Is The Future Of Work Remote?

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently drew a huge line in the COVID-19 sand: Twitter employees can work from home forever, if they want to.

Since the coronavirus reared it’s spiky head, companies have had to rapidly adapt to keep employees safe and keep business on track. That’s meant a huge shift to working from home. Especially in the tech industry, employees are now attempting to get their usual work done with resources available remotely.

Experts have warned that we shouldn’t consider ourselves to be “working from home during a pandemic.” Rather, a pandemic is raging, and we are attempting to get our work done while at home. These are no usual work from home circumstances.

Some industries have had an easier transition than others. Fortunately, the tech industry was already disposed to let employees work from home. Collaboration tools such as Slack, Atlassian, Google Suite, and Zoom were already commonplace.

Now that we’re a few months into quarantine, talk has shifted to when society will be able to reopen. And, will things ever truly go back to “normal”? As offices are formulating strategies and policies for bringing team members back, there’s always the option to just keep working from home.

Work from home benefits

For a lot of people, they would gladly keep working from home indefinitely. In fact, they wonder why their bosses ever made them come to the office in the first place.

On the employer side, a work-from-home staff presents some advantages to a company’s balance sheets. It’s costly to maintain an office, pay cleaning staff, stock up on snacks, and fully equip an office with furniture.

There have also been notable benefits to the environment. Air pollution levels are at record lows in countries such as China, South Korea, and Italy. Globally there’s been an approximate 50% drop in air pollution levels. With remote work, people won’t have to drive their cars to the office, or fly across the country for a single meeting.

Jack Dorsey noted in his letter to Twitter employees that his plan is to place increased focus on a distributed workforce, in order to be less reliant on Silicon Valley. This could be enormous for extending lucrative job offers to workers outside the Bay Area, where housing costs are extremely prohibitive.

Working from home is also better for quality of life in a lot of ways than putting in daily commutes to the office. Employees can get more sleep, dress comfortably, work on their own schedule, and stay connected with their families. Parents don’t have to choose between earning an adequate salary and spending time with their kids in their formative years.

Some employees also note that working from home enables them to focus more effectively. Programmers, writers, designers, and other occupations that require long stretches of heads-down work can ignore distractions more effectively at home, than at an office where conversations and meetings constantly interrupt.

Concerns over prolonged remote work

So, is remote work truly the future of work? It’s hard to say. There are still some hurdles that leadership teams haven’t found answers for.

Loneliness is a top concern amongst employees working from home. Even the most reserved introvert likes to have a chat with their co-workers now and then. Especially during a pandemic, when physical distancing is in place, there’s extremely limited social connection.

Managers are also concerned over employee’s productivity levels when they work from home. Before the pandemic, WFH was jokingly synonymous with “sleeping till noon, logging on for your one meeting, then playing video games for the rest of the day.” If companies are to transition to remote work permanently, it will take concerted and proven commitment from team members from the top down.

Work life balance has gone by the wayside in this age of remote work. Employees wake up in the morning and are glued to their devices all day, where their bosses and colleagues can ping them anytime with a request. When you work from home, you essentially never leave the office.

There’s also fewer relationships forged when teams are working remotely. This lessens overall company morale, culture, and networking. Colleagues who may have formed strong long term professional relationships might only have vague knowledge of each other if their correspondence remains digital.

And, while technology has enabled businesses to stay in operation during the pandemic, when your apps and tools break down then you’re stuck. Internet networks are being strained with increased residential usage. For workers in remote areas, at-home work is extra frustrating with a slow internet connection.

It’s important to remember that working from home is a privilege. Studies show that only the fairly affluent are able to transition to fully digital work. People who work in essential services, retail, construction, and so on, must be onsite to complete their duties. In doing so, they risk exposure to COVID-19.

Planning for the future

Experts suspect that there will be a compromise between onsite and remote work from here on out. Some teams may remain working from home permanently. HR managers are recommended to bring teams back to the office in waves. Engineering can come in one week, customer support the next, sales after that, and so on.

Offices will need to be reconfigured so that employees can maintain a six foot distance between each other. Policies around hand washing, business travel, and contracting COVID-19 will need to be put in place.

The response to COVID-19 has proven that remote work is possible long term and on a large scale. Whether or not remote work is sustained, however, is another question. Remote work might present a business disadvantage. If every company commits to remote work, remote meetings, and remote client management, then everyone will be on even footing. Once the expectation for face-to-face meetings returns, especially to land new deals, things might slowly slip back to the way they were before. “It’s fly or die,” is a phrase bandied about in the world of sales.

One thing’s for sure: the world won’t be the same even after a vaccine is found for COVID-19. Remote work will likely be a fixture in business operations. This may be just the solution for quality of life, environmental, and economic problems the world has long been facing.