I work for a pretty well-known tech company, and my hypothesis is that we'll switch to a mostly at-home work week, where most people WFH 3 or 4 days a week with one day of the week being designated as a "meeting day" where everyone is in the office.
I don't think this will happen because of people are worried about virus transmission, but instead because most people like working from home and we've proven we can be just as productive when we're out of the office.
That said, I'm one of the few people who like going into an office. There are fewer distractions and better food options. :)
I disagree that this is a likely outcome. For many people, this is a worst of both worlds - still requires all the costs of living within commuting distance of your employer (particularly for SFBA and NYC) and likely shrinks the average size/perks of the office you commute to. Partial remote doesn't seem to solve any problem in a way that is any better than the status quo.
I agree. I would quit. This basically forces employees to get another room as an office. If my employers pays for it, fine. But if they don’t, it’s bs that I’ll have to continue to work from my living room because we don’t have a dedicated office space. It’s driving both me and my SO crazy because we want separate spaces to do our work but we are in a studio/open 1-bedroom.
I prefer working from home, but I also totally agree with you. Especially since they got rid of the uncompensated business expense deductions for individuals in the tax code, they're really just outsourcing the expense of maintaining an office.
However, I fully believe I can build a home office that's better (for me) than most employers can, at a fraction of the budget. It's a more efficient solution than a centralized office, but it's coming out of my pocket and not theirs, so it hurts me more.
Of course, your direct complaint seems to be the square footage, not the hardware (desks, etc). That's a tougher one to solve for, because larger square footage is opex instead of capex, and it'll be more challenging to get your employer to part with opex dollars.
It's interesting that adding square footage is opex for businesses (leased commercial real estate) but often capex for individuals (purchased residential real estate). And then the capex is mortgage-financed back into a monthly payment that is effectively opex....
(Yes, there are larger apartments, but they are somewhat rare. Maybe this will change!)
Not to take away anything from your point: it is an interesting thought experiment. For people who have an intuitive understanding of opex v capex, it's also a very convincing argument for owning your apartment (since your mortage "feels" like opex, but is actually capex, and it's always better to spend capex dollars).
This is especially true in markets like NYC, where you might never reasonably expect to pay off your mortage (since it's a coop, or the principle is 10+ years of untaxed salary).
Would it matter the interest/equity proportions of the mortgage payments?
Also what about the other costs associated with owning the real estate (taxes, maintenance)?
In a word, yes, but oftentimes the factors you mention either break-even between renting and owning, or tilt the table in favor of owning, on a long enough time horizon. This is especially true if you're a high-income employee with a lot to gain from itemized deductions.
Interest in most loans is front-loaded (i.e. your payments are mostly "interest" rather than equity in the earlier parts of the loan), and you can write off payments towards mortgage interest on your taxes in the US. So, while interest is technically opex, the government currently allows you to treat it as capex, tax-wise, because they want to subsidize home ownership. If you aren't in a top income bracket, this won't affect you much.
Other costs are tricky because, in competitive markets at least, taxes and maintenance cost are usually priced into your rent, so you're usually paying them whether or not you own your home.
The big difference is that when you own the home, the taxes and maintenance costs arrive all-at-once (when your home floods, or the boiler falls apart), rather than amortized over years of residency. That's why mortgages are almost always "cheaper" per-month than rentals: rentals price these costs in, mortgages do not. If you have a good chunk of liquid savings and can afford good insurance, exposing yourself to occasional all-at-once payments are not very risky.
But the point was more about forcing people to WFH most days and then having to come into the office some others. It would be the worst option for people in HCOL areas because it forces most of the office expenses onto the employees. (And the cost is ridiculously high per capita for employees)
I still don't think it's about forcing anything. I think a lot of companies will start to give the option to have employees come in 1 or 2 days a week, but there is no need to force that. Tons of people will take advantage of it for the reduction in commute alone, and thus the company will still need considerably less real estate.
still requires all the costs of living within commuting distance
If you don't have to go in everyday, the possible commuting distance increases massively. Before the virus, I worked from home and my commute was 160km twice per week by high speed train.
The average American spends 4.3 hours per week commuting. If you go into the office every day, that gives you a 26.1 minute commute radius. If you go into the office twice a week, now your commute radius extends out to an hour.
Take a map around the office where you work. Look at the kinds of home prices you can find an hour out. See how much closer you can be to nature or other particular amenities that matter to you. Would you like to have those with zero total change to your commute time?
