After nearly a year of sheltering in place, the way we work has fundamentally changed. More than 40% of American workers are working entirely from home, and some Bay Area tech giants have already announced long-term remote or distributed work policies, including Apple and Google. As vaccines roll out across the U.S., some elements of life may return to pre-pandemic norms. Will working in an office be one of them?
Future of work experts say: Nope, probably not.
“Silicon Valley’s heyday is over,” said work expert Lauren Razavi, a former Google consultant, and author ofGlobal Natives, an upcoming book about the future of work and innovation. “One of the results of everything that’s happened in 2020 is that opportunity and place have been permanently uncoupled. People used to move to San Francisco because of the incredible serendipity that you find there. But I think what 2020 has really proven is that the same serendipity is now happening online.”
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Companies aren’t only shifting where they operate during the pandemic, but how they work, too, says Razavi. To accommodate working parents and others with caretaking demands or stressors at home, companies are beginning to embrace asynchronous work — meaning, an understanding that people may not be working at the same time or even in the same time zone.
The result: employees with more freedom, and companies with lower overhead costs.
Although working from home has its challenges, most employees ultimately report they feel more productive and happier working from home than they did in the office, according to recent surveys.
“I really think to stay competitive, companies will need to be remote-first or distributed — bottom line,” Razavi says. “It costs less money to adopt those models. So I think that the companies that don’t transition to this way of working are not going to be able to maintain efficiency, both in terms of cost and actually getting work done really well.”
Whereas the national average is between $8–$23/square foot, San Francisco’s office space rents for the premium price of $72/square foot on average. Smaller office spaces — or none at all — may be necessary for companies to survive the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. But the shift to distributed work is likely to take place across the greater Bay Area and beyond.
“Offices are likely to become collaboration spaces or meeting hubs where they exist at all,” Razavi says. “I think you’re likely to have a really hard time convincing people to commute or live in places with high prices and give up their freedom and flexibility.”
Michael P. Toothman, an educator at the University of California, Riverside who specializes in “future-proofing” (that is, preparing organizations and companies for the future), agrees.
“People are going to ask themselves, why do we need this workspace? It’s worked perfectly well offsite. Let’s divest ourselves of some of this real estate that we don’t need and be more lean and nimble,” he says.
Robert Nickell, a business consultant through his business Rocket Station who works with companies throughout the Valley and the greater Bay Area, does not have a single client currently planning on returning to the office fully. Some are planning on making office work optional a few days a week, but none plan to require it.
The change to remote work doesn’t mean we will work solely virtually, Toothman cautioned. He believes workspaces will still exist as shared gathering spaces and collaboration hubs, rather than somewhere workers go every day. With the pace of vaccine distribution in the U.S. slower than public health officials had hoped, it might take a large portion of this year to get it done, but eventually vaccinated workers will be able to gather again, Toothman says.
“There are still plenty of technical challenges to be overcome, but coworking spaces are going to come back,” Toothman says. “The downtown area is just going to become an extended collaboration space for remote workers.” Toothman explained that when workers have a choice about where they work, they may still choose to leave their homes and meet up, especially if they’re not asked to do it every day.
Although it may not mean that workers never go back to an office in any capacity, the shift to distributed work — and the subsequent freedom for workers to live wherever they like — may be good news for the cost of housing in the Bay Area. Rents have already dropped dramatically since the start of the pandemic, with rents in San Francisco down 25% since March. As office workers for tech companies leave the area, rents may continue to tumble.
“I think you’re going to see the cost of living go down quite a lot, and the result will be that quality of life improves for people living in the Bay Area because of the affordability,” said Razavi.
Even as vaccines begin to be distributed and we enter a post-pandemic world, the way we work has likely changed forever. The Covid-19 pandemic will end, but its impacts on work and life will continue for years — if not decades — to come. According to labor and work experts, working in your pajamas is here to stay.
