New alarm bells ringing tonight on the Corona virus outbreak in this
country. Doctors say the virus is spread through droplets when someone
coughs or sneezes.
And I think the business community, it's in their interest that people
actually stay home and stop the spread.
For a business that can allow more employees to telecommute, we want you
to do that. Hey, my name is Lindsay Jacobson.
I'm a senior producer with CNBC.
We've been working from home for about a week now and it's going OK.
I'm very lucky in that I have a separate space where I can work.
My partner works at home full time.
So I've been invading his space a little bit, but so far so good.
I did some research on how the U.S.
economy can perform while we're all dealing with the coronavirus outbreak
and how productive America the American workforce can be while working
remotely. 50 to 60 percent of the workforce holds a job at least partially
compatible with remote work.
As of 2017, the U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated the civilian labor workforce at about
160 million employees.
If 56 percent of those people are eligible for remote work, that means
over eighty nine million people could potentially work from home.
Of course, that leaves out 44 percent of the American workforce, but does
provide alternative opportunities for a lot of people.
For us, the obvious choice was to really strongly encourage our employees
to work from home. And the technology is here now that enables remote
working to be really, really effective and productive.
While not all employees are eligible for remote work, the emptying of
offices and mass transit limits exposure for those who still need to go to
the office like doctors, cleaning staff, police officers, firefighters,
gig workers and other service related professionals.
With the vaccine for COVID-19 still in the distant future, U.S.
companies are individually taking steps to enable their remote workforces.
It's been really interesting to see the spike in usage that has actually
followed, unfortunately followed the spread of Coronavirus.
With the Corona virus pandemic shuttering offices nationwide, Can employers
and employees adapt to a culture of remote work?
Can the U.S. work from home?
With many states, including Washington, New York and Florida and the
federal government declaring states of emergencies, many companies are
attempting to follow the trend of allowing remote work.
However, telecommuting, remote work and working from home, which all entail
similar experiences, have been on the rise for a while.
There's a lot of different things.
It's called telecommuting.
Remote working. The future of work.
It's absolutely something that is gaining in momentum.
The the federal government has been required to every employee to work at
home to the maximum extent possible.
Since the year 2001.
Regular work at home has grown one hundred and seventy three percent since
2005.
The drivers tend to change with the economy, with whatever is going on in
the world. So during a recession, it was about saving money.
And that's what's wrong with driving CEOs to it.
They found that if people were not in the building, they didn't have to
pay as much for real estate.
Right now, it's about attraction and retention of talent.
It's a talent shortage and people want flexibility in some cases more than
salary. This past week, it has been continuity of operations and the
Coronavirus. Over the course of the last really couple of years, we have
been moving to a more distributed workforce.
Gallup State of the American Workplace study found that 43 percent of
employees work remotely with some frequency.
Global Workplace Analytics found that five million employees or 3.6
percent of the workforce works at home at least half of the time.
Research indicates that during a five day workweek, working remotely for
two to three days is the most productive.
That gives employees two to three days of meetings and interaction and
collaboration with an opportunity to focus on just the work for the other
two to three days of the week.
I think there's really four things that's driving it.
Number one is, frankly, an increased focus on sustainability.
People in the United States who wanted to work from home and that's about
80 percent of the population say they'd like to do it at least some of the
time. Did it at least two and a half days, a week, half time, it would be
the greenhouse gas equivalent of taking the entire New York state
workforce off the road permanently.
The other thing that it does is obviously on the cost side and there's a
lot of costs associated with business travel and so it helps companies
address the costs. But we calculated that a typical company saves about
eleven thousand dollars per half time telecommuter, somebody that's doing
it two and a half days, a week per year.
However, not all companies agree that working remotely cuts costs.
Cost savings has never been a driver for us to distribute our workforce.
If you reduce food service, for example, because not as many people are
coming into the office, what I think that will allow us to do is shift
resources to allowing more and more support for people in their home
office setup where you might save costs from an office perspective.
I think if you're going to do it the right way, you've got to reinvest in
other things. There's another interesting thing that the millennials are
not the ones that are working at home, but they're the ones that asked for
it. I would say the thing that we've seen in the last two years would be a
change in the workforce itself, almost demanding workplace flexibility,
the ability to work where they want to work, when they want to work.
That workplace flexibility has also allowed for a more diversified talent
pool. It's been more about talent and flexibility and being able to
attract and retain the right folks for us.
So getting kind of spreading our our teams out, not being as concentrated
in San Francisco for a number of reasons and part to tap into broader
pools of talent across the globe and not just have, you know, hire people
who are only willing to work in San Francisco.
New England and mid-Atlantic region employers are most likely to offer
telecommuting options and full time employees are four times more likely
to have remote work options than part time employees.
A typical remote worker is college educated, at least forty five years old
and earns an annual salary of fifty eight thousand dollars while working
for a company with over 100 employees.
A lot of people think it's the millennials.
A lot of people think it's moms.
Both of those are wrong.
It's about equal men and women.
But it is skewed that the older, more experienced, more tenured, higher
salary end of the spectrum.
Actually, it's a little bit poller.
There's there's there's this area at the very low end of the spectrum
below income call center agents, that kind of thing and then the sort of
senior managers.
