Working from home is here to stay, even when the economy reopens

[Hamartia Antidote]

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/11/work-from-home-is-here-to-stay-after-coronavirus.html

• Companies in technology, financial services and insurance have invested in remote work tools, and there’s no indication they’ll be returning to the old way of doing business.
• The first batch of employees to return to the office will be the ones who are itching to get back, but even that won’t start happening for weeks or months.
• “We’re going to see this come back more slowly than you might have expected,” said Liz Fealy, who runs the global workforce advisory group at EY.

We asked experts in various fields for their best predictions on what the world will look like when the coronavirus pandemic finally recedes. In this segment of our series, ”The Next Normal,” we examine what happens when office life reopens and what becomes of remote work.

While President Donald Trump pushes states to allow businesses to reopen, companies in technology, financial services, insurance and other industries that can successfully function over internet lines are choosing to keep their people home.

Long commutes have been replaced with heavy Zoom use, and workers in big cities are in no hurry to sit on crowded subways and buses during rush hour.

Corporate leaders are waiting for some reliable combination of mass testing, therapeutics, contact tracing and possibly even a vaccine, before they’ll consider it a worthwhile risk to send employees back into the traditional workplace. Another consideration is child care, and with schools closed across much of the country and summer camps unlikely to proceed as planned, kids are likely to be at home during the day at least for the next few months.

Facebook said last week that most of its employees will be allowed to work from home through the end of 2020. Google parent-company Alphabet plans to open offices for up to 15% of workers as early as June, but the majority of people who can work from home will continue to do so, perhaps through the end of the year.

“We’re going to see this come back more slowly than you might have expected,” said Liz Fealy, who runs the global workforce advisory group at consulting firm EY. “Especially in organizations where people believe employees can be equally productive at home.”

A staggered return
Fealy said that she’s hearing companies talk about a variety of different ways to start sending employees back when they believe it’s safe.

One general theme is a staggered return, with people coming to the office in waves based on individual risk levels, and increasing in numbers as contact tracing improves.

Another approach could be “clustering employees on teams” so if there’s an infection it’s easier to identify who is most exposed and needs to be quarantined. Corporations are already looking to employ phone-based contact tracing to help track employees who have been in close proximity at the office, then use that information to inform workers who may have been exposed and ask them to self-quarantine.

Across the 198 global offices of Fidelity National Information Services, a financial technology company, roughly 95% of employees are working from home. Chief Risk Officer Greg Montana doesn’t see that lasting forever, but he says there’s no returning to the pre-coronavirus days of packed buildings.

From his home setup in Jacksonville, Florida, Montana told CNBC that the first phase of a return to the office will be for those employees who are itching to get back, either because they feel isolated in their current confines and yearn for human contact or because they’re struggling to be productive. Even that small initial wave is unlikely to begin until late in the third quarter or early in the fourth, Montana said.

“We are really focused on the health and well-being of our employees,” said Montana, who’s part of a 40-person crisis management team that’s meeting twice a week to work on the company’s reentry plan.

Montana said that FIS wants to make sure employees are getting temperature checks, masks are readily available and deep-cleaning processes are in place for meeting rooms. The company is also putting together procedures for travel, so employees can go to a website, type in the desired destination and determine if it’s advisable to make the trip.

In the meantime, the company has been issuing virtual private network licenses to employees so they can access the network remotely and offering wireless hotspots to those who lack reliable home Wi-Fi.

“If you’re able to be productive at home, we want to get you what you need to be productive,” Montana said.

At consumer products giant Newell Brands, parent company of Sharpie, Coleman, Rubbermaid and Crock-Pot, Samantha Charleston is leading the return-to-office task force.

Charleston, a vice president in human resources, told CNBC by email that she’s working with local leaders across each of Newell’s regions to determine how and when to begin the return process, taking into account government recommendations, office readiness and input from employees gathered through weekly surveys.

Like FIS, Newell is content to take its time, as Covid-19 breakouts continue to emerge in various parts of the U.S.

“For the time being, Newell Brands is continuing our remote work structure for the majority of the office population,” Charleston wrote. “The repatriation process back to the office will be slow to make sure we take every safety consideration on behalf of our employees.”

Remote tools are exploding
Experts say that even when the coronavirus is in the rearview mirror, many of us will still be working from home.

Now that so many companies have been forced to function with a remote staff and to adopt technologies that enable collaboration from a distance, they’ve already made the necessary investments, and they know they can save money on office and real estate costs. According to Global Workplace Analytics, employers can save $11,000 a year for every employee who works remotely half the time.

