Work Futures Update | A Sort Of Life
| Working From Bed | Minimum Office | National Payscales | Amazon Union |
Catching up on a long list of links after shutting down for a few weeks.
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Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.
| Studs Terkel
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Working From Bed Is Actually Great | Taylor Lorenz breaks the news about a long list of people that work from bed. Truman Capote (‘I can’t think unless I’m lying down.’), Winston Churchill, Arianna Huffington, and Frida Kahlo.
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Minimum Office
Are You Sure You Want to Go Back to the Office? | Anne Helen Petersen enlightens, as usual:
When I talked to dozens of analysts, H.R. experts, architects, consultants, real estate agents and office furniture designers, the consensus was clear: The future of office work is flexibility. At one end of that flexibility spectrum, there will be fully “distributed” companies like the software maker GitLab, with no headquarters and employees scattered across the world. At the other, there’ll be more old-fashioned organizations that demand face time in the office, but whose belief in the infeasibility of remote work has been permanently undercut.
And then there’s the vast, corporate in between. Headquarters aren’t going away, but more companies will embrace the hub-and-spoke model: smaller footprints in big, expensive cities, and smaller offices in places where employees want to (and can afford to) live. Some companies will keep their existing office space and allow people to claim staggered schedules that align with their preferences, avoid peak commuting times, and reduce overall capacity in the office.
Others will try what used to be known as “hoteling” or “hot desking,” in which multiple workers share a desk. Still others will offer stipends for employees to join the small, neighborhood-oriented working spaces that will proliferate as Americans get vaccinated.
People will be leaving their homes, having conversations, working with others — which is what they actually miss when they say they miss the office. They’ll just be doing it more on their terms than ever before.
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Remote work will have to be viewed as equally important as in-person work. In practice, that means rethinking what remote working actually looks like — that is, very little like what we’re doing now. We’re not just working from home, after all. We’re working from home during a pandemic.
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All of these companies catering to the highly skilled work force told me the same thing: Post-Covid flexibility is going to make the office even better. Workers are going to have a higher quality of life, more time with their kids, more connection to their communities. They’ll be able to live where they want to live, stop paying exorbitant rent. They might even figure out how to work less, simply by being able to concentrate more. This is the wild, blissful, utopian flexible future.
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If the future of work is flexibility, our challenge now is to make sure that future doesn’t just worsen the ever-widening divide in American society between those promised a new vision of the good, balanced life, and those for whom “flexibility” means effacing your wants and needs and dreams, once again, to the fickle demands of your employer.
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Covid-19 Propelled Businesses Into the Future. Ready or Not. | Greg Ip is looking back to look ahead:
After the Sept.11, 2001 terrorist attacks, a predicted shift to videoconferencing and telecommuting didn’t materialize because the necessary technology was clunky and expensive. By contrast, the pandemic arrived when many workers already had high speed internet and a device with a camera and video conferencing software.
Before the pandemic, roughly 5% of work days were spent at home, according to surveys of 15,000 Americans conducted by academics Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis. That had climbed to 50% in November, they reported in a paper for the Becker Friedman Institute, an economic research organization at the University of Chicago. Once the pandemic is over, respondents still expect to spend 22% of their work days at home.
The authors attribute the stickiness of remote work to, among other things, the investment employees and employers have made in the necessary equipment, and residual fears of physical proximity due to the pandemic. To this they add the network effect: “When several firms are operating partially from home, it lowers the cost for other firms and workers to do the same.” They also credit innovations such as collaboration software that enhance the experience. A different paper co-authored by Mr. Bloom, Mr. Davis and Yulia Zhestkova found that 1% of patents filed early in the pandemic related to working from home, nearly double the pre-pandemic share.
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Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., in Columbus, Ohio, illustrates the shift. Shortly after the pandemic hit, Nationwide had 98% of its 28,000 employees working from home. The initial impetus was safety, but chief executive Kirt Walker said it accelerated pre-existing plans to rely on virtual operations. Before the pandemic roughly 15% of employees worked from home and the company now plans for half to eventually do so permanently.