There used to be a perception that only particular jobs are able to work
from home because everyone was essentially coming back using applications
that were sitting behind a firewall.
Now, a lot of our applications are available just through an Internet
connection in the cloud.
As businesses evaluate how to properly protect their employees from the
recent COVID-19 outbreak, many are basing their decisions on guidance from
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC.
The CDC recommends employees stay home from work until the criteria to
discontinue home isolation are met.
Employers should also ensure that sick leave policies are flexible and
consistent with public health guidance.
The CDC recommends that employers not require a doctor's note for
employees who are sick as health care provider offices may be extremely
busy. The CDC also recommends employers maintain flexible policies to
allow employees to care for sick family members.
Employees who come to work sick should be separated from other employees
and sent home immediately.
The CDC is a premier public health agency, and so it's important that
they're able to to spread their recommendations appropriately.
We have to make it possible for people to follow those recommendations.
To help employees follow the guidelines for social distancing, many
companies are implementing their business continuity plans, which
incorporate a work from home policy.
Companies like Twitter are requesting all employees work from home.
So people are just really thinking thoughtfully about how to get the same
the same work done in a different way.
Some companies are instilling a bi weekly work from home policy.
In that case, at least a portion of the workforce has their exposure
limited while work is still able to continue.
Depending on an employee's role, companies are allowing remote work and
testing its feasibility.
We're actually doing a rolling shutdown of offices around the world and
testing stress testing, if you will, to make sure we are we have business
continuity in place that we don't have cause disruptions for our customers
or our employees. Remote work seems like a logical precaution for many
companies that employ people in the digital economy.
However, not all Americans have access to the Internet at home or work in
industries that require in-person work.
According to the Pew Research Center, roughly three quarters of American
adults have broadband Internet service at home.
However, the study found that racial minorities, older adults, rural
residents and people with lower levels of education and income are more
likely to not have broadband service at home.
In addition, one in five American adults only access the Internet through
their smartphone and do not have traditional broadband access.
We did an analysis of several years ago looking at the Bureau of Labor
Statistics data in terms of what industries have components of remote work
now and it was virtually every industry so construction, agriculture.
Now there's some component of many, if not most jobs now that involve
sitting in front of a computer or talking on the phone or whatever.
I mean, certainly there are some industries that are leading the tech
industry, of course, health care might surprise you, banking and finance.
However, there are many jobs that simply cannot be performed outside of the
office. So allowing employees who can work remotely to do so protects
those employees who need to commute to the office.
For health care providers, for educational schools, hospitals,
municipalities and non-profits dealing with Coronavirus.
We're actually giving away what we call emergency remote work kits, which
enable those companies to stand up workers really quickly.
This means LogMeIn, like other organizations, is offering its software
services, including video conferencing and I.T.
support, free of charge to eligible groups during the Coronavirus
pandemic. Other digital connecting sites like Slack and Skype have always
had free versions available.
This outbreak is testing the abilities of both software and broadband
companies. Many people also do not enjoy working from their own home, from
their own couch. They can find it hard to concentrate, difficult to work
in their home environment, be easily distracted, and have members of their
family or neighbors not respect their time.
Of course, all of these are heightened by the outbreak.
Children have been kept home from schools and many employees agreed to
work from home without much notice or time to prepare.
We wouldn't have rolled it out in this accelerated pace.
We would have taken it in more of a tiered approach and wouldn't have
rolled out for virtual on boarding, for example, until we had it in a
place where we thought it was in great shape or better shape.
That said, I do think this is just accelerating what the direction we were
going anyway. Coronavirus is going to be a tipping point.
We plodded along at about 10 percent growth a year for the last 10 years.
But I foresee that this is going to really accelerate the trend.
Adapting to working remotely or from home can be an adjustment for both
employees and managers.
I think one of the most important things is having a door, having a place
in your home where you can close the door, lock out the kids, lock out the
dogs and just concentrate.
You have to be with comfortable technology.
You know, knowing how to not just not just use go to meetings or Skype,
but, you know, all of the tools because you're gonna be talking to people
that are using different platforms and you can't let that scare you.
So there's there always is that fear, you know?
Are you working or are you doing what are you doing what you're supposed
to be doing? And so stay in touch with your boss and your colleagues more.
You need to replace those those water cooler conversations with with
greater rigor around management and engagement.
You have to force yourself to make sure that you're connecting with your
team every day.
There's managers who are skeptical that are now starting to believe.
I think there there are employees that weren't sure that they could be
productive or show up the right way if they were they were remote that
now. Like that flexibility would want to continue it.
When you have this kind of environment where everybody is remote, you feel
like you're on this kind of level playing field.
We've actually seen companies have a sight leader for remote workers.
Someone who represents the needs and expectations of remote workers to
management. If they're going to work hard enough office, they're going to
work hard at home. If they're going to slack off in an office, they're
going to slack off at home. I don't think people fundamentally change who
they are as a human just because they're working from home.
Telecommuting all comes down to trust.
Study after study, academic or practical, shows that they're more
productive. In fact, they give back about 60 percent of the time they
would otherwise spent commuting to working back.
One of the biggest problems for people who work at home is turning it off.
At some point we will return to normal and once the country wide stress
test of remote work is over, some company cultures may change to be more
open to telework.
I don't think we'll go back to the same way we used to operate.
I really don't.