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Remote work has gotten a lot of attention in the last 1.5 years obviously, so now we are able to see some long-term results. What is the next thing for the workforce? Do people really want to go back to the office? How are big companies with open office policies changing their work environments?
Show Notes
Remote Work, some people love it and some don’t. What about companies? Smaller businesses may like the light overhead requirements of remote work, but what about all those bigger companies who are not paying for office buildings that are empty?
For this podcast, join our hosts Dave Erickson, Kenlyn Terai and Botond Seres as we remotely examine where the remote work trend is going, what are the advantages and disadvantages and what are the tools and techniques that help make remote work better.
One of the main problems with remote work is that it's a two-dimensional kind of situation and people are working three and four-dimensional. So, with remote communication and remote working, you're only able to talk and say some things on video, and it is very different from meeting somebody in an office. There's a productivity issue here and there's also a personality issue. Let’s say you're just kind of having a conversation at the office, and maybe you bump into someone in the hallway, you can read a lot from body gestures and you can have a random conversation that might yield a new idea. So, a major issue in remote communications and remote work is that you don’t have that kind of communication.. I think companies are seeing this and they have indicated that in a lot of the surveys that remote work has productivity taking a hit.
What about Creativity taking a hit with remote work? We discuss this much deeper in the Podcast.
Connect with this month's hosts below:
Dave Erickson = https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveerickson1/
Botond Seres = https://www.linkedin.com/in/botondseres/
Kenlyn Terai = https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenlynterai/
Creators & Guests
Host
Dave Erickson
Dave Erickson has 30 years of very diverse business experience covering marketing, sales, branding, licensing, publishing, software development, contract electronics manufacturing, PR, social media, advertising, SEO, SEM, and international business. A serial entrepreneur, he has started and owned businesses in the USA and Europe, as well as doing extensive business in Asia, and even finding time to serve on the board of directors for the Association of Internet Professionals. Prior to ScreamingBox, he was a primary partner in building the Fatal1ty gaming brand and licensing program; and ran an internet marketing company he founded in 2002, whose clients include Gunthy-Ranker, Qualcomm, Goldline, and Tigertext.
What is ScreamingBox Technology & Business Rundown ?
Join us for interesting conversations about technology and the business of IT.
Dave
Welcome to ScreamingBox Technology and Business Rundown podcasts. This is a monthly podcast, if you don't want to miss our podcast, please subscribe, using whichever platform you're currently listening to or watching this on. So you don't miss us each month. And now to kind of begin the rundown. So we're gonna be talking about remote communication, remote development, remote technologies, everything involving remote, since our glorious pandemic, it's kind of forced everybody into that mode. And so there's probably lots to talk about, with our hosts, Kenlyn, and Botond. So does anybody want to start with anything? Or any thoughts on anything concerning remote, say, development, or communications? All right, well, that was a great conversation. Now we can move on to the next subject.
Kenlyn
One thing that comes to mind is just the constraints that we've got with just being in this zoom, or these virtual environments where we can't get a lot of the nonverbals of serendipity doesn't happen as symmetric, those you run into somebody in the hallway, and you remember something. And I think, there could be a loss of creativity, and because of being in Zoom, or these remote environments that we just can't quite replicate in person. I mean, I don't know, what do you think? Would you say something different?
