The some times serendipitous finger of chaos
Often it takes massive shocks to the collective social, economic and even geographic contexts of our living ecosystem for slowly smoldering truths to erupt as self evident. This was true with the emergence of the Nazi party from the crucible of a humiliated Germany post World War I coupled with depression era inflation and economic misery of the late 20's and early 30's.
This was true of the cataclysm of pathogen invasion that attended the crossing of species from the Asian continental mass to the American mass during the last inter-glacial and is true today with the sudden appearance of a global pandemic in city centers all of the world after being decanted from the full bottle of natures bounty of pathogens through human action.
The echoes of this black swan event as some call these unforeseen, unexpected and uncertain in scope shocks will reverberate in lives in a myriad of ways. Some immediately seen to be positive even as the rapid spread of the virus and it's infection of vulnerable populations due to combinations of historical, economic and personal circumstance.
How has the release of a pandemic been positive? One immediate way was seen in the wake of the many national declarations of closed off economies in February, when the world finally decided to take seriously the warnings of the WHO who upped the anti on their level of concern by formerly declaring the infections a "pandemic". This first positive was the dramatic reduction in green house gas emissions across the globe. Within days, cities like Beijing , LA and NY , normally choked in atmospheric haze due to automobile and factory fumes presented nearly pristine skies. The obvious good of this turn of events for the cessation, albeit temporary, of the accelerating impacts of carbon emissions on our climate systems. Other immediate signs were seen in the waterways as rivers normally churned with the noise and pollution of motorized boats and ships fell unusually silent, again revealing in days clearer waters in many areas.
I state this not to assert in any absolute way that the pandemic has "done good" in a net calculation, that is nonsense. It implies that the trade off of human lives required to achieve this "good" is acceptable. No, we have been told by Scientists that such changes are entirely required and entirely doable IF we are willing to sacrifice in other ways ...the many niceties of our lives which cause the degradation of the environments in which we leave through the waste and refuse that these lives expel.
Conversely, the impacts that are negative to human lives are numerous. Now, livelihoods are disrupted as those with check to check living situations are incapable of funding their own survival. Governments have carted out mostly effective programs to cover their citizens tab as these lock downs persist ...save for one large United example of States in disunion and with schizophrenic and narcissistic leadership to boot.
It is in dispassionate analysis of these impacts positive and negative that we find that black swan events often act as a magnifying glass for an existing reality as mentioned previously. The particular shift I refer to as subject of this article is how this shift will impact how we work. In the United States and across Europe, decade after decade has seen the slow but steady erosion of working class employment. Many manufacturing jobs have disappeared into thin air (not over to China as many erroneously often due to the political machinations of their political leaders) and vast swathes of the work force are white collar workers who deal more with data than they do in driving or serving or cooking or building. The sole enabler of this shift has been of course technological innovation...in particular automation of formerly manually performed tasks and as well digitization of the over arching processes and control systems. Even farming today at commercial scales is a highly technologically intensive activity.
In an article I wrote 5 years ago titled The Telepresent Workforce
, in it I detailed one possible future regarding the consequences of the impact of Technology on white collar jobs that leverage knowledge workers, these are the aformentioned group that use digital technologies and their cognitive skills to conduct services and guide the development and building of products without ever swinging an axe, welding a beam or hammering a 2 x 4.
Why working flexibly as a knowledge worker is likely better for all involved.
When I was working on the Action Oriented Workflow paradigm I saw clearly that at some point the costs of working from offices would far exceed the gains from allowing workers to have more flexible working constraints. I hypothesized and built a technology to facilitate this imagined future, where working from home would be ideal not just from the perspective of workers who spend a large part of their day commuting...but also from the perspective of the business, particularly the executive set that make the rules about how the workforce is expected to conduct the business. I was not sure if the sociopathic default to bias for having people commute to offices to show face only to be partially productive at their desks could be over come without some great moment of enlightement, a shock so clear and sudden and moreover unavoidable that the executives would have no choice but to examine this truth eye to eye.
