Teleworking: Will we go back to the streets when there is a vaccine for COVID-19?
A Morning Consult survey, conducted in late May for Prudential, revealed that 54% of Americans said they wanted to work remotely
As long as the new coronavirus pandemic remains active, employers seem convinced that remote work has a bright future. But decades of setbacks suggest otherwise, especially due to the behavior that may arise in employees on this subject, the violation of their rights, the lack of commitment, the labor persecution and even desertion.
On this controversial topic, on which there are different visions, from the ones that the employer could have to the variants and diverse visions that arise in employees, the American journalist David Streitfeld wrote a report in The New York Times that addresses these different perspectives on working from home, the longed hope that it becomes permanent and its supposed “bright future”.
“The long and unhappy history of working from home”, is the article mentioned, which contains a few comments from Richard Laerme, CEO of RLM Public Relations, a public relations firm he founded in 1991.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic showed its great virulence and lethality, especially in the American continent, the vast majority of governments have decided to activate strict measures of confinement, social distancing, cessation of work in the workplace and remote work where applicable.
Already the pandemic has just over six months ‘hitting’ humanity and in that same order the economy, workers, companies and the most vulnerable people in a contingency like the current one.
In this regard, Streitfeld conducts an analysis of the particular situation in the US and how, after more than three months of pandemic, the massive closure of offices, the loss of more than 40 million jobs and access to remote work have allowed “Corporate America” to consider that “despite everything” “working from home is functioning”, that “many employees will be tied to Zoom and Slack for the rest of their careers”, because “their transfer to work will take only a few seconds”.
“Don’t be idiots”
In his article, Streitfeld quotes Richard Laermer, who has some advice for companies rushing into this remote future, the most striking: “Don’t be idiots”.
“A few years ago, Laermer allowed RLM Public Relations employees to work from home on Fridays. This small step toward teleworking proved to be a disaster, he said. Often he couldn’t locate people when he needed them. The projects languished”, says Streitfeld.
“Every weekend became a three-day holiday”, said Laermer. “I found that people work much better when they are all in the same physical space”.
IBM came to a similar decision. In 2009, 40% of its 386,000 employees in 173 countries worked remotely. However, in 2017, with declining revenue, management called thousands of them to return to the office.
Even as Facebook, Shopify, Zillow, Twitter, and many other companies develop plans to allow employees to work remotely forever, the experiences of Laermer and IBM are a reminder that the history of telework has been plagued with failure. Companies that are now rushing forward risk facing the same fate.
“Working from home is a strategic decision, not just a money-saving tactic”, said Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics. “Much of it comes down to trust. Do you trust your employees? ”.
Is remote work an innovation?
Small and large companies have tried for decades to function with employees working from home. Since 1985, traditional media have used phrases like “the growing movement of teleworking”. In 1989 Peter Drucker, the administration guru, said that “commuting to work at an office is obsolete”.
Telecommuting was a technology-driven innovation that seemed to offer benefits for both employees and executives. Employees could eliminate transfers that were getting longer and work on the schedule that suited them best. Administrative management would save on real estate and could hire applicants who live far from the office, increasing the amount of talent.
And yet, many of the projects were eventually curtailed or abandoned. In addition to IBM, companies that have publicly backed down telecommuting in the past decade include Aetna, Best Buy, Bank of America, Yahoo, AT&T and Reddit. Remote employees often felt marginalized, making them less loyal. Creativity, innovation and serendipity were affected.
Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, drew attention when she forced employees to return to the office in 2013. “Some of the best decisions and ideas come from conversations in the hallways and the cafeteria, from meeting new people and from impromptu meetings with the team”, explained a company memo.
Tech companies proceeded to spend billions of dollars on increasingly luxurious locations so employees never needed to leave. Facebook announced plans in 2018 for what were essentially dorms. Amazon restructured an entire Seattle neighborhood. When Patrick Pichette, the former Google chief financial officer was asked: “How many people are telecommuting at Google?”, he said he liked to reply: “As few as possible”.
Does the wave of ‘work at home’ return?
That calculus has abruptly changed, says Streitfeld, adding that Facebook expects as many as half of its employees to work remotely as early as 2025.
The chief executive of Shopify, a Canadian e-commerce company that employs 5,000 people, tweeted in May that most of them “will be working remotely permanently. The centrality of the office has ended”. Walmart’s chief technology officer told his employees that “working virtually will be the new normal”.
