There’s a brewing public debate amongst companies regarding their ‘remote work’ policies going forward.
The split goes something like this:
- “Pro-office” (examples include Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg)
- “Forever flexible” (Twitter/ Spotify)
- “Hybrid mode” (Microsoft, Facebook)
- Or “Haven’t decided yet”
Executives are worried about productivity, but are still weighing in the pros and cons of remote work:
“I don’t see any positives. Not being able to get together in person, particularly internationally, is a pure negative.”
—Reed Hastings, co-chief executive of Netflix Inc., on working from home
“I don’t believe BlackRock will be ever 100% back in office. I actually believe maybe 60% or 70%, and maybe that’s a rotation of people, but I don’t believe we’ll ever have a full cadre of people in [the] office.”
Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock
“In all candor, it’s not like being together physically. And so I can’t wait for everybody to be able to come back into the office. I don’t believe that we’ll return to the way we were because we’ve found that there are some things that actually work really well virtually.”
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
So what does the future of work look like post Covid-19? Will we treat the past year as a ‘blip in the Matrix’ and go back to our daily commutes? Or are employees going to keep the sweat pants and make more adaptations?
The future of remote work has large implications, below are a few examples:
- Commercial and Residential Real estate – should companies reduce their commercial real estate footprint? Should employees ignore the need to commute and move to the countryside where they can get more space for their money? What will it do to house prices?
- Talent mobility – should companies start looking for talent offshore? For example, should European employees start applying for US-based jobs?
- Employee Compensation – should employees get paid based on their level of expenses/cost of living? Can someone who moved out of the market they were hired for, continue to earn the same compensation if they moved abroad?
- Enterprise software – what are the new needs of companies who support remote work? how do companies adjust to remote hiring/cybersecurity/collaboration software etc?
- The future of high streets in city centres – as offices remain closed, shops and restaurants in city centres make much less, which will make them question the high rents and many won’t survive.
- Business Travel – what % of business travel goes away? Are sales team able to get the same performance with only virtual client interactions.
A Global Workforce Survey conducted by Salesforce in June 2020 and including replies from 3,500 global employees, found that the answer depends on your generation, but that almost everyone wants some split between the home office and the ‘real’ office:
Just 37% of our survey respondents view full-time remote work as the most appealing long-term scenario. In contrast, 64% want to spend at least some of their working hours at an office, store, factory, or other type of workplace. Gen Z, which will soon become the largest segment of the workforce, is particularly interested in a “hybrid” approach in which time is split between home and the workplace.
In a survey conducted by Pew Research in December 2020 (with 10,332 US-based respondents) showed that the majority of those who say their job can be done from home say they’d like to telework all or most of the time post-pandemic.
- More than half of employed adults who say that their job responsibilities can mostly be done from home (54%) say that, if they had a choice, they’d want to work from home all or most of the time when the coronavirus outbreak is over
- The shift to remote work has been easy for many workers; younger workers and parents more likely to have faced challenges – 56% of adults who are working from home all or most of the time say, since the coronavirus outbreak started, it has been very easy for them to have the technology and equipment they need to do their job.
- About a quarter of workers say they are less satisfied with their job than they were before the coronavirus outbreak
Finally, a more recent but smaller sample survey conducted by Seyfarth at Work (500 workers from companies in all sizes, Feb 2021) found that “Lunches and happy hours with colleagues, more daily structure and fewer interruptions by children” ranked high in the reasons to go back to the office.
This weekend, FT Magazine quoted the double edge sword of Remote Work:
To quote the scary new mantra: if you can do your job from anywhere, someone anywhere can do your job. Lesser-skilled workers in western countries have been through this already, when jobs in factories, call centres and back offices were offshored. Parisian graphic designers and New York bankers may be about to find out what that feels like.
“Are superstar employees about to be offshored?”, FT Magazine
To get a sense of how my network feels about it, I polled this exact question on Twitter and LinkedIn, and while there’s still time to go it looks like most respondents agree:
Startup CEOs – what model will you embrace going forward?
— Eze Vidra (@ediggs) March 29, 2021
I predict that most tech companies will choose the Hybrid mode and offer some sort of flexibility for the next foreseeable future in an attempt to attract and retain top talent. I also believe people will be offered incentives to come to office. I’ve already started seeing ‘return to the office’ parties in Israel, the world leader in vaccinations per capita at the time of writing this post. Not unlike the ‘green passport’, perhaps the vaccinated employees who work in the office will be able to unlock certain perks, like training or bonuses.
As any good founder will know, challenges mean opportunities, and fast-moving startups that can build the future of remote or hybrid work tools might tap into large new markets. The ‘Anti Zoom’, posted on VC Cafe is part of it.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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