I predict the exact opposite.
The most talented employees will be in demand—and they will dictate their working conditions by refusing to work at jobs where they are required to be at the office.
It may take a while for this to sort out, but the days of white collar workers reporting to their office cubicles will be coming to an end.
Almost no one works as hard when no one is watching as when they are watched. And if your job requires interaction, the interaction is more effective in person.
Kids don’t learn as well remotely. Nor do workers interact as well.
And a huge number of jobs actually involve DOING something. Not just talking or writing.
“The most talented employees will be in demand—and they will dictate their working conditions”
That’s logical. In about 2005, before WFH was a big deal, our IT Support Tech moved from CA to AZ. She was SO good that they agreed to let her work from home as an experiment for the future. We knew 100% that it wouldn’t work. She was always on the go at the office, going to work stations to solve problems all day long.
It worked! She was able to offer support from home via phone and remote computer access, and never really missed a beat. She came to the office every other week for two days for regularly scheduled meetings.
Since I work from home four days a week, I will only miss it when I have to go to the office to meet with vendors which may not even require the one day a week that it does now. So instead of a 50 minute one way commute once a week, it may very well downgrade into one twice a month. Not sorry!
yep.
Here is my take on this.
The "talented employees" that you speak of are likely specialist workers in a commodity field like coding. Or, they might be level 3 support people who solve the nastiest of bugs. Or they might be designers or planners.
The less talented work-from-home employees might be call center workers or accountants doing payables and receivables work.
These workers might have been paid within a wide salary range where performance rewards one with a bump to the high end of the range, but they are locked into that range for a long time. The recent post-COVID demand for workers busted the ranges, but before that these talented workers (individual contributors most likely) would have been locked into a limited set of salary scales that are harder and harder to advance through once reaching the higher levels.
On the other hand, the management level workers (those whose salary is tied more to the position than the skill of the worker) are the ones who would be in the office, because they are needed to work with the higher levels of management. Their jobs are often to meet with leadership in strategy sessions, to review budgets and make recommendations, to hear confidential business plans or upcoming initiatives, etc. This layer of worker prefers the face-to-face engagements, especially as one advances higher into the leadership pyramid.
The bottom line is that the work-from-home employee may be locking themselves into a limited career range (and being labeled as a remote commodity worker) while the in-office worker gets the exposure to senior levels of leadership in the organization who likely are not working from home.
-PJ
I agree. My kids generation wants to be able to work from home at least part of the week. My company recognized this and went to a 3 & 2 model. 3 days in the office one week, 2 days the next week. We are a massive company and it has allowed us to consolidate dozens of facilities and plants by rotating workers, which has saved millions of dollars.
I like the flexible schedule but I travel a lot so I wasn’t in the office all the time before covid. When I am in, I see just as much wasted time as people claim working from creates. Ultimately, the market will have the final say.
You are very close to reality.
In many companies, there are what I call “Heavy Lifters”.
They make all the key decisions and work very very hard.
They will be calling the shots and the bean counters in HR are going to find companies no longer need THEM.
I am proud to say after nearly 40 years in High Tech....
I am now one of the Heavy Lifters.