WORK

FROM
HOME BY

Kerri Anne
Renzulli

NATION
As the coronavirus pandemic continues, more companies
are sending employees home to work.
Is it a passing phase—or a FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE
in the way we do our jobs?

22 NEWSWEEK.COM A P R I L 10, 2 0 2 0
ILLUSTRATION BY

Alex Fine
 JOB S

t’s been a couple of weeks now But businesses in other industries have followed: auto-
and here you are, slumped over the makers Ford, General Motors, and Fiat Chrysler have
grimy keyboard of your laptop, unsure asked all global workers who can work from home
what day it is since you never go outside, and you’ve to do so. Telecom giant AT&T and Wall Street banks,
had these sweatpants on since...was it Wednesday? such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs? Same deal.
The first few days were great. No need to put to- That’s why Steve King, a partner at Emergent
gether an outfit, no reason to comb your hair or Research, a small business consultancy, says there
even look in the mirror. No commute! But unlike may be no turning back. “If you already have a
many things in life, working from home does not trend or shift that is growing, a shock like the
always get better with experience. coronavirus pandemic tends to be supportive of
Life on lockdown isn’t what you wanted, after that, accelerating the trend,” he says.
all—and it may be what “office life” will be like Since the virus was declared a pandemic on
from now on. The coronavirus pandemic has ut- March 11, many companies have attempted to rap-
terly disrupted the way millions of us work, and idly move their operations, culture, management
while the public health emergency will someday style and communications fully online. Employees
dissipate, some aspects of the Work From Home have longed for the flexibility that at-home work
Revolution are likely here to stay. offers, and thousands of employers had encour-
“This may be the tipping point for remote work,” aged remote work by eliminating private offices
says Kate Lister, president of consulting firm Global and putting open cubes in their place. The tech-
Workplace Analytics. “I don’t think the office is go- nology was already there from Slack, a messaging
ing away, but more people will be spending at least system, to Zoom video-conferencing.
part of the week at home.” But there are still downsides to this new re-
There is already a measurable spike in the number mote-work reality. Many workers don’t have the
of at-home workers. Gartner, a research and advi- space at home and hate feeling isolated. It’s harder
sory firm, reports in a March 17 survey of 800 HR to delineate personal and work time. (Does work
executives that 88 percent of the organizations have interfere with Netflix binging or visa-versa?) Em-
encouraged or required employees to work from
home. G&S Business Communications, found in
their own “snap poll” on March 21 that 26 percent of
those surveyed have moved from the office to home. “The pandemic has created a massive, forced
Tech company services have also soared. Free-
ConferenceCall, a telecom service, says that us-
age in the U.S. is up 2,000 percent. (In Italy and
Spain: 4,322 percent and 902 percent, respectively.)
Kentik, a network analytics firm, says video-confer-
encing traffic has increased roughly 200 percent in ployers might not be prepared on the technology
North America and Asia. front. And furthermore, how do you know you’re
In short: the pandemic has created a massive, not paying someone to shop and FaceTime?
forced socioeconomic experiment, with millions The recruiting company that Pamela Gonzalez, 24,
of Americans as the guinea pigs. works for in Orlando beefed up the hours for the tech
department to install products like Google Voice and
p r i o r t o t h e o u t b r e a k , 6 9 p e rc e n t o f deal with problems related to remote setups. But as for
organizations already offered a remote work option the actual experience of working fully remote for the
on an ad hoc basis to at least some employees, while 42 first time? Gonzalez says there’s both good and bad.
percent offered it part time, and 27 percent offered it full The good: “I’m a lot more productive working
ROB CARRʔ*E T T <

time, according to SHRM’s 2019 Employee Benefits Survey. from home, which surprised me,” says Gonzalez,
After the pandemic was declared, the trend accel- who began working remotely on March 17. “I feel
erated. The usual suspects were the frontrunners: like I don’t have someone micromanaging me. I
tech-centric companies like Microsoft and Amazon. can work really hard for two hours and then take

