Common for sales and many service people, working remote has been hit and miss for so-called knowledge workers – people whose main capital is knowledge and information such as programmers, accountants, engineers, architects, visual designers, many administrative types – depending on how remote-friendly the employer has been.
Fast forward to today and 70% of knowledge workers are estimated to be working remote during the Covid 19 pandemic. Exceptions are few, mostly essential workers such as doctors and other health care workers whose work requires on-site presence.
Will things ever go back to requiring always working on-site people working remote for the first time?
In a word, “no.” Start with the facts.
The current Covid 19 pandemic has pushed millions of people to working remote in less than ideal conditions. Kids through college are schooling online at home, outside childcare for younger kids has disappeared due to health concerns, and the options to get out of the house – parks, cafes, shared work spaces, are largely closed. In bad conditions working remote has largely worked.
In San Francisco, where we often think we’re living the future first, and sometimes we do, larger employers such as Google, Twitter, Facebook have already stated that they don’t expect their teams to return to their offices until Summer 2021. Twitter has even said that folks need never return to the office.
Technology advancements, such as Zoom, widespread laptop availability, and broadband in non-rural areas, has hit a tipping point where remote work for many is doable. Barriers to working remote largely only exist in more rural areas, where broadband is often MIA.
Current estimates from the folks at Goldman Sachs, assuming accelerated vaccines efforts work, is that the necessary herd immunity point, when it’s safer to return to work site in larger numbers, won’t be reached until Q2 or Q3 in 2021. As an aside, if the efforts don’t work – all of the early vaccine initiatives are chasing the same target – return to a physical workplace for remote workers will be much later.
The findings on what’s happened with productivity for all these new remote workers is that people are working more, not less. The fear that all this remote work will cause people to goof off is unfounded; productivity, despite the challenges for many, seems to be up.
Estimates from Kate Lister, who heads up Global Workplace Analytics, is that a typical employer can save about $11,000 pe year for every person who works remotely half of the time. Employees, according to Lister, can save between $2,500 to $4,000 per year if they work remotely half the time as well.
Last, the CEOs with whom I work who were formerly location-centric (e.g. folks are expected to be in the office most if not all days unless they’re traveling) have now embraced the idea of having people work remote on a steady basis.
Given the next 6-12 months of needing people to work remotely until mass vaccination of the workforce occurs, it’s unlikely such a massive shift that has mostly worked will easily revert back.
The 29 percent of Americans, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who can work from home, including one in 20 service workers and more than half of information workers are going to have choices, if not an employer preference, to spend much more time work remote post Covid.
So what will the post-Covid 19 future look like?
Economists at Harvard Business School project that one in six workers will continue working from home or co-working at least two days a week. Global freelancing platform Upwork found that one-fifth of the workforce could be entirely remote after the pandemic.
There is research and experience to validate that people, particularly teams and workgroups, do best with physical in-person relationships. My experience with early stage startups, including virtual ones, is that nothing beats meeting early on together to get people together.
But once you’ve established those working relationships it becomes less important to physically meet together all the time.
What we’ll see for those organizations that formerly had a “come to the office very day” practice is some form of hybrid strategy. There will be core days where people in work groups and teams will be asked to be physically be on site and days when it’s purely optional as to where you work.
As we all know by now, there are people who do their best work in a centralized office and there are those people who don’t, or won’t.
You can lead a horse to water but, as the adage goes, you can’t make them drink.
The Covid 19 pandemic has meant that working in an office 5 days a week for knowledge workers become mostly an option, not a requirement.