The varied shades of remote work

Note to Readers: This is a two-part series on the ‘Varied Shades of Remote Work’.

A year ago, exactly to this day, if someone were to tell you that you'd spend all of 2020 working from home, I'm sure you would have politely suggested a remedy for their hangover. However, here we are in front of our screens, having traversed all of 2020 wondering when this mass work-from-home experiment will end.

While the pandemic, job-retention and stress consumed much of our mental space in 2020, we have come to realise that in the knowledge era, work can never be confined to boundaries restricted by real-estate. The learnings from 2020 are global, have the largest sample size (of the entire world) and are from across industries as hardly anyone was spared.

In a single year, we have experienced working-from-home, remote work,* and in some cases become entirely remote-first**. The underlying theme: taking work beyond the office premises, while maintaining productivity and the smooth functioning of the organisation. It has also been a time when we have experienced how each of these models has panned out and the nuances of each as highlighted in this article.

Before we delve deeper, the biggest upside as rightly pointed out by Ganapathy Venugopal, Cofounder and CEO of Axilor Ventures,*** is that “trust and accountability have grown as the need for supervision has fallen…upending traditional management models”.

After 50+ conversations with Founders, Senior Management and Employees, here is what comes through strongly:

1) Long-term work-from-home will never take off (anywhere).

2) Hybrid work is emerging as a middle path. Is it the panacea?

These shifts have been interesting to observe and from my multiple conversations, I have realised that there are too many variations attached to each model and hence in this article I try to relate aspects that resonated with me and I leave you, the reader to determine what resonates with you.

* WFH and Remote are not the same (while WFH is more geographically restricted, remote work means working from literally anywhere).

** I will be writing a separate piece on remote-first companies. Watch this space. 

*** The writer is Manager, Outreach at Axilor Ventures. 

THE REPORT CARD:

Why will long term work-from-home never take off?

Before the pandemic struck, only 7 percent or roughly 9.8 million workers in the US had access to remote work, says this report. During the pandemic-induced work-from-home, it was almost impossible to step out and that affected everyone’s mental health to varying degrees. Stress, irregular working hours, death by notifications have been spoken about enough. We also know that infrastructure-wise, large-scale work-from-home is a burden on bandwidth and whether it was Koramangala, South Bombay or swanky Gurgaon, the internet was flaky and there were frequent power cuts, sometimes amidst work calls.

Mohammed Abraz, Lead Product Designer at BimaPe, a startup that simplifies insurance, lives in East Bangalore. He says: “I am a Product Designer and my job entails interacting with people and seeing their expressions. On a call, I cannot figure their tone or expression. My job is not suited for remote work.” Abraz says sometimes he even has to be ‘mute’ on calls and have someone else ask his questions due to a roar of construction-related noise outside his house.

“War cannot be fought remotely,” believes Arnav Kumar, Founder of LeapFinance, a Fintech startup. “For startups that want to grow more than 100x a year, unless you are celebrating small wins regularly and being more collaborative, it becomes stressful. I have not yet figured a great way to celebrate remotely. Think of an army control room, how can you run that remotely?”

Vineeta Singh, CEO of SUGAR Cosmetics, echoes him: “For a startup there is a huge dependency on innovation, creativity and a combined mission to disrupt the market. While the teams rose to the occasion working from home, we already have some members coming back to office at least once a week.” SUGAR Cosmetics also has a manufacturing division, a warehouse and a supply chain division. And being a trendy cosmetics company, there was a constant need to produce fresh social media content, which was all done ingeniously through the lockdown. However, much of this is hard to sustain when things slowly look better.

Bhagyashree Pancholy, a lawyer, specialises in Remote laws. Pancholy says that whether it is India or Egypt, women who work from home or even remotely create their own communities and prefer working in each other’s homes. Not only does this solve child-care issues, it also gives them a safety net and these spaces are better equipped than co-working spaces that do not specialise in child care.

Work-from-home was also particularly hard on students who had to seek internships and many I spoke to mentioned that not only were they shortchanged in terms of profiles, but they were not paid. Also, if they were given sales roles, they had to buy the product themselves many times, in case they were not able to meet targets, meaning they literally had to buy their internship certificates.

Lastly, Pancholy reports that while the number of cases of child abuse fell, the number of domestic violence cases rose during the pandemic. During the first four phases of the lockdown, women in India filed more domestic violence complaints than recorded in the last 10 years. According to official data with the National Commission for Women (NCW), domestic violence complaints received in 2019 were 607, while in 2020 between March and May 1477 cases were registered.