Dave
I think one of the main problems with remote work is that it's a two-dimensional kind of situation and people are three and four-dimensional. So, with remote communication and remote working, you're only able to talk and say some things on video and it is very different from meeting somebody in an office. There's a productivity issue and there's also a personality issue. As you mentioned Kenlyn, this serendipity, you're just kind of having a conversation, and maybe you bump into someone in the hallway, you can read a lot from body gestures. When all you see is ahead, you don't see as much, and it doesn't allow you to communicate fully. So, I think that's a major issue in remote communications and remote work. I think companies are seeing this. They have indicated in a lot of the surveys that remote work has productivity taking a hit. They're not surveying creativity. So, they haven't measured if creativity has taken a hit. But companies are seeing less productivity because it's much harder to get a group of people together to brainstorm or to do things, and everything has to be scheduled. People are living their lives on a conference call schedule, which is a little bit different than working in an office where you can just randomly, as you feel like it, get up and walk over to the other person's desk and say, "Hey Bob, what do you think of cats with three legs?" and you can have a conversation. So, I think that's a challenge that remote work is showing. This pandemic hit, all this remote work. ScreamingBox, as a company, we've always done remote work. That's kind of how we built the company, but most people do not. And I read somewhere I think it was in a Vox or something. You know, the pandemic put half of the US workforce into their homes. So that was done in a very short period. Before the pandemic, remote work was like 10% of the workforce. Now it's like 50-60% and they'll go back but it's got to be higher than the people who stay at home they're predicting it might be 30% of the workforce is now working remotely instead of 10. Right? Or maybe even more. It depends. But I think the companies are trying to figure out how to do this. They talk about this hybrid model, where people work from home, and they come into the office two or three times a week and work from the office, or some of the people work from home and the rest of the people work in the office. It's going to be very interesting. A lot of it has to do with the people. So I've always worked remotely; I kind of like being alone in my office at home, and I'm very comfortable with that. You know, my wife, on the other hand, loves working in an office, she's very social, and she wants to talk to other people. She gets a lot done by doing that. So for her, working at home has been a little bit more stressful, because she doesn't have those social interactions. And so some people want to go back to the office; they can't wait. Some people enjoyed working from home and wouldn't go back to the office because they liked it better. So I think it's gonna be an interesting mix in the future.
Botond
It's a steep learning curve to learn to socialize remotely because we take it for granted. When you're in person, you can just talk to each other. Like you mentioned previously, we can just go up to someone and say, "I'm working on this, what do you think?", but remotely, it takes a lot more effort to stay connected, to keep a schedule on who to reach out to and when. And it's really simple and really easy to lose those connections. It takes a lot more effort to keep up with coworkers, even just to ask them how they are doing every day.
Kenlyn
It's a lot more work. I've been working remotely for about five years now, actually pre-pandemic and the thing that seemed to help me the most is putting virtual coffee meetings on my calendar. So I try to meet different people like this intentionally, but there's no just running into somebody. The second best thing I've seen so far is in slack. There's a question of the day where you can learn about your coworkers. But again, it just has to be a lot of thought put into getting to know people rather than just being able to run into people.
Dave
Yeah, the social aspect of having to meet people and be concerned about their personal lives and all of that can be exhausting, especially when you're on your seventh zoom call of the day. And it's just like, okay, I haven't left my chair in eight hours. It'd be nice if I could move around or something. Sometimes it gets a little difficult in that sense. But we will see how it progresses in the future. I agree though, for those who have been doing remote work for a long time, they know that there's kind of a tempo to the work, whereas I think people in an office are used to a very different tempo. Now teams are getting distributed and spread out. So, for example, some of these large companies, their workers are all going to be working from home, have all moved. A lot of them are moving to California; they're moving to states with a much lower cost of living and the companies are realizing this. So now the teams are more distributed. And so it can be a question of, "do we pay them the same?" The time zones are different now they have to schedule calls at weird hours. You know, people are working, if I want to talk to someone in Asia, I'm working late at night and then there's Europe, so then you're working early in the morning. And so I think the companies are finding that this kind of time zone scheduling and just distribution of employees are making it harder, whereas it's much easier if they're all in one building. in one location. Communication is much faster and the tempo of work is much faster because you don't have all these differences in time zones and other things.
Botond
What do you think is the longest time we can schedule meetings between time zones? Like, how many hours of difference would you say is reasonable? I don't wanna say ideal, but it's acceptable when we are working remotely, because I have seen that usually remote work opportunities often include that, for example, you can only take this job if you live in the States, or if you live in Europe, or Asia, or whatever.
