What Will Make Hybrid Work Stick? - The New York Times - "Offices reached a crucial benchmark at the start of this year: They’re at half their prepandemic occupancy. Just over half of workers who can do their jobs from home are now combining remote and in-person work... A study in Nature last year found that communicating virtually can inhibit creativity. Another study from researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that with the onset of remote work, the formation of what sociologists call “weak ties” — measured in terms of emails between people with mutual contacts — declined 38 percent. But then there’s the immense stress relief that some workers have experienced with remote work. Parents have found that it enables them to better balance professional duties with child care. Employees of color say it reduces microaggressions and cliques. The best hybrid arrangements promise to combine the values that all sides want: the creativity of in-person collaboration, the ease and fluidity of working from home. Some executives remain hopeful they can strike that balance."
The Unintended Consequences of Working from Home - Freakonomics - "BLOOM: The 1,600 employees in the experiment are all grads. A third of them had a post-grad degree. They’re at high-end professional jobs that have a lot of creativity, a lot of mentoring, the types of things people worry about...
Employees were dramatically happier being allowed to work from home two days a week. You can see this in surveys. Maybe more convincingly, you see it in quit rates. They fell by a third... The second finding was that it also changed the structure of hours. If you’re working from home, it’s much easier to go to the dentist, maybe go pick up your kids from school, maybe go out for a jog. If you play tennis, the tennis courts are free, or golf. So what we saw is folks that were working from home worked on average a couple of hours less a week on their home days but made up for it on other days, on the weekends... They end up sending many more messages to coworkers... productivity went up a bit. It wasn’t enormous. It was less in some ways than we expected. There were four different measures of performance and productivity — promotions, performance grades, a self-assessed measure, and then, finally, how many lines of code they wrote. Promotions and performance grades were about flat, but self-assessed and lines of code were up and, in particular, lines of code. If you think of that as maybe the hardest measure, that went up by 8 percent, which is a pretty large increase...
BLOOM: One of the reasons in China and Japan, work-from-home levels are lower is it’s not as appealing to be at home if you’re in a very high-density Asian city because your apartment is small. And in developing countries — you go to Africa, South America — it’s a lot lower because the industrial structure isn’t amenable. It’s much more agriculture, manufacturing, but the change is very high. So even in Africa, it’s gone from 1 to 5 percent. It’s still an enormous increase in levels...
The surge in startups is just one of many unintended consequences from shifting to remote and hybrid work. Here’s another: think about employees with disabilities. Their disability may have made it hard for them commute; they might have encountered discrimination in the labor market. But since April of 2020, the labor-force participation rate for American adults with disabilities has risen nearly five percentage points — a huge gain. Remote work has also meant a lot of people can relocate without changing jobs"
Many Americans hate those who work from home - because they think work should be about suffering (which is the same reason why they say anyone who doesn't work 7 days a week and 100 hours a week are useless and lazy)
intellectualtakeout.org/2020/08/when-half-of-nycs-tax-base-leaves-and-never-comes-back/.Xz1_evlFXMQ.twitter - "The traditional view has been the rich need the poor to exploit as cheap labor – textbook economic inequality. But with COVID as the spark, the ticking bomb of economic inequality may soon go off in America’s greatest city... It’s snapshot simple. The wealthy and the companies they work for pay most of the taxes. The poor consume most of the taxes through social programs. COVID is driving the wealthy and their offices out of the city. No one will be left to pay for the poor, who are stuck here, and the city will collapse in the transition. A classic failed state scenario... The top one percent of NYC taxpayers pay nearly 50 percent of all personal income taxes collected in New York. Personal income tax in the New York area accounts for 59 percent of all revenues. Property taxes add in more than a billion dollars a year in revenue, about half of that generated by office space... While overall only five percent of residents left as of May, in the city’s very wealthiest blocks residential population decreased by 40 percent or more. The higher-earning a neighborhood is, the more likely it is to have emptied out. Even the amount of trash collected in wealthy neighborhoods has dropped, a tell-tale sign no one is home. A real estate agent told me she estimates about a third of the apartments even in my mid-range 300 unit building are empty. The ones for sale or rent attract few customers. She says it’s worse than post-9/11 because at least then the mood was “How do we get NYC back on its feet?” instead of now, when we just stand over the body and tsk tsk through our masks... For the super wealthy, New York once topped the global list of desirable places to live based on four factors: wealth, investment, lifestyle and future. The first meant a desire to live among other wealthy people (we know where that’s headed), investment returns on real estate (not looking great, if you can even find a buyer), lifestyle (now destroyed with bars, restaurants, shopping, museums, and theaters closed indefinitely, coupled with rising crime) and… The future. New York pre-COVID had the highest projected GDP growth of any city. Now we’re left with the question if COVID continues to hollow out the city, who will be left to pay for New York? As one commentator said, NYC risks leading America into becoming “Brazil with Nukes,” a future of constant political and social chaos, with a ruling class content to wall itself off from the greater society’s problems."
