Jobs and Homes

A couple of years ago, reading "WFH" might have made many of say WTF?  A year into the pandemic, we are all well aware of WFH.  There is so much work happening at home that it seems more like we are living at work :(

Technology has stepped up with tools that we didn't know even existed.  We are now emailing, chatting, Zooming, and chatting while Zooming while checking emails while checking personal messages on the smartphone, ... All these make one wonder, well, is this a win-win-win all around?  Or, is something important lost in this WFH?

Microsoft teams "conducted over 50 studies to understand how the nature of work itself has changed since early 2020." What did they do?

Microsoft’s annual Work Trend Index is part of this initiative and includes an analysis of trillions of productivity signals — think emails, meetings, chats, and posts — across Microsoft and LinkedIn’s user base. It also includes a survey of more than 30,000 people in 31 countries around the world.

That's a pretty good survey.  What did they find?

The effort revealed a significant impact on "organizational connections — the fundamental basis of social capital."

People consistently report feeling disconnected, and in studying anonymized collaboration trends between billions of Outlook emails and Microsoft Teams meetings, we saw a clear trend: the shift to remote work shrunk people’s networks.

It doesn't surprise me one bit. But, before I add my editorial comments, let me present more from that report:

[Interactions] within close networks increased, while interactions with distant networks diminished. As people shifted into lockdown, they focused on connecting with the people they were used to seeing regularly, letting weaker relationships fall to the wayside. Simply put, companies became more siloed than they were pre-pandemic. And while interactions with close networks are still frequent, we’re seeing that now — one year in — even these close team interactions have started to diminish.

Now, this is also the time when big organizations are beginning to think about office structure post-pandemic.  Microsoft announced that from March 29th, it will open its headquarters to a limited number of employees.  As more and more organizations think about these issues, will everything be remote?  WFH forever?  Or, fully back to how things were pre-pandemic? Or, a hybrid of sorts?

Most of us hypothesize that it will be a hybrid.  Employers realize that productivity does not mean everybody has to be in the same place at the same time. Employees have experienced the advantage of doing laundry in the background while working on reports.  So, will a hybrid mode restore people's networks and the social capital in the organization?

When we studied trends in countries where more people had returned to hybrid work environments, we saw improvements in team isolation. For example, in New Zealand, we saw spikes in team isolation — measured by the amount of communication with distant networks — when lockdowns were issued. When lockdowns were eased, team isolation improved. We saw this trend in other countries as well, like Korea.

This data supports our hypothesis: remote work makes teams more siloed, but adding some in-person time back to the workplace will help.

The pandemic has changed the world in many ways.  There's no going back.    

Can't work with them. Can't work without them.

Writing is a solitary activity, even for wannabe writers like me, and more often than not it is done when working from home.  Well, yes, there are stories of how writers would check into hotels and furiously pound on the typewriter keys.  Right, Jack?

Working from home has never been the norm for most, but WFH has become the default for most white-collar occupations.  With a coronavirus vaccine months away, companies like Google are making it clear to their employees that it might be summer 2021 before they can regroup in office buildings, and play ping pong like in the good old days.

Does WFH help with productivity?

Measuring productivity in the service sector has always been problematic.  What exactly are the outputs that we can measure and compare when the output is not always tangible, unlike in manufacturing or agriculture?

Yet, "they" said that WFH since the Covid-19 lockdown had increased productivity.  But then the reality is slowly sinking in that WFH is creating more problems for productivity.  The US, which unlike the European countries, is strangled by its irresponsible leader in the White House and several gubernatorial offices, is doomed to experience a productivity drop with continued WFH.

And then there is the employee morale itself.  For people whose living spaces are not really work environments, work-life divide has become hopelessly blurred.

“I used to think of a desk as like a kind of prison cell, where I was chained for eight hours a day,” she tells me over the phone. “It was always like serving time. But, at this point, my desk would be my saviour.”

