With a third of San Francisco employees back in their offices and other US cities following suit, it seems we have wasted the opportunity the pandemic offered to revolutionize labor practices through distributed work, and that only a privileged few will benefit, at least for the time being.
While some companies are proud to continue the working conditions they established during the pandemic, adopting trust-based cultures that allow employees to work from anywhere without being monitored by bossware, more traditional outfits are fighting back with threats of layoffs or pay cuts to staff who do not want to return to the office, while mayors are doing all they can to get their city centers full of workers frequenting restaurants and shops.
For many other people, for whom distributed work was an impossibility, things have gotten worse, and are earning less from tips while their employers try to economize by making fewer people take on an ever-increasing workload.
For many middle managers, a return to the office is the only way to justify their existence, based on something as antiquated and primal as supervising and overseeing their subordinates. In some organizations, management is trying to justify the return to the office to meet their employees’ supposed need for physical contact, claiming this is the key to innovation, while ignoring the fact that the issue is not about where we work from, but how we define work itself.
After more than two years of pandemic and lockdowns the huge numbers of people who successfully adapted to working from home will almost all have to return to the office, apart from those whose skills are in such demand — and who have been able to redesign their homes to accommodate distributed work — that they are able to impose their conditions. A lucky few will work completely independently of physical location, others will move to three-day weeks, and most will simply return to the way they worked before the pandemic.
In practice, we will see a Darwinian process whereby the companies that offer the greatest degree of freedom will be able to attract more and more of the best talent, regardless of physical location, and end up becoming the best places to work, the most desirable, and the ones with the most skilled workforces. Professionals who believe that they cannot demand these conditions will remain as a sediment in traditional companies with an increasingly impoverished talent pool, against the trend, who stay simply because they cannot consider the risk of leaving their jobs to go elsewhere. The Dead Sea Effect taken to its logical conclusion.
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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.
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