And it’s probably too early to get anyway.
2020 seems to be on a mission: to drastically change the way we used to think about work. Are we truly witnessing a revolution, though? Or are we just getting too excited?
I’ve worked remotely a few times in my life either for longer periods as part of my employment agreement or on occasions just because “home office”. I’ve found it okay and still do. That being said, I wouldn’t kill for it. But as long as your profession allows it, it does offer the flexibility you sometimes need or oftentimes expect from modern employment standards.
This is for the most part the point: institutionalising remote work is seemingly part of the future of the workplace. But how exactly? Until a few weeks ago we were moving towards that future at a steady pace, slowly absorbing things such as Friday’s home office or the digital nomad freelancers. Then Covid-19 happened. Now we’re already in the future, and I have little idea what it really looks like.
What will really happen to salaries?
You thought you’d soon be working from Bali on a San Fransisco salary. Think again. It’s not just Facebook that seems to have shattered the dream. Despite the controversy, you could claim the narrative makes some sense at least at first glance. Notwithstanding the frequently disappointing results, salaries are here to make you a living and so they try to match the cost of life in your location. Among other things, though. Qualifications, for example, are also part of the salary mix. So what happens to the salary when you take everything into account? Isn’t this the reality we face already irrespective of remote work? We indeed reward the same great skills differently in India and in Singapore, don’t we?
At the same time, will we have to pivot to a truly performance-based pay? To simplify things, the commonly observed principle is to get paid a basis of salary by the time worked and not the output. Then extras such as yearly or sales bonuses do go by performance, but they’re also agreed on and justified differently. Spending nine hours in the office per day doesn’t really tell me how much you slacked, but, hey, at least I know you weren’t in a bar. Employers will have to either make use of stricter ways of surveillance to come down to your active hours or define, measure, and award performance in more sophisticated ways. And then, this goes such a long way to how flexible working hours, days, and conditions can really be to ensure the same results – whatever that means.
What will really happen to those cities?
San Fransisco, New York, London, Berlin, Hong Kong, Singapore – you name it. I’m talking about those cities. Part of the reasons why they’ve become what they stand for today is also the concentration of population, capital, regulation, offices, institutions, education, talent – frankly, even coffee shops. The list is close to endless. Even with all the things we love to hate in them, this has so far worked as a circle feeding itself. It made the city more expensive, it also attracted more talent. And so on. Location mattered. Will those cities not only stop being hubs but also lose their general radiance – will they literally decline? If so, what will or can replace them? Do remote networks of all types of things produce the same effects?
What will really happen to talent?
How will opportunities and every day working life change for professionals?
Maybe it won’t matter where you’re located as long as you can do the job, and even gender or other inequalities at work will start fading. A working mother won’t have to leave the office earlier to pick up the kid to start with. You might as well get closer to your dream job, the job that wouldn’t previously consider you because you were too far to move. All kinds of flexibility come into play.
Or do they? The not so rosy scenario I can easily picture is that remote workers will simply become a new version of the good old freelancer. This is not bad in itself, but it does come with certain considerations. Once you’re in, how are you going to be treated by your employer – namely in terms of labour rights and career opportunities? It’s easy to get carried away by the contingency circumstances in these past months: for most of us employment variables were left unchanged but the place of work. Also, there was no opportunity cost to mind: when the whole entity works from home (or even more so stays home), nobody is missing out. But if half of us work on campus and half in different rooms around the world, we practically get two palpable types of workers with distinct links with the same employer. In this case, the classic advice to just “stick around the longest to get the most out of it” becomes tangible. I wouldn’t be surprised if the campus guys end up mastering the remote guys.
What will really happen to real estate?
It doesn’t take a mathematician to conclude that reducing real estate cuts costs. Does it also hurt the brand, though? And how important is this for employers and employees alike? Both the tower in Manhattan and the three-story office in downtown London are symbols beyond buildings. They are part of the deal. Is Harvard from home the same as Harvard from Harvard?
This reminds me of a friend’s story from an investment bank a while ago. The bank tried to ease the formal attire policy by encouraging people to loose the tie and the blazer, you could even ditch the cashmere trousers for some high-end jeans. Employees seemed excited when first asked, but guess what: it didn’t work – they kept going to work all suited up. Totally believable. Had they wanted to work in hoodies, they would have probably picked a different environment in the first place. Is an investment banker in Hugo Boss in a Manhattan tower same as an investment banker in sweatpants in her kitchen in Brooklyn? Do we feel the same about her? Does she feel the same about herself?
This nicely brings me to the last point.
What will really happen to that glue that keeps it all together?
The whole ecosystem, the corporate culture. It’s there even if you don’t see it. It’s the suit vs. jeans, the way we do things around here. And this “way”, no matter how intangible, is also demonstrated by tangibles from the way your meeting rooms are designed to how you dress for work.
I can’t help but think that remote work will inevitably have an impact on culture. Will it be more difficult to demonstrate and identify culture? Will it be more difficult for a talent to realize if she fits it? Will people lose the excitement about being part of an entity and simply be individual contributors delivering tasks? What about team building and team dynamics? What about serendipitous explorations and discoveries when you just happened to stay overtime on an empty campus? Can an extra Zoom call provide the solution? How many extra Zoom calls would you need, for crying out loud?
I have no answers obviously. I’m a fan of the concept, though – you can tell; company culture has always mattered to me, and I find it substantially difficult to think of my job – any of my jobs – without it. It’s part of why, one, I pick the job, two, I stick around, three, I enjoy it. Culture simply takes all the separate parts of the deal and makes sense of them.
There’s definitely consensus with regard to one thing: remote work has proven just fine and feasible even in cases we thought it wasn’t. And this is a great realization in itself, and it’s even better that we made it sooner rather than later.
Formalising it is a whole different story that goes beyond the worker’s location. It’s all these other things that immediately need to be adjusted for remote work or are affected due to remote work. I’ll end the way I started: it’s too early to tell.
Image via Cricket GIFs on GIPHY.
I walk fast. 