Covid didn’t cause this so much as accelerate it. These trends were inevitable. And when it comes to education, this is good news. Start funding students, and not “school systems.”
7 thoughts on “The Office Apocalypse”
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Covid didn’t cause this so much as accelerate it. These trends were inevitable. And when it comes to education, this is good news. Start funding students, and not “school systems.”
Comments are closed.
When you have employees you can trust, doesn’t always make sense to warehouse them in an expensive office building. Although, this opens up considerations of work/life balance. When you work from home, you are always at work. How do people create separation? What about people working from home but your home is an apartment with lots of roommates?
Will companies take the Uber route and shift all of the costs onto their employees without equivalent compensation?
There are a lot of solutions but not available to everyone that has been, or will be, working from home.
“Although, this opens up considerations of work/life balance. When you work from home, you are always at work. How do people create separation?”
Depends on what your work entails. I have a job which supports 24/7 operations. For about the last 20 years the only way I’ve ever been able to create separation has been to go camping in a place where absolutely cannot be reached by electronic means. Working from home improves my work/life balance because I get back a couple hours a day that were used for commuting. Even if I spend another hour working it is still a net gain in my favor.
Minor changes in most homes will facilitate working from home. I see much less need for commuter trains and busses, thus making for more leisure time and cleaner air. I forsee more small neighborhood gathering spots in our future. This will probably lead to more home schooling, not as much for elementary students, but definitely high school and post secondary students. I already see more face time (actual fact time, note iPhone FaceTime) with our neighbors than in the last decade.
For many companies, the forced work from home due to COVID provided provided actual data on how productive employees can be outside the office. In many cases productivity has gone up. That makes it much tougher to justify the cost of a large urban office.
I’m one of those who will probably never go back to being in the office. I will miss the social aspects of being around some coworkers, but that is a small price to pay for gaining 2-3 hours a day I am not longer spending commuting on a bus.
I once worked in a nearly windowless building where there was one door leading from my office that was always locked. I assumed it was storage or HVAC space but eventually learned it was the office of the IT guy. He was the only person who worked from home. On one occasion he was working from the passenger seat of his car as his wife drove them to another city.
The way I became a free agent: I was looking for a job after EZ-Serve Convenience Stores went bankrupt (I was an It project manager making $70K a year in 2002), One large IT firm offered me $54K with what they said were primo bennies. I said, “What if I don’t want the benefits package?” The reply: “Oh, in that case you can work as a contractor, no benefits and you handle your own taxes.” Since I’d worked as a freelance writer before, I knew that’d be no problem, and asked, “For how much?” “How does $50/hr sound?” I still don’t know why they thought the crappy bennies were worth that much!
If you ever had to pay for employees you might not be so surprised. A lot of money is needed for payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, workman’s comp, etc. The bennies are only a small part of the cost.