United States is having Stressful Experiment in WFH due to corona

Several seconds after the invention of the personal computer, people predicted that our jobs would eventually be relieved of office, and home work would have a thrilling future. Consider me your correspondent from the future. And let me tell you, working from home this week, it's not entirely thrilling.

My desk is a kitchen counter, whose constant cleaning makes for good laxity, and my cafeteria is an emergency-stock fridge, which Regular raiding makes for better procrastination. There are hundreds, thousands, millions of people joining me this week who take refuge in the coronovirus. Not sure.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 29 percent of Americans can work from home, including one in 20 service workers and more than half an information worker. So while the servers are still operating the restaurant, the technology sector has effectively become remote. Amazon, Apple, Google, Twitter and Airbnb have all told at least some of their employees to stay away from the office. Outbreaks of coronovirus have led to a curious test for a large-scale remote function.

What we learn over the next few months can help shape future work that may be unavoidable with or without a century's public-health crisis. Even before the epidemic, the U.S. The work of the remote was speeding up.

According to the Federal Reserve, the share of the labor force working from home over the last 15 years. Two of the accelerators are evident: the highest density of knowledge workers residing in metros, and technology, such as Slack and Microsoft teams, in which collaboration and online gossip run. But the initial returns from the US home office have been mixed.

In The New York Times, Kevin Ross wrote from his temporary quarantine bunker that remote work affects creative sparks that fly when we're interacting with real people instead of their thumbnails on Slack. In the 2016 paper "Does Home Work Work?" A team of economists looked at the 16,000-employee Chinese travel agency Ctrip, which randomly assigned a small group of employees from its call center to work from home. At first, the experiment seemed like a win for workers and owners.

Employees worked more, quit less, and said they were happy with their jobs. Meanwhile, the company saved more than $ 1,000 per employee on reduced office space. But when Ctrip rolled out this policy for the entire company, it messed up. One complaint destroyed everything: loneliness.

Beyond the lost creativity and companionship, remote work poses the greatest threat to many companies in that it breaks the social bonds that are necessary for productive teamwork. Several years ago, Google conducted a research project on its most productive groups. The company found that the most important attribute was "psychological safety" - the belief that team members would not embarrass or punish a person for speaking out.

But online communication can be a mine field for psychological security, according to Bill Duane, a former Google engineer who now works remotely as a corporate consultant and researcher. "Whenever we read a sentence on Gchat or Slack that we find unclear or sarcastic, we miss thinking, you bastard!" Duane told me. "But if someone has said the same thing to your face, you must be laughing with them." Office banquets, bad jokes, and even unwanted corporate talk in the hallway can be dismissed as empty.

But Duane calls these things "the carrier wave for psychological safety". Almost everything that does not feel like work in the office is the one that does the most creative, most productive work in the office. The remote may not work for many in the future. But the status quo is already failing millions. Since jobs are concentrated in city areas without affordable homes, workers' homes are pushed into remote suburbs. The American commute is a psychological and environmental crisis that exacerbates depression, divorce, and fossil-fuel emissions. The average ruckus in the US recently set a 27-minute unilateral record. He spent about an hour a day away from friends and family, burning in the sky in a machine.

Allowing people to work closer to home — whether at a coffee shop, a co-working space or on the couch — can be a win for balance of work-life, for happiness, and for the biosphere . Geographic concentration of jobs also means that powerful industries are in a handful of wealthy cities. Eighty percent of US venture capital investment goes to just three states — California, New York and Massachusetts — and nearly 70 percent of Internet-publishing jobs are either in the Ekela Corridor between Washington and Boston, or in the western crescent from Seattle to Phoenix.

A future with remote work may be somewhat troubling, but that annoyance must be weighed against an alternative future where the majority of the middle class is barred from corporate headquarters in financial, media and technology. "With the lack of homes in the metros, you have more talented people living outside those metros," said Hiten Shah, an entrepreneur and consultant to remote-working companies such as Automatic. "As a result, companies have to build remote-work facilities in their culture to access that talent."

Another negative aspect of headquarters-based work is that the concentration of labor in high-income metros can attract people from the same socioeconomic pool, who share similar views and blind spots. "One thing that's not enough is that you have a less homogenous culture," said Gabriel Weinberg, founder of the search engine DuckDuggo.

“Working remotely, people are never forced to drink after work. You are not substituting work sociality for community sociality. They are in their own communities. So you are really getting a real diversity of thought. "

I have presented two pictures of remote work. In one picture, it is a desolate and lonely experience that often saps creativity and collapses the narrow distance between labor and downtime.

 In the next picture, it is a boon to social life, family life, egalitarianism, neurodiversity, and the planet itself. The messiness of the remote-work picture is a sign of the idea’s infancy.

"At the moment, the remote is not working for most companies," Shah said. "That's because we spent the last 120 years learning how people can be productive in an office." The rise of the telegraph and rail at the end of the 19th century did not give us retail, advertising, and mass distribution;

It also gave us managerial capitalism — middle manager, top manager, and modern hierarchies at corporate headquarters. The 21st century economy has already replaced retail, advertising, and mass distribution. Perhaps inevitably this will also change work and management. But first, companies need to learn that remote work is separate work. Managers have to be better at identifying productivity by establishing and monitoring specific goals rather than using proxies of office attendance.

Workers must adopt exceptional duty when it comes to dividing their day into intensive work, office communication, personal time, and civil or family life. Employees must develop new habits, such as maintaining abundant documentation of every meaningful work engagement, so that teams of space and time are always ready to pace when they are "down the hall".

And the owners will have to normalize more video conferencing and corporate retreats, as their employees crave for face-to-face interactions. In the current panic, Twitter is full of raspy predictions that the virus will be a inflection point in the future of distributed work. But an epidemic is not the appropriate time to determine what kind of labor system is hopefully productive on a per labor basis.

This is a moment for companies when they build that kind of technology and culture when the economy returns to full scale, making remote work easier for those who want to take advantage of it in the future Where white robes can work include a little less traffic and a little more house.