What Working From Home Can Teach Us

Thoughts about technology that is inclusive, trusted, and creates a more sustainable world

These posts represent my personal views on the future of the digital economy powered by the cloud and artificial intelligence. Unless otherwise indicated, they do not represent the official views of Microsoft.

Could working from home be considered a privilege? Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella suggested as much when he noted the other day that “At Microsoft we have the privilege of working from home.” What does Satya mean by this?

Working from home certainly has its drawbacks. We’ve all seen (and perhaps personally experienced) instances of work-related video meetings being interrupted by children, pets, or a neighbor’s loud construction project. We’ve heard about and many of us are experiencing how working from home can disrupt the work-life balance by erasing the line between the two. And working from a cramped urban apartment is not the same as working from a spacious suburban home. For some of us, there are arguably even more serious downsides as well. Even without distractions, some jobs are very stressful to do from home. Satya observes that “remote education has put more burden, not less, on our teachers and school administrators.”

But undeniably there is a sense in which working from home is a privilege—or perhaps I should say, an opportunity that comes with some real advantages. Such work directly correlates with education, which directly correlates with income. The chart below based on data from a recent Federal Reserve survey makes this clear.

data source: Federal Reserve

People who are able to work from home are people whose jobs mostly involve sitting in front of a computer. They are what social critic Robert Reich nearly 30 years ago presciently called “symbolic analysts,” which he defined as “mind workers” who process information for a living. He was thinking mostly of professionals such as engineers, lawyers, scientists, executives, journalists, and consultants. But today the population of workers whose activity utterly depends on constant interaction with a computer is much broader than it was in 1992. It’s nearly everyone who works in a building and whose job is not primarily about face-to-face interaction with other people (as in retail or healthcare) or direct manipulation of some kind of machine (as in factories or on construction sites).

In short, while there are exceptions, being able to work from home is often a proxy for socio-economic class. This is an important fact, because even before the pandemic struck we knew that the jobs most at risk of being automated out of existence were those that did not require a college education. This is illustrated by the chart below developed by the consulting firm McKinsey.

This is why governments trying to steer their national economies toward recovery must focus on helping workers acquire the new skills needed to thrive in an increasingly digital world.

Let’s also remember that the people who can’t work at home are precisely the ones who make it possible for the rest of us to work at home. Satya reports that when he meets with the CEOs of major retailers such as Walmart or Kroger they always remind him:

“Look, when you say ‘work from home,’ remember, ‘We’re sending millions of people to work each day so that your people can work from home.’”

At the same time, we can notice that the digital has for some years been creeping into what we perceive as “manual” or “outdoor” work. In a near future there will be very few retail jobs that don’t incorporate digital technology in one form or another. Every UPS, FedEx, and Amazon delivery truck is already constantly exchanging a stream of data with its dispatch center. Every Uber and Lyft driver has an always-on cellphone on the dash in front of them and could not do their job without one. When everyone on a construction site has a powerful pocket computer equipped with a high-resolution video camera and an always-on Internet connection, new ways of working naturally arise. The arrival of 5G and a ubiquitous Internet of Things will amplify this trend because it means that essentially every industrial or field process will be connected to management and analytical applications in the cloud at all times.

If the pandemic continues to wind down, as we all hope, how many of us will still be working from home a year from now? Satya Nadella believes that we in the tech industry “will probably be the last to come back to work.” Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg reveals that a recent survey of that company’s employees shows 40% are interested in working from home long term. But Zuckerberg’s forecast goes even further. He thinks that in 5 to 10 years fully half of Facebook’s employees will be working remotely.

One thing is clear: working from home requires a good Internet connection. And millions of people even in wealthy countries like the United States still don’t have one, as the survey data below from Stanford economist Nick Bloom shows:

Source: Nicholas Bloom, Stanford home Internet user survey, 2019

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s essential that the government stimulus programs now being launched close the broadband gap for rural and other underserved populations.

In sum, the pandemic reminds us that an increasingly digital society cannot allow itself to be divided between “digital haves” and “digital have nots.” In a world where almost all jobs will have a digital component we must, as Satya says, “recognize the essential nature of all the roles.”