24 NEWSWEEK.COM A P R I L 10, 2 0 2 0
socioeconomic experiment, with millions of Americans as the GUINEA PIGS. ”

a break and come back.” She adds: “In the office everything but the job at hand when they’re out of
there are a lot more distractions.” sight. (Not that office workers don’t do things like
The not so good: “It does mess with my work-life shop online and scroll Facebook on company time.)
balance,” Gonzalez says. “The first night I worked In fact, 76 percent of HR leaders reported to
remotely, I ended up going back to my computer Gartner that the top employee complaint during
and working at 10 p.m. My boyfriend was not happy.” the coronavirus outbreak thus far has been “con-
That double-edge to remote work, Gonzalez cerns from managers about the productivity or
BATTLING discovered, underpins one of the biggest miscon- engagement of their teams when remote.”
COVIDʝ1 ceptions and key adjustments managers will have But many managers are likely to find themselves
A Maryland Cleaning
& Abatement to make as they embrace a fully remote workforce. surprised. More than a quarter of workers who’ve re-
Services worker A common reason employers cite for not offering cently switched to telecommuting say they’re clock-
in action at an ofɿce remote work prior to the pandemic, Lister says, is sim- ing more hours than they normally do in the office,
building in Hunt
Valley, Maryland, ply that they don’t trust their staff to work untethered. according to a survey by G&S. And a study from Har-
on March 21. They fret that employees will use working hours for vard University last year found that people were more

NEWSWEEK.COM 25
 JOBS

STAY IN PLACE productive when given the freedom

Scenes from the to work from anywhere as opposed to
pandemic:
Home workers staying strict workplace requirements.
on the job in France, Managers will also extrapolate
Germany and from their own experience. “Working
Serbia and a virtual
church service in remote themselves is often what gets
Liverpool, England. resistant managers over their reserva-
tions the quickest,” says Lister. “They
see how hard they are working while
at home and the hours they’re putting in still, and it
helps them get over this issue of trust.”
Employees will need to step up their communi-

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cation, developing habits to document digital inter-
actions so other teams and superiors know what’s
happening. And that sometimes means an overre-
liance on meetings. (Because everyone knows that
more meetings create an illusion of productivity.)
Only 3 percent of office workers attend 11 or more
meetings a week, but 14 percent of remote workers
do, according to a 2019 survey by Owl Labs.
Of course, productivity can only be so high if the
necessary tools aren’t also at home with you.
Not all at-home workspaces are created equal and
employees may be held back initially if their compa-
nies haven’t implemented the right technology. G&S
found that 40 percent of Americans who’ve begun
working remotely say one of the top challenges is
setting up technology, like their phones and laptops.
Managers seem to feel the same way. Gartner says
about half of HR leaders surveyed admit that poor
technology and infrastructure for remote working
is the biggest barrier in the grand transition.
“Some of our developers [were] coming into the
office anyway even though we’d been encouraged to
work from home,” says Doug Tabuchi, a lead engineer
at SquareFoot, a New York-based real estate tech com-
pany, referring to the week before remote work was
made mandatory on March 13th. “It’s too much of a
hassle to rebuild the setups and the operations they’ve
come to expect and rely upon at the office.”
And sometimes, he adds, it’s the little things that
add up. “I don’t have a second monitor…I’m using
AirPods instead of headphones and a microphone.
It affects what I can get done.” (It doesn’t help
that he lives in a one-bedroom apartment with a
2-month old and his wife.)
Art Papas, chief executive of Boston-based soft-
ware firm, Bullhorn, is learning as he goes along and
has a different set of worries. He had a head start—

NEWSWEEK.COM 27
about 20 percent of his 1,200 employees already
were remote. That helps, but he’s still concerned
about lost productivity. There are a lot of things he
finds easier done in person. “The biggest challenge
is that teleconferencing takes more energy than an
in-person meeting. It requires a different level of
focusing and paying attention is harder.”
But people will learn and adjust, he says: “just like
any skill, remote work will take time.” And the big
plus, Papas adds: “No one is in traffic for two hours.”
As employees get used to the benefits, the num-
ber of remote workers will rise; businesses can use
it as a bargaining chip to recruit and retain top
talent. “Companies will see remote work as a com-
petitive advantage,” says Dan Schawbel, managing
partner of Workplace Intelligence. “Time and time
again, workers have prioritized flexibility as part of
their job search criteria—and now as they taste the
benefits of it, the demand will only grow.”
About half of America’s on-site workers wanted re-
mote work options before the pandemic hit, accord-
ing to the Owl Labs survey. And more than a third
of workers even said they’d be willing to sacrifice 5
percent of their pay for the option. But just because
many employees may like having such flexible options,
doesn’t mean all of them will want to work remotely