Dave
12 hours is the reality. So you can do phone calls to one side of the planet in the morning, and you can do phone calls to your local area during the day. And then you can make calls late at night to the other side of the planet, right? So it depends.
Kenlyn
And sometimes you can't get out of it. One time I had to show up for a presentation at 4:30 in the morning pacific time because the management was over in Denmark. So I guess no way to get out of it, you just have to show up for your slot and present.
Dave
Yeah, I'm doing a conference on leading a panel for a European Investment Group. I have to get up at three o'clock in the morning, become conscious, run the panel, and then go back to sleep and there's just no way around it. That's just what the schedule is. I think people are starting to realize that yeah, for certain jobs and other things, a remote situation is great for them. They can work a normal kind of eight-hour day, but for other people, and particularly people who are running businesses, they tend to have to work long days and for me, I'm working all the time. One of my more productive work times is just before I go to bed at 11 p.m. because I can get a lot of emails and stuff done. A lot of the people I'm working with are in Europe so when they're starting their day, they're getting my emails. So I work, I usually do an hour of email before I go to sleep. Then when I wake up in the morning, I have a whole bunch of emails I have to answer before I make my first phone call. So it's a long day and so I break it up. That's kind of the advantage of working from home, being able to break up your day so you can schedule stuff that makes sense for you. I usually like to try to get in a bike ride during the day; the best time for that seems to be my three o'clock in the afternoon, and between the phone calls and timezones, that's an empty spot for me so it works out. I can do that three or four times a week, which kind of keeps me sane. Whereas if I was working in an office, it wouldn't be possible.
Botond
Yeah, that's a great topic. I mean, exercise, it's extremely important so that we don't lose our minds. Recently, I started walking on a treadmill instead of having lunch, and it has had an incredibly positive effect on my mental health. I think that's something to consider, when we think about equipment for remote work, we think of webcams, microphones, headsets. That's about it, just use your laptop, it does it all in one package. What we don't think of is that people need to do some exercise. Biking is a great option for sure, even if you are doing it at home on an exercise bike, it's awesome. But that is something we rarely think about. I've only ever seen a single job posting where it said that here's your allowance of, I don't know, 5000 euros, in that range somewhere, go buy some exercise equipment, because you're gonna lose your sanity working remotely if you don't exercise.
Dave
Yeah, absolutely; I need that part. I think companies are learning this too. If they're going to ask their employees to work these long hours, overtime, or a lot of hours over a long period. You know, they got to encounter a lifestyle. Right? And there are aspects of that, like, my wife has to schedule her day because she takes my daughter to daycare. So she has to schedule a call so that she doesn't have a call during one particular hour so she can do that, and that works out, but she's also taking calls at seven or eight at night because she has been asked to talk to China and so, I think the companies are now really accepting this kind of flexible timeline of when work is being done. There are times when you're not working during the day. Whereas in the past, if you were working in an office, that was unacceptable and I think these companies are starting to see that, this has real benefits. I don't know if they're promoting exercise as much, but clearly, exercise is really important, even just getting up and moving around. I do a lot of my calls without video because I like to walk around and wave my arms, and sometimes I just go up and down the stairs 10 times for some exercise. I have my headset on and people are talking while I listen and move around; that helps keep me sane, at least a little bit. But if you're on video, you just have to sit in front of the camera the whole time. It's similar to making a podcast or something like that.
Botond
This is funny, because, on the project that I'm working on, we never do video calls, ever.
Dave
Yeah, well here's something kind of relative to the subject, my normal kind of humor. So how many software developers does it take to change a light bulb? How many? None. That's a hardware problem.