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Friday's business with Katie Prescott (19 Feb 2021) - "'People do want to go back, but they also want to work flexibly.'...
'So does that mean you're going to be cutting down on the amount of real estate that you own and manage because businesses just won't need as much?'...
'I think you've got a number of competing factors at play, yes, the employee wants to spend two days a week working remotely... But in addition to that, post COVID, you know, office space is probably going to be less densified than the model has been in the past and research that we're doing predicts that the actual amount of space given to an employee in the future will be somewhat 15% more than pre COVID times. So you've got two competing forces... also the purpose of the office we think is going to change into the future. And whereas a traditional office may well have had 60 to 70% desk in space, what we predict into the future that will be 30 to 40% with much more space given to collaboration areas, innovation zones, space to learn and to socialize. So we see the design of offices changing very much as well... what we're sensing at the moment is that there would be a modest reduction to the amount of space that a corporate would need... encouraging the employee to come back to the office, so there needs to be a richer purpose. So we do actually see that a lot more investment will go into real estate into the future. And by definition, there'll be a flight to quality, and companies will tend to gravitate more towards high quality office space into the future.'"
Meta Cuts Back on Some of Facebook’s Perks - The New York Times - "Meta, the parent company of Facebook, told employees on Friday that it was cutting back or eliminating free services like laundry and dry cleaning and was pushing back the dinner bell for a free meal from 6 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., according to seven company employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The new dinner time is an inconvenience because the last of the company’s shuttles that take employees to and from their homes typically leaves the office at 6 p.m. It will also make it more difficult for workers to stock up on hefty to-go boxes of food and bring them to their refrigerators at home. The moves are a reflection of changing workplace culture in Silicon Valley. Tech companies, which often offer lifestyle perks in return for employees spending long hours in the office, are preparing to adjust to a new hybrid work model... Stopping the laundry and dry cleaning service for employees at Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., ends a famous — if unusual — perk. The laundry service, which was operated by a third party, had free pickup and drop-off around campus and was intended “to make people’s lives easier”"
Return to office has me worried as a Black woman and CEO: Parchment - "As we navigate this brave new world, it is becoming clear that there are important differences in how men and women view the return to office, and that race may also affect preference for time spent working in person. Unless we understand and thoughtfully navigate these preferences, we risk taking a big step backward in equity. Diverse representation, cultures of belonging, mentorship and sponsorship will all suffer... We have seen a number of global surveys that indicate that Black workers have a much stronger preference for remote working than white workers do, because remote work comes with fewer microaggressions. New data from Mercer around office work should also be setting off alarm bells at Canadian organizations. Our 2022 Global Talent Trend survey found that most men (77 per cent) agreed with the statement: “I fundamentally believe that work gets done in an office, not remotely.” Only 59 per cent of women said the same. If men feel that way and become more likely to show up — and women do not — it may have lasting consequences. Men in leadership might also wrongfully assume women working remotely are not getting as much done."
