The Coronavirus Could Change How We Work, Hopefully for the Better

Reading Time: 9 minutes.

 

The novel coronavirus causing the COVID-19 disease has been all over the news lately. People have bought enough toilet paper to coat entire towns in TP, for some reason. Medical professionals can’t get the masks they need. A cough can empty out a subway. Stocks have tanked, in part due to economic anxiety over Trump’s poor response to the viral outbreak, but also due to the fact that the virus has slowed production. People are panicking.

That’s why I didn’t want to write about it for some time. People are panicked, but we’re not going about this the right way yet. It’s only deadly in the elderly and those with prior conditions, still, “healthy” or “safe” people are scared too. After all, who wants to spread that to their vulnerable loved ones, or even just vulnerable strangers? Who wants to be quarantined for a month? To be cut off from society for so long? I’ve been in a hospital for a few days before, and wanted to run out of it screaming. A month or more of that? Of the anxiety of wondering if you’ll actually make it out of that hospital? I’d go insane.

But I won’t need the virus to experience that kind of isolation. You might not either. Companies in California are mandating work from home policies, and New York is as well. A few of my friends here in New York have been sent home “indefinitely,” working from their apartments until it’s deemed safe to go outside again. Since I started writing this article a few days ago, my office shut down as well.

Most people are ecstatic about it. You don’t have to wake up, put on all your makeup, find a decent outfit, go to the train, stand in a gross, hot train car for 40 minutes, get out, walk to the office, and get berated for being late because Cuomo can’t just fix the MTA. An extra hour or two of sleep in the morning? That sounds heavenly. Best of all, we can stop the spread of a virus that, for many, will be deadly. We can save lives by sleeping in.

For the first week or two? It’s not too bad. But after that things change. The honeymoon ends. But what if we can’t go back?

Casual Everydays

 

A few years back I was looking for a job. I was still living in a rural area, and programming jobs were harder to find. The interview that convinced me that I was moving to a city once and for all was a nationally known company in a niche market. I make it through the interview with flying colors. Ace every programming question, in multiple languages, solve every logic puzzle. It was easy. Too easy. I’m funny, I’m charming, I’m likely overqualified, and I’m definitely in. I get to the last interview, more of a formality. The VP of Engineering. We’re chatting, more a personality fit test than anything, and I ask him about the dress code. It seemed to me that many of the people were wearing business casual attire, at best, others were in suits. But surely that was either a personal choice, right?

Wrong.

He told me that business attire was required. I’d have to wear a skirt and nice shoes or slacks every day. I laughed. I knew he wasn’t joking, but the absurdity of it was just too much. He tried to assure me it was because it’s a professional environment, but I told him I wouldn’t do it. Besides, any investor or partner worth their salt knows a decent programmer doesn’t wear business casual unless by choice! No one wants a job like that, people settle on one like that, after being turned away from the job they want. It was a dealbreaker, if not for my comfort, then for my pride. That was that.

No one’s telling me what to wear.

Barefoot and Smelly

That philosophy started in Silicon Valley. It’s been said that in his younger days, Steve Jobs believed that, with the proper diet, he wouldn’t have body odor (wrong), and that shoes were unnecessary (have you been to New York? No, pass). He got a job at Atari, despite these character flaws, which helped him learn about technology and fund the early days of Apple.

Good programmers are hard to come by. It requires a mix of skills. Writing skills, believe it or not, along with math, engineering, structural planning, and an innate understanding of symbolic logic. It can all be taught, but it takes many years to get good. Even then, your work isn’t done when you go home. You have to study more. Read more. Stay on top of everything. As such, companies were clamoring for good engineers. One way they enticed people was a casual environment. Come as you are.

Well, as it turns out, not only is it great for attracting the best talent, it’s also great for productivity. A woman wearing sneakers is more comfortable and more capable of doing her job than one in uncomfortable heels, especially if that skirt is required in that chilly office. Comfortable employees are productive employees, and word spread. The work environment became more casual, following Silicon Valley’s leadership.

Of course, from there it would become beer coolers on Fridays, catered meals, massages, and many other perks. But all of this was an evolution on something employers have done for some time: trying to make employees have a way to pause, relax, and feel happy so they can get back to work. The break room water cooler was replaced with a keg, and productivity and creativity actually went up.

Now we’re changing the workplace again.

Going Home

 

I have a few friends at startups and a few at more well known companies who are working from home until COVID-19 is contained. Among those are at least 138 large, well known companies telling their employees to work from home. They’re using tools like Zoom, Slack, Skype, Microsoft Office 365, Google Docs, Polycom, and other apps to telecommute. Of course, with Github, our code’s already in the cloud. AWS is running our infrastructure. Cloudflare’s got the CDN. Everything’s distributed. You can run a multi-million dollar company out of your bedroom if you wanted. Your investors won’t be too happy, but it’s possible.

Tech is uniquely positioned for this. But it’s not the only job. Personal assistants can be remote, salespeople can work remotely. You can trade stocks from your phone. You can attend meetings through video, give presentations with screen sharing and a decent microphone, and more. Many jobs can be done at least partially remotely. As more companies allow work from home, or even mandate it, people will take them up on their offer. Eventually, this will become more normal, and many people will have at least a few days they’re working from home.

A Spreading Trend

Programming remotely is sometimes a good thing. In fact, the distraction-free setting can enable hours of punching away at code that would typically have interruptions. However, it can also be distracting in its own way. Sometimes I need something to actively tune out to help me focus. Perhaps you’re the same? Regardless, when someone can control their environment, they’re often more productive.

What happens at these companies when, after a few months, they realize that having many of their employees working from home actually improved productivity? They find that when people can focus, sleep more, relax, and work in a quiet environment, they get more done. When they work hours they’re more comfortable with, or take breaks through the day, they do better work.

