Four More Facets of Working from Home

The usual news on this issue has settled down.  The pendulum which swings back and forth between office and remote labor has continued to move toward the former, with companies not in the news as much for telling their employees they can choose between turning up onsite or losing their jobs.  There have been some items on this topic, though, over the past ten weeks.

First was “The ‘work-from-home weekend’ may be on its way out” (Lakshmi Varanasi, Business Insider, February 16^th).  The main example was Deutsche Bank, which now “won’t let employees work from home on both Fridays and Mondays.”  Decades ago, at AT&T, those were the most common days for that, which when combined with generally unconscious bosses and worker measures taken to impede contact, meant too many people were in effect working only Tuesday through Thursday.  Ostensibly, “the move was made to even out worker attendance across the week,” but as it is easy to try to solve attendance and productivity problems with policy, it was probably more than that.

Second, “The ZIP Code Shift:  Why Many Americans No Longer Live Where They Work” (Emma Goldberg, The New York Times, March 4^th).  Per then-breaking research, “many Americans now live roughly twice as far from their offices as they did prepandemic,” not across the country, but choosing couple-hour commutes, which they do less than five days a week and rarely if they are among the still 12% of workers exclusively remote.  That is bad news for those with businesses in downtown areas hoping that with Covid’s fading they would recover to where they were in the late 2010s – but can be a good choice for people wanting to live in another city for housing or personal reasons. 

Does anyone wonder why there has been no great remote-worker movement to isolated rural areas and small towns?  It may be “The hidden price of leaving a big city” (Aki Ito, Business Insider, April 15^th).  While “it may improve your quality of life,” you may need “good luck if you lose your job.”  As well, some making that choice have ended up “pining for the things they left behind, from culinary excellence to cultural diversity.”  Yet, although the author said “every week it seems like I see a new story about some former San Franciscan or New Yorker regretting their decision to leave,” population has been dropping in those metropolitan areas along with Los Angeles and Seattle.  It is important if not always determinative to consider how suitable new locations would be for continuing careers.

Finally, one office disadvantage you may not have considered.  In “Google’s worker firings show that the office actually isn’t a place to be yourself” (Business Insider, April 20^th), author Tim Paradis told us that “Google fired more than two dozen workers after they took part in sit-ins at offices in California and New York.”  For about ten years there has been a trend toward encouraging employees to “bring your whole self to work,” probably strengthened by blurred home-office borders, recreation as part of the workday, and Generation Z wishes.  However, it is still dangerous to talk about politics, let alone participate in it at the office, and other subjects would also invite unwanted controversy.  The concern here seems quite like something I read almost 50 years ago, when jobseekers were cautioned that management will only indulge talking about “real or imagined personal problems” up to a point, that “you can get fired,” which meant “so much” to the idea of coworkers being equivalent to a family. 

The issue of whether to work from an office is still important.  Expect more here – especially if the pendulum shows signs of stopping or reversing.