Feminists have long wanted equal pay for unequal work. Now it's taking on a racial dimension too
Return-to-office plans unravel as workers revolt in tight job market - "Even the most inflexible bosses are softening their return-to-office expectations. JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief Jamie Dimon has been one of the most vocal critics of remote work, arguing that it’s no substitute for the spontaneous idea generation that results from bumping into colleagues at the coffee machine. But in his annual letter to shareholders last month, the head of America’s biggest bank allowed that working from home “will become more permanent in American business,” and estimated that about 40 per cent of his 270,000-person workforce would work under a hybrid model, which includes days in the office and at home. Soon after Dimon’s missive, one of the bank’s senior technology executives told some teams that they could cut back from three days in the office per week to two, citing internal feedback. Many white-collar workplaces are making similar retreats as their employees stubbornly stick to working from home while struggling with child care, the grind of commuting and worries about rising COVID-19 cases. Bosses are wary of taking punitive action against those who aren’t following their ambitious so-called RTO plans, fearing it will backfire in today’s tight labour market... organizations that returned to the office in the first few months of the year now have loads of feedback from employees, many of whom are frustrated by commuting in just to spend half their day on Zoom calls... A new survey of real-estate executives by CBRE Group Inc. found that the share of them who expect their workplaces to be “office-based” for most employees going forward declined to 19 per cent from 30 per cent last year... While many companies settled on three or four days in the office when initially establishing hybrid-work arrangements, the ideal setup is actually just one or two days in the office, according to a recent working paper from Harvard Business School. Hybrid work schedules can also reduce employee quit rates by 35 per cent compared with those who work entirely from the office... When data-storage giant Teradata Corp. asked employees across all its U.S. locations if they wanted to come back to the office at least a few days a week, about half said yes, according to Chief People Officer Kathy Cullen-Cote. But of that group, only half show up. “If I’m sitting in the corner of the office, and only half the people are there, will I have that watercooler conversation? No,” said Cullen, whose company has cut its real-estate footprint in half... London-based law firm Stephenson Harwood, for example, recently told staff that anyone wanting to work from home permanently will have to take a 20 per cent pay cut. But such ultimatums are rare. Instead, frustrated bosses are increasingly making more emotional appeals. In a recent memo to staff, Rich Handler, chief executive officer of Jefferies Financial Group Inc., said “we are mentally healthier when we are around each other regularly. Our juniors and mid-level partners need our empathic seniors to truly lead them in person.” While acknowledging the efficiency of remote work, Handler and President Brian Friedman said it’s left many mid-level and junior staff “feeling abandoned,” and they “need to be in your physical presence” to see big deals get done or learn how to cultivate clients. “They need this from you,” the bosses said to the firm’s senior staff. “It just requires more effort from all of you.”"
The Impact Of Remote Work On Productivity And Creativity - "Microsoft recently conducted an extensive study that looked at data from more than 60,000 of their employees over a six-month period, starting just before the start of the pandemic. The findings, published in Nature Human Behavior, revealed some interesting and thought-provoking insights surrounding hybrid workplaces and the potentially negative effects of remote work on collaboration, innovation and output. To sum things up: While short-term productivity may go up, long-term productivity will likely go down... The business model itself should determine what kind of work environment is most beneficial and productive. There are too many variables to make this decision easily. Ultimately, it will depend on the nature of the business or the role. Take, for example, the auto manufacturing industry. Much of the industry makes remote work detrimental to productivity, but those who work in the finance or IT departments could conceivably work remotely... Remote work, by its very nature, means fewer connections between team members across the organization. Supported by findings in the Microsoft study, this leads to a breakdown of critical bridging ties. In remote or hybrid workplaces, employees don’t interact as much as they used to nor in the ways they normally would. The proverbial water cooler talks, lunches in the corporate cafeteria or impromptu meetings are no longer possible. In the workplace, these types of interactions would have occurred naturally and instinctively. Bottom line? There’s a direct link to how collaboration time is spent and, more specifically, what people spend their time working on or the information they pursue. If no one ventures out to investigate new fields of interest or looks deeper into emerging trends, then creativity and innovation will suffer."
