The shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic has been transformative for those who have said goodbye to soul-crushing commutes and embraced the flexibility of working from their own space. In some cases, that’s meant being able to relocate from expensive cities to regions closer to friends and loved ones, with lower costs of living.
But there is a class divide. As the Pew Research Center outlined in December, only 23% of people without a four-year college degree have been able to work remotely during the pandemic. And those who have been lucky enough to hold onto full-time jobs and shift to remote work have faced other hurdles, from lack of childcare to burnout.
For all the positive shifts we’ve seen in employer attitudes toward working from home, the fact remains that we are still in the midst of a pandemic, and have yet to really experience the new normal. When and if that does happen, these are the lessons to consider.
Silicon Valley’s Latest Buzzword: Hybrid
Big tech companies were among the first to acknowledge that employees would not return to offices in person until 2021. They are now grappling with how to create a hybrid work environment that accommodates people who have grown accustomed to the WFH lifestyle without sacrificing the benefits of in-person collaboration and brainstorming.
In October, Microsoft made headlines by offering employees the option to work from home permanently. But Redmond was quick to add that it would never be a fully remote company and that workers had to get manager approval before waving farewell to cubicle life.
“Our goal is to give employees further flexibility, allowing people to work where they feel most productive and comfortable, while also encouraging employees to work from home as the virus and related variants remain concerning,” according to Microsoft EVP Kurt DelBene.
As 2020 progressed, the company realized that setting firm deadlines for return to work was futile. “The virus and its impact were too complex to predict,” DelBene says. So Microsoft developed a six-stage reopening plan that adjusts based on health conditions rather than specific dates. As of May 2021, the company has moved from Stage 3 (WFH strongly encouraged) to Stage 4, a soft open.
Twitter came out early in support of a more remote workforce, saying in May 2020 that “opening offices will be our decision, when and if our employees come back, will be theirs.” That’s still the case today. While Twitter’s Singapore and Sydney offices have reopened at reduced capacity, returning to its US offices is still up in the air, a Twitter spokesperson says.
Ultimately, Twitter expects that a “majority” of its employees will adopt a hybrid approach. “We see that mixed model as potentially being the new normal,” Twitter says.
In late April, a limited number of Google employees returned to the office on a voluntary basis at the company’s Seattle and Kirkland, Washington, offices. Initially, Google seemed intent on getting as many people back in the office as possible by Sept. 1. But it recently announced a more relaxed approach that embraces the hybrid work week.
“Most Googlers [will] spend approximately three days in the office and two days wherever they work best,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai says.
All told, Google expects that 60% of its employees will return to the office at least a few days a week, another 20% will move to a different office, and 20% will be fully remote. The company will also allow people to work from a Google office in a different location for up to four weeks each year, up from the two weeks it allowed before that.
Google saw a 10% growth in headcount over the last year, so it will have to accommodate more employees than ever. “We are looking at less density per employee,” Google CFO Ruth Pora said during a Q2 earnings call with investors. “So even with a hybrid work environment, we will continue to need space and so we are continuing to build out our campuses and office facilities.”
A team within Google’s Real Estate & Workplace Services have been “testing new multi-purpose offices and private workspaces, and working with teams to develop advanced video technology that creates greater equity between employees in the office and those joining virtually,” Pichai says. “All of these efforts will help us work with greater flexibility and choice once we’re able to return to our offices globally.”
DelBene says Microsoft sees “the value of bringing people together in the workplace.” But it’s also studying ways to better accommodate remote workers. “The group is investigating different meeting configurations and technologies like multiple screens, cameras and mixed reality scenarios to understand the most effective, inclusive set-up for hybrid work,” he says. “It’s still early days, but we’ve explored solutions that range from simply reconfiguring existing technologies to designing exciting new Microsoft Teams innovations for hybrid work.”
Surviving From Home
But while many are enjoying this no-commute, sweatpant-friendly existence, this is not typical work-from-home life. We’re surviving during a global pandemic. Yes, attitudes around remote work have changed for the better over the past year, but we have yet to experience what working from home in non-COVID times looks like.
We’ve been unable to set up shop in local coffee shops, libraries, or co-working spaces for a change of scenery. With travel restrictions still in place, vacations have been few and far between. And parents have been forced to add teacher and IT expert to their resumes.
You’re Muted: Zoom Fatigue Sets In
And the video chats. So many video chats. As weeks turned into months and now a year, the novelty of regularly seeing your coworkers in their Brady Bunch-esque video-conferencing boxes has worn off. Zoom fatigue is real, as Stanford professor Jeremy Bailenson explains.
“Just because you can use video doesn’t mean you have to,” according to Bailenson, who wrote a paper about the psychological effects of staring at your colleagues (and yourself) on a screen for hours every day.
Bailenson concludes that video chats are an intimate exchange. He points to work from anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who found that interaction between two people that’s less than about 2 feet apart is “the type of interpersonal distance patterns reserved for families and loved ones.” But when you’re talking with someone on Zoom, you’re effectively 0.5 feet from them.
