The Future of Work is Anywhere

I’m loving seeing the term “Work from Anywhere” being used a lot these days. For more than a decade, I’ve believed in the idea that work is a thing you do, not a place you go, and we built Dialpad around this belief from the start. 

15 years ago, I was working for Yahoo! and was in a taxi leaving LAX when I had my first “aha!” moment. I was thinking about how the moment the plane that I was just on landed, everybody on the flight immediately went for their phones and started checking all of their different voicemail systems - they had their home phone, work phone and their mobile voicemails to check. I remember thinking at the time, what if I just had one phone number for me, the “Craig” phone line, which would never change regardless of my job, home or mobile number.  

I asked myself - what if I could move all those disparate features (voicemail, caller ID, call blocking, screening, etc.) into one web-based, cloud-based platform, and I would only have one place to manage all of my communications? That was the start of the journey but something I have always kept in mind - this idea that phone calls should live in the cloud, that the user should be able to control all aspects of their communications, and that it should all be through a beautiful web or mobile interface rather than a bunch of buttons on a clunky desk phone.

2007-2010, I was at Google working on Google Voice when it became clear that every business would ultimately move to the cloud for email, docs and calendar. At the time, only Gmail for Business was able to do this, but it was such an obvious improvement over on-premise Exchange that I could tell it was inevitable. I could see the move toward everything always being in sync and available from any internet-connected device, and no more silly VPN or remote desktops to access your work from out of the office. Once I saw the power of Gmail and the freedom the entire G Suite provided (I had been a diehard Microsoft Outlook user previously), I knew that business phone systems had to follow.

I first tried to get Google Voice to focus on an enterprise phone system inside of Google, but the priority at the time was Google Plus, the now-defunct social networking platform launched in 2010. My team and I decided then that the opportunity to work on a pure, modern, cloud-based business phone system that would work natively from anywhere was worth quitting our jobs to go build. That was 10 years ago and we’ve since seen the market and customers embrace the power, flexibility and availability of this concept as more and more companies have moved toward a “Kill the Deskphone” mentality. It was inevitable that the cloud would prevail over the on-premise phone system, just as it was inevitable that Gmail and (now) O365 would prevail over the on-premise email system.

Now, with Dialpad, as I commuted from the East Bay to downtown San Francisco for over an hour each way, every day of the week, I lamented the fact that even though we built Dialpad and UberConference to allow people to be productive from anywhere, we as a company still worked primarily out of offices. It just made no sense and we began to dabble in Work from Home scenarios. We started letting our employees WFH on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and they loved it. This led to thinking about expanding this to more days, while we also ramped up our hiring of talented, remote folks around the globe.

As this movement toward remote work continued to gain speed around us and we knew that this would continue well into the future, last year we started to brand our swag and collateral with the "Work from Anywhere" tagline. We had hoodies, koozies, stickers and more branded materials (see pics for nostalgia). We believed in the “Anywhere Worker” concept so much so that we applied for a trademark (and got it!). 

Now, here we are today, in the COVID-19 world, and we are finally acknowledging that the old way of working was truly broken. Paying top dollar for large offices in the best locations wasn’t a good use of our resources. Fighting to hire, retain and compete for a relatively small pool of talent (when compared to the rest of the world), wasn’t an efficient use of our team’s recruiting, HR and hiring resources. Requiring employees to lose 2 to 3 hours per day just getting to and from work, where they would work on the same laptop they had in their hands when they began their commute, wasn’t a great use of our employee’s valuable “free time”.  

In the past few months, the world has definitely changed. The companies that once thought they might at some time in the future allow their employees to possibly work some of their days in a remote location are now seeing that it can be done, and even done full time. They’re seeing that employees are productive working from anywhere. They’re likely seeing that people don’t need to waste hours on crowded subways or BART trains to get into crowded elevators, to sit in crowded offices, to just start their jobs. And once this crisis is in the past and kids are back to school, restaurants are once again bustling, and the getting out of the house to go to a concert or sporting event can be done again, we’ll be left with a much better model of what “work” looks like. A world where everybody truly can be an Anywhere Worker and where the quality of life will be much higher.

Over the last decade, we’ve all been prognosticating the “Future of Work,” but that future is now here and companies need to adapt or fall far behind. Not providing remote work tools or flexibility is no longer an option as we are #AllInThisTogether. 

#WorkfromAnywhere #AnywhereWorker #RemoteWork #NewNormal #StaySafe