The future of remote work according to 6 experts

Whether you are a remote work proponent or a skeptic, there are many unanswered questions about what will happen next with remote work, especially as Covid-19 restrictions continue to ease and fears of a recession grow.

How many people will work remotely in the future, and will this change in an economic downturn? Will telecommuting affect your opportunities for advancement? What does this mean for the places where people live and the offices in which they have previously worked? Does this have any impact on the majority of people who cannot work remotely? If employees don't need to work in person to be effective, couldn't their jobs be outsourced?

It turns out that there is a dangerous line between advocating remote work and fearing losing your job. And since telecommuting makes employees less visible, they must find other ways to communicate their existence to superiors or risk being passed over for raises. Remote work will also have a long-term impact on the built environment, as office owners need to renovate and workers have the opportunity to achieve a higher quality of life. Ultimately, what happens in a recession depends largely on whether your company decides to save money by downsizing real estate or laying off employees it never met.

What is clear is that teleworking is not going away. However, there are a number of ways to make it better and more commonplace and ensure it doesn't do you more harm than good.

To get a better idea of ​​what might be in store, we asked some of the most knowledgeable telecommuting experts - professionals in business, human resources, and real estate - to give us an idea of ​​what to expect in the future of telecommuting is. Their answers, edited for length and clarity, are below.

What percentage of the US population will be working remotely in five years?

Those : cloudcodes.com

Johnny Taylor Jr., president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management: I think the number will never be more than 30 percent working fully remotely. What percentage will work remotely to some extent? Probably 60 to 65 percent. There are some tasks that can never be done remotely. But even in retail, employers are trying to figure out how to enable these workers to work remotely. One retailer I spoke with will set it up so that employees who work in-store five days a week will work remotely in customer service one day a week.

Nicholas Bloom, economics professor at Stanford University, co-founder of WFH Research: Currently, 10 percent of the U.S. workforce is working fully remotely and 35 percent is working remotely. I think in five years both numbers will be quite similar. The reason for this is the continuous technological improvements in work from home technology. The reason for the decline is the pandemic, which is increasingly being forgotten.

Julie Whelan, global head of real estate research at CBRE: The last few years have shown that people are capable of working remotely. Now we are trying to achieve a combination of face-to-face and remote work - that is the big challenge. I'm not convinced we'll see a big jump in full remote work; I think fully remote jobs will always remain a minority.

What needs to change to enable more people to work remotely?

Matthew Kahn, economics professor at the University of Southern California and author of Going Remote: How the Flexible Work Economy Can Improve Our Lives and Our Cities: Companies need to have clear performance metrics - ideally ones that can be verified against quantitative data - so that remote workers are in Know in real time how your performance is going. Companies also need to figure out how to design “virtual kettle” interactions so that remote workers don’t feel uninformed.

Arpit Gupta, assistant professor of finance at New York University Stern School of Business: Companies need to find better ways to onboard new employees and integrate them into the company culture. They also need to improve remote workers' ability to connect with different parts of the company and create better ways to manage the development of new ideas and creativity. Finally, they must provide better opportunities for advancement for remote-only employees and allow them to move from one company to another.

Bloom: The most important factor for working from home is whether it makes sense for the company and whether employees are happy with it. This is determined by the technology and the work task. As time goes on, technology is slowly improving to support work from home. I have been working on this topic for almost 20 years, and incredible changes have occurred in that time. Twenty years ago, working from home meant making phone calls and sending small files via email or mail. Today it's all about video calls and the cloud. I expect that in 10 years new important technologies will emerge that will make this much better. Work tasks are also changing to support working from home. For example, my neighbor is a doctor and was in the office every day before the pandemic, but now she sees her patients remotely two days a week since her duties now include TV visits.

Taylor: We as management have to get used to a total paradigm shift. We constantly say, "This can't happen." And the fact is that we have to be willing to question our ideas about what doesn't work and ask, "Is this possible?" We are in this dynamic phase where we decide whether it works or not. The question “Can you work remotely?” so that's not really the question. Is it possible then? Yes, during the pandemic we have proven that it is possible. The question is whether there will be compromises.

