Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
WFH: Three+ Years After the Pandemic, Is Anyone Home?
By Adam Stern, founder and CEO of Infinitely Virtual
“Work From Home.”
Seemed like a good idea at the time. A necessity even, to keep the economy on life support, and no matter the hodgepodge of tools (home computers, Hollywood-Squares-style group communications platforms) pressed into service in time of need.
More than whether employees have fully returned to the office as the pandemic has morphed from something legitimately scary to something sort of manageable to something (dare we say) routine, does anyone still care? Not about the virus, which is real enough, but about “Work From Home” as a thing. What did the tech community learn, and not learn, from the pandemic? How are those experiences apt to shape the way businesses behave in 2024?
Pharmacologically speaking, the pandemic is mostly over. COVID is certainly still around but the shocks to the system – financial, technological, interpersonal – continue to reverberate, even if masking is no longer a learned reflex.
For our purposes, the issues today are clarifying, if not fully settled. The business community’s reaction /response to the sudden imposition of WFH mandates lingers, in part because consensus remains elusive.
The status quo is a mixed bag, as organizations grapple with partial mandates – arguably the new normal. In the main, we (the business community) have internalized the reality that we’re not going back to 2020. Today, it’s a matter of company policy more than an issue of technology. The tools that got us through the worst of it have been supplanted by somewhat more expeditious workarounds. The novelty has worn off. It isn’t that some things no longer matter in 2024, but that they matter in a different way.
Communication kludges fairly quickly gave way to tools that became routine and almost indispensable.
Figuring it out, in a practical sense has not ended these larger policy concerns. Just because Zoom works (and works well) doesn’t mean that IBM, to cite just one corporate and tech heavyweight, isn’t summoning its staff to again man the cubicles (Tech.co (September 11, 2023): “IBM Demands Workers Return to the Office, Starting Today.”
Of course. It’s wise not to underestimate the power of inertia. As Fast Company observed in September, “Why Your Boss Isn’t Coming to the Office: A significant proportion of middle managers are adamant about maintaining their work-from-home arrangements, which is creating a ripple effect throughout the corporate landscape.” New York Times (October 14, 2023): “Here’s What We Do and Don’t Know About the Effects of Remote Work”
Fast Company contributor Gleb Tsipursky suggests recalcitrance around the Great Return isn’t limited to the rank and file. “Surprisingly, the bosses in middle-management positions are exhibiting resistance toward this shift,” he writes. “A significant proportion of these middle managers are adamant about maintaining their work-from-home arrangements, which is creating a ripple effect throughout the corporate landscape.”
A recent MKinsey report cited a survey of 13,000 office workers in six countries: The punchline: individuals who possess the power are using their privilege to avoid coming to the office. Nearly half of higher-ranking employees currently engage in remote work for at least one day per week, while only a third of those in entry-level positions do the same.
Similar evidence comes from a survey by Deloitte and Workplace Intelligence Research. The firm interviewed 700 full-time executives with job titles of manager or equivalent and above. Fully two-thirds of financial service leaders working hybrid or remote said they would leave their firm if required to come in full time. Execs preferred flexible work arrangements over prescribed workplace models. The takeaway is unsurprising: some financial services institutions now require their workforce to go into the office three to four days a week.
Technopedia’s Linda Rosencrance offered an especially astute analysis: “Is remote working the new world order we’ve all been led to expect? Or was it a bubble formed off the back of COVID, and it’s going to subside? Questions: As lots of workplaces had to move to WFH, is it now a massive and costly effort to go back to the original status quo? Do office workers now expect to work remote e.g., it can be a really compelling job perk, so will companies struggle to employ if they take it away?
“Flipside, will companies who enforce it find a brain drain as talent walks away? Companies will have had some level of cost-saving by not needing 200-people offices in the center of cities. It also changes the nature of cities if people don’t need to physically locate there. How will this change if companies go back to in-office working?”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Stern, founder and CEO of Los Angeles-based Infinitely Virtual, is an entrepreneur who saw the value of virtualization and cloud computing upon finding the company in 2007. Infinitely Virtual helps businesses move from obsolete hardware investments to an IaaS [Infrastructure as a Service] cloud platform, providing them the flexibility and scalability to transition select data operations from in-house to the cloud. Stern founded Infinitely Virtual to provide virtual dedicated server solutions to growing enterprises, offering what was essentially a cloud computing platform before the term existed.
