Josh Harcus sells robots for a living. Robotic vacuum cleaners, to be specific — a model called the Whiz, which his employer, SoftBank Robotics America, released here last fall. The company, part of a group owned by the Japanese conglomerate, has deployed more than 6,000 of the robots around the world, including at Facebook headquarters. They look like something out of “Wall-E”: a rolling gray cylinder about thigh-high that trundles back and forth over carpets, sucking up dirt. Many of Harcus’s customers are major airports and hotel chains or the huge cleaning companies hired by them. SoftBank Robotics rents the units to clients, at an annual cost of $6,000 per machine. It’s an expensive lease, so all last fall and through the winter Harcus was traveling around, showing off the Whiz, pressing the flesh to convince customers of its value.

“Probably a good 80 percent of my time was on the road,” he says. He would pack up a robot, fly it into town, turn up at the hotel and then have it go to work in front of the staff. “It feels kind of like vacuum sales back in the day, like Hoover sales: You show up, throw dirt on the ground, scoop up the dirt — ‘How many do ya want?’” He had mastered a sales pitch filled with patter about industrial filth. (“Not to bore you with stats, but a foot of carpet can hold up to a pound of dirt,” he told me. “Honestly? Those are the nastiest hallways in the world.”)

When Covid-19 hit, Harcus’s company, like most firms across the country, sent its office staff home. Overnight, it essentially became a remote workplace. There was still a lot of demand for the robots, Harcus knew; he kept in touch online with cleaning firms, which told him that hotels were desperate to clean their premises even more intensely now, to convince guests that they could safely visit. But Harcus was stuck sitting on the gray couch in his small San Francisco apartment, trying to figure out a new challenge: How do you sell a robot to people who can’t touch it?

After discovering that executives were easy to reach — “They’re bored,” he says, “because they’re used to being in the field, cleaning” — Harcus began making five or six sales calls a day over Zoom, the videoconferencing app. Because he couldn’t show the Whiz to his prospective customers in person, his colleagues created a looping image of the robot zipping around a hotel, which he ran in Zoom’s “virtual background,” while his face and torso floated in front of it, as if he were a YouTube streamer talking over a video. Harcus, who is 31, with dark hair, dark-framed glasses and a wide smile he flashes readily, studied webcam technique to get his lighting right. (“We call it the ‘witness-protection-program look’ that you’re trying to avoid, where you look superdark,” he says.) And he came up with new patter. Talk about the weather was out, while commiserating over at-home child care was in: “I have a lot of screenshots running of babies crawling on people I’ve met.”

It worked; clients kept signing contracts. The day before we spoke in early May, Harcus said, he closed deals with six hotels. He shared with me a recording of a call with Michael Asnani, the operations manager at Ganir & Company, a firm that cleans hotel chains like Marriott and Sheraton. Asnani said he liked the idea of robots taking over the hallway vacuuming, because it would free his staff to do extra, trickier cleaning and linen-folding. Harcus pointed out that robots record data on the carpet area they’ve covered, helping prove to skittish hotels that surfaces had been scoured. “Nice, nice,” Asnani said. “That’s awesome.”

The success of Harcus’s remote sales surprised everyone at SoftBank Robotics. Kass Dawson, a marketing and communications executive there, had been worried that employees would slack off if they weren’t in the office. Instead, they all began working so nervously, even neurotically, that productivity rose, Dawson told me. The hours that employees previously spent commuting were now poured into sales or into training customers online.

Today Harcus can’t quite believe how time-intensive sales used to be. “We spent all this time, we flew robots out — we flew out,” he says. Yet usually the face-to-face demo was astonishingly brief. “Hours! Hours and days of prep! Just for a 10-minute discussion.” The customer would look at the robot, “and they were like: Wow, you’re right. It picks up dirt, and it keeps doing it. I don’t have any questions.” He laughs. “We traveled all for this. Like, that’s it?”

This has caused him and his colleagues to wonder what’s crazier: being forced to work from home, peering into a webcam all day? Or the way they used to work?

That question and others like it have been caroming around white-collar, office-work America for months now. In a May working paper, Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor in management science at M.I.T., and a group of academics reported survey results indicating that half of those who were employed before the pandemic were now working remotely. That’s a significant increase — pre-Covid-19, the paper estimates, the figure was about 15 percent. (In 2018, a U.S. Census Bureau survey found that just 5.3 percent of Americans worked from home full time.) It’s a situation deeply skewed toward the privileged: Many employees who work in health care, public transportation or the service sector, for instance, have never been given the option to work remotely, during the crisis or before. At companies where remote work is possible, though, many now expect it to continue for quite some time. As Kass told me, the remote experience at SoftBank Robotics is “absolutely going to change the way we think about as a company who needs to be in the office and not.”

The coronavirus crisis is forcing white-collar America to reconsider nearly every aspect of office life. Some practices now seem to be wastes of time, happily discarded; others seem to be unexpectedly crucial, and impossible to replicate online. For workers wondering right now if they’re ever going back to the office, the most honest answer is this: Even if they do, the office might never be the same.

The consulting firm Accenture has more than 500,000 employees worldwide. Before the pandemic, no more than 10 percent of them worked remotely on any given day. By the middle of March, though, nearly all of them had been sent home. Their use of Microsoft Teams — software that enables co-workers to talk, videoconference, whiteboard and chat by text with one another — erupted. The volume of video calls went up sixfold; the audio calls tripled, to 900 million minutes. “Just to put that in context, that’s 1,700 years of continuous audio,” Paul Daugherty, the firm’s chief technology officer, told me from his home office, where a huge ship’s wheel could be seen hanging over his bookcase (“I’m a nerdy sailor,” he joked).

Employees adapted quickly, he says: “They were using ironing boards as a stand-up desk.” But what astonished him was that even though they had lost the easy rapport of face-to-face office contact, productivity didn’t sink. It went up, when measured by several metrics — developer productivity, for example. “If you, six months ago, had said, ‘We’re going to give you a few weeks’ notice, and then you’re going to have your whole work force working from home,’ I would have said: ‘You’re insane. There’s no way it’s possible.’”

It’s difficult, in a pandemic, to judge how sustainable this surge in remote work is. Home life in a lockdown is much harder than usual. Many workers who live alone are experiencing enforced isolation as an emotional grind. Among those with young children, many are finding it exhausting to juggle child care, home schooling and their jobs. A senior communications specialist at TD Ameritrade, Ruby Gu, told me that she and her husband, a quality-assurance engineer, were taking turns hunkered down in their basement while the other looked after their 21-month-old and 4-year-old in the living room above (“two small children running around over my head right now”). A marketing director and parent of two toddlers told me her new hours were “9 to 4,” by which she meant 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., the only quiet hours she could find to work.

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