Remote work is underrated

Remote work is underrated

By Matthew Yglesias. SlowBoring.com

April 29, 2021.

It'll be better when you're not stuck in the house

For over a year, most white-collar workers have been doing our jobs primarily remotely as a response to the pandemic. We’ve been doing so mostly with off-the-shelf tools that have existed for a while — phones and email augmented by chat apps (Slack and Microsoft Teams) and videoconferencing (famously Zoom, but there are many others) and the fact that general modern office software has a lot of collaborative tools.

One school of thought is that since these tools existed before the pandemic but people mostly worked in offices, that shows the tools are not that good. Another school of thought is that the pandemic forced individuals and institutions to get over a learning curve with regard to the tools, and their use won’t be sticky.

I don’t particularly think I can solve that debate — it’s clearly some of both. Many currently remote office workers will go back to the office. But I think many others will not. Will the ratio be 80:20 or 20:80, or something in between? I’m not really sure I have a solid argument. But what I do think I’ve seen based on talking to people involved in management is that institutions are seeing a bit less demand for a return to office work than they anticipated. And I think the underrating of office work will continue for a little while because remote work is so firmly associated in most people’s minds with the specific conditions of 2020 which were so very terrible. But remote work in fall 2021 won’t be the same as remote work in fall 2020 — it’s going to be different and more appealing.

The hardware of collaboration

Apple marketing image

A really simple example of why is that the set of iMacs that Apple just announced at their mid-April event have high-quality webcams — that’s one of the highlighted marketing features of the product.

Apple has been making high-end expensive computer hardware for a long time. And in their iPhones and iPads, they make really great cameras. But the webcams they include in their iMacs have been notoriously obsolete for years. That’s because Tim Cook didn’t get those incredibly fat profit margins by being a sucker. Upgrading the camera on Mac laptops would have raised component prices across the board in exchange for a small increase in sales. What he learned in 2020 is maybe that sales increase won't be so small after all, and suddenly a quality camera appears. Next year, you’ll probably start to see the same thing in his laptops. And PC makers will intensify their own efforts.

And that’s the point. Remote work went remarkably well in 2020 even though relatively few people were really equipped for it. With a larger, permanent base of remote workers, the tools available will improve and so will the experience.

Great built-in cameras on laptops in particular are important because they’ll let people be mobile while being remote.

The return of hanging out

I was full-time remote back for a while back in the pre-Zoom, pre-Slack era, and despite the worse tools, it was a lot more fun than the pandemic year. That’s because in 2020, “remote work” meant “sitting alone in my basement at a makeshift desk.”

That was way worse than hanging out at the Vox office which featured some good friends, lots of smart people, and the ability to get a change of scenery or take a break without getting distracted by some household issue.

But in my previous remote era, I mostly worked at the no-longer-existent U Street coffee shop Mocha Hut. I had two other friends who showed up there almost every day. And two to three more who didn’t like the Mocha Hut hangout scene as much but who dropped by occasionally. It was fun and social (and there was coffee I didn’t have to make myself and dishes I didn’t have to wash), but it was also informal and flexible. Adam Ozimek has a new paper out for Upwork making the point that these kinds of arrangements are fairly typical for remote freelancers.

A few bullets stolen from his writeup:

Among Upwork freelancers who were remote prior to the pandemic, 37.1% worked somewhere outside the home sometimes.

22% of those planning on working remotely permanently will work outside the home (like a coffee shop, co-working space, or public park) in a post-pandemic world.

Remote professionals, on average, would have an additional 4 hours and 15 minutes per week, without a commute, to spend with family or friends.

What was cool for me about the Mocha Hut era is that I happened to have a group of friends I really liked who also all had non-office jobs.

This is a network effect. If you’re the only person you know who’s working remotely then there’s nobody to hang out with and you’re just a guy who’s not invited to any office happy hours. But if more people work remotely, then there’s a thicker “market” for hanging out, which makes it more appealing to extroverts.

And then the hardware point and the socializing point work together.

Bring back WeWork

WeWork was, as structured, valued way out of proportion to other real estate plays.

But the basic idea of trying to create a national chain of coworking spaces that’s cooler and more sociable than the Regus offerings makes a lot of sense. And it really is kind of a scale play. It would be cool to not only have a fun, well-equipped office to work from in your city but also in every other significant destination around the world so you could engage in digital nomadism, “bleisure,” or even just extended seasonal travel.

Even if you’re talking about just a fraction of a fraction of the white-collar workforce, it’s still a significant national market. And the key ingredients would be a footprint not just in major central business districts but also in leisure destinations and nice smaller towns around the country. Some company that’s not run by a charlatan (maybe Regus itself!) will do it and, again, you’ll see network effects.

Again, I don’t have a super-strong prediction about how far remote will go.

But the basic formula is this:

More than zero percent of the newly remote workers will stay fully remote.

A larger remote working population will mean more opportunities for remote workers to connect with each other.

A larger remote working population will mean a larger investment in supportive hardware.

At the intersection of hardware and socialization is real estate — whether in the form of coworking spaces or wifi-enabled coffee shops or whatever else is designed to be used by remote workers.

The larger the remote pool gets, the more ancillary services there are for it, and the more attractive it becomes. At the same time, the larger the remote labor pool, the more advantageous it is for employers to tap into it. But there’s always the question of how much the built environment will be allowed to change.

Zoning, zoning everywhere

I’ve often written about the role of bad land use regulation in driving scarcity of housing.

But a larger problem is just that land use in the United States is excessively prescriptive. If there’s a place where planners anticipate people will want to own one car per adult, they make it mandatory to have one off-street parking space per adult. If there’s a place where planners anticipate that you wouldn’t want to put an office building, they forbid office buildings.

This is never a great idea. But when technologies change — whether that’s scooters or Uber or electric cars or remote work — it becomes especially costly. People are going to want different stuff. If only one member of your household has a daily commute, maybe you only need one car and want to turn the garage into home office space. If “the office” is, for many people, more of a hangout opportunity, then maybe you want much more decentralized neighborhood-based places to work. If there’s less need to be within commuting range of a huge downtown but some people still like walkable urbanism, maybe there’s a structural surge in demand for living in cutesy small towns. Who knows?

But I mean it genuinely: Who knows? That’s the problem with prescriptive regulation. It’s not clear where housing demand is going, or how people will respond to increased demand for home offices, or where there will be demand for coworking and coffee shops and other “third spaces.” That’s the kind of thing that markets are good for. When fashions and preferences for consumer goods change, supplier behavior just shifts. But the real estate exception to that trend is a huge share of the economy, and while remote work alleviates some specific problems associated with specific housing shortages, the general lack of flexibility remains a big problem.