“Think about that—in one-on-one meetings conducted over Zoom, coworkers and friends are maintaining an interpersonal distance reserved for loved ones,” Bailenson writes.
For months on end and hours at a time each day, that can be exhausting. And weird. “This is similar to being in a crowded subway car while being forced to stare at the person you are standing very close to, instead of looking down or at your phone,” he says.
Not only that, but reading non-verbal cues is much harder on video chat. And reactions are often exaggerated to signal that you’re engaged—waving hello and goodbye or holding eye contact, for example. And of course, you have to look at your own mug all day, something that doesn’t happen in the office. Studies show that “seeing a video of oneself has a larger impact on women than men,” Bailenson writes, and “the tendency to self-focus might prime women to experience depression.
Not everyone is ready to delete Zoom. According to a December Pew Research Center survey, 63% of employed adults say they are fine with the amount of video calls they have to attend; 37% are worn out by them. “In general, teleworkers view video conferencing and instant messaging platforms as a good substitute for in-person contact – 65% feel this way, while 35% say they are not a good substitute,” according to Pew.
At Microsoft, researchers conducted a study with 14 employees who wore electroencephalogram caps that monitored their brain activity during four, 30-minute, back-to-back video meetings. On one day, they got 10-minute breaks between each meeting, during which they meditated with the Headspace app. On the other day, they jumped from meeting to meeting with no breaks.
“When participants were given a chance to rest using meditation, beta activity dropped, allowing for a ‘reset,'” according to Microsoft. “This reset meant participants started their next meeting in a more relaxed state. It also meant the average level of beta waves held steady through four meetings, with no buildup of stress even as four video calls continued.
“The antidote to meeting fatigue is simple: taking short breaks.”
Your New Co-Worker: A 6-Year-Old
But what if those breaks are used not for meditation but for preparing snacks, troubleshooting remote class problems, or third-grader meltdowns? Remote classes or hybrid setups are still a thing in some school districts. And while Zoom classes are preferable to no classes, serving as a co-teacher for younger kids while also working full time has only compounded the stress of 2020 (and now 2021) for many parents.
Women have borne the brunt of that stress. As the National Women’s Law Center notes, all of the jobs lost in December were positions held by women—156,000. With limited or no access to childcare, women have been forced to leave the workforce. Unemployment rates among women in the US have rebounded from a high of 16.2% in April 2020 to 5.9% in March 2021, but that’s still higher than the 4.4% rate in March 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And all of April’s US job gains went to men.
“Women have accounted for nearly 56% of workforce exits since the start of the pandemic, despite making up just 48% of the workforce,” McKinsey & Company said in February. “Forward-looking scenarios indicate employment recovery for women is likely to take 18 additional months compared with men, creating an employment gap that persists beyond the initial recovery.”
Disconnected: The Digital Divide Widens
Another major gap laid bare by the pandemic is the digital divide. For all the parents out there struggling to get their kids to focus on a remote class, there are just as many who lack access to the kind of speedy broadband internet needed to get their kids connected to Zoom or Google Classroom. It’s a challenge policy makers have struggled with for decades, and some of those gaps have been closed by wiring up schools and libraries. But those who can’t afford broadband service in their home or lack access to it in their rural or Tribal communities are out of luck.
“When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, access to those public places disappeared and with it, so did the access to a reliable broadband internet connection for millions. Now, as the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated our society toward a ‘remote everything’ lifestyle, the costs of exclusion are growing even larger, further exacerbating the divide between those who have a home broadband connection and those who do not,” Joi Olivia Chaney, SVP of Policy and Advocacy and Executive Director of the Washington Bureau National Urban League, said at a recent congressional hearing on broadband equity.
“Even as some communities begin reopening and returning to physical spaces, scars from the pandemic will leave an indelible mark,” Francella Ochillo, Executive Director of Next Century Cities, said at the same hearing. “In many instances, online services have eclipsed the need for in-person transactions. The pandemic accelerated the crawl of many industries to telework, which is expected to continue. Meanwhile, the people who do not have reliable broadband access are locked out of those work from home opportunities. Many do not even have access to the online application.”
As part of his $2 trillion American Jobs Plan, President Biden proposes allocating $100 billion to build a “future proof” broadband infrastructure in underserved areas across the US. But he has to sell Congress on the idea first.
What Day Is It? Burning Out in the Age of COVID
You don’t need to have a child at home to be struggling with your pandemic WFH setup. When home is work and work is home, and there are few non-solo ways to de-stress, burnout creeps in. Remember when this was going to be knocked out after two weeks of sheltering in place? And yet, here we are, more than a year later, only just having the conversation about when we might—actually, finally—return to the office in person, if at all.
According to Pew, younger people are having more trouble adjusting to the WFH life. “Most adults who are teleworking all or most of the time say it has been at least somewhat easy for them to feel motivated to do their work since the pandemic started,” Pew says. “But there’s a distinct age gap: 42% of workers ages 18 to 49 say this has been difficult for them compared with only 20% of workers 50 and older.”
