A future of working from home
David Streitfeld
Four months after the coronavirus pandemic shut down offices, corporate America has concluded that working from home is working out. Many employees will be tethered to Zoom and Slack for the rest of their careers, their commute accomplished in seconds.
Richard Laermer has some advice for all the companies rushing pell-mell into this remote future: Don’t be an idiot.
A few years ago, Laermer let the employees of RLM Public Relations work from home Fridays. This small step toward telecommuting proved a disaster, he said. He often couldn’t find people when he needed them. Projects languished.
“Every weekend became a threeday holiday,” he said. “I found that people work so much better when they’re all in the same physical space.”
IBM came to a similar decision. In 2009, 40% of its 386,000 employees in 173 countries worked remotely. But in 2017, with revenue slumping, management called thousands of them back to the office.
Even as Facebook, Shopify, Zillow, Twitter and many other companies are developing plans to let employees work remotely forever, the experiences of Laermer and IBM are a reminder that the history of telecommuting has been strewn with failure. The companies are barreling forward but run the risk of the same fate.
Companies have been trying for decades to make working from home work. In 1985, the media was using phrases like “the growing telecommuting movement.” Peter Drucker, the management guru, declared in 1989 that “commuting to office work is obsolete.”
Telecommuting was a technology-driven innovation that seemed to offer benefits to both employees and executives. The former could eliminate ever-lengthening commutes and work the hours that suited them best. Management would save on high-priced real estate and could hire applicants who lived far from the office, deepening the talent pool.
And yet many of the ventures were eventually downsized or abandoned. Apart from IBM, companies that publicly pulled back on telecommuting over the past decade include Aetna, Best Buy, Bank of America, Yahoo, AT&T and Reddit. Remote employees often felt marginalized, which made them less loyal. Creativity, innovation and serendipity seemed to suffer.
Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, created a furor when she forced employees back into offices in 2013. “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings,” a company memo explained.
Tech companies proceeded to spend billions on ever more lavish campuses that employees need never leave. Facebook announced plans in 2018 for what were essentially dormitories. Amazon redeveloped an entire Seattle neighborhood. When Patrick Pichette, the former chief financial officer at Google, was asked, “How many people telecommute at Google?” he said he liked to answer, “As few as possible.”
That calculus has abruptly changed. Facebook expects up to half its workers to be remote as soon as 2025. Walmart’s tech chief told his workers that “working virtually will be the new normal.”
Remote workers might be free of commuting costs, but they are traditionally more vulnerable.
At the beginning of the year, the unemployment rate was low, and workers had some leverage. All that has been lost, at least for the next year or two. Widespread remote work could consolidate that shift.
“When people are in turmoil, you take advantage of them,” said John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University.
“When you hire remotely, you can get the best talent around and not just the best talent that wants to live in California or New York,” he said. “You get true diversity. And it turns out that affects innovation.”