Tag: remote working

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Why Being Virtually There Is Virtually There

If you work in a factory or somewhere else that requires you to touch things or people, the COVID shutdowns and social distancing have clearly been a difficult situation to overcome.

But it seems that the past few months have also been very trying for many people who worked in office settings before COVID set in.  The Brady Bunch meme captured this well.  However, to me, that’s something which is less a reflection of reality than a lack of imagination and experience.

I’m in the minority of folks who have worked remotely for more than ten years.  By now, I’ve forgotten some of the initial hiccups in doing that.  Also, the software, hardware and bandwidth have gotten so much better that the experience is dramatically better than when I started.

So, I’m a little flummoxed by some of what I hear from remote working newbies.  First off, of course, is the complaint that people can’t touch and hug their co-workers anymore.  Haven’t they been to training about inappropriate touching and how some of these physical interactions can come off as harassment?  Even if these folks were in the office, I doubt they would really be going around making physical contact with co-workers.

Then there is the complaint about the how much can be missed in communication when conversations are limited to text messages and emails.  That complaint is correct.  But why is there an assumption that communication is limited to text.  If you had a meeting in a conference room or went to someone’s office for a talk, why can’t you do the same thing via videoconference?

(My own experience is that remote work requires video to be successful because of the importance of non-text elements of human communication.  That’s why I’m assuming that the virtual communication is often via video.)

In the office you could drop by.  Users of Zoom and similar programs are often expected to schedule meetings, but that’s not a requirement.  You can turn on Zoom and, just like in an office, others could connect to you when you want.  They’ll see if your busy.  And, if you’re a really important person, you can set up a waiting room and let them in when you’re ready.

There is even a 21st century version of the 19th century partner desks, although it’s not new.  An example is the always-on Kubi, pictured to the left, that has been around for a few years.

Perch, another startup, summarized the idea in this video a few years back.  Foursquare started using a video portal connecting their engineering teams on the two coasts eight years ago.  (A few months ago before COVID, a deal was reached to merge Foursquare with Factual.)

By the way, the physical office was no utopia of employee interaction.  A variety of studies, most famously the Allen Curve, a very large reduction in interaction if employees were even relatively short physical distances from each other.  With video, all your co-workers are just a click away.  While your interactions with the colleague at the next desk may be less (if you want), your interactions with lots of other colleagues on other floors can happen a lot more easily.

And then, despite evidence of increased productivity and employee happiness with remote work, there is the statement that it decreases innovation and collaboration.

Influential articles, like Workspaces That Move People in the October 2014 issue of the Harvard Business Review, declared that “chance encounters and interactions between knowledge workers improve performance.”

In the physical world, many companies interpreted this as a mandate for open office plans that removed doors and closed offices.  So how did that work out?

According to a later article – The Truth About Open Offices – in the November–December 2019 issue of the Harvard Business Review reported that, “when the firms switched to open offices, face-to-face interactions fell by 70%”.    (More detail can be found in Royal Society journal article of  July 2018 on “The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration”.

The late Steve Jobs forcefully pushed the idea of serendipity through casual, random encounters of employees.  That idea was one of the design principles of the new Apple headquarters.  Now with COVID-driven remote work, some writers, like Tiernan Ray in ZDNET on June 24, 2020, are asking “Steve Jobs said Silicon Valley needs serendipity, but is it even possible in a Zoom world?”.

There is nothing inherently in video conferencing that diminishes serendipitous meetings.  Indeed, in the non-business world, there are websites that exist solely to connect strangers together completely at random, like Chatroulette and Omegle.

Without going into the problems those sites have had with inappropriate behavior, the same idea could be used in a different way to periodically connect via video conferencing two employees who otherwise haven’t met recently or at all.  Nor does that have to be completely random.  A company doing this could also use some analytics to determine which employees might be interested in talking with other employees that they haven’t connected with recently.  That would ensure serendipity globally, not just limited to the people who work in the same building.

It’s not that video conferencing is perfect, but there is still an underappreciation of how many virtual equivalents there are of typical office activities – and even less appreciation for some of the benefits of virtual connections compared to physical offices.

To me, the issue is one of a lag that I’ve seen before with technology.  I’ve called this horseless carriage thinking.  Sociologists call it a cultural lag.  As Ashley Crossman has written, this is

“what happens in a social system when the ideals that regulate life do not keep pace with other changes which are often — but not always — technological.”

