The novel coronavirus pandemic has disordered traditional notions of work, travel, socializing and the way we collaborate with colleagues.
It seems obvious that the future of work must evolve, given what we’re experiencing, but what will that future look like? Which changes are here to stay and which ones will revert the moment offices reopen?
TechCrunch has been a WFH employer for essentially its entire existence. Our staff is distributed across major startup hubs like SF and NYC, but we also have writers in smaller cities around the world, so we compiled reflections and thoughts from three of them about how remote work has changed our lifestyles and what we predict to see in the next few years, post-COVID 19.
Devin Coldewey talks about what’s going to change with coffee shops and co-working spaces, Alex Wilhelm discusses the future of the home office setup and Danny Crichton talks about the revitalization of urban and semi-urban neighborhoods.
Devin Coldewey on coffee shops and more flexible work arrangements
I’ve worked from home for over a decade and part of what makes it so lovely is the ability to do my work from a nearby cafe, or even a restaurant or bar. I’m lucky in that my part of the city is famously packed with excellent coffee shops, but in the time I’ve lived here I’ve seen them grow increasingly packed with — well, people like me. Some days they seem more like co-working spaces than cafes — and this is something business owners and neighborhoods are going to need to acknowledge one way or the other.
Most urban and suburban American communities were formed around the convention of commuting, which means fewer work-related resources where people live. Instead, we have all the restaurants, bodegas, thrift stores and all the other things that cater to people who aren’t working.
If working from home increases even by a modest amount compared with the steady trickle of change we’ve seen over the last 10 years or so, the infrastructure will need to reflect that new convention.
What will that mean exactly? It’s hard to say, given the uncertainty about any lasting effects from the pandemic, but I would guess that we’re going to see a lot more flexible spaces and policies that accommodate working people to whatever extent they are comfortable.
Existing businesses may take over an adjacent property to be their dedicated working space where music is quieter, there’s separate wireless and lots of outlets. Dedicated co-working or office-on-demand spaces will also multiply, as office amenities like shared printers and professional videoconference setups (you didn’t think we’d do it from our living rooms forever, did you?) will be scarce in many communities.
On the other hand, increasing numbers of people working many hours in communal spaces will lead to a backlash from those who wish to define their environment as more explicitly not for work. Doing this without torpedoing business is a difficult line to walk, but for some, the identity of their space as a social one and not a professional one is important. It may seem counterintuitive in the short-term, but it’s important to recognize that there must still be barriers between work and everything else, and sometimes those barriers will be set by others.
When one is working more literally from home, other changes will be needful. Claiming a space in one’s living situation for work is not necessarily easy or pleasant, but it can be a fair trade-off. But that means investment in both simple, obvious needs, like home office equipment, and deeper ones, like improving internet access and living conditions in poor areas. How can you expect someone to work from home if their broadband is subpar and their building’s wiring prevents air conditioning, making it hell in the summer?
The new balance in our homes and neighborhoods will no longer be able to rely on treating the office, the home and the neighborhood as truly separate places conceptually or commercially. Reinvention and investment will be necessary if we want the greater work-from-home transition to be healthy and empowering for all.
Alex Wilhelm: Home-office hybrids will remake American homes, change how we view apartments
But let me take you into the future. That work-from-home setup you currently rock at your dining room table as you slowly gain weight and your pet tries to sit on you? It sucks; you know it, and it won’t do.
What to do? If you have a house with room, you are going to carve out a lot of dedicated space for working. Not just a desk like you had in your old, open-floor-plan office from hell. A real room. With a door if you are lucky. And you are going to kit that bastard out with good screens, good lighting, good heating and cooling and a super-fast internet connection that, let’s be clear, you’ve needed for ages.
You might even put some weights in there, and a yoga mat. Things to help you move. You will splurge on a standing desk, you will think about your ergonomic setup. Finally, you can actually control your work environment and be comfortable and take care of yourself. Working from home can be more than convenient, it can be freeing if you invest in it properly. And so you will.
If you have a house, that is. If you have a small apartment, you’re in trouble. I can’t stop thinking about what I would have done if I had had to shelter-in-place in my old San Francisco apartment. It was nine square feet on a good day. There was no room for work-life separation, literally. Now imagine working from that same space every day, forever.
The result of this won’t be to make apartments larger; that’s not possible. But it will make small apartments so very much less attractive. This, in turn, will make some cities less attractive. High housing costs will be harder to surmount by having roommates. Sure, living with two other people is hard, but can you imagine working from home with two other people at the same time?
Danny Crichton: Work from home will revitalize American neighborhoods
I have been enjoying reading Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” the past two weeks. It’s an incredible work of human observation, but let’s be honest, there has been much more emphasis on the “death” of our massive conglomerations of people given COVID-19 than on the “life” aspects. Streets are empty, parks are deserted and the ballet of the street that Jacobs famously analyzed is all but nonexistent looking out my apartment window.
It can be demoralizing thinking about it all, and yet, cities have weathered crisis after crisis after crisis — wars, famines, plagues, terrorism, droughts, fires, bankruptcies… the list goes on. Cities are resilient because people are resilient, and what draws people back to these centers is always the same: the ability to connect with others; to sample diverse and eclectic foods, cultures and ideas; and to build a life that’s a continuation of an historical legacy of generations of our forebears.
Working from home isn’t going to be the undoing of the city — it’s going to be the awakening of a new vibrancy to our neighborhoods.
I’ve worked remotely for a majority of the last decade. Removing what was once an hour-long-plus commute in the Bay Area and replacing it with a home office empowered me not only to destress from the vagaries of the 101 and 280, but to situate myself in a neighborhood that I now call my own with the time to properly enjoy it.
Leaving suburban neighborhoods and the commute to the suburban office park (a great history here by the way is “Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes” by Louise A. Mozingo) has meant that I can now walk — at pleasure — to dozens of restaurants, bookstores, coffee shops, working nooks and crannies and public parks. I can take calls from a bench outside. I can walk and think about new article ideas and ways to analyze a new data set. And, of course, when I actually need to write words or write Python to process that data, I can do it at home or from a wonderful coffee shop with great internet and the aromas and pleasure that comes with living life.
Sadly, such great and vital neighborhoods are astonishingly hard to find in the United States, but work-from-home is here to stay and is going to change that fundamental calculus. Few of us can live in the dreary confines of a suburban enclave our entire workweek. And so I expect to see a revitalization of the classic Main Street clusters that once dotted towns across America as people appreciate the close proximity of amenities that they need throughout their day and remote work makes it possible to skip the commute to the central business district.
It’s not going to be a simple transition, of course. The built environment alone will probably take decades to fully transition. But the spirit of Jane Jacobs lives on and will move beyond the downtown core neighborhoods she observed to spread to medium and perhaps even small towns across the country and throughout the world.
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