Welcome to 2017. We all have huge comfortable homes that we mostly heat and cool all day. In this home, most of us have a desk or table, a chair, and an unimaginably fast computer, hooked wirelessly to the internet at unimaginably fast speeds. We also have cell phones with the same amazing properties. All this costs us many thousands of dollars a year. This cost is paid from our salary.
We also spend several thousand dollars a year (and risk our lives, and lose hundreds of hours) commuting to an office. The financial costs are paid from our salary.
The office is a building owned or leased by our employer at a cost of millions of dollars/yr. It has all the same expensive amenities of home: space, heat, AC, lighting, wifi, a bathroom (except with janitors paid to clean it), water, furnishings, trash service, insurance etc. The purpose is to provide a place where employees can hold meetings and push buttons. This cost directly reduces company profits and indirectly reduces our salaries because providing an office is part of the cost of having employees.
Question:
Which items are duplicative / wasteful?
Answers:
1)The office is a wasteful expense because all the same requirements are met by the employees' homes.
2) The commute is a wasteful expense because working from an office is not necessary.
Next question:
Why do employers insist upon employees' physical presence in office buildings, instead of insisting that they work from home and use web-based software for meetings, file sharing, communication, collaboration, projects, workflows, etc?
Possible answers:
1) The need for high-bandwidth communication in meetings, which is not currently supplied by our current blurry video conferencing and scratchy-ass conference phones.
2) Difficulty monitoring productivity of remote employees, due to a lack of remote reporting/monitoring systems.
3) Fear of software outages stopping people from working remotely, due to low-reliability of existing systems.
4) Higher costs of providing support services such as HR and IT remotely.
5) {is that it?}
Maybe you all can identify additional reasons. My point is, this list of reasons could become software requirements documentation for an integrated communication / collaboration toolset that could replace offices and end commuting for most office workers. If developers could solve the issues described above, they could sell companies the software they need to have an entirely work-from-home (WFH) workforce, and get rid of those costly office buildings. Employees would want to work at such companies, because it would save them thousands of dollars, save commute time, and eliminate the need to live in high-COL areas. Eventually, companies that stuck with old-school offices could not compete.
I don't see any technical barriers to producing a software system that would knock 20% of the cars off the road at rush hour. Do any of you?
The cultural change might take a generation, though.
Thinking about the latest MMM post about car-centric cities, this seems like the low-hanging fruit, and maybe a necessity. The reason for many of those cars is an outdated management model, based on assumptions of a slow, text-based internet. Those assumptions are already irrelevant, and yet people still drive to an office to write software. WTF?
Even if our cities and towns were denser, people would still be forced to commute back and forth to a usually-distant office. So we have to fix the management model to fix the commute and to fix the city.
I would hope Google, Apple, or Microsoft are working toward this solution while they're not developing self-driving commuter cars which don't solve the underlying problem, but maybe they're not.
What can we do to make WFH a reality for more office workers? Is there some barrier to adoption that I cannot identify? WHY DON'T WE ALREADY HAVE THIS?