Remote Working News and Discussions

[caltrek]

Opponents of capitalism might object to this (see below) as a way of indoctrinating youth into the evils of capitalism at an early age. Others may see this as a way to promote early independence from large scale business enterprises. Your thoughts?

New Mighty E-Commerce Where Kids Operate Their Own Store Fronts
by Connio Loizos
July 2, 2021

(TechCrunch) Until children reach a certain age, enrichment programs are somewhat limited to school, sports, and camps, while money-making opportunities are largely non-existent.

Now, a year-old, L.A.-based startup called Mighty, a kind of Shopify that invites younger kids to open a store online, aims to partly fill the void. In fact, Mighty — led by founders Ben Goldhirsh, who previously founded GOOD magazine, and Dana Mauriello, who spent nearly five years with Etsy and was most recently an advisor to Sidewalk Labs — hopes to woo families with the pitch that it operates at the center of fintech, ed tech, and entertainment.

As often happens, the concept derived from the founders’ own experience. In this case, Goldhirsh, who has been living in Costa Rica, began worrying about his two daughters, who attend a small, six-person school. Because he feared they might fall behind their stateside peers, he began tutoring them when they arrived home, using Khan Academy among other software platforms. Yet the girls’ reaction wasn’t exactly positive.

“They were like, “F*ck you, dad. We just finished school and now you’re going to make us do more school?'”

Unsure of what to do, he encouraged them to sell the bracelets they’d been making online, figuring it would teach them needed math skills, as well as teach them about startup capital, business plans (he made them write one), and marketing. It worked, he says, and as he told friends about this successful “project-based learning effort,” they began to ask if he could help their kids get up and running.

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

Great article –

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -are-wrong

[Ken_J]

Opponents of capitalism might object to this (see below) as a way of indoctrinating youth into the evils of capitalism at an early age. Others may see this as a way to promote early independence from large scale business enterprises. Your thoughts?

New Mighty E-Commerce Where Kids Operate Their Own Store Fronts
by Connio Loizos
July 2, 2021

(TechCrunch) Until children reach a certain age, enrichment programs are somewhat limited to school, sports, and camps, while money-making opportunities are largely non-existent.

Now, a year-old, L.A.-based startup called Mighty, a kind of Shopify that invites younger kids to open a store online, aims to partly fill the void.

meh, I knew something like that was coming. I've said to family for years that too much our schooling systems are training employees in a system that is increasingly headed in a direction where companies can be run with enough automation and outsourcing that they can run a global business with a handful of people. so many imagine this means a horrible wasteland of no work, but fail to realize that anyone can own and run a company, and it can have a global reach without having to hire any employees or own a building. we should be training kids for a future of starting a business.

now that's not a glossy bright problem free direction by any stretch of the imagination. we're going to have to readjust how our economies, political systems and general life works for that to work. But we'd have to make equally big changes to get the current system to last a few years more.

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

For Women, Remote Work is a Blessing and a Curse
by Rani Molla
July 13, 2021

https://www.vox.com/recode/22568635/wom ... -work-home

Introduction:

(Vox) Women may be more likely to want to work from home than men. They’ve also had a harder time doing so, reporting higher rates of stress, depression, and sheer hours worked — especially if they have kids. This paradox is a result of women trying to do the best thing for their careers while also navigating an unfair role in society and at home. In other words, women need more flexible work arrangements, because women have more to do.

While the ability to work from home has been a godsend for working parents who were able to keep their children and jobs safe during the pandemic, it’s also exacerbated deeply ingrained gender inequality. Too often a crying toddler makes a cameo on a mother’s Zoom call and not a father’s. In a spare moment, women turn over the laundry while men don’t. Day-to-day scheduling, schooling, as well as decisions about their family’s health amid a global health crisis disproportionately fall to women.

And that’s only talking about women fortunate enough to be able to work from home — typically knowledge workers, whose relatively high-paying jobs have also afforded them a measure of physical safety. For many women, working from home isn’t an option at all. Women who have to work outside the home and care for children, especially without a partner at home, have to face a whole different set of challenging, and dangerous, circumstances.

Even before the pandemic, women were doing what sociologists describe as the “second shift,” where they complete an inordinate amount of household and caregiving chores after they’ve finished their paid labor. The pandemic has made things even worse, since much of the infrastructure that helps alleviate those tasks — schools, day care, elder care, cleaning services — has been off-limits. While women and men alike have worked from home, employed women are three times more likely than men to be their children’s main caregiver during this period. Additionally, telecommuting moms significantly increased the amount of housework they did while working from home (men didn’t).