Mr. Walker used to hold town halls with employees in the auditorium at the company’s Columbus headquarters, which can hold up to 350. Now, he has regular companywide broadcasts attended by thousands of employees. They submit questions and vote on which Mr. Walker should answer using Slido, a live-polling application startup just bought by Cisco Systems Inc.
“We looked at major occurrences in the U.S.: the Great Depression, recessions, world wars, and what we found is that American reacted in two different ways,” Mr. Walker said. “First, they were forced to try new things and in many ways. Those new things became habits. Two, people became more value-conscious.”
Nationwide is closing 17 offices across the country, keeping four main campuses, reducing its real estate needs by roughly 1.1 million square feet and saving about $100 million, which it says will be used to reduce policyholders’ premiums.
Some companies, Mr. Walker said, wrote off 2020 as a lost year. “For us it was an accelerator, and got us closer to some long term objectives.”
Saving $100 million is nothing to sneeze at.
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National Payscales
These Tech Companies Are Paying Workers the Same Rates Across U.S. | Katherine Bindley boils down this controversy:
Tech workers and employers alike are beginning to question location-focused pay scales. A handful of companies are moving to abandon them altogether.
In setting pay without regard for location, tech companies including Reddit Inc. and Zillow Group Inc.are making a potentially expensive gamble to retain talent and gain a hiring edge. The move can entail maintaining relatively high salaries of employees who are relocating, and adopting a revised scale for new hires. Though it is early, the move challenges a long-held, but not universal, notion that where people live should determine what they make.
Some big tech firms including Facebook Inc. were clear early on in the pandemic that people moving away from the Bay Area to less expensive cities would see a pay cut. Payment platform Stripe Inc. offered one-time bonuses for workers who moved out of San Francisco, Seattle or New York — and agreed to a pay cut of up to 10%.
But a pay cut for any reason can be bad for worker morale, said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis who researches pay determination. “Employers really have to do a bit of a dance to justify it to workers,” he said.
Workers considering more flexible work scenarios are themselves divided. A November survey of 600 tech workers by the job-search platform Indeed found that 60% of respondents would be willing to take a pay cut to work remotely permanently while 40% said they wouldn’t.
A good rundown of various companies and why they fall into one camp or the other, like Zillow (moving toward a nationalized pay scale over time), Reddit (no location-based scales), Slack (yes), Facebook (yes).
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Amazon Union
Amazon Workers Near Vote on Joining Union at Alabama Warehouse | Michael Corkery and Karen Weise summarize the agreement between the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and Amazon **that was mediated by the National Labor Relations Board:
Thousands of workers at an Amazon warehouse near Birmingham, Ala., moved closer this week to holding a vote on whether to form a union, a milestone at the nation’s fastest growing large employer and a coup for organized labor, which has tried for years to make inroads at the e-commerce giant.
After three days of hearings before the National Labor Relations Board, which concluded on Tuesday, Amazon and the union agreed on one of the most crucial details of an election: which types of workers in the facility would be allowed to vote.
The agreement between Amazon and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union sets the stage for one of the few times that the company’s workers have had an opportunity to vote on whether to unionize.
The vote at the fulfillment center in Bessemer, Ala., about 14 miles from Birmingham, could cover roughly 5,800 workers, including full-time and seasonal employees.
This follows on the heels of a NLRB finding that Amazon illegally retaliated against a warehouse worker in Staten Island last spring for drawing attention to coronavirus-related safety concerns.
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Elsewhere
Enterprise-Ready-As-A-Service: WorkOS | Crossing the enterprise-readiness chasm
What I Said the Internet of 2020 Would Be Like… In 2011 | I anticipated a fragmented web and civil unrest in the West leading to increased authoritarianism
