Coronavirus will end office culture

The argument

Since coronavirus began to spread, a huge amount more people are working remotely as a precautionary measure. Videoconferencing in the US has doubled, and large companies like Twitter and Facebook are encouraging or requiring people to work from home even without any workers having the virus, a detail the argument leans on because it shows the shift being made pre-emptively as policy rather than reactively case by case. This is likely to continually increase as the virus spreads, with even more workplaces putting measures in place in case everyone needs to work from home. The claim about permanence rests on what an extended trial does to an untested assumption. Office attendance had not previously been evaluated against an alternative, because no alternative had been run at scale; the pandemic supplies that comparison involuntarily, and over a long enough period that its results cannot be dismissed as a one-off. As this increases, it is likely that it will have lasting effects even after the threat of coronavirus is gone, and after an extended period of everyone working from home, many workplaces will permanently increase the amount of work that is done this way as it proves to be productive. Productivity is not the only thing on the ledger. Working from home has several documented benefits, like decreased stress and increased sense of well-being for workers, which gives employees a reason to press for the arrangement to continue even where an employer is indifferent, so the pressure to retain it comes from both sides. The conclusion is drawn as a matter of institutional momentum running in a new direction. As workplaces try a new way of working, it is likely that many will not go back. Coronavirus may be the push that makes remote work the norm.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Remote working has been imposed due to lock-down restrictions from many governments. Although some companies, especially in the advanced technology sector, have already announced more flexible policies upon return to work, there have been consistent calls to return back to 'normal' work in the office. Arguments that are being made against the Remote Working idea, are linked to diminished productivity, diminished creativity due to less interaction at work, but also due to concerns of the impact on the local economies of people not travelling to work anymore.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The uptake described was compulsory and near-universal, imposed while workplaces were closed. That measures nothing about preference or suitability, and the firms named were technology companies whose work is unusually portable. [Rejecting P2] Productivity during that period is contested and hard to interpret, since it was measured against a backdrop of closed schools, no commuting and no alternative. The counter-argument on record lists the objections raised against permanence: reduced collaboration and informal exchange, difficulties for training and early-career staff, and the effect on the local economies built around commuting. [Rejecting P3] This is a prediction that can now be assessed, and it has only partly held. The dominant pattern that settled is hybrid rather than fully remote, many large employers have since mandated a set number of days in the office, and the reversion has been strong enough to become a recurring point of dispute between employers and staff. [Rejecting C] 'Ending office culture' overstates even the change that did occur. Offices remain the default for most sectors and most of the world's workforce, much of which cannot work remotely at all — so what the pandemic altered was the mix for a subset of office roles, not the institution.