Hybrid work is emerging as a middle path: is it the panacea?

Companies have hired employees across geographies (within India) during the pandemic. And, on the other hand, many employees have also gone back to their home towns and villages/ parents’ homes or families during this period. In such cases, hybrid work is emerging as a middle path between employees and the management. This model is one where people can come into office for two or three days a week and also entails that the company has a hub-and-spoke real-estate model.

Hybrid work has its own nuances. According to Vinish Garg, Founder of a digital agency in Chandigarh, who has been remote since 2008, “remote workers working in a different city or even in another country should be given a wider choice and the right incentive to travel. Common sense plays a role in defining these rules.”

Kartik Mandaville, Founder and CEO of Springworks, has a slightly different point of view. “The hybrid model is a disadvantage to people who cannot come to office.” They lose out on the camaraderie and discussions others could possibly have over the water cooler,” he opines.

Mandaville prefers the remote-first model where there are no headquarters and employees can work from the closest co-working spaces instead. For team bonding, he proposes offsites (among teams or even the company at large) for more focussed sessions and unstructured time.

Pancholy was a legal consultant with Automattic when it set up its APAC business in 2012 and has now started All Remotely, an India-based Remote Law consultancy. She has observed that over time, employees who live far away do not turn up to swanky offices in the hybrid model and that adds to the real estate and utility cost of the company. Legally speaking, an office space is considered an asset that can earn companies tax rebates. However, if it is not used over a long period, the overheads tend to go up.

Secondly, if employees are working from multiple cities, then there are State tax implications that can get very complicated for the company (which has to pay tax in the city of its incorporation).

Lastly, for the hybrid model to be successful, new definitions of productivity and output have to be put into place and the role of managers has to be better defined.  Says Praval Singh, VP Marketing at Zoho Corporation: “Hybrid as a model is easier to adopt in traditional companies and is slowly redefining the way we work. It gives one the flexibility of planning their week for both remote and in-office work, and provides for articulation and better clarity in communication — we might end up with far fewer meetings. And lastly, it creates more ownership and accountability.”

Founders I spoke to were unanimous in their choice of the hybrid model but also said that they were yet to assess its true implications. There is a good possibility that we may go back to the old ways of office-first or become completely remote-first.

Whichever direction we tread, some trends will evolve and stay. 

• Co-working spaces will become community centres of talent and people. More companies will have seats in co-working spaces and they will create the sub-remote culture where talent and under-represented communities will thrive. Further, as per this article, co-working spaces may provide some kind of respite in terms of secured networks and a technician on call to address cybersecurity and computer-malfunction challenges of occupants.

• Modular work overtakes 9-5. The clock was seen as a proxy to productivity. After having worked remotely, there is a realisation that work happens in chunks. While we may continue to put in 40+ hours a week, they need not come in 8-hour stretches anymore.

• The talent of India meets the spirit of Bharat. During the pandemic, companies such as Zoho opened satellite offices in districts such as Surandai, Mohanur, Namakkal, Srirangam, Palakkad and other locations in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. They are opening more. The objective is to take opportunities to the hinterlands. This also helps conserve remote dialects and develop tier 3 and 4 cities.

• Cities for digital nomads: one example of this is Remote Portugal, where Portugal is marketing itself as the ultimate destination for remote workers in Europe. Similar initiatives will come up in India and some are already in the works.

• More regulation to protect remote workers. Pancholy says that overseas there are remote regulations in place where it is mandatory for companies to reimburse employees for WFH facilities and part of their utility costs. That apart, in an all-remote environment there are laws mandating ergonomics checks on employees’ remote workplaces and certifications to protect employers against legal action in case employees are injured at work.

Overall, organisations are built by people but driven by cost efficiencies. It is still unclear what the long-term cost implications of both models are. Many startups gave up their offices to save on rent. However, these costs were offset by setting up home offices, employee perks and shipping hardware. Similarly, for those who have not given up office space, upkeep charges remain the same or have decreased only marginally. In this article we have addressed the people aspect; the cost aspect will be better understood over time.

This is a two-part series on the ‘Varied Shades of Remote Work’ co-authored with Varun Choraria, Associate Product Marketer, Vymo Inc. Read the second part here.