It’s also harder to tear yourself away. It’s far too easy to slip into answering (or sending) Slacks, emails, and other work-related queries outside normal office hours. Project Include, a non-profit working to accelerate diversity and inclusion solutions in the tech industry, found in a March survey of 3,000 people that 64% are working more hours during COVID.
“Many felt increased pressure to be online, even outside of working hours, and to be available for their managers,” Include says. “Many felt tool overload, with the expectation of being responsive requiring checking multiple tools throughout the day—and sometimes night. Interviewees said managers are checking if they are online or active on collaboration or production tools.”
The Pandemic Unicorn: Work-Life Balance
That said, it’s not all doom and gloom. A Harvard Business School Online survey finds that, for some, the WFH life brought about the elusive work-life balance.
While 75% of the 1,500 people surveyed did up their binge watching, a significant number of people took up healthy habits like preparing healthier meals at home (70%), exercising more (44%), spending more time outdoors (45%), reading for enjoyment (50%), embarking on a new hobby (31%), and even napping more (36%).
How? Eliminating a lengthy commute was a big factor. In the Bay Area, the average commute time pre-COVID was 260 hours per year per person, according to The Mercury NewsThe Mercury News, or just over 10 days. Nationwide, the average one-way commute in 2019 reached a record high of 27.6 minutes, according to the US Census Bureau, and 9.8% of commuters had daily one-way commutes of an hour or more.
Ditching the bumper-to-bumper traffic, crowded subways, and often-delayed commuter trains is good for your health and your bank account. The US Department of Transportation put the cost
of personal transportation service at $415 billion for Q1 2020. By June 2020, that cost plummeted to $267 billion. There’s been a steady rise with some returning to work, but the number is still at only $351 billion, a significant reduction year over year. Those numbers seem abstract in aggregate but on a personal level, the savings is effectively a salary boost for many.
Kicking Expensive Cities to the Curb
COVID has done nothing to diminish housing prices in the Bay Area; if anything, bidding wars have dramatically increased. Even some well-compensated engineers at Google, Apple, and Facebook can’t afford houses in Silicon Valley; some Google employees were forced to live in RV parks near their company’s sprawling Mountain View campus pre-COVID.
With workplaces closed, though, many Americans left expensive cities behind. In July 2020, 22% of those surveyed by Pew Research reported moving because of the pandemic. In the months since, that number ticked a bit higher still, with finances cited as the main reason for a move.
With this in mind, we put together a guide to the top WFH cities based on affordability, livability, and connectivity. Some cities are even offering incentives to attract remote workers, like Savannah, Georgia, which has grants of $2,000 for tech workers looking to relocate.
Many COVID-related moves were hasty, which could be why only 43% of those surveyed by Pew reported feeling positive about it. But with the space of a year and the solidifying of a more WFH-friendly environment, having the ability to work from anywhere gives employees the chance to live closer to family, enjoy a lifestyle that was previously not possible, and, of course, save money. More favorable views on remote work also helps ease location bias. In pre-pandemic times, research found that living just a few miles more away from a job than other applicants decreased the likelihood of being hired.
You Don’t Live in NYC? No Problem
Working from home grants a new level of freedom for everyone, but it has particular benefits for groups that are often shut out of tech jobs because of location. The unaffordability of the top cities for working in tech is an extra burden on women and people of color, who are paid less than many of their colleagues. A Dice survey found that in some cities, women in tech make $15,000 less than men. A report from Hired on wage inequality at tech companies showed that Black men receive 9 cents less on the dollar than white men, while Hispanic men receive 6 cents less on the dollar than white men. While the struggle of pay inequity goes on, location-agnostic jobs can ease some of the burden.
The same goes for employees with disabilities and chronic illnesses. The digital divide aside, COVID has made the world a more accessible place, as more organizations embrace online classes, Zoom meetings, and virtual cultural events. Those with disabilities and chronic illness also do not have to contend with commutes that can be taxing or even impossible.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The tech industry has shifted its perspective on working from home in the last year, a rare silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic. Long commutes have evaporated, noisy and distracting open offices have been replaced by the comfort of home, and opportunities have opened up for those not able or willing to live in crowded and expensive cities.
But this change comes about due to a traumatic event: a global pandemic. And we’re still making our way through it, dealing with personal loss alongside transitions in our communities. Embracing remote work is not a Silicon Valley experiment being conducted in a bubble. Vaccines are in arms and plans to fully reopen are in motion, but for all the benefits brought about by our year of professional solitude, it also highlights problems that need our attention going forward, from diversity and inclusion in the workplace and adequate childcare options to the digital divide and the need for mental health awareness among the US workforce.
As we meet friends in bars, buy concert tickets, and make travel reservations, let’s remember those we’ve lost and those who will need our help going forward.
