Will the trend of remote working continue?
After the outbreak of covid-19, “social distancing” became a common term in our life. We quarantine ourselves and spend most of our time at home. Furthermore, after a while of adaptation, many job positions, especially information jobs, offered remote working, which gave more flexibility for the workers and helped them avoid the risk of being infected by the covid. Besides social distancing, many employees can even achieve work distancing to protect their health by choosing jobs can support remote working. This seems to be a great change in the work form: in the ideal future, people can just work at home!
Unfortunately, many critics held a negative attitude toward this idea, and proved their argument with solid data. During the Great Resignation, 2.9% of the national workforce left their jobs, creating a huge demand in the labor force market. They argued that this temporary demand became a great asset for many employees to quit their original jobs and pursue better ones with remote working, and they claimed that companies will not continue offering the choice of remote working because the supply of labor force would increase to the original level after the pandemic: remote working is just a temporary trend. However, I believe that the trend of remote working won’t change in long term and will become a norm for most jobs because millions of blue-collar jobs, which require employees to work in person, are being replaced by machines and computers, and the demand for information workers, such as software developers and quants, will continue increasing, providing the foundation to the popularization of remote working.
Even before the pandemic, the mode of remote working appeared in many scenarios. Many students chose to take online courses on Coursera or other platforms: they could learn almost every subject they want at home. Even more, more and more universities started offering their online courses, such as the famous Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective from Carnegie Mellon University, and Justice, the philosophy course that guides a generation of young people to think of the value of their life, from Harvard. Without the limitation of space, people can learn better at home, and the lectures producers and knowledge providers can earn greater profits by having a larger audience number and have a lot greater impact in the society. What’s more, since 2010, people tend to find jobs on LinkedIn instead of going to the crowded career fair, enduring the suffocating air in summer and cold wind in winter. The job seekers just need to post their resume online and reach out to the companies they are interested in. On the other hand, the employer and human resources can just scroll down the page, browsing the information of all the potential candidates, deciding whether refuse them elegantly, give them interview opportunities, or offer them the jobs. Furthermore, office workers more and more rely on zooms and other platforms that reflect the notion of remote work during work. Through zoom, people from all over the world can connect, which really improves working efficiency and saves transportation expense. Take international trade as an example. A negotiation between a company in Beijing and a company in London can easily be done by two computers, instead of days of travel and expenses of flight, hotels, and taxis.
During the pandemic, remote working became a mainstream for most information workers. Companies were forced to make this change due to the Covid: even many employees could not adapt this change at first. Some even complained that the feelings of working have changed. However, most of them adapt to this new form of working soon and started enjoying it. No need to get up early with sleepy eyes, rush to take breakfast, spend half an hour on subway or take the expensive taxi to get to the company on time. Employees can calmly wake up, have a hot water shower, make a healthy breakfast, and turn on their computer whenever they are ready to work. In fact, they can even work on bed! The flexibility provided by remote working make many employees turn their focus on their life and families. In the past, people work to live, but now many choose to enjoy work.
Many may say that the companies will no longer be willing to offer remote working option after the pandemic since more people would return to work after the Great Resignation. For this argument, I have point out that it’s no need for companies to make difficulties to their employees when it has proven that remote working is as efficient as working in person, or even more efficient in some cases. What’s more, more and more companies pay attention to the happiness of their employees, promoting the employees’ loyalty to them. Furthermore, the opening in many jobs’ positions did not provide direct advantage to the job seekers, and most employees did not quit their jobs for better ones.
While plenty of companies are eager to hire people, plenty of articles, like the “Pandemic Revealed How Much We Hate Our Jobs. Now We Have a Chance to Reinvent Work” on Time, believe that the data show that the pandemic induces people to leave their original jobs and pursue better jobs with higher salaries, better work condition, or remote working mode. However, Bryan Lufkin thinks this is an oversimplification of the Great Resignation and argues that people are leaving their jobs for different reasons. He states that “some quit because of ennui and desire for growth” (Lufkin 2021), and “some quit their jobs due to untenable working conditions or because they had to take care of children while schools were closed” (Lufkin 2021). In other words, he thinks it is hard and biased trying to understand the Great Resignation and why people are quitting their jobs by pure data. I support his idea that not everyone who quit their jobs has the choice to pursue better jobs. In fact, we tend to see the Great Resignation through the perspective of people who already have good jobs and quit for better opportunities, “like top executives or financially secure workers” (Lufkin 2021), and neglect those who are forced to quit their jobs to deal with the impact of the pandemic.
Most of the jobs’ positions with plenty of opening are those that will be replaced by the machines and computers. Many people were still struggling to get a job during the Great Resignation, so companies did not have that much pressure to offer remote working during the pandemic and won’t retreat this working mode after the pandemic.
The trend of remote work is in long term, and more and more employees will work at home after the pandemic.