It's absolutely huge in Austin. There is a very high correlation between distance from downtown and housing prices because our traffic is so abysmal and our public transportation is a joke. Price for "equivalent" houses 5 mins from downtown vs. 35 mins from downtown is 2x minimum.
Yet, many workers prefer it. For example, my team is 18 persons fully in-office and 4 fully remote (I'm one of the latter). We've been all fully remote for two months now, and today the manager asked: what do you think about making this permanent? And all the 18 colleagues agreed that their preferred solution would be partial remote.
People like their socialization at work. Many also like living in the city anyway (granted, most of my colleagues are young and childless). And outside of extreme cases like SF, a tech salary is enough to rent a decent apartment.
This is already a pretty common situation for many companies (in NYC). A 1 hour+ commute to be more tolerable if you only have to do it twice a week. Fully remote companies, you might see your coworkers in person once a year. That's a big leap for a lot of places to accept.
Yeah I just took a WFH job and if I HAD to be near one city that would really limit my flexibility and is a huge negative. My company does bi-yearly get-togethers, or did.
I am having a very hard time staying motivated in the current context. Kids at home yelling at each other, other coworkers distracted, work tasks badly defined without the ability to verbally hash things out, emotional / mental health stress due to the current scenario.
I don't feel like the current scenario is indicative of a well structured WFH setup, even though we've been doing it for 2 months now.
In short I hope companies don't use this interlude to evaluate WFH productivity, because I think it isn't the best representative.
As a childless person with a great home office, this is exactly how I felt being forced to work in an open floor plan office. There was no time to concentrate on my work unless I got in early or stayed late. There were constant distractions from the crush of people around me. I would take the distraction of a couple of children over 100s of my colleagues elbow-to-elbow any day.
Could you imagine how rad it must be to work from home without kids?
My wife and I both work full time with a 3yo at home, so rather than put him in front of a screen we work in shifts - one of us does 6:30 ᴀ.ᴍ. to 12:30, then we switch until 6:30. It's really tough.
What about when this is over and you have access to your regular childcare?
I imagine a thoughtful approach to “everybody WFH” would include a coworking space credit if needed, a stipend to equip one’s home office if needed, etc.
“My home is too small / distracting / I like to be near people” => coworking space
Personally - I'm thankful for you. The parents with kids at home are dragging down the average amount of work done. So - the rest of us look good in comparison - or my preferred choice - I get to work less. :) I just blame corona for lower productivity - not the fact that I hate my employer and am actively looking for a new job.
My partner is home and doing most of the stuff with the children, which is great... but it's still going on in the background. With lots of conflict. Two kids -- including an adolescent going through some serious adolescent stuff right now -- and a border collie rampaging around the house.
> work tasks badly defined without the ability to verbally hash things out
The ability to hash things out verbally is a great escape hatch, but it has turned into a crutch. I hope universal WFH will push people to work to a standard where it can be the exception instead of the norm.
> Kids at home yelling at each other, other coworkers distracted
In my experience, working at home isn't much different from working at work. If you don't have a private office with a door, it's going to be very challenging to focus regardless of whether you're sharing space with your coworkers or your family. Long ago I worked in a cube farm that had the depressing gray regularity of a low-effort DOOM wod, and I'm not sure that wasn't better for productivity than the attractive, high-end open plan offices I've worked in since then.
In a couple of years, my wife and I will be living in a different house, and we will both have private offices, cost be damned. I've decided mine can be as small as 10'x6', as long as it has a door and a window.
Yes, it is not representative at all. It's a stressful period, kids are always at home as schools are closed, the lockdown requires more organisation than usual in everyday life and there are less options to relieve stress.
We still manage to work with the same productivity in my company but we already had some experience with WFH.
My employer gave us the clear message early on that personal / family care comes first, take the time you need to deal with crisis, etc. And we have indeed had plenty of family issues to deal with and it's been very difficult to concentrate on work.
The problem is going to be when performance is evaluated -- no matter how much leeway has been given now, I will be compared in some respect to my coworkers who have been able to manage this transition better, who haven't had a turbulent home life, etc. etc.
>we've proven we can be just as productive when we're out of the office.
I think it's very important to realize that if we are or are not productive WFH, there will be others who feel the opposite.
Working from home doesn't work for everyone, or it doesn't work in every case. Maybe it can be further optimized to work better for most cases, but currently it's not.