How might remote work impact non-remote jobs?

Gupta: Changing consumption patterns will mean that demand for goods and services - and the people who provide them - will be greater in suburbs and remote locations than in the central business districts of today's metropolitan areas.

Bloom: Many remote workplaces interact with remote workers. Think of the employees in retail and restaurants in city centers. As office workers transition to remote work, these service workers will also need to change their work location.

Taylor: More and more workplaces could be partially controlled remotely. A nurse could work three days in the hospital and two days as a tele-nurse. So we're thinking about dividing responsibilities to achieve a hybrid approach, even in those areas where you absolutely have to be physically present at the end of the day.

Will it be harder for remote workers to get ahead than their on-site counterparts?

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Taylor: Yes, definitely. More than two-thirds of managers (67 percent) believe remote employees are easier to replace than on-site employees, and 62 percent believe remote work is detrimental to employees' career goals. Managers have admitted that they often forget about the remote employee when awarding orders. Proximity is important.

Something that is particularly important to me as an African American is that for years we have claimed that we are incapable of building relationships with mainstream society. We had no access to them and therefore no visibility. Well, you really lose access and visibility when you're at home and they're at the office.

I've heard the argument that office culture is a white male-dominated relic of the past. This may be. But as long as these white men are in the office deciding who gets promoted, you are most likely at a disadvantage yourself. It's not a question of whether it's right or wrong, just or unjust. It's just like that. When you work remotely, you have significantly fewer opportunities to build relationships with people who can influence your career.

Whelan: There is a risk that those who have more time for face-to-face conversations will obviously have an advantage and progress faster than others. However, if a company truly supports flexible working, then behavior around promotions and pay rises needs to be discussed early and closely monitored, and action should be taken if desired outcomes are not achieved. Just because employees sometimes - or always, depending on company policy - work remotely doesn't mean they can't be visible. So it is everyone's responsibility, including employees themselves, to ensure that employees remain visible, in the spotlight and evaluated based on their work performance despite their remote work.

Kahn: The answer to this key question depends on whether a particular company promotes based on some form of nepotism or based on objective value added to the company's core goals. Personal interaction builds trust and friendship. When bosses favor their employees, remote employees are at a disadvantage when it comes to promotions. Bosses who want to promote based on performance will emphasize the value of the quality of personal interactions over the quantity of personal interactions at work. Such an emphasis on quality over quantity of in-person interaction will allay fears that remote workers are second-class citizens because they can only visit headquarters a few days a month.

The companies that master these new ways of working will have an advantage in attracting and retaining a more diverse workforce.

Blume: Employees who work completely remotely can only make careers slowly, especially those who are at the beginning of their careers. However, the further an individual advances in their career, the less important personal support becomes. It's also worth noting that most remote workforces in the US are not fully remote. They are mostly hybrids and come to the office on average three days a week, so they get a good dose of face-to-face interaction. So fully remote workers may incur some career advancement costs, while hybrid workers will likely incur little or no cost.

What will happen to all the offices?

Whelan: Offices will continue to exist - they will only evolve. The most desirable locations, the most desirable amenities, and the most productive spatial design will continue to change as populations migrate and work patterns in a new location. Today, the workplace is anywhere you have a mobile device and an internet connection. However, the physical office as a place of meeting, innovation and exchange cannot simply be replaced.

Bloom: Not much in the short term. The reason is scheduling. Most companies either have their employees work from home, which usually means Monday and Friday, or they schedule teams or the entire company to work the same days, often Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. So you can't save any space. Nobody sublets an office on Monday and Friday. In the longer term, clever scheduling software like Kadence will organize teams and workgroups to come on different days: say the industrial team is in the office on Monday and Tuesday and the residential team is in the office on Wednesday and Thursday. However, from speaking to hundreds of companies, we know that this is probably still a few years away from becoming a reality. Until then, office demand will be weak, but not significantly reduced.

