Remote work is different work

Even before the pandemic struck, remote work was accelerating worldwide but the next few months will be a very strange test of our white-collar future.

After decades from the invention of the personal computer, people predicted that our jobs would eventually be emancipated from the office, and home would be the thrilling future of work.

Consider me your correspondent from the future. And let me tell you, as someone working from home since 4 weeks, it’s not entirely thrilling. My desk is a kitchen counter, the constant cleaning of which makes for good procrastination, and my cafeteria is an emergency-stocked fridge, the routine raiding of which makes for even better procrastination.

Joining me in this remote work method are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people taking refuge from the coronavirus. Not all, to be sure. According to public statistics, only 29 percent can work from home, including one in 20 service workers and more than half of information workers. So while servers are still manning the restaurants, the technology sector has effectively gone remote. Amazon, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Airbnb have all asked at least some of their employees to stay away from the office.

The coronavirus outbreak has triggered an anxious trial run for remote work at a grand scale. What we learn in the next few months could help shape a future of work that might have been inevitable, with or without a once-in-a-century public-health crisis.

Even before the pandemic struck, remote work was accelerating worldwide. The share of the labour force that works from home tripled in the past 15 years.  In the 2016 paper “Does Working From Home Work?” a team of economists looked at Ctrip, a 16,000-employee Chinese travel agency that had randomly assigned a small group of its call-centre staff to work from home. At first, the experiment seemed like a win-win for workers and owners. Employees worked more, quit less, and said they were happier with their job. Meanwhile, the company saved more than $1,000 per employee on reduced office space. But when Ctrip rolled out this policy to the entire company, it caused a mess. One complaint swamped everything else: Loneliness.

Beyond lost creativity and companionship, the gravest threat to many companies from remote work is that it breaks the social bonds that are necessary to productive teamwork. Several years ago, Google conducted a research project on its most productive groups. The company found that the most important quality was “psychological safety”—a confidence that team members wouldn’t embarrass or punish individuals for speaking up.

As jobs concentrate in downtown areas without affordable housing, workers’ homes are pushed into the far suburbs. Workers commute is a psychological and environmental scourge that increases depression, divorce, and fossil-fuel emissions. The average commute in certain countries recently hit an all-time record of 27 minutes one-way. That’s almost an hour a day spent away from friends and family, in a machine coughing fumes into the sky. Allowing people to work closer to home—whether at a coffee shop, in a co-working space, or on a couch—could be a win for work-life balance, for happiness, and for the biosphere.

The geographic concentration of jobs also means that the powerful industries are clustered in a handful of rich cities. A future with remote work might annoy some, but that annoyance must be weighed against an alternative future where much of the middle class is financially barred from corporate headquarters in finance, media, and tech.

I tried in this blog to present two pictures of remote work. In one picture, it is a desolate and lonely experience that often saps creativity and collapses the narrow distance between labour and downtime. In the next picture, it is a boon to social life, family life, egalitarianism, neurodiversity, and the planet itself. The messiness of the remote-work picture is a sign of the idea’s infancy.

 Right now, remote work isn’t working for most companies. That’s because we spent the last 120 years learning how people can be productive in an office. The rise of the telegraph and the railroad in the late 19th century didn’t just give us retail, advertising, and mass distribution; it also gave us managerial capitalism—middle managers, top managers, and modern hierarchies at corporate headquarters. The 21st-century economy has already changed retail, advertising, and mass distribution. Perhaps inevitably it will also change work and management.

But first, companies will have to learn that remote work is different work. Managers will have to get better at judging productivity by setting and monitoring specific goals rather than using the proxy of office attendance. Workers will have to adopt extraordinary conscientiousness when it comes to dividing their day into deep work, office communications, personal time, and civic or family life. Employees will have to develop new habits, such as keeping copious documentation of every meaningful work interaction, so that teams across space and time are always up to speed on what’s happening “down the hall.” And bosses will have to normalize more video conferencing and corporate retreats, because their employees will continue to crave face-to-face interaction.

In the current panic, Twitter is filled with rosy predictions that the virus will be an inflection point in the future of distributed work. But a pandemic is not an appropriate time to determine what kind of labour arrangement is optimally productive on a per-worker basis. It is rather a moment for companies to build out the kind of technology and culture that, when the economy is back to full force, could make remote work easier for those who want to take advantage of it in a future where white-collar work might involve a little less commuting and a little more home.