When fears of the virus are over, do you invite all the workers back to the office to start working and being less productive? The things that encourage us to work together, like creativity, aren’t as measurable as completing projects. There just won’t be data to support coming back in.

And this is where things could start to get a little problematic. More jobs will go out of the office. Why even have a physical location if you don’t need one? More employees will work remote. That means less stress, more sleep, more comfort, and even less travel. We could reduce travel and potentially dramatically decrease our CO2 footprint! Everyone wins!

Not all Sunshine and Rainbows

Before the interview of skirts and pantsuits, I had a remote job. I was working for a large, world-renown company from the comfort of my bedroom. I had my corner desk, a few monitors, and a window with sunlight in the morning and a view of the willow trees around the parking lot out back. It was a tiny bedroom, but it was nice. I’d wake up in the morning, make a pot of coffee, go back into my bedroom, and start working. I’d sometimes take a short coffee nap after lunch, or go for a quick run. Often at the end of the day I’d do a few miles on my elliptical, take a shower, and go down to the local watering hole.

That last part’s important. In fact, it was vital. Until I walked into that bar, I hadn’t seen a human face all day. I’d go to the bar every day. I’d hang out with friends, I made new friends with the locals, I became a staple at that little bar. People gave me my “Norm!” moment. I left many great memories behind there. But this wasn’t exactly healthy, is it?

I was miserable when none of my friends could make it out. I tried going out a few times on my own, but as you can ask any woman, being at a bar alone is a recipe for disaster. No one would just let me drink, read my book, and chat with the bartender in peace. People treat a woman, alone, in public, like she’s offering herself up. I just wanted to see a human face in 3D. Chat with someone without the 500ms of lag. I just wanted to feel like I wasn’t in a Twilight Zone episode.

I got stir-crazy. It was as though I was storing up all my social energy all day and let it burst forth at night. If I didn’t, I’d be miserable. It’s maddening talking to yourself all day. Especially as an engineer. When you’re dealing with complex problems and you can’t just vent to a coworker, or look for solutions a few chairs away, you get incredibly pent up. It’s isolating and lonely. It’s like solitary confinement, but you’re working. At least there’s something to do, that’s true. You have music, you have TV, you have so many ways to distract you from it, but the truth is, you’re alone. I’m socially anxious and sometimes quite introverted, but even I realized I didn’t want to be a hermit. I needed people sometimes.

You probably do too. Even if you don’t realize it. Even if you, like me, often think, “I wish I just had a day in this city all to myself,” you’ll find you actually do need human interaction.

By then it might be too late.

Reducing Creativity, Cohesion

There are a few theories that state creativity goes down when workers are working from home. They may be productive, able to complete tasks quickly, but they’re potentially less innovative. This could be due to the lack of social interaction, a potential loss of empathy, the inability to quickly hash out ideas with other people, or just the fact that you don’t have as much cross-talk. On multiple occasions, I’ve overhead someone talking about something unrelated to my position, yet joined the discussion and learned about a new technology I could use later. I’ve talked to people from other teams about solutions to problems that I could apply to my own application. People work well together.

You know how internet arguments frequently become toxic? Why don’t you see those more in the workplace? Because it’s so much easier to figure out someone’s tone, emotions, and purpose when in person. Furthermore, it’s easier to empathize with a person’s idea as a part of that person when you’re talking to them face-to-face. Video chat helps, but text-based chats over Slack will be picking up the, erm, slack a lot when it comes to team communications in the coming weeks.

With teams broken up geographically, teams might actually break up.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

I worked from home for 8 months. I kept my sanity by heading to the bar to hang out with my best friends, play some trivia, drink some cheap beer, and stay until close. Basically, I was a character in a sitcom. But any therapist can tell you, your sense of happiness and community shouldn’t strictly come from a bar. You’ll have to go out of your way to socialize. Out of your comfort zone. But that’s harder than it seems.

As you work from home, your comfort zone shrinks. It’s as though you give yourself some agoraphobia. I’ve noticed it after being very sick for a week, that the day once the symptoms subside, it’s still difficult to leave the threshold of my apartment. But unlike working from home by choice, you’ll find that when you want to go back to the office, you can’t. Some places may choose to close down their offices permanently.

We may be changing the way we do work, the way we socialize and the way we interact with people dramatically. While some aspects will be great, like more sleep and more time for hobbies, other aspects, like reduced socialization, might make some people feel lonely, depressed, or anxious. It could hurt our ability to innovate in the long run.

For How Long?

How many weeks or months will we be confined to our apartments, fearful of the air outside? How long will the lockdown really last? My office just closed for two weeks, but I have no doubt that it’ll be at least a month, that people will be afraid of going back after two weeks, that we’ll need more time to contain this contagion. This infection won’t go away overnight, even if every one of us stays inside. Unfortunately, many people, even those who could work from home, are still heading to the office. That’s only going to make matters worse.

We’ll know by the end of this pandemic what avoiding all human contact for a few months does to our society. Maybe it’ll snap back. This could be nothing more than a short chapter in the book of humanity. We’ll all go back to work late this spring, and be better and healthier for it. I hope so. Because the alternative is fewer—if any—real interactions, and as much as I love cyberpunk dystopia movies, that’s a little too on the nose for my tastes.

Perhaps, once this pandemic has subsided, the answer will be balance as we head back to the workplace with our newfound love/hate relationship with working from home. We’ll have a few office days a week, and spend the others at home. We’ve got to be ready for change, but we have to be sensible about it as well. Things will be different, but this may be the kick we needed to make the workplace work better for everyone.

Stay home, stay safe, and stay healthy, everyone!