The powers of hybrids

Direct and indirect

Hybrid telecommuting was what I had in mind in the first place, in 1970, primarily as a means of reducing traffic congestion and its associated energy use and pollution production. I didn't imagine that most people would like working at home full time (although I'm now one of them) because of their need for social interaction. Our first test was in satellite centers located near where the employees lived so they could forgo driving to work. The limiting problem then was that telecommunications technology simply wasn’t available that would allow people to connect from homes to distant mainframes at affordable prices. Yet it would still allow us to materially reduce use of cars for commuting.

As the technology improved, first with personal computers and then with the internet, the move of work from satellite offices to homes became practical. But still, I didn't think that full-time working at home would be practical for all but about 4 or 5 percent of the telecommuters. So our concentration was all on the one or two days per week version of telecommuting. I expected that number of remote days to increase as both the telecommuters’ work experience and the supporting technology matured.

The turning point

The Covid pandemic changed all that worldwide for a couple of years; forcing office workers to work remotely full-time almost overnight. Yet the fundamental problem remained: humans are a gregarious species; they need at least occasional face-to-face human contact. Even so, the number of full-time workers at home grew to about 8 percent or more by the time of our Year 2000 national survey. We're in the period now where we're trying to reach some form of equilibrium between working at home and elsewhere. Now, after the Covid pandemic has largely disappeared, telecommuting, now called remote working or WFH, has stabilized to about half the work week.

There is a lot of shuffling around still going on while organizations sort out the tradeoffs between facilities commitments; productivity; corporate culture; training; retention/attractiveness and C-space attitudes. I can imagine lots of different scenarios but the overall result is what you're seeing now: 20% - 30% reduction in former office space usage.

Quasi-monopolies, like big banks and tech companies, feel that they can enforce their facilities investments because their employees have no alternative sources of income. They’ll have to go to The Office for lack of local employment alternatives. That threat will continually erode because smaller competitors will use their WFH-provided flexibility to outflank the big ones, possibly providing similar jobs for similar pay but with less in the way of fringe benefits other than the highly desired freedom of working style.

Size Matters

One of the major potential side effects of the increased level of telecommuting is the impact on urban structure. This was something that concerned me even in the 1970s but I just never got around to doing a detailed analysis. Also in the 1970s I started wondering about the optimal size of cities. Big cities are too busy and congested. Small cities are liable not to have enough infrastructure such as hospitals, entertainment and cultural centers, and the like. Possibly city size of 300,000 to 500,000 residents might be an optimal solution, I thought. Like Milwaukee or one of the 18 regional centers in Los Angeles that were proposed then.

There is anecdotal evidence, and some of our own tests, that many telecommuters will move to a different, usually smaller, city when pulling up stakes. This apparently is preferred to moving farther away from The Office in the same city. The motivation stated by the moving households is often something like: I wanted to move to a place where there are functional neighborhoods and less anonymity; a place where we can get to know neighbors and have an enhanced sense of community (or words to that effect). Again, my earlier musings about the importance of city size in life choices. I used to say that, with modern technology one can have both access to interesting work, a comfortable life style AND access to what’s going on in the rest of the world.

Of course one other side effect has been the sudden and continuing emptiness of office buildings in downtown areas. The persistent resistance to the full time return to those offices gets more press. I’ll treat that in other posts.