
Also, regardless of what real estate deals they might be making, Facebook at least sees half of their workforce going remote.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/5/21/21266570/facebook-remote-work-from-home-mark-zuckerberg-twitter-covid-19-coronavirus
Of course the current work situation isn't going to continue. What I do anticipate is that it will be much more than a modest boost - it's going to be a giant jump upwards, especially if the number we're looking at is people who work mostly from home. I suspect that the vast majority of people who work jobs that could be done 80-100% remotely are going to prefer to do them from home more than 50% of their work week/pay period. Especially in areas with long commutes. And COVID has forced employers who were previously resistant to the reality that many of their employees could actually work from home if only the old-school boomers (and to some extent, older Gen X-ers)... err, excuse me, I mean the bosses who are vacating their senior posts later than ever and causing a talent logjam... anyway, if employers are realizing that their employees could actually work mostly or completely from home if only the employers would allow them to.
But that would require employers to actually supervise their employees' work, instead of supervising the employees themselves. In some places, this will help weed out bad managers (managers who manage people instead of managing work). In others, bad managers will remain.
But overall, work from home post-COVID is still due for a huge boost compared to pre-COVID. If I need to put my chips on the table... I'm going to say that the ~5% who worked completely from home in the Before Times is going to double for the 2021 or 2022 numbers, at minimum. And that those who work from home occasionally (or even mostly) is going to more than double.
A pre-COVID survey published by LinkedIn said that 57% of workers wanted to work from home at least part of the time. Now that many of them have experienced it, I expect maybe that number will decline a little bit. But I'd still expect the number of people who work from home at least part of the time is going to approach that, and there is going to be a lot of pressure on employers who have been making do for the last 13 months to keep at least partial work from home schedules, since clearly it can work at least well enough to keep the business in business.
And given the myriad benefits to businesses and other organizations from remote work (lower office costs, which are sometimes shifted to employees; lower turnover; better long-term performance; higher morale; fewer sick days; and so on) - there is absolutely a sea change coming. There's a reason that commercial real estate is in trouble right now, and it's not just because so many retail businesses are going to end up wiped out from having to close for COVID. We already had way too much office space built up, especially in places like DC, and demand for it is about to take a serious hit.
In looking for silver linings in the pandemic cloud, this is definitely one of them.
Sooo....is that Apple and Facebook "office space" being used for people or servers?
Having done both 100% remote and 40% remote, I definitely preferred 40%. It's just a lot harder to bounce ideas off colleagues, get minor questions answered, etc. when you are fully remote. The level of creativity and innovation in my work has suffered over the 6 1/2 years I've been fully remote. It's just so much harder to get a second set of eyes to give me 2 minutes of constructive criticism.
But 40% was nearly perfect. I had both the time to develop relationships with colleagues and all the benefits of informal contact, while still having 2 days a week to focus on major projects at home.
It is possible that companies will learn how to manage at-home workers better, but so far it's been pretty bad where I work. The best way to make it work is to have small groups (3-4) people work on projects, so they can build some camaraderie and everyone feels able to talk and ask questions (even questions that are unrelated to the project, but related to other work). But, instead, too many companies decide to have giant zoom meetings where 2 people talk, except for the torture of the round robin where everyone is expected to share their favorite candy bar, or some other inanity. Some rando in another department loves Mars bars? Who the F cares? Every few months we're all subjected to upper management wasting 20 minutes of our time telling us random facts about themselves while we all have to stare at their expensive home offices (or worse - their designer kitchens).
I work for a company that is about to merge (be taken over by) with another company. Our present CIO is against WFH. He doesn’t trust us to actually work.
The new company is all for WFH and plans to expand WFH. On our first town hall meeting, the new management was excited that soon they can do 50 state recruiting. Great, now I have to compete against the entire US, not just our large metropolitan area.
I've mostly worked from home for about 20 years. Before that I was I a traditional office for about 20 years. My feeling is that after COVID we'll go back to people mostly being in the office. Some companies might scale back to a four day workweek with one day at home or something like that.
For some jobs and some people work from home is fine. I find that I have missed out on a lot by not being in the office. I don't know who people are besides their email addresses. I'm always late to know about changes in procedure.
Companies have benefited financially by people using their kitchen table as their office. For serious work from home you need a dedicated office. That can be a substantial space, depending on your job. You also need a good chair, good lighting, a good sized monitor or multiple monitors. Companies will have to invest in home offices if they want them to succeed.
I suspect that companies that bring people back to the office will succeed better than those that don't which will drive others to do the same.
Finally, we are lumping all offices into one category when we talk about corporate offices. For a while I was consulting and got to see inside a lot of other companies. It was amazing. Some companies are almost dysfunctional. They can't change the brand of toilet paper without having 20 people in an hour long meeting. Other companies function smoothly with fewer people and fewer meetings. Most companies seem to have a sort of personality which persists through staff turnover. You many not get the mission statement you want but companies do seem to observe a mission statement of some sort, even if it is implicit.
My spouse has worked remote for a decade.
Of my two friends who have been forced into work-from-home, one is eager to get back to the office - of course, he doesn't have a home office. He rents a bedroom. So he's trapped in a single room all day. The other has a whole house. Which he just sold because he's going to be working from home permanently now, so why have a suburban home near the office?
I think this has shown many, many more people that working from home can work, and that we should make it work for more people. But that doesn't mean the end of the office.
Some people will want to keep a day home a week. Others will want only one day a week in the office (my spouse is like that).
Just happened across this in the Boston Globe. At least right now, the overwhelming majority of respondents would prefer either a remote or hybrid model. Only a small percentage favor a return to the office full time.
https://www.boston.com/culture/commute/2021/03/29/what-2000-readers-said-about-returning-to-the-office
The New York Times? The same NYT that thought there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? The same NYT that missed Russian intervention in the 2018 election, but doubled and tripled down on buttery emails? The same NYT that partnered with Breitbart to generate a fake news expose of the Clinton foundation? To top it off check today's front page head line: "Tanker Blocking Suez Canal is Freed". For the record, the Ever Given is a container ship, not a tanker.
At my tech company, we worked in a hybrid model, 3 days in office, 2 at home each week, prior to the pandemic. Since then, 100% remote.
I think the hybrid model strikes a pretty good balance between the need for in-person collaboration and convenience of remote working.
We will be returning to the norm once the pandemic ends. The interesting thing is, tech companies have had 100% remote workers via outsourcing for a long time now. IMO, it is not effective, and the only reason they do it is that they can hire 6 engineers for the cost of one here. It really builds in inefficiencies, though, particularly if your remote co-worker is leaving for the day as you arrive in the office. You have a 24 hour lag in a Q&A process, and sometimes much more if the question isn't understood the first time around, or more info needs to be elicited.
I think we’ll see companies being more flexible, work from home when it’s convenient and go into the office when it’s needed.
I received an email from my employer this morning notifying staff the enterprise is moving to a smaller facility that will only accommodate half as many staff to save money because remote work will become permanent.