— Lifestyle, Work, Future, Opinion — 9 min read
We are living in crazy times. More than a year the world is under constant change. Businesses must adapt quickly or go out of the equation. The same is with the way we work. Everything is questioned now: working culture, office spaces, remote work, work-life balance. The one thing is clear: world will never be the same as before happened events. In this post I want to discuss the future of work and try to better understand what awaits us after life will be back to “normal”. We will be focusing on what future offices might look like and try to figure out whether remote work is as good as it looks at the first glance.
In short, I like it. I gives me more freedom and I use my time more efficiently. Also, I would say I am more of an introvert, most of the time, so I do not really need to overcommunicate in office environment. At the same time, I clearly realize that myself, working in tech industry is not a representative example. People might have a different personality, life situation, house ergonomics or simply be occupied in the industry where remote work in not the best choice or even not possible. So, despite of might short answer being “yes”, truthful answer would be “it depends”.
No, it is not. Despite of looking cool and even romantic sometimes (imagine working from an exotic island), remote work has a substantial number of subtle aspects that could be hard stoppers not only for individuals, but for entire industries.
First and foremost, working remotely sets enormous bar on how you manage your time. And it is super easy to miss it if you never worked from home. Imagine, you do not have to commute, dress up, go outside. All you need to do is to turn on your computer, or start any other equipment you need for work. It is always at hand, you do not have time pressure to go home, etc.
In such a setup it is super easy to mess up your work-life balance. Here is a catch – it is fine for deeply passionate people who work with fire in their eyes all day long. But the reality is that not everybody is like that. For huge amount of people, it is necessary to leave the apartment, commute, enter another building, finish work, leave the building and leave work behind. This is a routine that is simple, understandable and makes total sense. We cannot assume that everybody can change so quickly. Forcing people to work from home might create unhealthy environment and blur the boundary between life and work, which is bad.
Let us assume your employer is ready to sponsor your home office environment. Let us even assume budget is unlimited. Will it help? I do not think so. It will certainly spark a joy short term, but long term it makes absolutely no difference. What if your partner must work from the same home too? Ok, you can figure that out somehow, you are an adult... And what if your child will have to stay at home to study (because schools have decided to teach remotely)? And what if you have two children? You will need to convert your home in a micro-office facility and I am not sure you want it.
What if you have enough money to buy/rent more space for your family? Well, guess what? Space is a finite resource. It simply does not scale well. Office buildings are designed for higher density and higher mobility of people and residential buildings are not – they designed for life. Have you evert thought why many office buildings a rather tall? Because otherwise, people won't fit in. Manhattan has high risers not because it's cool, but because it is necessary, due to workers density.
It applies even to basic things, such as internet connection. I remember how connection quality dropped when offices were closed in Berlin. Residential home connections were so under-provisioned that ISPs had to rush into upgrades. There are many examples like that (elevators, garbage collection, etc).
Remote work transformation is hard even for digital businesses, putting conservative industries aside. The move should happen without destructive effect. It should improve the efficiency, safety and work/life balance. Otherwise, it will be just change for the sake of change. In this sense, I do see couple of major road blocks we have to move yet:
When company is fully distributed, where is it registered? And why in this country? An absence of physical spaces removes the common pattern of having an office in the county you pay business taxes in. So, if you have no offices, what stops you from being registered in the country with extremely low taxes? It is clear that for a fully remote businesses, there will have to be some extra guidance on business residences and tax implications of it. Also, I hate to say this, but we will have to add more regulations to company registration process. We see these problems every year with large enterprises already and it will only get worse.
Huge amount of business processes is set up for being physically present. It is simply hard to change that fast enough. E.g., if you are a software company, it is highly likely that your engineering department will be able to switch to remote operation in a month or so. But what about your Legal department or Accounting. For instance, in certain countries paper documents are still required by law. Should your staff members send those around daily? Just a small example but such things are adding up quickly, making full transition much harder than it looks like.
Another aspect is the decision-making process in sales. Let’s be realistic – it is still extremely important for some customers to see the seller. Even when we are talking SaaS (Software as a Service). Especially when purchase is large enough. Part of it is cultural, I believe, but it does not mean we can ignore it.
In real life it would mean that your sales person would have to go to the potentially buying organization. And there will have to be some common space to meet in (certainly not an apartment and likely not a restaurant, because it will look fishy). Such things could (and will) change in future, but it will certainly slow down adoption of office-free work model. Could be that future might boos the market of flexible offices (like WeWork), so that some more physical workflows could still be implemented.
For certain industries it is impossible to do a remote operation. Scientists, is a good example. When doing something ground breaking, you often need a specialized equipment, which could be bulky, shared, power consuming and require special maintenance. You just cannot do it at home and there is no way it will ever be possible soon.
