The Future of work is changing — One work from home at a time — Feb 25, 2025
created by @robtyrie from www.greyswanguild.org
The future of work is rapidly evolving, with remote work becoming a dominant trend across Canada, the US, Europe, and major metropolitan cities worldwide.
I have had a home office, for the past 40 years. In my first apartment living on my own in 1987, I leased a space that I thought was perfect. It was a 2 bedroom apartment on a quiet street of low-rise apartments, beside Tunney’s Pasture, near the village of Westboro, right by the Western Parkway and an amazing bike path that went right downtown. I was working for a software company and we were doing a year-long project. creating the new accounting system for Health Canada. (so much COBOL). It the condo, the extra bedroom was not for an Airbnb or a roommate — it was an indulgence — a home office. My spouse and I would be living there. She was teaching at a local school and we knew we needed a spot to work from after hours or on weekends. It was also the spot for the first PC I purchased for myself, an Amiga 500. I chose it because I loved how advanced it was over the character-ux-chained IBM Clone I could afford. I could not afford a Mac workstation. That’s another story.
When I moved to Toronto 25 years ago, although I had an office with Janna System a start up rocket ship I worked at, I was normally travelling andworking on client sites in New York and Chicago. I still tucked my office into the basement with some bookshelves and a folding table, a lab of a laptop, a decktop PC and a NexT Slab Unix Workstation. It was more an art piece than a work horse in that setup.
For the last 20 years I have worked remotely much more than in a home office. I was either in the field dialling in or dialling in from home. Now I work from home 80% of the time and I have a big setup now that the kids have moved out. I took over the den and have added 5 bookshelves, and large dining room table of a deck, 3 large screen monitors, and a high-end gaming laptop to run a private, fine-tuned LLM. It is as much a digital entertainment zone as it is a work area. And lately with the Yetti Mic and multople camer and ful spectrum lighting it is also a Zoom Studio set up for what I call Rought Podcasting (thing Rough Guide Meets Pivot). I can’t imagine living any wany and planning and spending for it with good equipement and high bandwidth my clients pay for. We are very, very fortunate to have these resources.
In my house, especially when 6 of us were living, playing and working here, router problems and internet issues were crisis events… everyone got good at fixing things and I set it up to administer remotely.
The pandemic did not change my work style from home very much, we were ready, 5 of us to use the house for work. For others, there has been greater impact onm people, and living in Toronto, I saw the abandonment of the Down Town from 2020 to 2023. Even though the city is full by Wednesday. Friday’s still feel more like Sundays than anything else. all thought the tourism has definitely picked up.
This is evident is large and small cities from around the world. Will we ever return to the way things were?
Studies show a significant increase in remote job postings globally, with Canada, the US, and the UK leading in remote work rates. The landscape of remote work is reshaping labour markets, cultural exchange, and economic decentralization. As organizations embrace remote work, they are navigating challenges such as legal frameworks and cultural competency while unlocking opportunities for collaboration and diversity[1][2][3].
The shift towards remote work is not just a temporary change but potentially marks the beginning of a new era in the workforce. And there is not a lot of agreement. Some bossed want their staff in the office 40 hours a week if they are not with clients. Jamie Diamon hauled in all his MDs to lead by example becuse he could. As the graph above shows, workers are not agreeing with employers but compromises are being made. With the majority of full-time employees still working in-office, the normalization of remote work environments is evident. Remote work offers flexibility and autonomy, attracting younger workers who value these aspects. Industries like computer and IT, marketing, accounting, finance, and project management are leading in embracing remote work practices[3][4].
The rise of remote working has had a profound impact on downtown office real estate across the globe. In New York City, simulations accounting for remote work rates suggest a staggering drop of over 40% in the value of all office properties in 2020.
According to McKinsey, the fall in valuations represents a 26% slump from values seen in 2019. The change in employment trends has also impacted retail and residential real estate, as footfalls in metropolitan areas have dropped 10%-20% below pre-pandemic levels. Asking rent for office spaces in U.S. cities like NYC and San Francisco has taken a bigger hit than Paris, London, and Munich counterparts.
Manhattan, the world’s leading financial hub, has seen workers spending $12.4 billion less annually due to reduced days in the office, with significant implications for local businesses and tax revenues
In Canada, the shift to remote work has been equally transformative. At the pandemic’s peak, around 40% of Canadian employees worked from home, with urban centers like Toronto and Montreal having the highest share of remote workers due to a concentration of finance jobs.
This shift has led to changes in real estate dynamics, with a potential long-term impact on urban office spaces as remote work continues to be a viable option for a significant portion of the workforce.
The UK has also experienced a dramatic increase in remote working, with 46.6% of people in employment doing some work from home during April 2020. This shift has led to a reevaluation of the need for traditional office spaces and has likely contributed to changes in real estate values and demand in city centers
These examples from different countries illustrate a broader trend of declining demand for downtown office real estate as remote work becomes more prevalent, reshaping the commercial real estate market and urban economies worldwide.
As we move towards 2025, it is projected that 70% of the global workforce will work remotely at least five days a month. Companies are increasingly offering flexible work practices to meet the expectations of job seekers. The productivity benefits of remote work have been demonstrated through studies showing performance increases and improved work environments for remote employees. English-speaking countries are at the forefront of fully-remote roles, with companies like Dell and Aetna showcasing increased productivity with flexible work arrangements[4].
Notes in the articles below.
The Grey Swan Guild is a Virtual Think Tank that does cool interesting events for smart and curious people. This piece was written in support of our next Event, Leap Day of the Swan.
On the cusp of the fourth year anniversary of our Guild, we are hosting a three hour Leap Day of The Swan event on Thursday, February 29th at 10am EST/7am PST/4pm CEST/5 pmSAST/7 pmGulfST/8:30 pmIST/11 pmSGT. Here’s some of the salient details.
We’ll be breaking out into four hives to discuss four key aspects of remote work, distributred teams, flextime and work-from-home and where this could all go with our Futures Wheel tool. Get familiar with a great strategic planning tool and invest in identifying the four-year probabilities, preferabilities, possibilities, wild cards, extremes and consequential effects of all these WFH aspects.
Rob Tyrie is a founder of the Grey Swan Guild, and the Managing principle and General Operations Director of IronstoneAdvisory the developers of the Creator Model, a tool and method to help small companies grow and go to market at the same time. He is Curious-Computer-Scientist in all senses if the term. He’s trying to write a short book this year on GPT Prompting Patterns for Insurance pros…. we shall see that the book will largely be written in serial on Linked In… follow along with the adventure 👈here. I am looking for both acolytic fans and scathing skeptics to polish it and keep it to 100 pages long across 10 chapters.