In addition to Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams, products like design software Figma and knowledge-sharing tool Guru have seen growth accelerate as companies cobble together a suite of work-from-home products. Alex Konanykhin said his company, TransparentBusiness, which helps customers securely manage remote workforces, has seen an 800% increase in subscriptions since March 1.

Some companies are also paying for remote mental health services and online learning sites for employees. And they’ve seen positive results.

“In some cases, productivity has accelerated,” Charleston said. “A benefit of the new situation is it has given employees an outlet to try new things, think differently, share ideas and find solutions.”

Chris Bedi, chief information officer of IT automation software provider ServiceNow, says the terms remote work and work from home are going to disappear.

“There’s just work, and it’s work from anywhere,” said Bedi, in an interview last week.

He said that the talent war will also fundamentally change, because employers will quickly realize that they can start hiring anywhere and attract a whole new set of prospects. And even though there’s a level of Zoom fatigue that’s setting in from nonstop video calls, the travel market is forever changed, he predicts.

“The concept of getting on a plane for six hours for a two-hour meeting and being jet lagged, people are going to go — why?” Bedi said.

‘Zero pressure’
Jeff Snyder, founder of Inspira Marketing Group, said his company approved the purchase of external monitors so the 90 employees with desk jobs could easily get up and running at home. Inspira has an additional 300-plus employees who work in the field doing event-based marketing, a business he says has been “crushed.”

Snyder said his human resources team has been actively reconfiguring the offices in Connecticut, New York and Chicago to allow for social distancing and cap the number of people that can be present at a time when they do start coming back. The company has also ordered 10,000 masks.

Despite all the available safety measures, Snyder’s not expecting many employees to rush through the door at their first opportunity.

“We know it’s not a light switch where all the sudden it’s game on,” he said. “There’s going to be zero pressure forcing people to come back.”

 

[waz]

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/11/work-from-home-is-here-to-stay-after-coronavirus.html

• Companies in technology, financial services and insurance have invested in remote work tools, and there’s no indication they’ll be returning to the old way of doing business.
• The first batch of employees to return to the office will be the ones who are itching to get back, but even that won’t start happening for weeks or months.
• “We’re going to see this come back more slowly than you might have expected,” said Liz Fealy, who runs the global workforce advisory group at EY.

We asked experts in various fields for their best predictions on what the world will look like when the coronavirus pandemic finally recedes. In this segment of our series, ”The Next Normal,” we examine what happens when office life reopens and what becomes of remote work.

While President Donald Trump pushes states to allow businesses to reopen, companies in technology, financial services, insurance and other industries that can successfully function over internet lines are choosing to keep their people home.

Long commutes have been replaced with heavy Zoom use, and workers in big cities are in no hurry to sit on crowded subways and buses during rush hour.

Corporate leaders are waiting for some reliable combination of mass testing, therapeutics, contact tracing and possibly even a vaccine, before they’ll consider it a worthwhile risk to send employees back into the traditional workplace. Another consideration is child care, and with schools closed across much of the country and summer camps unlikely to proceed as planned, kids are likely to be at home during the day at least for the next few months.

Facebook said last week that most of its employees will be allowed to work from home through the end of 2020. Google parent-company Alphabet plans to open offices for up to 15% of workers as early as June, but the majority of people who can work from home will continue to do so, perhaps through the end of the year.

“We’re going to see this come back more slowly than you might have expected,” said Liz Fealy, who runs the global workforce advisory group at consulting firm EY. “Especially in organizations where people believe employees can be equally productive at home.”

A staggered return
Fealy said that she’s hearing companies talk about a variety of different ways to start sending employees back when they believe it’s safe.

One general theme is a staggered return, with people coming to the office in waves based on individual risk levels, and increasing in numbers as contact tracing improves.

Another approach could be “clustering employees on teams” so if there’s an infection it’s easier to identify who is most exposed and needs to be quarantined. Corporations are already looking to employ phone-based contact tracing to help track employees who have been in close proximity at the office, then use that information to inform workers who may have been exposed and ask them to self-quarantine.

Across the 198 global offices of Fidelity National Information Services, a financial technology company, roughly 95% of employees are working from home. Chief Risk Officer Greg Montana doesn’t see that lasting forever, but he says there’s no returning to the pre-coronavirus days of packed buildings.

From his home setup in Jacksonville, Florida, Montana told CNBC that the first phase of a return to the office will be for those employees who are itching to get back, either because they feel isolated in their current confines and yearn for human contact or because they’re struggling to be productive. Even that small initial wave is unlikely to begin until late in the third quarter or early in the fourth, Montana said.

“We are really focused on the health and well-being of our employees,” said Montana, who’s part of a 40-person crisis management team that’s meeting twice a week to work on the company’s reentry plan.

