TL;DR: see the short post on LinkedIn

I started shifting to remote work back in 2014. Before that, in my personal life, I started using Flickr to stay in touch with international friends and family way back ‘in aught-four’. But that’s another story.

The best argument I’ve heard for tenaciously embracing the challenge of remote work is: If you want to deliver excellent digital services to clients, then you must be able to provide excellent digital services to your fellow employees. And that takes practice. If we want to optimize the client experience then we have to have to optimize the employee experience and ‘eat our own cooking’ first.

I’ve heard people claim that organizations may encounter productivity issues when they embark on the digital-first journey. However there’s a good chance those issues already exist due to historical HR and corporate culture challenges, and are being brought to light because of a change.

So, before giving up on the goal of offering excellent digital services in a global economy of 8 billion people, it’s important to remember change is hard and we should resist the temptation to give up on the challenge of remote work.

Early Experiences

I am a social person. The first decade of my career was in the retail sector, and it will always hold a special place in my heart. I love chatting with people and helping them find what they need. It gives me a deep sense of satisfaction. If you ever meet me in a store and I’m not in a rush I’d probably help you find something or make a decision just for the fun of it! Meeting and helping a stranger is worth some of my afterhours time.

In 2014 I had my first serious opportunity to learn to work online. I was working as a consultant helping people learn to use Microsoft SharePoint and the M365 platform. At the time many of my clients were in other parts of the continent, so most of my work done with a headset and screen-sharing software. Even my local clients preferred to work online most of the time, instead of paying an extra fee for me to travel to their office space and work on my tablet there. Thanks to that experience I didn’t have to learn about working with remote colleagues and clients in 2020, at the same time I had to deal with the emotions of a global pandemic and a difficult American election cycle. That was a big benefit for me.

Today my job as a knowledge worker involves a lot of analysis and logical thinking. Those skills require concentration if I want to provide quality and give my clients a good ROI. That means I shouldn’t spend most of the day chit chatting with people as they walk by my cubicle or pull me into unnecessary meetings. There’s a significant loss of efficiency and quality from each lovely office space distraction. And, to be fair, digital work can still suffer from distractions. We still need to learn how to reduce unnecessary email/messaging and video meetings in our new normal.

I am much more productive when I work from home. Even though some activities like negotiations and planning can be easier in-person with non-verbal communication signals (for ambiverts and extroverts), in the before times there were far too many unnecessary in-person meetings. Because “that’s the way we always did it”. The non-verbal communications perspective also needs to be balanced by the reality that certain privileged groups of people can benefit more from in-person interactions.

Individual Cost Savings

Here’s a more quantitative list for the data minded folks. By not commuting I:

• get back 2 good daylight hrs/day to develop skills (at an afterhours consulting rate of $250/hr that’s a $500/day benefit)
• get back 1 good daylight hr/day at lunch (another $250/day benefit)
• increase my ability to tend our garden on breaks and lunch, increasing our local food security and reducing our grocery bill
• don’t have to pay for gas (~$45/week in 2019 prices)
• don’t have to pay for parking (~$8/day, a 30 min walk away from the office building)
• don’t burn gas and create 11kg of CO2/day! (I would take public transport but that significantly increases my commute time, stress from missing full buses and being packed in like sardines, and likelihood of getting sick)
• reduce the amount of metal, plastic, time, and energy used in vehicle and road repairs
• reduce the risk of being in an accident and unnecessarily using medical services, insurance, and legal time
• increase my DIY and IT skills and reduce our contractor bills (setting up a solar system is now within my grasp!)
• interact more with my neighbours, half of them are retired so it’s nice to hold a ladder or carry something heavy for them, and generally help watch our neighbourhood
• interact more with my household (I enjoy spending time at home, but I acknowledge this can be a complex part of the equation that could be difficult to discuss for some)

I’m sure this list of intangible savings could go on if I put my mind to it. I was amazed that working from home meant I caught fewer colds and flus! Most years I miss 1-2 weeks on sick leave. I’ve also heard some people suggest working from home increases digital infrastructure costs. However I use my laptop the same amount in the office as I do at home, so I don’t think there’s a real measurable change for me there.

So, assuming I was commuting an average of 48 weeks a year, that’s a direct savings of $4240 just for gas and parking per year! Plus fewer public costs from wear on the public roadways and vehicles. It’s nice to have that money back in my pocket and to be able to put it to work into my local community. And, assuming an average of 260 working days a year, that adds up to intangible benefits of at least $195,000/year from having 3 productive daylight hours back in my personal life. That’s time I can spend on personal skills development which helps make me a happier worker and increases the quality of the services and products I can deliver on behalf of my employer.