As long as there was a work to go to, people complained about it while counting down the days towards their next vacation.  It was also a place to go to in order to get away for a few hours from the nagging spouse and whiny children.

Now, there is nowhere to go even if one takes off from work--you are stuck at home, which is where you also work.  Meanwhile, the nagging spouse and the demanding kids are always around all the time.

Those without spouses and children are trapped in loneliness.

More than half a million people have tuned into The Sound of Colleagues, a web page and Spotify playlist of workplace sounds, including keyboards, printers, chatter and coffee machines. Red Pipe, a Swedish music and sound studio, created it in April as a joke, but its data suggests that people keep it on in the background.

The whole thing is becoming a Kafkaesque nightmare for many!

Here's to hoping that the nightmare will end soon.  Make that nightmares--after all, they are linked!

Working from home ... in Chennai and Chengdu

For more than three months, many of the employed have been working from home (WFH.)  Is this working out well?

To answer that, let's check in with the wealthiest people in whose direct or indirect employ are people working from home.  If WFH has not affected productivity, then those wealthy people would have benefited, right?

Guess what?  Those gazillionaires have handsomely profited: "U.S. billionaire wealth surges to $584 Billion, or 20 percent, since the beginning of the pandemic."

Overall, between March 18—the rough start date of the pandemic shutdown, when most federal and state economic restrictions were in place—and June 17, the total net worth of the 640-plus U.S. billionaires jumped from $2.948 trillion to $3.531 trillion, based on the two groups’ analysis of Forbes data. Since March 18, the date Forbes released its annual report on billionaires’ wealth, the U.S. added 29 more billionaires, increasing from 614 to 643. During the same three months, over 45.5 million people filed for unemployment, according to the Department of Labor.
The top five billionaires—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison—saw their wealth grow by a total of $101.7 billion, or 26%.

Incredible, right?

It is no wonder that tech companies are looking at making permanent a great deal of WFH.  Think-tanks like Brookings immediately sensed an opportunity for those tech workers to get away from the expensive real estate like the Silicon Valley and move to the remarkably affordable interior of the country. 

Suddenly, it looks as if the COVID-19 pandemic could allow not just localized telework, but a more fundamental dispersal of America’s highest-value employment away from large “superstar” metro areas and into the lower-priced American heartland.

Not so fast.

If WFH has not affected company bottom-line, then why should the geographic dispersal be restricted only to within the US?  Companies might as well hire employees in, say, India, and have them work from their homes there instead of bringing them here to the US.  We could easily see a footloose economy on steroids!

A responsible policymaker might then look at these developments and begin to worry that big tech, which has brought wealth and power to the US, could easily start creating a whole bunch of satellite offices around the world.  Well, tRump is no responsible guy--he has proudly stated that he takes no responsibility.  So, it is no surprise that he announced a freeze until the end of the year on work visas for foreign labor.

So, let's recap.  WFH is doing well as a practice.  WFH has not affected productivity, and the big tech employers are reaping huge profits.  Many of the tech employees are foreign born.  tRump wants to prevent them from coming here.  Connect the dots yourself.

Or, read Shikha Dalmia's commentary:

high-skilled foreign workers that blue states like California, Washington, and New York depend on are out of luck. What is likely to happen in these states? Will they rush to hire Americans with big bucks in hand? Not really.
For starters, there just aren't enough high-skilled Americans sitting around to be hired. The unemployment rate last month—the peak of the pandemic—for computer jobs was 2.5 percent compared to the overall rate of 13.3 percent for all jobs, according to an analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy.
So as high-tech companies are choked off from hiring foreign workers, they'll start outsourcing more operations abroad.

If you prefer a "sound bite," Dalmia offers this:

The more Trump tries to turn America into a fortress, the louder will be the sucking sound of jobs fleeing overseas, to use the immortal words of failed presidential candidate Ross Perot.

As I wrote in this essay in Professional Geographer, in 2018, even the President of the United States cannot create an alternative facts of economic geography.