They say the world has changed. And one of the biggest changes brought along by the coronavirus pandemic is remote work. Work from home policies are the talking point of the year.
Like many technology companies, Microsoft was quick to transition to remote work for the majority of its employees when the virus went lose.
However, CEO Satya Nadella is still concerned about the changes to the work that this crisis is forcing.
Talking to the staff of the New York Times this week about the challenges that he is navigating as the leader of a giant like Microsoft, Nadella warned about the consequences of embracing telecommuting permanently.
“What I miss is when you walk into a physical meeting, you are talking to the person that is next to you, you’re able to connect with them for the two minutes before and after.”
He also touched upon the mental cost of this whole thing:
“What does burnout look like? What does mental health look like? What does that connectivity and the community building look like? One of the things I feel is, hey, maybe we are burning some of the social capital we built up in this phase where we are all working remote. What’s the measure for that?”
Apparently, his concerns are not widely shared throughout the technology industry — at least not at this stage in time.
Even though Microsoft was one of the first companies to opt for remote work during the quarantine, as we near the end of the lockdown several other firms have announced their flexible work from home policies, including the likes of Twitter, Salesforce, Zillow, and Square.
Many others are giving employees the option to telecommute for the rest of the year.
What’s you hot take on this?
Is work from home the future? Does remote work maintain the essence? Or do you agree with the Nadella, and his warning that switching to entirely remote offices would be akin to replacing one dogma with another dogma?
All Comments
If I have a choice, I’d like a combination of office work and telecommute work. I do tech support by email and phone for a software company, so working from home is much easier for me than for others. Sometimes I had to go into the office by myself to access the company network but that was actually my own choice. The CEO of my company was willing to get me a company PC that was authorized to access the company network through our firewall. I’m keeping that as an option for later as I use my home PC for now for support use. I would love to work 4 days in the office and one from home at least. When work slows way down in the afternoons (I’m 2nd shift), I can do some other household duties on the side if I am home, while checking emails and such in-between. If I am at work and it is incredibly slow, I can only do other PC stuff or walk around the office by myself (I am usually the last one in the building at night.) I don’t mind it as-is now but it would be nice for a change of pace later when everything opens up again.
In this world, working from home is easy if you are office-based. I’m lucky; I have a spare bedroom I’ve been able to turn into an office. Working from the kitchen table is not ideal, especially if you don’t live alone. However the biggest change has been the lack of commute. For half an hour in the morning and 45 minutes in the evening, the drive to and from work acted as a barrier, an interface between work-life and home-life. It allowed time for the transition into work-think and then back to home-think.Walking from the home office into the living room just doesn’t do that. I do get to walk the dog at lunchtime though, so there are benefits 🙂