Getting 3 good hours back in my day by working from home has allowed me to develop new skill sets. Using online tutorials I have:

• taught myself basic woodworking, epoxy resin casting, and masonry;
• improved my photography skills, including setting up studio lighting and using Adobe Lightroom for editing;
• learned to 3D print and how to find, edit, and process CAD files through a “slicer” app;
• improved my ability to administer our home local area network and the hardware devices on it;
• dusted off my bicycle, got some exercise, and learned more about my local community;
• designed and built raised garden beds in our yard;
• learned about seed storage and propagation, and how to harden-off and transplant seedlings;
• improved my understanding of our fruit trees, and the best times to prune, spray and water them;
• learned how to dehydrate fruit from our fruit trees into no-sugar fruit roll-up!

Like many people I improved my bread baking skills. The list goes on. Skills like these can all be put to work in my local community if needed. When I was wasting 3 hours a day commuting to a downtown office I didn’t have the time to develop practical skills like these.

Collective Cost Savings

Collective cost savings could be more important than individual ones. By limiting in-person work days, employers could significantly reduce their office building costs. And infrequent “meeting days” could be more enjoyable and feel like a retreat or conference. I wonder how much my current employer spends yearly on things like: electricity, cleaning, maintenance, refurbishment, taxes, etc. In B.C. we also have a shortage of available urban living space, and changes in the way we work could help ‘move the dial’ on that issue. I wonder how much one-time profit my employer could make by selling off downtown office buildings? Could that profit help to contribute to reconciliation? Could some of the office buildings be converted into open-concept lofts? Most floors in an office already have bathrooms and kitchens. Could recurring annual savings from not maintaining physical buildings help increase digital/cloud budgets?

Before the 1700s most people worked from home or local coffee shops, and we didn’t have a satellite-powered internet then. It was only in the early 1800s that we normalized the idea of the modern manufacturing plant and office building. In the big picture of history that’s not a long time. It was an experiment. We did it because we needed to communicate using mountains of heavy paper and steel. But a short 200 years later in the early 2000s we’re not as reliant on paper any more. It’s time to change again. It’s time to have people back in local communities. And we’ve barely started to unlock the potential of remote controlled machines that could let staff in the manufacturing and natural resources sectors work from anywhere. Kids who grew up with Minecraft and Fortnite will be well placed to participate in a drone-powered manufacturing sector.

Maybe your ideal local community is a pedestrian and bicycle friendly urban borough. Converting office buildings into loft-style condos could give a more steady stream of customers to local retail stores and restaurants. I’m sure the office floor I work on could be converted into two condos with a shared elevator entry-way. Repopulating our downtown urban cores could also reduce that horrible effect of downtown spaces feeling empty in the evenings, which could increase the safety of people downtown at that time. If I was trained as an urban planner or architect I’m sure the list of intangible benefits could go on.

Maybe your ideal local community is a small town with big gardens by a river or lake. Goodness knows we have lots of those in a country as spread out and underpopulated as Canada. Increasing the size of some of our rural communities in Canada could help our national housing crisis. The mid 20th century left a lot of ghost towns on the prairies and in the north, when office jobs were anchored to paper processes. Now that we’re free of paper processes in the 21st century we could have a renaissance of small communities.

These are not just untested ideas. In 2015 Giulia Faggio conducted an academic study at the University of London and demonstrated that moving public sector jobs to smaller rural communities stimulated local regional economies in the UK. She concluded, “Overall, the policy appears to have been beneficial. It acted as a Keynesian-type fiscal stimulus at the local level. It triggered the much sought-after local multiplier effect, even though its impact was restricted to service activities.” An earlier paper from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne titled ‘Public Sector Relocation from London and the South East’ from around 2003 came to similar conclusions, “A shift in the public sector from London and the South East can have a positive impact on the fortunes of lagging regions, whilst also freeing up some capacities in London and the South East and reducing inflationary pressures there.” Even small Canadian cities like Victoria B.C. are becoming too expensive to live in, and freeing up staff to work remotely from suburban or rural towns could be good for workers and municipalities.

Parting Thoughts

So before we rush to “get back to (a late 20th century) normal”, I think we should take a step back and try to appreciate some of the unanticipated benefits that appeared when we disrupted our work routines.

And if you disagree with all this, because you really want to get back into an office, that’s cool. I wouldn’t want to stop you. We’re all at a different point on our turbulent journey to a digital economy.