Permanent remote work policies: a good idea for workers and cities?
Written by Filipa Pajević and Richard Shearmur
Last month, Shopify announced a permanent remote work policy for the majority of their 5,000+ employees. The announcement came shortly after Twitter and Facebook shared their “forward-leaning” post-Covid19 restructuring plans, based upon remote work. Though Shopify will keep some of its offices, just how many of its 17 locations will reopen in February 2021 (and what they will look like) remains unclear. As researchers concerned with the spatial outcomes of changing work practices, we ask whether a permanent adoption of a temporary, pandemic-driven measure will be a safer and better deal for workers and, more generally, for cities.
Shopify’s CEO, Tobi Lutke, tweeted that “office centricity is over”. According to Lutke, the future of the physical office is to be an “on-ramp to the same digital workplace” that workers can access from anywhere. He added that Shopify’s remaining offices will be remodeled to reflect this “new normal”, and will be open for employees to “visit”, and for recruitment purposes. Changes in office function are not unexpected, and changes in office-based work culture were underway even before the pandemic, especially among digital industries. A number of Shopify’s employees were already remote, but offices were opening, not closing. In fact, in May 2019, Shopify unveiled a new office in Toronto, and announced a further 245,000 sq ft expansion by 2022. This past January, Shopify publicized its expansion to the west coast, with 70,000 sq ft of “permanent office space” in downtown Vancouver, set to open later in the year.
Lutke tweeted that employees will have “the same experience no matter where they work”. Existing research on remote work shows that workers’ experiences are shaped by the conditions in which they perform their work — which, for remote workers, consists of their personal environments. It will be difficult for Shopify to guarantee the same experience for workers whose living conditions (household size, availability of space, access to technology and supporting infrastructure, access to supporting services, such as daycare) are uneven. A company like Shopify will likely supply their employees with the necessary technology, but will they cover the costs of extra private space, high-capacity broadband, utilities, insurance, and so on?
The conditions that Shopify employees will face resemble those of freelance and digital platform workers, who notoriously lack sufficient labour protection and for whom the “new normal” has in fact been normal for a number of years. In absence of a physical office, there is little that separates the experience of full-time employees from that of part-time or temporary (gig) workers. While a full-time employee may have the security of long-term employment (which may weaken as social contact with colleagues and bosses disappears), if the costs of remote work are uncompensated by the employer this sense of security may also fade.
Meanwhile, computer mediated work is exposed to corporate monitoring: calls, keyboard activity and emails are overseen, and applications are being implemented to prevent employees from “slacking off”. In a physical office, the monitoring is not so one-sided: workers were indeed monitored, but could also do some monitoring. In a digital workplace, workers have a limited capacity to monitor — and evaluate — their employers and colleagues. The lack of physical office and shared experience of an employer’s work culture will result in a stunted ability to articulate collective responses to conditions that may need changing.
Finally, given Shopify’s influence, others will be tempted to follow suit. “‘Thrive on change’ is written on our digital walls for a reason”, Lutke tweeted. The changes proposed by Shopify, paired with fewer physical workplaces, initiate a transfer of costs from employers to employees, and contribute to the erosion of collective experience, and — probably — of collective action, whether to further workers’ rights or to generate a strong, fair company culture.
Just because digital companies can implement permanent remote work doesn’t mean that they should. It may not even be to their long-term advantage: a supportive work-environment, the capacity to build teams, and the combination of intense work-time in the office with true leisure time outside, may, once the current excitement about home-work subsides, emerge as a competitive advantage for businesses which maintain office space.
Filipa Pajević is a PhD Candidate at the McGill School of Urban Planning. She studies the spatial underpinnings of knowledge workers.
Richard Shearmur is Director of the McGill School of Urban Planning. He has published extensively on the geography of innovation and the role of locations in the urban economy.