Botond
All right, submit a ticket. (laughter here)
Dave
I just had to make at least one bad joke on this podcast so I thought I'd try that one; it brings up a different subject. So, there are jobs that need some kind of physical location, because for example, a hardware developer may not have access to the technology they need to develop their engineering They could do a bunch of their engineering at home, but they may need access to tools and location, so with remote work, that may be an issue. One of the things I read was that businesses are starting to provide tools, locations, and laboratories for people who are working remotely; they can kind of come in and rent it for a day or half a day to do work. That's because they've moved and they're now remote and need access to those tools because they can't fly into the headquarters of their company a couple of states over. What do you think about these people who, as remote workers, will need access to that? How do they deal with that? What are the things that they will need to figure out? They're saying if they don't have a resource like that, so if you are with a company and you decide to move to another state because the cost is lower, and the company needs you to do some things that require some tools or whatever and flying a couple of states over to do that for a couple of hours doesn't make sense, what are these people supposed to do? Do they try to build a laboratory in their house? Or do they rent a laboratory and buy or rent the tools? Should the companies have to buy the tools? Maybe. Some companies are big, and some small, this is a factor as to whether they can afford this or not. Right?
Kenlyn
Okay, what is the cost of travel for them to go into the office? Is it going to be less for the company to just buy the supplies and the equipment they need and send it to them? That might make sense rather than having them travel. I think a lot of companies are finding that work travel is not necessarily as much as they thought. For instance, this has been an Australian experiment where they get to have their beliefs challenged. So I think it could be that people are shipping equipment out where they wouldn't have otherwise spent money on hotels and food and travel.
Botond
Yeah, that's fair, but let's go to their departments when they are on the payroll, and let's go back to the example where we mentioned the lab. So, if you need the supplies for a chemistry lab, how many business class tickets will it cost in comparison to building up a proper lab for any kind of serious work? Travel is completely justifiable, right? I mean, it's even cheaper to buy a private plane. You can buy a Tesla, for I think, for less than an electron microscope. So I mean, those are some new considerations that employers probably have never thought of before.
Dave
Yeah, the other thing that companies have to deal with, there was a study by McKinsey where they analyzed over 2000 different types of jobs and 800 occupations, throughout eight different countries in Europe and the United States. They were only considering remote work that can be done without a loss of productivity. The results showed that 20 to 25% of the workforce can work from home three to five days a week, without having a loss of productivity or having to limit their work. So, what they're expecting, and what they're predicting from this is that probably 25-30% of the workforce will now be remote. That's going to leave a lot of empty office space. So, if they built a laboratory or a testing facility, and they were expecting 100 workers to use it all the time and now, it's only going to be 50 workers, it may not be that productive or efficient. They may have overbuilt for what they're going to have or they weren't considering the cost of having to fly those people all the time to use that facility. I think that's going to be a very big challenge that some of the larger enterprise companies are going to be dealing with.
Kenlyn
So how about in San Francisco, the Salesforce tower in San Francisco, and then Salesforce then announces that everyone can work from home. So like, what are they going to do with that giant tower?
Dave
Yeah, that was huge. I was about, what, 100 stories? I mean, I don't know, they spent $200 to $300 million to build that thing and now it's almost empty. I don't know about San Francisco, but much of the country, at least the United States, is predicting that during the pandemic, about 50% of the workforce was working remotely. So it went from 10% to 50%. And they think it's going to go back down to 30%, but that's still 20% of the workforce that isn't going back to the office. They used to go to an office, you know, that's a quarter or close to a quarter of the workforce. What are all those people going to do with those empty buildings? I know some people who work for a large company that has a campus with like 10 buildings on it, and they had 8000 people working on-site all the time, and now they're thinking it will be maybe 4000 people working on site now. So they have huge buildings that are going to be empty. Who are they going to sell them to? Not a lot of people need empty buildings because their workforces aren't all working in an office. Another person I know, their office was renovated to be the office of the future, where everybody works together in one place, they're all compact, sharing desks and everything. Now, in this post-pandemic world, they have to convert that office back into an old-style office with cubicles where people are isolated and there are a lot of people who don't want to go back to that. So there are some really big challenges.
