Work from Anywhere isn’t new, just unequal

Execs have always had the right to work from anywhere. But with a vaccine coming, will they permanently extend that right to their employees?

By Jamie Hodari

In 2005, Netflix wasn’t the company we know today. It was a fast-growing DVD-by-mail subscription service, nearing its billionth DVD delivered. Behind the scenes they were putting the finishing touches on their industry-changing shift to streaming. It was an existentially important and stressful year at their HQ in Los Gatos, California. Fortunately for their CEO, Reed Hastings, he had a few things to take the edge off: cacio e pepe, picturesque villas, rolling hills. Throughout that whole year, Hastings and his family lived in Rome.

Stuart Butterfield, CEO of San Francisco-based Slack, is one of the world’s leading voices on the future of work and how teams collaborate. He’s built an $18-billion company that sits at the center of how many companies function. And he did it from 1,200 miles away in Vancouver. 

When I was a corporate lawyer, the firm’s partners would disappear every summer Friday. While the associates were stuck at the office until 1 or 2am, their bosses were working from the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley. I had an officemate who went in on a Fire Island house share, only to go the whole summer without ever seeing it. Meanwhile, the partner on the same deal spent the entire summer in the Hamptons, less than half an hour away from his associate’s unused rental.

We’ve all read the articles, op-eds, and Tweets suggesting that COVID-19 has kicked off a great experiment in the flexibility to work from wherever. But to parrot William Gibson, the future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed. Until the pandemic, most mid-level employees had to fight for the occasional Friday out of the office, while for C-suite execs, working from anywhere isn’t nascent territory. If anything, it’s profoundly conventional. 

This isn’t to say the C-suite doesn’t work. They do — a lot. CEOs typically put in more hours than almost any other type of role--62.5 hours a week—they’re just not tethered to one spot or schedule In fact, less than half of C-suite executives’ working hours are spent at HQ.

The nature of their work doesn’t account for this executive transience. C-Suite executives aren’t solo workers -- they spend 72% of their time in meetings— far more than the average white-collar worker. Given the collaborative nature of their roles, you’d expect they’d be the absolute worst candidates for phoning it in. Yet, that’s exactly what they do, and the Fortune 500 is getting along just fine. 

What’s not fine is CEOs begrudging employees the very same liberties and perks they’ve long taken themselves. As the pandemic has reminded us, there are certain essential roles that require fixed schedules and locations. But place-based employment isn’t actually necessary for the vast majority of white-collar roles, and there’s an ugly class component to saying an exec can spend half the year in Palm Beach or Davos but a marketing associate can’t make it work from Missoula or Asheville. 

I run Industrious, one of the largest workplace providers in the country. Every piece of internal data we have reinforces what study after study has shown: the ability to work from anywhere isn’t an idiosyncratic desire of the executive class—this flexibility is what the vast majority of workers want. 

As soon as a vaccine is widely available, there’s going to be a backlash against work from anywhere. In sectors like finance, the blowback has already begun. And when the backlash inevitably takes shape, it’ll be important to remember that it isn’t a sign that executives have developed a firm, defensible point of view about the nature of work. They absolutely trust themselves to do great work from just about anywhere, they just don’t trust you to.