* Speaking as someone who recently started a new job two weeks before the government SIP for the Bay Area and has had to mostly virtual on-board and ramp-up. It has not been an easy experience. Maybe it's the on-boarding/ramp-up for my team that's not optimized, or maybe it's not easy simply because I'm not already a full-time remote worker already. Some people who enjoy WFH and get remote jobs probably don't have the issues I've had, and that's okay too. But I think it's unrealistic to expect everyone joining a new company during this situation to be properly productive through it and potentially WFH indefinitely. For my company in particular they've already mentioned we'll get to WFH for this through the end of the year.
The utility of partial WFH is much, much lower than full WFH. With partial WFH I still have to live within reasonable commuting distance from the office, while if I’m full WFH I can leverage the difference in cost of living away from the office.
I would consider a much longer commute to be acceptable once or twice a week compared to having to do it every day. You could still have the benefit of having a lower cost of living without increasing the number of hours you spend commuting per week.
I wouldn’t say that partial WFH is of no benefit, but it’s of significantly lower benefit. If I’m coming to the office once a week, I still have to live in a ~1 hr ring around my office. If I’m full WFH I can live anywhere.
The former opens up more options, but it only opens up a tiny percentage of the options that the latter creates.
I guess it depends on the invidual. Personally if I only had to do it once a week I would be fine with a 2 hour commute. Small price to pay for actually being able to own my own home.
Talking to some of my team and coworkers the main thing I hear is they miss face to face interaction with the people they work with, and I do as well. I would like to see the 1 day a week "meeting day" but really try to focus on socializing than "this is the day we do all our meetings" since those seem to be working just as well with video conference. Maybe restrict it to things like 1:1s and group discussions.
Having a 1 day a week office would I think help people move away from high cost areas. If I only had to do it once a week a multi-hour or even flying to the office once a week wouldn't be bad (assuming that we return to our previous status quo with air travel.)
I've done this in the past - I live in Portland, and worked with a firm in Mount Vernon, WA, which is about three and a half hours north, one way. I didn't go in every week, more like a few days a month staying in a hotel, but I found it very agreeable. I quite enjoyed having a few days to collaborate intensively and then private time to finish the detail work.
That said, I'm notably introverted and happy as a clam during quarantine, more or less, so I'm probably not representative of the country as a whole. Of people currently working remote, I think we'll see about 20% of people who won't want to go back into offices. For my own selfish purposes I'm really hoping for a paradigm shift towards more remote work, but I accept it doesn't work well for some people.
Are you kidding? Traveling economically by air is one of the worst travel experiences you can have. If you're going to do it weekly, then it needs to be relatively cheap to make it worthwhile. Don't forget, too, that if this does become the norm, companies will start decreasing comp to make up for not having to pay people to live in high CoL areas. In terms of comfort, I'd rather stand on a BART train than fly for an hour.
I don't think flying weekly to an office scales up as well as you think it might.
I've known a person or two who flew twice weekly to commute. Honestly I rather an hour flight twice a week than commute an hour each way 5 days a week on BART.
> people WFH 3 or 4 days a week with one day of the week being designated as a "meeting day" where everyone is in the office.
I sort of had this setup before covid: the company I work for does consulting and my coworkers and I will often be at client's offices. When we write our contracts we make sure to always designate Friday as the day where all employees come back to the 'home base' for meetings, catch-ups, socializing, etc. It works quite well, and we'd always look forward to Friday's because of it.
If I could continue to WFH 3-4 days a week and then go into the office on Thursday/Friday, that would be great.
I work for another pretty well-known company and management just asked us how we were feeling about a future were we could chose to have a designated desk in the office or not. This is crazy, our wildest dreams are being answered.
I quit a great job to work remotely 4 months ago after about 15 years of trying to do it. I feel like the universe is having an absolute riot at my expense right now. This is not a fun time to be new at a company. It's so hard to focus and sip the koolaid when the world feels like it's falling apart outside of my skype meetings and facing customers and selling products is the last thing I'm energized to do.
I think some of the replies here are misguided, I've interviewed (and turned down offers from) some well-known companies who were doing remote work and renting office space for face to face meetings 1 day a week while they were constructing a new office in my city.
Before COVID I lived this, and it's really the best of both worlds. You have one day a week where you meet with your coworkers and demo stuff, talk about stuff, grab some good food in the city, grab a smoke outside, ride the train. It's a nice "day off" as-in out of the ordinary.
Typically the company will then reassess the office capacity needed to provide enough flexible space and accommodate all teams and their needs. But there's plenty of time to do that, since you cannot break (or not renew) a corporate lease overnight.
I don't think this will happen because of people are worried about virus transmission, but instead because most people like working from home and we've proven we can be just as productive when we're out of the office.
That said, I'm one of the few people who like going into an office. There are fewer distractions and better food options. :)