Regular readers will know that I am a strong proponent of working from home (WFH).
Part of my enthusiasm comes from my own biased experience: I have worked from home for nearly 10 years while writing for MB and love the convenience and flexibility that it provides.
In particular, WFH enables me to start work early (usually 6am), drop my children at school, and care for my autistic son. It was also a great help in 2013-14 when my wife was undergoing aggressive treatment for breast cancer and my children were at home. I honestly don’t know how we would have survived if I was still working in Melbourne’s CBD.
Personal biases aside, I also believe that WFH provides significant efficiency benefits. In particular, not having hundreds of thousands of people travel into CBDs every day frees up infrastructure resources and mitigates the need for costly new investments to expand capacity. It also saves commuters hours a week in travelling – time that could be better utilised elsewhere – as well as enables people to live in more locations (e.g. rural areas).
That said, Adam Creighton yesterday warned that WFH creates outsourcing risks. White-collar workers who have been WFH during the pandemic and who are reluctant to return to the office could find that their continued absence will make it easier for their employer to replace them with someone who can do the same job in another country for a much lower wage.
In fact, a recent article published in the ‘Harvard Business Review’ claimed that the pandemic has made executives more open to the idea of work from anywhere for some or all of their workforce:
“If you can do the job from home, someone can do it from Dhaka … jobs will melt away one by one to Manila,” [One former chief executive of a large multinational company told me]…
Why would a business keep Australian-based data analysts if it rarely saw them in person, when there are Indian and east Europeans as smart and available for a quarter to half the price?
Why bother employing receptionists…
Surveys in Britain have suggested office workers would be willing to sacrifice 20 per cent of their pay to work permanently from home. They might have to. Polish doctors might become as much of a threat as Polish plumbers.
For mine, WFH poses the biggest risk to new entrants into the jobs market, like graduates. They stand to lose the face-to-face mentoring and on-the-job training that working in an office provides.
My preferred model would be for most white collar workers to split time between the office – say 3 days in the office and 2 days WFH (or visa versa).
This would provide workers with the best of both worlds – face to face interaction but also more flexibility and a less grinding commute. It would also moderate demand for public transport, making travel more comfortable and forestalling the need to continually boost capacity.