If you're looking for big real estate impact, focus on downtown retail. With office workers working from home 50 percent of the time, retail spending has collapsed in Central New York, San Francisco and other major cities, and that retail spending, jobs and space is moving to the suburbs.

Kahn: In cities with a high quality of life, these commercial buildings are being converted into apartments as well as schools and centers for the aging seniors of our population.

Taylor: There is no question that demand for traditional office space will decline. Will she disappear? No.

How will remote work affect where people live?

Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin: Remote work is already having an impact on where people live. A record number of almost a third of home buyers were considering moving from their home metropolis in the second quarter of 2022. That is around 26 percent more than before the pandemic. Many people who have the flexibility to move have done so during the pandemic, often taking their higher housing budgets with them, which in turn has contributed to higher property prices in the places they move to. Nowhere is this more evident than in popular Sun Belt cities like Phoenix, Miami and Austin, which are seeing heavy influxes from more expensive coastal metros like NYC, San Francisco and Seattle.

Taylor: We're definitely seeing people moving further away. I've even had people who have to be in the office two days a week say, "Hey, I live in a completely different city and I can commute here. So I can live in Atlanta, in Washington, DC , work, buy a plane ticket for those two days, book a hotel, and the math says it's actually cheaper and better for me to live where I want to live and commute - even if the company doesn't pay for it , because I don't have to pay for housing in DC.

Kahn: In expensive superstar cities, homeworkers are more likely to move to the outskirts of the city, where land is cheaper and the houses are newer. Remote workers will also look for beautiful areas that offer the recreational opportunities they desire. Real estate prices in Santa Barbara, California have skyrocketed since March 2020 due to its beauty and proximity to Los Angeles. It may come as a surprise that mid-sized cities like Baltimore will see growth. Located along the Amtrak corridor, Baltimore offers easy access to Washington, DC, New York City and Philadelphia, as well as significantly lower real estate prices.

How does this affect salary?

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Fairweather: Some companies are adjusting salaries for their employees who move and work remotely, but many are leaving their high salaries in place. The biggest winners will be coastal workers who move to cheaper locations and maintain their salaries. You'll find that your money goes much further, not just for housing, but for other goods and services as well. The biggest losers are people who already live in popular migration destinations, who may not have the opportunity to move somewhere less expensive, and whose salaries no longer stretch as far as they once did due to higher inflation and rising real estate prices in their area. However, some people living in popular migration destinations may be happy that the value of their homes has increased and their local businesses have more high-earning customers.

Bloom: Working from home is a perk, so every single company that offers hybrid WFH can pay about 5 to 10 percent less. But of course there are also general equilibrium effects as companies compete for talent in a labor market. If every company offers work from home, no single company can reduce wages without losing employees.

What will happen to remote work in a recession?

Gupta: I suspect that telecommuting will increase. Although companies have bargaining power with employees, they primarily want to save on costs such as real estate rent and are urging employees to telework.

Companies are also less interested in integrating new employees into company culture and long-term innovation - two important use cases for the office. It's more about keeping things running, which can be done by existing employees at home.

Kahn: Scenario 1: The boss has discretion in who to fire and is more likely to fire the remote employee because he doesn't really know that employee and hasn't developed a friendship with him.

Scenario 2: Since remote workers do not have to bear the daily fixed costs of commuting to the office, they can more easily reduce their working hours to meet the company's new labor needs. In this case, remote workers are less likely to be laid off.

Taylor: Reversing this trend - putting the genie back in the bottle - is not going to happen. I think it's more likely that productivity will become even more important in a recession. Then employers will pay very close attention to the data because they have to choose between employee A and employee B. So the employees who are more productive and efficient will make it.

Fairweather: In the past, recessions have lasted longer because it takes time for workers to move to new jobs. If a saleswoman in Cleveland lost her job, she may have had to move to San Francisco to find a new job. But with remote work, you can work from anywhere. Hopefully, thanks to remote work, this recession will be shorter than previous recessions.