Montana said that FIS wants to make sure employees are getting temperature checks, masks are readily available and deep-cleaning processes are in place for meeting rooms. The company is also putting together procedures for travel, so employees can go to a website, type in the desired destination and determine if it’s advisable to make the trip.

In the meantime, the company has been issuing virtual private network licenses to employees so they can access the network remotely and offering wireless hotspots to those who lack reliable home Wi-Fi.

“If you’re able to be productive at home, we want to get you what you need to be productive,” Montana said.

At consumer products giant Newell Brands, parent company of Sharpie, Coleman, Rubbermaid and Crock-Pot, Samantha Charleston is leading the return-to-office task force.

Charleston, a vice president in human resources, told CNBC by email that she’s working with local leaders across each of Newell’s regions to determine how and when to begin the return process, taking into account government recommendations, office readiness and input from employees gathered through weekly surveys.

Like FIS, Newell is content to take its time, as Covid-19 breakouts continue to emerge in various parts of the U.S.

“For the time being, Newell Brands is continuing our remote work structure for the majority of the office population,” Charleston wrote. “The repatriation process back to the office will be slow to make sure we take every safety consideration on behalf of our employees.”

Remote tools are exploding
Experts say that even when the coronavirus is in the rearview mirror, many of us will still be working from home.

Now that so many companies have been forced to function with a remote staff and to adopt technologies that enable collaboration from a distance, they’ve already made the necessary investments, and they know they can save money on office and real estate costs. According to Global Workplace Analytics, employers can save $11,000 a year for every employee who works remotely half the time.

In addition to Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams, products like design software Figma and knowledge-sharing tool Guru have seen growth accelerate as companies cobble together a suite of work-from-home products. Alex Konanykhin said his company, TransparentBusiness, which helps customers securely manage remote workforces, has seen an 800% increase in subscriptions since March 1.

Some companies are also paying for remote mental health services and online learning sites for employees. And they’ve seen positive results.

“In some cases, productivity has accelerated,” Charleston said. “A benefit of the new situation is it has given employees an outlet to try new things, think differently, share ideas and find solutions.”

Chris Bedi, chief information officer of IT automation software provider ServiceNow, says the terms remote work and work from home are going to disappear.

“There’s just work, and it’s work from anywhere,” said Bedi, in an interview last week.

He said that the talent war will also fundamentally change, because employers will quickly realize that they can start hiring anywhere and attract a whole new set of prospects. And even though there’s a level of Zoom fatigue that’s setting in from nonstop video calls, the travel market is forever changed, he predicts.

“The concept of getting on a plane for six hours for a two-hour meeting and being jet lagged, people are going to go — why?” Bedi said.

‘Zero pressure’
Jeff Snyder, founder of Inspira Marketing Group, said his company approved the purchase of external monitors so the 90 employees with desk jobs could easily get up and running at home. Inspira has an additional 300-plus employees who work in the field doing event-based marketing, a business he says has been “crushed.”

Snyder said his human resources team has been actively reconfiguring the offices in Connecticut, New York and Chicago to allow for social distancing and cap the number of people that can be present at a time when they do start coming back. The company has also ordered 10,000 masks.

Despite all the available safety measures, Snyder’s not expecting many employees to rush through the door at their first opportunity.

“We know it’s not a light switch where all the sudden it’s game on,” he said. “There’s going to be zero pressure forcing people to come back.”

So it should it makes perfect sense. Businesses save on rates i.e. rents etc. Workers save more of their pay cheque without the daily commute and hassle of getting ready etc.
If people can be productive from home then why not.

 

[Thamizh Puli]

commercial real estate toast

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

So it should it makes perfect sense. Businesses save on rates i.e. rents etc. Workers save more of their pay cheque without the daily commute and hassle of getting ready etc.
If people can be productive from home then why not.

October 20th, 2017
https://www.aberdeen.com/techpro-essentials/telecommuting-reinvigorate-american-dream/
Could Telecommuting Reinvigorate the American Dream?

George Jetson had a flying car. Yet he still commuted to work.

Even though the Jetsons lived in a world where everyone teleconferenced, and even saw the doctor via telemedicine, it still didn’t occur to the Jetsons’ creators that people in the future might not have to drive to work every day. That’s how ingrained commuting to a job is in our way of life. But if that were to change, how vastly different would our lives become? And how much better?

Telecommuting is on the rise, and as technology continues to advance and better allow workers to productively work from home, more and more employers are allowing their employees to do so, at least some of the time. Mass transit lobbies, highway construction firms, and public transportation unions may hate the idea of reducing traffic and congestion and eliminating the daily commute as an indelible factor in our way of life. But then again, messenger boys probably hated the idea of the telephone.

