Scaling Up To Wholesale Remote Work
A very different prospect than a few people working at home on occasional Fridays
Last week, I received a last-minute email from a contact, asking to reschedule a call. It was a very 2020 moment. He said we had to postpone because his company was being evacuated from their building for coronavirus decontamination. Someone working in a company there had tested positive.
That email made the Covid-19 emergency very tangible to me, although I was on the other coast, 3,000 miles away from his office in San Francisco. I immediately started to think about the thousand other emails sent from that building that afternoon, and the tens of thousands of similar emails likely sent across the country last week. A growing and perhaps exponential curve of disruption, spreading in all directions. And I am only talking about rescheduling calls and calendar reshuffling, not the human toll that the virus can potentially take.
Let’s focus on just the first-order implications of the rapid and unprecedented adoption of working from home as a technique of ‘social distancing’ as a defense against coronavirus, and put aside the health and economic considerations for others to discuss.
