Saturday, June 6, 2020 | 2 a.m.
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The days of office-centric employment seem to be on the wane as COVID-19 dramatically and permanently changes the way we work. Instead, work from home is going to be the new normal. The transition to work from home has been made possible by newly available technologies such as Zoom’s Video Communications, Facebook’s Workplace and Microsoft’s Teams software. These software products offer the capabilities of high band-width, high-speed communication and secure encryption, which make it easy to work from anywhere in the world and seamlessly connect with co-workers and managers under the concept of distributed work.
Corporate executives Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square announced that tens of thousands of their company jobs will go to remote work over the next five to 10 years. The CEOs have seen merit in working from home, as it solves many problems they and their employees face, particularly by having their offices located in high-rent areas like the Silicon Valley and New York City.
Google is encouraging its employees to continue to work from home until the end of the year. Its CEO, Sundar Pichai, offered employees $1,000 each to purchase equipment and office furniture to work from home.
There are many advantages to working from home for employers. The company does not need lofty office space and furniture for workers. No longer do they need to provide tons of tangible on-premises cafeteria/kitchen food and bar services, laundry services, gym facilities and the like for employees, which have become an expected norm to Silicon Valley companies to retain talent. No need to provide expensive parking facilities. With the elimination or reduction of such souped-up workspaces and services, the employer will reap enormous savings in business expenses.
The old way of commuting to and from the office by utilizing hours that could be otherwise productively spent on work will be a plus for both the employee and the employer.
There is no need for the employees and their families to live in the prohibitively expensive homes in the Silicon Valley or New York City, but can instead move to lower-cost cities. The employee can live in lower-tax states within the U.S. or in another country and carry out the assigned work remotely. This is a tremendous advantage for the employee.
Still, the gift of working from home may be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Zuckerberg clarified that those employees who flee to lower-cost areas may have their compensation adjusted based on their home location, for example.
Another disadvantage of working from home is that it removes in-person collaboration and connection. It will be difficult to manage and mentor employees who work from home. It may also bring about potential burn-out and mental health issues if employees are isolated for an extended period. And those are just a few of the drawbacks.
But as more and more businesses move to the digital economy and online operations, working from home will become more accepted and embraced by the employer, employee and online customer. Such a business model has been proven during the COVID-19 shutdown to be highly profitable to Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, Target and a host of other companies.
The remote work strategy will offer employers the opportunity to access the best talent worldwide for the lowest salary they can pay. A ramification of working from home is that high-tech companies do not need to depend on sponsoring or accepting highly skilled H1-B visa workers from overseas. Such foreign-based workers can work from their home country for a substantially lower salary to perform the same job if a deal can be structured properly without violating the U.S. Export Control laws. This works perfectly with our government’s embargo imposed on granting visas to foreigners and restrictions on travel into the United States.
With improvements in workplace software, the work-from-home digital economy will be the new normal. More companies big and small will move online and avoid the static concept of the office-centric workplace. It is time for businesses to get used to this shift and be prepared to reap the benefits of the new economy based on the reality of employees working remotely from home.
T. Rao Coca is an intellectual property attorney for licensing and litigation. He lives in Las Vegas.
