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Facebook is working from home. Google is working from home. Twitter announced last week that its employees can work from home forever. Today, Shopify just announced the same. Also today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook would be the “most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale.”
And now 44% of us would take a 10% pay cut to get the same privilege. Interestingly, however, not everyone agrees. Almost as many, if forced into that option, would seek a new job.
Analyst and author Jeremiah Owyang ran a poll on his Twitter account yesterday that 717 people voted on. It’s not a scientific poll and not generalizable to everyone, but it does provide a decent cross-section of white-collar and no-collar knowledge workers, especially in the tech industry.
The option:
Your company offers you the ability to work from home indefinitely, but with a 10% reduction in pay. Do you accept because you can reduce your cost of living by potentially moving to a cheaper region? And because productivity might go down (although many have higher productivity in their home offices) and you’re competing with potentially cheaper global talent?
Result of a Twitter poll on working from home.
JOHN KOETSIER
44% say they’d accept it.
But 56% say they would not: they’d either continue going into the office, or they’d look for alternative employment. That’s incredibly interesting, and may say something about the percentage of introverts and extroverts in the world as well as where people prefer to work.
But even if only 44% of people decided to take their companies up on an offer like this, it would disrupt work and office life as it’s evolved over the last 100 years.
What’s happening right now is a perfect confluence of events: the technology that enables remote work in Slack and Teams and Zoom and Google Meet, and the burning platform of COVID-19 that it took for businesses to make the move. The result is the freedom to work anywhere.
And the impact won’t be pretty for downtown office space.
I spoke to the owner of a small business that’s had office space in San Francisco for most of the last decade. He gave notice on their $10,000/month office rental a month or so ago. Everyone’s working at home, so why pay the lease?
And he doesn’t anticipate going back.
It’s not just small businesses either.
FIS, a 55,000-employee fintech giant, moved 95% of its staff in 52 countries to home offices in just six weeks. This company moves $10 trillion per year around the world in 75 billion transactions. If they can do it, anyone can. Except, of course, blue-collar workers and location-dependent workers in retail, hospitality, service, and food.
They literally can’t work remotely.
The question is: if half the white-collar workers move out of the city … how many service jobs will remain?
Credit:-Forbes.com
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