Kenlyn
This is among developers too. With so many companies now offering remote work, I've heard talk of people not wanting to go back to a place that requires them to be in an office; they want the flexibility. So I feel like it could end up being a competitive advantage for companies as far as hiring. They will need to offer remote work, or they might lose some of their best workers.
Dave
I think another issue is, as a lot of companies already know, they're going to have a hybrid mix, where they have employees that work remotely and they have employees that work on-site. They will also have employees work half remote and half on site. One of the things I read was that a lot of promotions and career development during the pandemic stopped. One of the reasons they cited for it is that a lot of those events take place in person. People who are on-site, working with the management, and the on-site directors, will have a better opportunity to advance their career than the remote people who never come on-site and never meet the management in person. What do you guys think, is this a valid concern? Is that something that you think will be happening?
Kenlyn
I think it's valid. By having in-person face time with people, you're allowing yourself to be present, and people to put your face to your name. I think that's more of a powerful visual for people. Even if this is intended for remote people, I think having people in front of you makes a big difference.
Botond
We can also flip this on its head and just say that remote people are less annoying, so they may have more opportunities. I'm sure everyone on this podcast had their share of annoying coworkers, and there are many more annoying people, that can be guaranteed. There's a shift. There's a much larger emphasis on corporate events, I mean after the pandemic, because right now, obviously everything is canceled; everything is postponed. But since most of us are working remotely anyway, we probably are in a good place to understand that FaceTime does not necessarily mean being in the office; it can also mean just showing up for events, being well dressed, and well-groomed in those situations. That way, we can leave a lasting impression on people. In the office, after the first couple months, maybe we stopped wearing suit jackets, or just forgot to put our handkerchiefs in our pockets, little stuff like that; we start to unintentionally let go after a while. So there's something to be said for always being presentable. We meet executives, CTOs, CEOs, and such.
Kenlyn
Absolutely. I know for myself, I was able to advance remotely. At the same time, like what is happening in a hybrid environment where you have almost everybody in the office, there was only a group of us that were remote. I feel like it's harder to be visible if most people are working in person. So I think that's when it takes a lot more effort to put yourself out there. As you said, I think it is possible. But how do you make yourself visible if most people are not remote? What do you think?
Botond
I mean, advancement is an interesting topic, because it's also a generational thing. So there have been many studies on this and millennials and up, usually see advancement as quitting a certain position at a certain job and going to another one. It's certainly much easier to advance this way because they can just brighten their resumes. I had two-plus years of experience that displays doing one job. I was hired for a position befitting my experience. So, honestly, in my generation, I haven't seen anyone advance at their positions. I don't know if that's a social thing, but in the same position, I've never seen anyone advance. That's something we didn't have, further advancement. It's always a strange topic to me because I used to work at corporations like huge multinational corporations. They gave a pay raise based on the evaluations given at the end of the year by supervisors. The thing was, the pay raise didn't even cover inflation. So what's the point? Why wouldn't someone just quit and find another position? The funny thing is, when I exited that corporation, they kept calling me for an entire year, saying, hey, we have this and this job opening. Guys Why?
Dave
I also think it is with different types of people with the company. So, I guess you would say that the "worker bees" are not looking for lots of promotions or they don't expect a lot of promotions. But all the managers and all the directors, their only question is, when do I get to become a director? When do I get to become a senior vice president? They're looking for their next career move. But usually, in these companies, those higher directors don't have a whole lot of places to move to, because once you're a director or senior vice president, it's kind of hard to move up in the company. But you know, the middle management, managers and senior managers and those types of people, yeah, they're expecting to move up, they would like to move up and as part of this career drive within technology companies; the companies know that if they want to keep their people, they have to provide some kind of way for them to be promoted or to move up. At the same time, if the organization isn't a 2000 or 3000 person organization, and you're working in a company with only 100 people, how many times can you move up? There are just not that many places to move up to.