Working from home for the long-term isn’t beneficial, CIBC CEO says - The Globe and Mail - "Permanent work-from-home arrangements may not be beneficial for companies over the long haul, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce chief executive Victor Dodig says, and could create division between front-line employees who have to come to work, and others who are given a choice. During an annual public policy conference on Tuesday, Mr. Dodig said most company work “still needs to be done in collaboration,” and includes some level of interaction among people to deliver services or products, particularly for businesses that make “hard goods,” but also those that make “soft goods.” “Right now, you see a view emerging that you can do everything from home. But you can’t build a company, and a company culture that’s cohesive, just working from home”"
Remote Work Evolves Into Hybrid Work And Productivity Rises, The Data Shows - "In a recent report out of Accenture, 83% of 9,326 workers surveyed say they prefer a hybrid model — in which they can work remotely at least 25% of the time... Full-time work from anywhere can be a good thing, but is not optimal for those who are in the earlier stages of their career. Younger people need to be out in the world, forging bonds, gaining mentors, and learning how things work — not sitting alone in front of a screen all day. This is validated by the Accenture survey, which finds a hybrid model that works for all generations may be a challenge: three in four Gen Zers (74%) want more opportunities to collaborate with colleagues face-to-face, a higher percentage than Gen Xers (66%) and Baby Boomers (68%)."
Wall Street Plans Large Job Cuts As Remote Work And Tech Take Over - "around 25% of financial services firms plan to “cut their workforce” over the next five years. It's not just the big banks. About 13% of Big Apple employers expect to reduce their workforces in coming years, and around 33% responded that their need for real estate and office space will decline... 54% of Manhattan office workers are fully remote... The study wasn’t too specific about the downsizings. It could be attributed to the expenses associated with their substantially underutilized office spaces, the ability to hire people remotely from anywhere in the world, the usage of artificial intelligence and technology instead of people and the effects of relocating jobs to other locations, in an effort to find cheaper labor compared to well-paid financial professionals who are based in New York. The flight out of Manhattan has been going on for many years. It first started after Sept. 11 when business leaders recognized it wasn’t smart to have all of the banks clustered closely together on Wall Street. The first move was to Midtown Manhattan and then opening up offices in Jersey City, New Jersey. When clients didn’t balk at the change in address, financial services firms expanded across the country, in an attempt to find lower real estate costs, less taxes and better weather than the brutally hot August summers and freezing-cold winters in New York. They also paid people in these locations less than New Yorkers. Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, UBS, Citigroup, Alliance Bernstein and an array of other financial institutions established and aggressively staffed hubs in Florida, North Carolina, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Nashville and other less expensive locations compared to New York. Investment and financial companies also started relocating jobs around the world. The pandemic ushered in another exodus of firms leaving New York, which for a long time was the epicenter and hot spot of the outbreak. During the bleak days, Goldman Sachs considered moving its money management division to Florida. The absence of a state income tax, plus warm weather and a business-friendly mindset, prompted hedge fund billionaires and native New Yorkers Paul Singer and Carl Icahn to relocate their respective businesses to Florida... Artificial intelligence, algorithms, electronic trading and automation has taken jobs away from thousands of traders. Investment banks seek people who have the math, technology, software, coding, data analytics and related skills, which can all be done remotely anywhere in the world... When you see footage on cable news about the stock market, they’ll usually show a busy, open-outcry market on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. It's really a Potemkin village. The cameras shoot where there are some live traders and support staff herded into one small area. In reality, the New York Stock Exchange floor is devoid of humans and runs primarily on technology conducting the electronic trading activities... If people remain steadfast and require remote work, New York City could be in trouble. Unless city and state-elected politicians enact changes, the flight out of high-taxed, expensive cities will continue. As corporations and well-paid, white-collar workers leave, the cities will bear the brunt of plummeting tax revenue. The decline will force mayors to drastically cut costs. This will include massive layoffs of teachers, police officers, firefighters, garbage collectors and other municipal workers. With less services, the cities become dirtier, crime increases and living conditions worsen. This will prompt even more people to move. A cascading downward spiral could occur, making places, like New York, dangerous and inhospitable. It could become just like in the dark days of New York in the ‘70s. It took over a decade to turn things back around."