[caltrek]

Survey Says...
by Rani Molla
July 17, 2021

https://www.vox.com/recode/22576811/rem ... s-approval

Extract:

(Vox) Most Americans approve of letting people work from home.
…
More than half of Americans worked from home earlier in the pandemic. And it went surprisingly well, with workers, their managers, and objective studies reporting that employees maintained or increased their levels of productivity.

So it makes sense that over the course of the pandemic, employees’ desire to continue working from home increased, and so did employers’ willingness to let them. But there’s still a gap between what employees want and what employers say they’re going to do, according to data from a study authored in part by Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom. Employees would like to work from home about half the time, while employers plan to let them do so about one day a week.

As the more acute effects of the pandemic are subsiding and the number of people who work remotely is declining, numerous surveys of employers — as well as a giant increase in the number of remote job listings — suggest that many Americans will continue to work from home at least some of the time even when the pandemic ends. What’s less clear is how often that will be.
…
Overall, though, working from home is a valuable perk, with the average employee saying it’s worth about 7 percent of their salary, according to Bloom’s study. It’s not worth much more than that. Our survey, which asked whether people would prefer the ability to work from home or to receive a 10 percent pay raise, found that two-thirds of people would go for the raise.

[caltrek]

The article below reminds me of a joke I read earlier in the year. A house maid calls from home and indicates that she is only interested in working remotely. There are just some types of work that are site specific. As the article below points out, this raise issues of equity. Perhaps, another reason why blue collar workers should be paid relatively more for their efforts.

Companies That Make People Return to the Office Will Lose Employees
by Rani Molla
July 21, 2021

https://www.vox.com/recode/22583285/com ... ey-harvard

Introduction:

(Vox) After a year-and-a-half hiatus, many offices will open back up in September. Most companies are asking that employees return on a hybrid basis, meaning they come into the office at least some of the time. But what exactly that will look like is uncertain.

What is certain is that more people will work from home than ever before, and this shift has the potential to disrupt everything from physical office space to the way people feel about work. And as US companies face a hiring crisis, companies that don’t offer remote work could find themselves at a significant disadvantage when it comes to recruiting new talent.

Recode talked with Tsedal Neeley, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and the author of Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere, about the many issues that are coming up as the nature of work changes.

The interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity. (See article linked above quote box for interview).

[Yuli Ban]

The Battles to Come Over the Benefits of Working From Home

Not having to commute was the equivalent of a big bonus for many employees. In the future, bosses may expect more hours in exchange for remote work, an economist says.

[raklian]

In the future, bosses may expect more hours in exchange for remote work, an economist says.

Which obviously will backfire, in a big way.

[wjfox]

The surprising toll open-plan offices have on our mental health

06 Jul 2021

If you’ve ever felt your noisy open-plan office makes you cranky and sends your heart racing, our new research shows you aren’t imagining it.

[...]

– New research suggests a significant relationship between open-plan office noise and physiological stress.
– The study found noise increased negative mood by 25% and increased the human sweat response by 34%.
– Chronically elevated levels of physiological stress are detrimental to mental and physical health.
– Negative moods are also likely to harm job satisfaction and commitment, increasing the likelihood of employees leaving.

[...]

One advantage of more employees working from home at least some of the time is a less crowded office, reducing both visual and auditory distractions.

Read more: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/ ... es-welfare

[wjfox]

Return to Office Hits a Snag: Young Resisters

July 26, 2021

David Gross, an executive at a New York-based advertising agency, convened the troops over Zoom this month to deliver a message he and his fellow partners were eager to share: It was time to think about coming back to the office.

Mr. Gross, 40, wasn’t sure how employees, many in their 20s and early 30s, would take it. The initial response — dead silence — wasn’t encouraging. Then one young man signaled he had a question. “Is the policy mandatory?” he wanted to know.

Yes, it is mandatory, for three days a week, he was told.

Thus began a tricky conversation at Anchor Worldwide, Mr. Gross’s firm, that is being replicated this summer at businesses big and small across the country. While workers of all ages have become accustomed to dialing in and skipping the wearying commute, younger ones have grown especially attached to the new way of doing business.

[...]