Some people don’t yet realize and aren’t quite comfortable with what they can do.  For most, time and experience will educate them.

© 2020 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

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Working From Home Will Change Cities

Just three years ago, the New York Times had this headline – “Why Big Cities Thrive, and Smaller Ones Are Being Left Behind” – trumpeting the victory of big cities over their smaller competitors, not to mention the suburbs and rural areas.  At the top of that heap, of course, was New York City.

Now the headlines are different:

A week ago, the always perceptive Claire Cain Miller added another perspective in an Upshot article that was headlined with the question “Is the Five-Day Office Week Over?”  Her answer, in the sub-title, was that the “pandemic has shown employees and employers alike that there’s value in working from home — at least, some of the time.”

This chart summarizes a part of what she wrote about.  As Miller’s story makes quite clear, it is important to realize that some of what has happened during the COVID pandemic will continue after we have finally overcome it and people are free to resume activities anywhere.  Some of the current refugees from cities will likely move back to the cities and many city residents remained there, of course.  But the point is that many of these old, returning and new urban residents will have different patterns of work and that will require cities to change.

While the focus of this was mostly on remote office work, some observers note that cities still have lots of workers who do not work in offices.  While clearly there are numerous jobs that require the laying of hands on something or someone, there are also blue-collar jobs that do not strictly require a physical presence.

I have seen factories that can be remotely controlled, even before the pandemic.  Now this option is getting even more attention.  One of the technology trade magazines, recently (7/3/2020) had a storied with this headline – “Remote factories: The next frontier of remote work.”  In another example, GE has been offering technology solutions to enable the employees of utility companies to remotely control facilities – see “Remote Control: Utilities and Manufacturers Turn to Automation Software To Operate From Home During Outbreak”.

So perhaps the first blush of victory of big cities, like the British occupation of New York City during the American Revolution or the invasion of France in World War II, did not indicate how the war would end.  Perhaps the war has not ended because, in an internet age where many people can work from home, home does not have to be in big cities, after all, or if it is in a big city it does not have to be in a gleaming office tower.

These trends and the potential of the internet and technology to disrupt traditional urban patters, of course, have been clear for more than ten years.  But few mayors and other urban leaders paid attention.  After all they were in a recent period in which they could just ride the wave of what seemed to be ever increasing density and growth in cities – especially propelled by young people seeking office jobs in their cities.  This was a wonderful dream, combining the urban heft of the industrial age with cleaner occupations.

Now the possibility of a different world is hitting them in the face.  It is not merely a switch from factory to office employment, but a change from industrial era work patterns too.  Among other things that change means that people do not all have to show up in the same place at the same time.  This change requires city leaders to start thinking about all the various ways that they need to adjust their traditional thinking.

Here are just three of the ways that cities will be impacted by an increasing percentage of work being done at home:

  • Property taxes in most cities usually have higher rates on commercial property than on residential property. Indeed, commercial real estate has been the goose that has laid the golden eggs for those cities which have had flourishing downtowns.  But if the amount of square footage in commercial property decreases, the value of those properties and hence the taxes will go down.  On the other hand, most elected officials are loath to raise taxes on residential real estate, even if those residences are now generating income through commercial activities – a job at home most of the week.
  • Traffic and transit patterns used to be quite predictable. There was rush hour in the morning and afternoon when everyone was trying to get the same densely packed core.  With fewer people coming to the office every day that will change.  Even those who meet in downtown may not be going there now for the 9:00 AM start of the work day, but for a lunch meeting.  Then there is the matter of increasing and relatively small deliveries to homes, rather than large deliveries to stores in the central business district.  This too turns upside down the traditional patterns.
  • Excitement and enticement have, of course, been traditional advantages of cities. Downtown is where the action is.  Even that is changing.  Although it is still fun to go to Broadway, for example, I suspect that most people had a better view of the actors in the Disney Plus presentation of Hamilton than did those who paid a lot more money to sit somewhere many rows back even in the orchestra section of the theater.  At some point, people will balance this out.  So, cities are going to have be a lot more creative and find new ways, new magic to bring people to their core.

Cities have evolved before.  In the 18th century, American cities thrived on the traffic going through their ports.  While the ports still played a role, in later centuries, cities grew dramatically and thrived on their factories and industrial might.  Then they replaced factories with offices.

A transition to an as yet unclear future version of cities can be done and will be done successfully by those city leaders who don’t deny what is happening, but instead respond with a new vision – or at least new experimentation that they can learn from.

© 2020 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved