The future of remote and distributed work
The future of remote and distributed work
COVID-19 may have rung a bell that can’t be unrung with regard to remote work.
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WFH indefinitely
We hope this finds you staying safe and feeling well during these extraordinary times. As millions nationwide work from home, we’re thinking about how new technologies can improve remote working. While some of us are working with relatable, unglamorous home office setups, there are some exciting technologies that could improve working from home, and possibly even make it more preferable to traditional offices.
In a continuation of this week’s “future of technology” theme, we’re also considering Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott’s vision for AI in the American heartland. Additionally, we’re learning about a former poultry farmer’s potentially cold chain-revolutionizing invention. Finally, we’re thinking about the parallels between dance and agile organization management.
We hope you’ve been enjoying this newsletter and would love any feedback (erica@nycmedialab.org). We wish you and your community safety, calm and solidarity as we support each other through this unprecedented time. Thank you again for reading.
All best,
Erica Matsumoto
At present, the majority of companies with remote workforces have been forced into this position due to COVID-19. Having employees work from home wherever possible isn’t just good HR policy — it’s required by local orders.
However, there’s reason to believe that the bell will not be unrung on the matter of remote work even after it’s safe for people to return to their offices. According to an Upwork study of over 1,000 hiring managers, 63% of companies already have remote workers and hiring managers increasingly believe agile team structures in which offices are temporary anchor points, rather than daily destinations, will become the norm.
Fully remote company TaxJar may have one of the best takes with regards to today’s working remotely reality. In a blog post on March 4, the company says, “We recommend treating a temporary remote work situation less like a field trip and more like what it truly is — the future of work. And if you take your company remote for a time and decide to switch back to co-located work, be prepared with a strong argument as to why you’re making the change.”
The implication here is that many companies may find that they don’t have a compelling reason to return to daily in-person work. Work can get done outside of commercial offices, and remote work actually works for their workforce.
For companies and workers that embrace remote work in future, there are a number of exciting technologies that promise to improve and enhance telework.
IMMERSIVE TELECONFERENCING AND MEETINGS
A common argument against remote work is the idea that meetings and collaboration happen more effectively in person. With this concern in mind, some tools to bridge the gap between dispersed workforce have emerged to make WFH environments feel more office-like.
Virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality — currently most used in gaming — are expected to become more ubiquitous and embedded into workplaces and workflows as companies move to remote work. While Zoom and Skype are useful stopgaps for now, some studies estimate that videoconferencing offers only about 10% of the value of in-person meetings. By creating virtual locations to host meetings and work on projects with visuals or prototypes, VR, AR and XR could significantly enhance remote collaboration and meetings.
As an example of this proposition, Spatial applies immersive tech to extend content from users’ PCs and phones, and turns the space around individuals into shared augmented workplaces. This allows remote users to collaborate, search, brainstorm, and share content (and ideas) as if they were in the same room. Check out the demo video for its HoloLens 2 AR Headcraft:
IMPROVED CONNECTIVITY: 5G AND WI-FI 6 AT HOME
When employees rely on the internet to dial in and log on to work, reliable internet and cell phone networks are foundational. Although they’re still a few years out from widespread deployment and adoption, there’s reason to expect that next-generation connectivity technologies such as 5G and Wi-Fi 6 (see our previous issues on these topics here) will significantly transform the work from home experience.
At the most basic level, these technologies will significantly increase connection speeds. This will shorten document, image and video download times to mere seconds; it will also improve the quality of online meetings. 5G and Wi-Fi 6 also promise to provide much lower latency (the time it takes for a device to communicate with a server and receive a response). As an example of use, this will reduce the lag between sending an email and the recipient receiving it to virtually zero
For cell phones, the 5G technology standards are written to allow new 5G devices to simultaneously connect to both Wi-Fi and cell networks by default (presently, cell phones are designed to require users to manually shift between the cell network and a Wi-Fi network for internet access). This would allow cell phones to be designed to rely on Wi-Fi where it’s available, but then automatically supplement Wi-Fi with cell network bandwidth when a Wi-Fi connection is poor.
Finally, 5G and Wi-Fi 6 will be more robust and capable of handling more devices simultaneously without slowing connections down. For homebound families contending with slowed-down internet connections due to parents and children being home on the internet all at once right now, the value of this is obvious. PITFALLS OF REMOTE WORK
We should note that the future isn’t all rosy with regard to remote work. In a 2016 paper, a team of economists analyzed data from a 16,000-employee Chinese travel agency, Ctrip, that randomly assigned a small group of its call-center staff to work from home. Initially, the study found that employees worked more, quit less, and said they were happier with their jobs, and Ctrip saved more than $1,000 per employee on reduced office space.
However, when the policy was rolled out to the entire company, it was disastrous, with most employees choosing to return to the office. The most commonly-cited factor? The loneliness of working from home. As a bellwether, this Ctrip example highlights the social-emotional needs of human productivity that in-person work — and perhaps in-person interactions generally, provides its employees.
Additionally, the ambiguity of online communications can make it harder to establish the trust that’s needed for teams to collaborate effectively. Bill Duane, a former Google engineer who now works remotely as a corporate consultant and researcher, explains, “Whenever we read a sentence on Gchat or Slack that seems ambiguous or sarcastic to us, we default to thinking, You f — r! But if someone had said the same thing to your face, you might be laughing with them.”
Microsoft’s CTO wants to spread tech’s wealth beyond the coasts Unlike some who believe robots will supplant humans in many jobs, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott believes that AI and robotics can be democratized to inspire and empower businesses in rural America by giving traditional businesses such as farming and rural healthcare new tools to survive. He also believes AI can robotics can help new businesses, particularly small businesses, harness technology to create more value. 8 min read A One-Time Poultry Farmer Invents the Future of Refrigeration Former poultry farmer Peter Dearman’s liquid air engine has the potential to remake the entire cold chain, reducing its massive environmental footprint (at present, refrigeration accounts for a sixth of humanity’s electricity usage, and that demand is expected to grow as populous countries such as China and India build U.S.-style cold chains). 19 min read Lessons on Agility from a Dancer Turned Professor
In the management context, “agility” is an incredibly popular buzzword. However, its meaning — much less how to achieve it — can be exceedingly unclear. Drawing upon her dance background, IMD professor Jennifer Jordan argues that agile management requires the same characteristics as does agility in dance: core strength, the ability to change focus quickly, extreme flexibility and range of motion, and knowing where you want to go.
7 min read This Week in Business History
April 6, 1930: James Dewar invents Hostess Twinkies
The “original junk food” is invented as a way to use shortbread pans that were no longer in use. With strawberries out of season, one of the bakers at the Continental Baking Company in Illinois creates a banana cream-filled cake using the small shortbread pans. Later on, when banana imports effectively cease during World War II, the banana cream is switched out for vanilla — hence, the contemporary Twinkie is fully realized.
More recently, when Twinkies producer Hostess filed for bankruptcy in 2012, Twinkies briefly vanished from store shelves. This led to bidding wars between multiple companies that saw the value in owning the classic brand. Ultimately, Twinkies returned to stores in 2013 after Apollo Global Management and Metropoulos & Co bought Hostess for $410 million.
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