How a Recession Could Weaken the Work-From-Home Revolution

Many employers are going to struggle through the transition to hybrid work. If they push too hard to get workers to come into the office, some people will just leave to preserve their independence. If employers fail to build any kind of tangible corporate culture, a lot of workers, feeling no sense of real community among their colleagues, will swi... See more

Working from home, our connection to the office weakens, and our connection to the world outside the office expands. At the kitchen counter, hunched over your computer, you are as close to the people and communities on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram as you are to the Slack messages and chats of your bosses and colleagues. By degrees, the remote e... See more

As people realize that their connection to the office is virtual, more Americans may take on side gigs and even start their own companies.

Indeed, most of Corporate America punished the women and men who opted to work from home, believing a dated lie that one can’t be as productive or an effective member of a team without sharing the physical world with others. To make the sale, you had to break bread with the customer. To hire the employee, you had to go out for drinks. Yet, in a dig... See more

The traditional office was probably doomed anyway. Then a global shutdown changed everything we thought we knew about work, including where and when it needed to take place.

Many people are now seeing how technological progress has enabled a world where work can be divorced from the office, and married to the home. We may have understood this in theory before, but now we have been forced to see it in action. And for the most part, the technological infrastructure has been sound enough to support this shift at a fairly ... See more