“Teleconferencing requires a different level of of focusing…but people

will LEARN AND ADJUST. Plus, no one is in traffic for two hours.”

when the crisis ends. After all, companies such as IBM, times more likely to be engaged in their work, ac-
Best Buy, Yahoo and Aetna experimented with remote cording to a study published in the Harvard Busi-
work in years past and returned to the office. ness Review. Another HBR study discovered that
“We make generalizations that this experiment when a salesperson increased their interactions
will be good for remote work, but many people don’t with co-workers by 10 percent, their sales also
OL I9E R .ILL I*ʔPICT 8 RE ALLIANC E ʔ*ET T <

like always having to work remotely, especially under grew by 10 percent.

IN CONCERT
these circumstances. We can lose camaraderie and And for some, the convenience just doesn’t Karoline Strobl and
a sense of belonging the longer we are out of the trump the isolation—no matter how many video Zoltan Macal perform
office,” says Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., president and CEO conferences you throw at them. “I’m an introvert Beethoven’s
“Ode to Joy” for their
of the Society for Human Resource Management. who lives with a cat,” says Justin Sanak, 29, who housebound neighbors
Those in-office connections aren’t just good works for a government contractor in Plano, Texas. in Dresden, Germany.
for workers’ social lives and well being; they can “I need time at home to recharge my batteries. But The concert was
duplicated by other
be hugely beneficial to a company’s bottom line. batteries aren’t meant to be charging forever. I’m musicians across
People with a “best friend” co-worker were seven ready to be back at the office.” the country.

28 NEWSWEEK.COM A P R I L 10, 2 0 2 0
 JOBS

BY
Kerri Anne

ADVICE FOR
Renzulli

FIRST-TIME Are you a new telecommuter because of the

coronavirus pandemic? Here are FIVE TIPS from
WORK-AT-HOMERS our experts to help make the adjustment:

Maintain Normal Plan Your Home Use Video- Over- Take Regular
Work Hours Office Space Conferencing Communicate Breaks

Creating boundaries Don’t settle for the soft “The biggest issue with When your co-workers Because you’re remote,
helps, especially when sofa. Maybe you need remote work is the or boss can’t directly you may feel pressure
your desk, work comput- silence, good natural isolation and loneliness see you hard at work, to be available at all
er and ɿles are always light and a comfortable you feel from not having they may question times, tethered to your
within reach. Some desk chair? Or back- a human connection like what you’re doing with computer or phone. But
advice from Dan Schaw- ground noise and a you would at a typical your time at home. you can’t work eight-
bel, managing partner of standing desk? This is ofɿce” says Schawbel. “That’s why we need hours straight without
Workplace Intelligence your chance to fashion Consider turning on to communicate much enjoying a couple little
and author of the book, your ideal work space. If your webcam rather more when we are head-clearing breaks.
Back to Human: “One of you’ve got to share the than sending an email remote,” says Schaw- Much as you do when
the biggest fears people house with a partner, or picking up the phone, bel. “Doing so signals in the ofɿce, schedule a
have with remote work is kids or roommates, try so you can see your that our teammates little mid-morning cof-
that they end up working to come to an agreement co-workers as you do can trust us and that fee pit stop, take that
longer, and harder, about who gets what in the ofɿce. Video tip: we are, in fact, avail- full hour lunch break
without additional pay space, when they can in- position the camera able even if it appears away from your desk
and it can hurt their terrupt you during work so your eyes are two- we aren’t.” He further or go for a walk when
personal life,” he says. hours, how noisy the thirds of the way up the recommends setting stuck on a problem.
“You are empowered, and house can get and how screen and your face regular meetings with Says Schawbel: “It’s
accountable, to keep much privacy you need is completely visible, your manager to clue impossible to focus on
the same work hours to complete your work. says Jeanne Meister, them into what you’re work for hours upon
that you had in your “This will help reduce the founding partner of working on and the hours, so make sure
corporate ofɿce but at potential for misunder- Future Workplace. progress you’ve made. that your calendar has
home. If you work 9-to-5, standings and resent- a few 30-minute or
then mimic that at home, ment,” says executive 1-hour breaks through-
stopping work at 5 p.m. coach Dave Wondra. out the day just like you
and leaving the spillover would normally take at
work until the next day.” a corporate ofɿce.”

NEWSWEEK.COM 29
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