People should be careful what they wish for
Winners and Losers of the Work-From-Home Revolution - The Atlantic - "Remote work might crush productivity, but it will also lead to a productivity boom? It obliterates focus and extends working hours, but people want more of it? It hampers the sort of teamwork that is essential at knowledge-economy companies, but those same companies say they’re going to make it a permanent feature? This complexity makes more sense if we think of WFH as an invention that helps some people more than others. The remote-work revolution might be, as I’ve argued before, a good thing overall. But it will produce winners and losers. Let’s consider a few.
Winners: High-income workers at highly profitable companies
In the past year, no group has been more pleased with working from home than high-income men in their 30s and 40s, according to the survey of 30,000 U.S. workers. And highly profitable companies are more likely to say they are planning to make WFH a central part of their business. The most likely immediate winners of the remote-work revolution, then, are those who, in an economic sense, are already winning. “Ground zero for who stands to benefit from WFH in the near future is something like a 45-year-old software engineer who used to work in central Manhattan but now they can do the same work, for the same salary, from their living room in the suburbs,” says Nicholas Bloom...
Winners: Work introverts and people who enjoy (or are good at) using online communication tools...
The distributed office is not a placeless space. A Zoom call is a place; a Slack channel is a place; your manager’s inbox is a place. These are all “rooms” in which bosses can evaluate worker performance. It’s a fact of human diversity that different people thrive in different spaces, so we should expect that the virtual spaces of remote work will reward certain skills that went underappreciated in office settings.
Losers: Entry-level workers in less established positions...
the post-pandemic office may be more like a neighborhood café. People will come and go, you’ll recognize some of them but feel estranged from others, and the office might convey a sense of both vague belonging and day-to-day transience. That’s not an ideal environment for new workers to feel welcomed into a community of peers. “Deprived of desk neighbors, impromptu coffees, and any real way to, for a lack of a better term, read everyone’s vibe,” my colleague Amanda Mull wrote last year, “new hires and young people who work remotely risk remaining unknown quantities.”
Losers: Downtown landlords and businesses...
Downtown office vacancies have surged across the country, and even in the optimistic scenario that 90 percent of white-collar workers return to the office three days a week, that’s still a nearly 50 percent decline in commuting and office use.
Winners: Suburban-town-center developers
The money that’s not going to downtown commutes, offices, and barbershops won’t disappear into the ether. A lot of it will just move to the suburbs... For years, urban developers have been talking about “15-minute cities”—accessible downtown neighborhoods where residents can satisfy just about every food, drink, beauty, entertainment, and fitness need with a short walk or bike ride. Logically, as more 30-somethings relocate to the suburbs, real-estate developers will chase their needs by pouring money into a constellation of 15-minute suburban town centers. The downtown office building’s loss will be the suburban developer’s gain.
Winner: the how-to-WFH economy...
the average worker invested “15 hours of time and $561 in home equipment to facilitate WFH” last year. That’s an astonishing number—amounting to close to 1 percent of annual GDP spent on WFH amenities. And that figure doesn’t even account for all the money companies spent on telecommunications, back-end systems, and other tech to support WFH...
Loser: Political comity
College is already the most important dividing line in politics. It’s also the most important dividing line in remote work. More than half of graduate-degree earners can work from home, compared with less than 25 percent of people with just a high-school degree, according to Bloom. The remote-work revolution, therefore, is principally a revolution for the colleged class, which is disproportionately a Democratic cohort. If the college-graduate workforce evolves toward a certain kind of work that is off-limits to most noncollege grads, the cultural divide between graduates and nongraduates may widen even further, pulling apart a country that is already split by a diploma gap."