Quora, a question-and-answer website, said last week that “all employees can immediately move to any place where we can legally employ them”. Workers who don’t want to move can use the offices in Silicon Valley, which would become a shared workspace. Quora declined to say how many employees it has.
Adam D’Angelo, CEO of Quora, said he and the rest of the administrative leaders would fight the notion that remotely employed employees were second-rate workers. All meetings would be virtual. The future of work — he wrote — would be a paradise for everyone.
Quora said 60% of its employees said they preferred remote work, somewhat similar to what surveys in the United States show. In a Morning Consult survey conducted in late May for Prudential, 54% said they wanted to work remotely.
However, in a warning sign for managers, the same 54% of respondents also said that by doing remote work they felt less connected to their company.
The dissent of remote work
Streitfeld describes how a very well known setback for remote work was an attempt at Best Buy, the Minneapolis-based electronics retailer. The original program, which attracted attention in the United States, began in 2004. It was intended to evaluate its employees for what they accomplished, not for the hours the project had taken or the location where it was carried out.
Best Buy canceled the program in 2013, saying it gave employees too much freedom. “Anyone who has led a team knows that delegating is not always the most effective leadership style”, said CEO Hubert Joly at the time.
Jody Thompson, co-founder of the program, who left her job at Best Buy in 2007 to become a consultant, said the company was underperforming and panicked. “The company went back to the philosophy of: If I can see people, that means they must be working”, she said.
The coronavirus shutdown, in which 95% of Best Buy’s corporate campus workers currently work remotely, and that could be generating another change in the company’s philosophy. “We hope to continue permanently with some kind of flexible work options”, said a spokeswoman.
Flexible work gives employees more freedom with their schedules, but it doesn’t fundamentally change how they are supervised, which was Thompson’s goal. “This is a time when working can change for the better”, she said. “We need to create a new work culture, in which everyone is 100% responsible and 100% autonomous. Just manage work, not people”.
But it is also a time — she acknowledged — when work can change for the worse. “This is a puzzling moment”, said Thompson. “When you’re a manager, there is a temptation to supervise someone more rigorously if you can’t see them. There is an increase in managers who use spyware”.
Vulnerability of remote employment
Remote employees can free themselves from the costs of commuting to the office, but traditionally they are more vulnerable. Jeffrey Gundlach, who heads the investment firm DoubleLine Capital, said in his monthly webcast that he had begun to see his newly adapted teleworking staff in a different light.
“I realized, somehow, who really did the work and who didn’t do as much work as it seemed”, he said. Regarding “some of the supervisory and middle management people I start to wonder if I really need them”, he added.
At the beginning of the year the unemployment rate was low and the workers had some advantage. All of that has been lost, at least for the next year or two. Widespread remote work could consolidate that change.
“When people are in crisis, you take advantage of them”, said John Sullivan, professor of management at San Francisco State University.
“The data obtained during the last three months is very powerful”, he stressed. “People are shocked. No one saw a drop in productivity. Most experienced an increase. People have been going to work for thousands of years, but that will end, and it will change everyone’s life”.
Innovation — Sullivan added — could finally catch up. “When you hire remotely, you can get the best talent available and not just the best talent who wants to live in California or New York”, he concluded. “You get true diversity. It turns out that that affects innovation”.
“Very romantic and very unrealistic”
Laermer, the public relations executive, is more cautious about the implications of the crisis. In March, when he closed his office, he anticipated a disaster, like what happened on the experiment of Fridays in 2017, but five times worse, Streitfeld describes in his article.
Although the situation has been very good for Laermer, since he even hired, via Zoom, people he has not met face to face, “and they have turned out to be exceptional workers”, there are other reasons for not predicting the success of remote work as well.
What changed? Well, on the one hand, the technology, including Zoom, is better. Also, “now we have rules”, he said.
“The worker must be available between 9:00 in the morning to 5:30 in the afternoon. You can’t approach this as if you were a children’s supervisor”. But he assured that this was not why he was trying to end the lease of his office.
“Companies say that working from home is working so well that they are going to let people work from home forever”, said Laermer, who maintains that the whole issue of remote work “is a good public relations strategy, very romantic and very unrealistic”, therefore, he added: “We will return to the office as soon as there is a vaccine!”.
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