Government organizations, given their commitment to paper, if I may put it like that. Not like it is impossible for them to move, but it will require immense effort to do it (and some extra laws too).
Construction works – yes, a lot of things could be done remotely, but nothing will give you better understanding of a project state than a field work, yet.
In other words, it is pretty clear that in certain use cases, any changes to the work process might be devastating and will take really long time (if ever at all).
Attention is becoming a currency of 21st century. We lost it and now desperately trying to get it back. One of the foundations of productive remote work is a deep focus. But it is incredibly hard to achieve it if your attention span is short – you just cannot focus long enough because your mind is constantly switching topics. This is a new problem and we do not know how to solve it yet. So, for people who suffer from short attention span remote work will be a huge challenge. And even for those who do not, maintaining a deep focus long enough at your home environment is not exactly trivial.
This is healthy for any business, but it is very context specific. Like if you have an office at San Francisco and you are trying to hire a Software Engineer for office work, there is a certain and arguably reasonable low-end salary in the city and nobody will work for less than that.
It is very different for remote work culture. Speaking from pure efficiency perspective, if global workforce mobility is allowed and encouraged, what would prevent you from NOT hiring locals at all, as they are 10 times more expensive than people from poorer locations? Even now it is absolutely clear that you can find talented people everywhere in the world for incomparable compensation packages. Such things could be devastating for established hubs and metropolitan areas with higher costs of living.
Frankly, we can only speculate now. It is still pretty unclear what current situation will morph into. What we can tell already is that current work model is not sustainable in crisis. We also know that COVID situation served as a catalyst for changes that had to happen sooner or later.
Personally, I am a big believer of hybrid mode when you can fluently change the place you work from (including office space) – this is a compromise, which we need to train our mobility and flexibility, because, as we discussed previously, pure remote work has a lot of downsides to be resolved.
Also, I do not believe in 8 hours work day. My personal take on work is that you must like it to be productive. Anything else is a torture. Like I picked engineering because I enjoy it and have a passion for building things. Another important thing to me is a “feeling of usefulness”, or “feeling a purpose” if you will. And I do not really care how much hours it will cost me. Sometimes it will be less than 8, and sometimes much more.
I believe that in future, such approach will begin to dominate, because younger generations are already trying to pursue their passions, instead of picking up the first work they got an offer for. It was simply impossible before due to lower quality of life, but more and more societies can afford doing it now.
I have a feeling that in future people might start to work earlier in life, because education pipeline will speed up. We see now that an education pipeline is a bit archaic and redundant. We are already a year within the pandemic situation, so for some people, remote education became dominant. It is yet to see how it will scale and what real outcomes will it bring, but it feels like it could work.
It is very likely that nobody will study 4 years online without doing anything else. There is a big difference between physical university and online university – former provides you an extra environment to adapt to, side activities, etc. And online, you do not have any of that, yet, so it is very likely that people will complete their education much faster.
The "new" problem we will have to regulate is the education shallowness, but it's not like we do not have it now. And to some extent it is even not bad, because it is getting harder and harder to follow "first principles" approach. After certain level of progress it might just become unreasonable to know certain things. Like now, it is cool, if you know how pumping systems work in your residential building, but do you really need that knowledge? Or, do you need to know how electricity work? Cool to know and really interesting but rarely required. I hope you got my point ;)
One more thing I would envision is that we might start seeing more mobility across professions. Our knowledge is getting shallow (due to fast progress) and it is getting inherently easier to acquire a required skill-set to start a new profession. I suspect that it will only get easier in future.
Which is a good thing by the way, because it might finally become easier to find yourself in life, instead of locking yourself within wrongly defined boundaries.
It is also clear, that in future, human creativity and adaptability will become the main currency at the job market. Even comparing 2020 with 2021 we see how business flexibility became the main attribute of businesses that survived. Same with creativity – lots of survived companies managed to rework their business lines and products in a matter of weeks to adapt to new conditions.
And I really like it, because, as some of you might know from my older posts, I strongly believe that our creativity is what will keep differentiating humans from computer systems in future.
To me, it looks like we have a unique opportunity to contribute to the huge change in the industry. Like 8-hours shifts by Mr Henry Ford changed the industry forever, we can change it to something new. We should look positively into the future and think deeply on how to utilize our human capital in the best way. We must find ways how to use our unique creativity in day-to-day work, to build more sustainable and solid future.
In terms of technology state to make flexible working environment possible, I believe we are doing OK already. Now, we just have more social and legal issues to resolve before rolling it out. Some of the city infrastructure aspects are to be solved yet, but hey, we already kind of know how to do that.
Hope you enjoyed the reading! Want to discuss the content? Feel free to reach out to me on social media!