Botond
People use smoke, and mirrors, just to get a new title and a slight pay raise.
Dave
A lot of companies are just not even giving title changes. They're just giving pay raises, saying, look, we can't move you up, but we'll pay you more money, please stay happy. I guess the benefits of remote work that they're now offering is to say, well, you'll get to work remotely. But the companies are also realizing things like a lot of people, especially in say California where I am. They're saying, Well, if we're going to work remotely, I'm going to move to Florida, because the cost of living is half of California. And the companies are saying, okay, move to Florida; we're going to renegotiate your salary, you don't need as much money because you don't have a huge mortgage, a California mortgage, you now have a Florida mortgage so we're gonna pay you less. That's starting to happen to these people who are moving thinking that they're going to get California income in Florida. Companies are saying no, we would like to see the cost savings too.
Botond
That's the thing with remotes, even if we go to a company that operates in California, they'll say, but you live in the EU, while the cheapest countries in the EU. So you're going to get the lowest pay from the company. It's fun. And also, your country of origin, I feel matters a bit, not so much because we are so invested in diversity and supporting diversity that it's getting to be less and less of an issue, but I have noticed that especially in Europe, you've got the east side and the west side. Let's say on the east side you get paid 1000 shekels while on the west side, you get paid $10,000 and if you take a job on the west side, but you're from the east side, you're gonna get paid, maybe $2000, $3000, or something like that. It's just baffling to me, how did this become normal? Was it the same work? Yes, you're doing the same work. Because you're from lower-income areas, you feel like you have to prove yourself. So some of the hardest working people are from the Near East. I don't know what the right expression is, but some of the best guys are from those regions because they feel this immense motivation to prove themselves.
Dave
Yeah, it is a real question about pay rates and fame work for different rates, and it is reality. It's more of a reality with in-house or with local development or local work, right? But I think that a lot of companies, a year, two, or even three years after the pandemic, are going to realize that for the productivity and the way they want to do business, they're going to want their employees to spend time in the office. So yes, there'll still be a lot of remote workers, but I don't think it will be at the level people are thinking right now, I think the companies want to have their workers closer and in that situation, the cost of living in the local area does mean something.
Botond
But it's also an ego thing, for example, for middle managers, it's a huge ego thing to have everyone working at their desks, clearly visible, you know?
Dave
There's that as well and you know how the world is, countries that are working at lower pay rates, those people are going to get higher pay rates as remote workers, particularly when they are working in a freelance kind of situation because working as a company employee might be different. Part of that is other benefits that you get as an employee, that you won't get as a freelancer, and companies are going to leverage that. But I think the world is going to go through a change with remote work, that the rates are not going to have as much of a difference, that the gap between a worker doing one job in one country and a worker doing the same job in another country, I think the pay rates are going to get a little bit closer. I don't think they'll ever be the same globally, but I think you'll see a little bit less of a gap.
Botond
That's a dream in the thread.
Dave
Yeah, I see it happening now so we do see changes. Now, a lot of that is because of demand. Example: For developers, there's a very high demand right now, because, during the pandemic, everybody realized they're gonna have to do business digitally. So they need their websites working; they need their digital product working better. So everybody's scrambling to find developers. In another year or two, those projects will all be finished and it will probably go back to the way it was pre-pandemic when we had a lot more developers available. The rates were a little bit lower then, however, I don't think the rates are going to come down that much. But developer availability will probably increase and so people will be looking for projects, whereas right now, there are more projects than developers. But it may shift to other things and other types of workers. For example, right now, the hardest thing to find is restaurant workers. Where we are, they're opening up a lot of the restaurants and the restaurant owners can't find workers. Nobody wants to work in the restaurants for what they used to pay. Right. Now they want a lot more and the restaurants aren't built on that business model to pay more. Restaurant workers are one of the most abused groups of people ever by employers. So it's no wonder that they don't want to go back.