There is, and has been, much initial resistance to telecommuting. It’s not being unanimously embraced with open arms (we all remember the infamous decision of Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyers to eliminate telecommuting altogether). Generally, telecommuting is seen as something that employers are reluctantly allowing employees to do, one or two days a week at the most. And their concerns are understandable. There have been studies that show that “water cooler talk” does benefit team building, and personal interactions at the office do lead to the inception of productive, profitable ideas. The social aspect of work culture is very real and valuable.

But I have to wonder, at what point will the pros of telecommuting outweigh the cons? At the end of the day, I suspect that something that costs less for everybody, increases our quality of life, and is better for the environment will triumph over an older, more expensive, dirtier, and more stressful way of doing things. That’s usually how it goes.

Water cooler talk and interpersonal socialization definitely have value. That isn’t being disputed. But at what point does the cost/benefit scale tip in favor of telecommuting? As technology keeps evolving, just how close can virtual interactions get to in-person interactions? Will it become more beneficial to sacrifice the benefits of in-person interactions in order to reap the benefits of telecommuting?

The first obvious benefit of telecommuting is the absence of a physical office. The costs of renting and maintaining real estate, especially in cities or other in-demand locations, would be a significant savings in itself. Without a physical location that workers have to commute to, the potential pool of talented employees to hire increases astronomically, often to a global scale.

But in the bigger picture, large-scale telecommuting could become a milestone in the creative destruction that defines our economy and way of life.

Why are some places so unaffordably expensive to live, and others not? Why would a modest four-bedroom house cost a million dollars in one neighborhood, but a hundred thousand dollars in another? Obviously, it’s because homes are more in demand in some areas than others. But why is that? Again, obviously, because the location is more desirable. It’s within commuting distance of places that people need to get to. Urban areas and suburbs close to cities are generally more expensive to live in because companies with highly-paid professional employees are located there. The further you get from a major city, typically, the less expensive the real estate is. Once the commute to where the majority of high-paying jobs are located gets to be untenable, the real estate value drops. Obviously.

But imagine, hypothetically, if more often than not, people could work at these jobs without having to commute to them? What if you could live in a $100,000 house with plenty of land, but still work a six-figure job for a company that’s based in a major city? Would you want to pay a mortgage on a $500,000 house located within driving distance of that major city? Again, at what point does the cost/benefit scale tip?

But what about schools? Activities? Churches? Museums? Restaurants? Nightlife? Culture? Communities? People don’t only want to live near cities because of employment. There’s an entire lifestyle inherent in it. People won’t just want to live in the middle of nowhere simply to save money.

Very true. But I think this line of thinking underestimates just how disruptive technology can be, and just how adaptable we are to it. After all, the majority of us aren’t working on family farms anymore. But if we were middle class in America before the invention of the automobile, we most likely would be. And it would have been nearly impossible for most of us to even fathom the suburban life the middle class lives today in 2017.

What if, in the vast number of exurbs and virtually limitless space available in rural America, telecommuting suddenly made these spaces desirable for young professionals to move to? What if they brought with them the demand for quality schools and theaters and museums and trendy coffee shops?

As it stands, young people are going to great lengths and devising some pretty creative ways to afford their own homes. At what point do young people decide they’re tired of having to choose between box-car living or being perpetually broke just to live in a comfortable home? Most houses used to be built with a barn, because it was necessary for an agricultural life. Houses today are often built with a driveway and garage, because owning a vehicle and commuting are often necessities today. What if in the future, with self-driving cars and telecommuting, houses are typically built with home offices included?

The benefits don’t stop at affordable home ownership. Flexibility regarding the time and place that work gets done would go a long way toward closing gender pay gaps. Widespread adoption of telecommuting will reduce congestion on our highways, save on gas and infrastructure costs, and reduce CO2 and other greenhouse emissions. The more commuting can be limited, the longer seniors who want to work can do so, and the more easily people with mobility issues can fit into the workforce. It’s also a quality of life and family issue: If we reduce the number of hours Americans spend sitting in traffic and making long commutes, we give people more free time and more time with their families. At what point do Americans demand their legislators give tax breaks to companies that encourage telecommuting so they can better live the American Dream?

All of these are pretty broad questions, and it’s impossible to see the future. But the creative destruction of nine-to-five cubicle jobs could revolutionize the way we live and work, while producing many social and economic benefits. While not all industries will be able to adopt widespread telecommuting, and not all jobs will be able to be done remotely, telecommuting is, ultimately, another step forward in our never-ending pursuit to increase our quality of life.