The Future of Work

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In 2011, I was standing in a Barnes and Noble bookstore in my hometown. I had seen this bookstore being built when I was a kid. It was where I joined my first writing group and where I painfully wrote my first fictional pieces. This time, I had returned to buy some magazines and the cashier asked me what I did for a living and I answered, “Freelance Writer.” That wasn’t quite right but it was close enough. She asked me how that worked and I explained that people online hired me to write content for them or do transcription/dictation. We got to talking about the nature of work and at the end of the exchange I said, “In 10 years, more people will work like I do than work like you do.”

And thanks to Covid, my prediction has basically come true.

Forced to Work from Home

The idea of working from home or working remotely of an office is not a new one but until the advent of the internet, it was reserved for the leisure executive who could employ a dozen people and three phone lines to make it possible. Thanks to the internet, wi-fi networks, and laptops, software programmers, web designers, and others could work essentially from anywhere. I was apart of what Louie C.K. once dismissively called, “laptopistan” that is one of those nervous people sitting at a coffee shop, hunched over a laptop pecking away at the keys on some project.

One of the principle effects of the pandemic is the changes in work. For office workers, they all learned how to use zoom, having meetings digitally, and suddenly had to learn digital collaboration tools. The second wave of the Delta variant is reviving these tools again. Just as companies were preparing to get everyone back in the office, many are sending people back home or canceling and delaying plans.

Many bold predictions were made about how covid would change work. This spring and summer, managers and executives were pressuring workers to go back to the office. Instead of going back, many quit and moved to other jobs with more flexibility. Still other companies offered more flexible work-from-home options with limited time in the office.

The New Contractor

In the pre-pandemic world, many futurists thought that the worker of the future would likely not work in an office as more and more work could be done from anywhere. This is obviously not true for true service jobs that interact with the public but it is certainly true for much of the administration it takes to keep companies going.

This corresponds with another trend in various industries of hiring more contractors than employees. In the near future we might see more and more people working as contractors without benefits for companies that are far from where they actually live. As things like health insurance and unemployment are tied to regular W-2 employment, this will have a massive social impact.

The new contractor might perform specific tasks for a good hourly rate but can be let go at the end of their contract term and not getting any benefits while working for the company that contracted them. Much like janitorial and food services, temp companies could find a new market for everything from copywriters and marketing professionals to programmers and other professionals. Companies can realize the benefits of off-shoring without all the cultural and linguistic problems that come with moving jobs overseas. Companies could export their expensive coastal labor force to Iowa.

Work From Home Forever

Workers have made it clear that they have gotten used to working from home and they are much less eager to go back to the office than their managers would like them to be. This has wider economic effects as well. There is a whole economy that depends on people commuting to work. If people are staying home, they may not need more than one car. People who sell lunch in business parks and downtown areas will find fewer customers. Mass transit systems will see fewer riders. Companies will reduce their commercial footprint which will lead to more buildings getting converted or torn down. This means fewer support staff in janitorial as well. This has huge economic effects across both the government and private sectors.

Work from home forever has economic impacts the other direction as well. As we say in the early pandemic, people moved out of cities to get more space for home offices and Amazon couldn’t fill the orders for office chairs, desks and other work-from-home equipment fast enough. Many of our remote workers of the future will want dedicated home office space which means home builders may want to update their home layouts to accommodate this new need for space. Suburban cities will benefit from these workers because people will spend money closer to where they live. Some suburbs are already building urban-like town centers where people can gather and enjoy activities. The big city may no longer be the only place to enjoy a great meal, entertainment, or meet friends.

Remote teams and remote tools

For businesses, having the right management for remote teams and remote tools will be crucial to creating a productive work-from-home environment. Productivity did not drop during the pandemic, and in many cases, it increased. However, workers often found that they ended up working nearly 24/7 and there was an expectation of availability that must be managed. Workers clocked longer hours as commuting time became productivity time. Creating a space between personal time and work time was already a problem before the pandemic, and if companies are going to continue the trend, then this is a problem that needs to be managed.

Using the right tools to manage digital collaboration will be crucial to the success of work-from-home staffing. This goes beyond an enterprise zoom account and some google tools. Things like an XML to JSON editor are important to keep the workflow moving forward. There are security concerns to be managed. In the future, companies may need to compensate employees for using their personal devices or choose to send out dedicated machines that are safer for the distributed networks required to keep everyone on the same page. Companies will be leaning on IT departments to deploy and maintain these solutions.

Team cohesion and social events will have to be managed as well. With a distributed team, it will be hard to have casual conversations that can spark new ideas or help people get to know and trust each other. New solutions will be required to help teams work together effectively. Everyone is scrambling for these new solutions. Whoever can create a system to solve these problems will become a star in the field. Can Slack recreate the casual conversation and “water-cooler” moments? What about employee only social networks or social media groups? Companies will be trying out various ideas as we continue to work from home.

Drawing it All Together

Working from home has many opportunities for companies who can deploy their human resources like this but it also presents a variety of challenges for an entire organization. However, it won’t take much to help make working from home a way of life. Given how things are going with the pandemic, most companies will need to be adept at using tools and creating positive distributed working arrangements. The economy will likely being adapting to this new reality. This situation would have happened over the next decade but as so many like Scott Galloway and others have said, every problem we thought we would have in 2030 is a problem we have now.

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