Here we are, in the last 2 months; millions of white collar workers who worked in companies that made working from home an option in the past, one mostly restricted away for special circumstances rather than personal desire; are now locked in their basement dens, Man or Woman caves and Guest rooms through most of the week day.
Covid 19 enforced enlightenment for workers and bosses
What is being revealed by this forced human sequestration are two trends that only reinforce the hypothesis I put forward in that earlier article.
When I was working on the Action Oriented Workflow paradigm I saw clearly that at some point the costs of working from offices would far exceed the gains from allowing workers to have more flexible working constraints. I hypothesized and built a technology to facilitate this imagined future, where working from home would be ideal not just from the perspective of workers who spend a large part of their day commuting...but also from the perspective of the business, particularly the executive set that make the rules about how the workforce is expected to conduct the business. I was not sure if the sociopathic default to bias for having people commute to offices to show face only to be partially productive at their desks could be over come without some great moment of enlightement, a shock so clear and sudden and moreover unavoidable that the executives would have no choice but to examine this truth eye to eye.
Here we are, in the last 2 months; millions of white collar workers who worked in companies that made working from home an option in the past, one mostly restricted away for special circumstances rather than personal desire; are now locked in their basement dens, Man or Woman caves and Guest rooms through most of the week day.
Covid 19 enforced enlightenment for workers and bosses
What is being revealed by this forced human sequestration are two trends that only reinforce the hypothesis I put forward in that earlier article.
The workers side of the coin
First, from the perspective of the user, many articles have already demonstrated that the employees at home are finding that they are doing a lot more work in this new state of affairs than they did commuting. Many are describing their super long work days which seem to never actually end because email is always on. This to me is the strong sign of what I predicted years ago...that employees would work more by default, for two multiplying reasons first the aforementioned availability of work for them to engage when THEY are enthused or engaged instead of artificially between a set of hours on the clock as is expected when going to "the office". The second is simply that there is a psychological bias to not appear like a slacker simply one is working from home. The honest employee suffers from this disproportionately and often goes beyond expectation to avoid this self perception and thus again they do more work.
That said, doing more work doesn't mean being miserable about it. To the contrary it appears the more work being done is being done in a state of less stress because the employee is literally at home, is not subject to the distractions of the office (though many with families will disagree here) and importantly can time slice work to large degree to coincide with the employees desire to work (always great to be able to do minimal work on Monday and Tuesday but spend Wednesday night ...when ones mind may be most fertile to bang out 3 days of work). So more work is being done but it doesn't feel like that much more work and this is an absolute gold mine for the other side of the equation.
The business side of the coin
This side was mostly described in that 2015 article but that article shifted to focus on what the shift to working remotely would mean for real estate and that is part of the benefit. The big part of the benefit directly correlates with what is happening for the employees at home. They are literally working more hours, which means they are being more productive which means the companies business processes are iterating at a faster rate which means they are either producing goods or dispensing services more efficiently which eventually impacts their sales and stock growth. The other part of this benefit is what happens back at the office, water is not run in bathrooms at the same rates, lights are kept off, security hours are restricted. The immediate reflection of this sudden reduction in monthly operating costs for offices will be clear as day to the money managers of these companies and it will be significant.
And now the twain shall meet
It is when business notes the increased productivity of workers working from home that comes with a bonus of a dramatic reduction in operating costs for office space that the check mate to the old paradigm is complete. Sociopathic tendencies or not, few truths in business can effect immediate change faster than the bottom line and the bottom line is allowing workers to work from home leads to a dramatic boost in the companies overall efficiency. With nearly 2 months of data these companies are now deeply sampled in this area that up to this event was sampled at a much lower density and likely was insufficient to examine the simultanous savings from the reduction in costs at the office coupled with the increased productivity of the employers at home. That data I predict will be clearly in quarterly results and will necessarily impact policy regarding work from home essentially immediately. Further, the grape vine of communication between executives will ensure that in the coming years many more companies accelerate their shifts to both enable working from home while at the same time plotting strategy to effectively use their office space in a much more flexible manner correlated to the barest minimum required space to conduct business in an office. In my article I indicated this would be mostly to preserve the desires of the egos of business managers who seem to enjoy getting together in conference rooms with their teams to pontificate for an hour and effectively killing the productivity of all in attendance for that hour. :)
The fallout of the unknown now becomes the future of work
First, from the perspective of the user, many articles have already demonstrated that the employees at home are finding that they are doing a lot more work in this new state of affairs than they did commuting. Many are describing their super long work days which seem to never actually end because email is always on. This to me is the strong sign of what I predicted years ago...that employees would work more by default, for two multiplying reasons first the aforementioned availability of work for them to engage when THEY are enthused or engaged instead of artificially between a set of hours on the clock as is expected when going to "the office". The second is simply that there is a psychological bias to not appear like a slacker simply one is working from home. The honest employee suffers from this disproportionately and often goes beyond expectation to avoid this self perception and thus again they do more work.