Commuting Has Surprising Mental-Health Benefits - The Atlantic - "Many people liberated from the commute have experienced a void they can’t quite name. In it, all theaters of life collapse into one. There are no beginnings or endings. The hero’s journey never happens. The threshold goes uncrossed... In 1994, an Italian physicist named Cesare Marchetti noted that throughout history, humans have shown a willingness to spend roughly 60 minutes a day in transit. This explains why ancient cities such as Rome never exceeded about three miles in diameter. The steam train, streetcar, subway, and automobile expanded that distance. But transit times stayed the same. The one-way average for an American commute stands at about 27 minutes. Marchetti’s Constant, as those 60 minutes are known, is usually understood to describe what people will endure, not what they might actually desire. But if you take the richest people of any era—who can afford to design their lives however they like—and calculate the transit time between their home and workplace, what do you find? J. P. Morgan: a roughly 25-minute ride by horse-drawn cab. John D. Rockefeller: an elevated-rail ride of about 30 minutes. In a 2001 paper, two researchers at UC Davis attempted to divine the ideal commute time. They settled on 16 minutes. To be sure, this was a substantial shortening of the study participants’ actual commutes (which were half an hour, on average). But it was not zero. In fact, a few wished for a longer commute. Asked why, they ticked off their reasons—the feeling of control in one’s own car; the time to plan, to decompress, to make calls, to listen to audiobooks. Clearly, the researchers wrote, the commute had some “positive utility.”... boundary theory holds that however much Facebook encourages employees to bring their “authentic selves” to work, we have multiple selves, all of them authentic... workers who engaged in “role-clarifying prospection” during their morning commute—deliberately thinking about plans for the workday—reported higher levels of satisfaction with both their work and home lives than those who either zoned out or ruminated on personal problems. Skipping this cognitively difficult task left them in limbo, making each place more stressful. Technology can help. In a 2017 experiment, a team at Microsoft installed a program called SwitchBot on commuters’ phones. Before the start and end of each workday, the bot would pose simple questions. A morning session helped the participants transition into productive work mode, while prompts to detach at day’s end—“How did you feel about work today? Is there anything else you would like to share?”—brought forth something unexpected. “People apparently would just spill out their day,” Shamsi Iqbal, a researcher who helped design the study, told me. In reliving their day, they “relieved themselves” of it (and sent fewer after-hours emails as a result)... the ability to detach from a job, Iqbal explained, is part of what makes a good worker. New research shows that it’s crucial to facilitating mental rejuvenation. Without it, burnout rises, effort increases, and productivity ultimately drops... “Enclothed Cognition”... When people are asked to do a difficult task involving visual concentration, they make about half as many errors if they first put on a white lab coat. (If they’re told it’s a painter’s coat, it helps, but only marginally.) The coat has a symbolic power, the paper says, which “is not realized until one physically wears and thus embodies the clothes.”... “Every single conversation I have with corporate clients is the same,” he told me: “Employees are burnt out and have no separation between home and life.”... “Rituals are friction,” he told me. Like the commute, “they slow us down. They’re so antithetical to most of our life, which is all about efficiency and speed.”"
Can Working Remotely Hurt Your Career? - The Atlantic - "Remote work might feel great, but unless you go to extreme lengths to signal your devotion to your company, it can irritate your boss and hurt your career... Compared with those who work full-time in an office, bosses are less likely to promote or monetarily reward those who work from home... the more people telecommuted, the greater the hit to their salaries. These studies suggest that workers are taxed either way: They pay more to live near their office, which is typically in an expensive city center, or they save money by living in and working from the exurbs, and thus don’t get as many raises... Remote workers might also be penalized because bosses make positive snap judgments about people who work in the office... This remote-work penalty is avoidable, however. In the tech-worker study, the detrimental effects of telecommuting were mitigated for people who had lots of co-workers who also worked remotely, or when the telecommuters did extra work outside business hours, or when they had more face-to-face interactions with their supervisors. Meeting with your manager face-to-face—presumably over Zoom, in this era—might serve as an “impression management strategy”
