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Pedestrians cross an almost deserted California Street in San Francisco amid the pandemic on March 17, 2020. Remote work is allowing people to relocate to less expensive places than the Golden City. Photo: Bloomberg
Opinion
Barry Wood
Barry Wood

The work from home revolution: a force for change – but for better or worse?

  • Pandemic-induced remote working is altering the way people live their lives, and affecting housing prices in the US
  • However, there are also signs that the trend may accentuate wealth inequalities, and aggravate mental health problems
Working from home “is really the biggest shift in how we work since the invention of the automobile”, says Marc Cenedella of Ladders, a job search website. Furthermore, the trend is here to stay.

Others analysing the pandemic world use stronger superlatives. A Forbes article calls working from home as transformative as the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s. Futurist Mark Pesce says: “The pandemic appears to have reversed the migration toward urban centres that has been going on since the start of the Industrial Revolution.”

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, whose video conferencing firm has been a huge beneficiary of the trend, says: “Work is no longer a place, it’s a space …”

Pesce adds: “People are now fleeing cities like San Francisco while rewriting the rules of office work. After all, why maintain expensive homes in or near a city when you can work from anywhere, via satellite?”

Indeed. In the United States, remote work is allowing employees to relocate to wherever it is cheaper to buy or rent a place. While a median priced home in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley is US$3.3 million, in Austin, Texas, it is US$575,000, for example.

Not surprisingly, tech workers who can do so are moving. The San Francisco Bay Area is losing people while places like Austin, Boise, Tampa, Miami and the Carolinas are growing, with accompanying sharp rises in home prices. What makes for a winning destination? Zonda, a California housing analytics firm, says winners offer lower taxes, active lifestyles, employment opportunities and good weather.

More than a year into the pandemic, only around a third of US employees have returned to the office. In a similar vein, data reveals that 87 per cent of US employees prefer to work remotely at least half the time.

02:28

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Why? Because they have more time for family, save money and time on commuting, and save money on petrol, lunches and dry cleaning. And they have more time for hobbies and visits to the gym.

Work from home is posing headaches for employers. How do they lure workers back to the office? Many Apple employees, for example, who are working from home are resisting even hybrid work, a combination of office and remote work.

In New York, financial firms want people back in the office at least once or twice a week. Bankers like JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon say face-to-face meetings are essential and team building isn’t easily achieved with video conferencing.

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Of course, not all sectors of an economy can work from home. Manufacturing can’t. Hospitals can’t and neither can construction, landscaping and others. Thus, work from home’s impact is uneven.

And its beneficiaries tend to be people who are highly paid. It may be that – even with pay downgrades for those moving to lower-cost areas – remote work accentuates wealth inequality.

We’re only 20 months into the phenomenon, so any conclusions are suspect. However, early evidence suggests that mental health problems are aggravated by working from home. Isolation from colleagues and projects can create anxiety and depression. Lack of social interaction is problematic.

02:45

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Digital nomads flee coronavirus-hit Manila for beach resorts

Work from home is a global trend; the whole world has been affected by Covid-19. In South Africa, for example, a leading research institution has closed its headquarters, told staff to work from home and terminated the lease on the building. Ford Motor Company, meanwhile, has told 30,000 employees that they may work from home permanently.

The work from home revolution could not have happened without the internet, high-quality, fast connections, and easy-to-use, free video conferencing technology.

The biggest corporate winner, it seems, is San Jose-based Zoom Video Communications, founded by Chinese-born Eric Yuan, who owned 22 per cent of the company at the initial public offering. Yuan worked at Cisco Systems, the networking giant whose WebEx applications trail far behind Zoom.

Pesce, the futurist, is an American living in Australia. He writes in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ IEEE Spectrum magazine: “The magnitude of the change that many people made over the last year cannot be overemphasised.

“Within hours of the planet effectively shutting down in mid-March 2020, many information-based businesses resumed operations, more or less unaffected. An entire population of office workers continued to carry out their daily tasks without skipping a beat. That is nothing less than miraculous.”

Miraculous indeed, but with an impact that is as yet unclear.

Barry D. Wood, based in Washington DC, is a journalist, author and educator. See econbarry.com

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