That said, doing more work doesn't mean being miserable about it. To the contrary it appears the more work being done is being done in a state of less stress because the employee is literally at home, is not subject to the distractions of the office (though many with families will disagree here) and importantly can time slice work to large degree to coincide with the employees desire to work (always great to be able to do minimal work on Monday and Tuesday but spend Wednesday night ...when ones mind may be most fertile to bang out 3 days of work). So more work is being done but it doesn't feel like that much more work and this is an absolute gold mine for the other side of the equation.
The business side of the coin
This side was mostly described in that 2015 article but that article shifted to focus on what the shift to working remotely would mean for real estate and that is part of the benefit. The big part of the benefit directly correlates with what is happening for the employees at home. They are literally working more hours, which means they are being more productive which means the companies business processes are iterating at a faster rate which means they are either producing goods or dispensing services more efficiently which eventually impacts their sales and stock growth. The other part of this benefit is what happens back at the office, water is not run in bathrooms at the same rates, lights are kept off, security hours are restricted. The immediate reflection of this sudden reduction in monthly operating costs for offices will be clear as day to the money managers of these companies and it will be significant.
And now the twain shall meet
It is when business notes the increased productivity of workers working from home that comes with a bonus of a dramatic reduction in operating costs for office space that the check mate to the old paradigm is complete. Sociopathic tendencies or not, few truths in business can effect immediate change faster than the bottom line and the bottom line is allowing workers to work from home leads to a dramatic boost in the companies overall efficiency. With nearly 2 months of data these companies are now deeply sampled in this area that up to this event was sampled at a much lower density and likely was insufficient to examine the simultanous savings from the reduction in costs at the office coupled with the increased productivity of the employers at home. That data I predict will be clearly in quarterly results and will necessarily impact policy regarding work from home essentially immediately. Further, the grape vine of communication between executives will ensure that in the coming years many more companies accelerate their shifts to both enable working from home while at the same time plotting strategy to effectively use their office space in a much more flexible manner correlated to the barest minimum required space to conduct business in an office. In my article I indicated this would be mostly to preserve the desires of the egos of business managers who seem to enjoy getting together in conference rooms with their teams to pontificate for an hour and effectively killing the productivity of all in attendance for that hour. :)
The fallout of the unknown now becomes the future of work
It is a bitter sweet moment to be living through a singular and tragic event in order to test positively predictions of better worker and business outcomes due to the utilization of more flexible work schedules. The social and economic impacts of the pandemic are only in their ascendance and large swathes of the workforce are literally out of work but it is now more clear than ever that this will be as has often been stated in the last few weeks...the new normal. We can say that as businesses look at the clear numbers on productivity coupled with cost savings they will dramatically shift their approaches to working from home from one of sampling with cautious tepidity to one of wild and enthusiastic embrace of the policy. The sooner they do this the sooner they may replicate the efficiency numbers seen during these times of high sample concentration for this experience from their workforces. Some companies may insist that workers take at least 2 or 3 days out of the office so that they can lock in specific reductions of available office space to accommodate a much reduced work force at the office and thus allowing the cutting of the associated rent/utility and supply costs for the now persistently working from home fraction of their workforce.
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