An interesting sea change in knowledge work is happening. Does anyone know if any other companies have made a permanent switch to remote like this during the pandemic?
I dunno. Here’s why I think it will and will not happen.
My company has been up to 50% remote in the past six years (way earlier when we were smaller) and have gone fully remote since shelter-in-place.
We have a really well established remote culture, so it was pretty easy. We’ve had people join in remote roles who found that they were not able to work well in that way.
I think it takes a confluence of the company culture, the individual, and the management’s willingness to do new and different work to accommodate a remote work culture.
This will not be broad, and some who try it will fail miserably, others will discover new inefficiencies and problems they’ll sink a lot of time into trying to solve.
A bulk of the population will go back to their normal day-to-day, and as long as the rest of the world isn’t adjusting, I think it’s unlikely for such a dramatically different work style to take hold outside of a few niche areas.
I would love to be proven wrong though, as I really dislike living in the Bay Area, and I’ve become a lot more comfortable working and managing fully remotely over the past four months.
Related: My company is fully remote until 2021 - and we’re actively considering what to do after that. I am pretty convinced I will be moving forward with assuming my own team will be fully remote (support and services) if they want to, and I plan to only visit the office for important company/management meetings, but we’ll see what happens after the economy crashes completely.