In a recent survey by the Conference Board, 55 percent of millennials, defined as people born between 1981 and 1996, questioned the wisdom of returning to the office. Among members of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, 45 percent had doubts about going back, while only 36 percent of baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, felt that way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/26/busi ... rkers.html

[caltrek]

The surprising toll open-plan offices have on our mental health

I am so happy folks are starting to notice that, and that it was not just me. I worked in what I presume is meant by an "open-plan" office and found it to be a miserable experience. Part of being relocated into such an office was the loss of my own personal private office. Much preferable, largely for the reasons discussed in the article that followed the cited title. I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of the additional walls needed for such privacy was more than made up for in increased productivity. I suppose working from home would be even better, assuming that workers could avoid the distractions that being at home might create.

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

Forcing people to return to offices is wrongheaded, says Starmer

Labour leader tells Guardian flexible working is one of few good things to have come out of pandemic

Thu 12 Aug 2021 16.56 BST

Ministers, civil service leaders and employers are “wrongheaded” to be trying to make people come back to the office against their will, and should not be standing in the way of progress around working from home, Keir Starmer has said.

Speaking to the Guardian, the Labour leader said it was wrong for people to be forced back into offices when it was the government that had asked them to work from home in the first place, especially if they were being threatened with pay cuts or the loss of London weighting from their salaries.

He said that this “misses a deeper understanding of what the pandemic has done to change our society”, as the move to more flexibility had been one of the few good things to have come out of the last 18 months.

“I just think it’s wrongheaded,” he said. “People were asked to work at home. And they did, and they worked very hard. The idea now that people are being threatened, if they don’t come in when there’s no good reason – it’s wrong.”

He said it had been learned in the pandemic that “there are many jobs where you can do them at home and people work very well and hard from home, we’ve absolutely destroyed the myth of people working at home [are] not really working”.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... -from-home



Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian

[wjfox]

State Street, which manages $3.5 trillion, is closing its New York offices

Mon August 16, 2021

State Street, one of the world's largest asset managers, is shutting down its two midtown Manhattan offices as the Wall Street firm embraces a hybrid working model.

The move by State Street (STT), the company behind the "Fearless Girl" statue outside the New York Stock Exchange, underscores the pressure facing the commercial real estate market as the pandemic changes the way people work.

State Street, which manages about $3.5 trillion, is closing both of its offices located near Rockefeller Center. The move will impact approximately 500 employees who previously worked there, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/16/business ... index.html

[caltrek]

Working from Home While Your Boss Watches on Video
by Jim Hightower
August 18, 2021

https://otherwords.org/working-from-hom ... -on-video/

Introduction:

(Other Words) If you’re a corporate employee, you know that something unpleasant is afoot when top executives are suddenly issuing statements about how committed they are to their employees, making sure that all of them are treated with dignity and respect.

For example, the PR chief of a global outfit named Teleperformance, one of the world’s largest call centers, was recently going on and on about how “We value our people and their well-being, safety, and happiness.”

Why did the corporation feel such a desperate need to proclaim its virtue? Because it’s been caught in a nasty scheme to spy on its own workers.

Teleperformance — a $6.7 billion global behemoth that handles customer service calls for companies like Amazon, Apple, and Uber — saves money on overhead by making most of its 380,000 employees around the world work from their own homes.

That can be a convenience for many workers, but a new corporate policy first imposed in March on thousands of its workers in Colombia is an Orwellian nightmare.

[wjfox]

Remote work may now last for two years, worrying some bosses

Aug. 22, 2021 5:30 am ET

With the latest wave of return-to-office delays from Covid-19, some companies are considering a new possibility: Offices may be closed for nearly two years.

That is raising concerns among executives that the longer people stay at home, the harder or more disruptive it could be to eventually bring them back.

Many employees developed new routines during the pandemic, swapping commuting for exercise or blocking hours for uninterrupted work. Even staffers who once bristled at doing their jobs outside of an office have come to embrace the flexibility and productivity of at-home life over the past 18 months, many say. Surveys have shown that enthusiasm for remote work has only increased as the pandemic has stretched on.

“If you have a little blip, people go back to the old way. Well, this ain’t a blip,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer of Intel Corp. , whose company has benefited from the work-from-home boom. He predicts hybrid and remote work will remain the norm for months and years to come. “There is no going back.”

Return dates have been postponed repeatedly. On Thursday, Apple Inc. told corporate employees that its planned return to U.S. offices would be delayed until at least January. Companies such as Chevron Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. have postponed September returns, while tech companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. have pushed them to early next year. Lyft Inc. said it would call employees back to its San Francisco headquarters in February, about 23 months after the ride-sharing company first closed its offices.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/remote-wor ... 1629624605