In addition to TCS, companies including Twitter, Facebook, Shopify, Siemens, and State Bank of India have announced that they will make remote work permanent even after a vaccine is available. The Covid-19 crisis has opened senior leaders’ minds to the idea of adopting WFA for all or part of their workforces. They include the United States Patent and Trademark Office, or USPTO (which has several thousand WFA workers) Tulsa Remote Tata Consultancy Services, or TCS (a global IT services company that has announced a plan to be 75% remote by 2025) GitLab (the world’s largest all-remote company, with 1,300 employees) Zapier (a workflow automation company with more than 300 employees, none of them colocated, around the United States and in 23 other countries) and MobSquad (a Canadian start-up that employs WFA workers). To better understand how leaders can capture the upside of WFA while overcoming the challenges and avoiding negative outcomes, I’ve studied several companies that have embraced all- or majority-remote models. However, concerns persist regarding how WFA affects communication, including brainstorming and problem-solving knowledge sharing socialization, camaraderie, and mentoring performance evaluation and compensation and data security and regulation. Workers get geographic flexibility (that is, live where they prefer to), eliminate commutes, and report better work/life balance. Organizations can reduce or eliminate real estate costs, hire and use talent globally while mitigating immigration issues, and, research indicates, perhaps enjoy productivity gains. Without question, the model offers notable benefits to companies and their employees.
So now we face new questions: Are all-remote or majority-remote organizations the future of knowledge work? Is work from anywhere (WFA) here to stay? Individuals, teams, entire workforces, can perform well while being entirely distributed-and they have.
We learned that a great many of us don’t in fact need to be colocated with colleagues on-site to do our jobs. Personal technology and digital connectivity had advanced so far and so fast that people had begun to ask, “Do we really need to be together, in an office, to do our work?” We got our answer during the pandemic lockdowns. Before 2020 a movement was brewing within knowledge-work organizations.
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