Behold a twist in the tale of remote work that no one saw coming: Now that coronavirus lockdowns are ending region-by-region around the world, some people may need to convince their bosses to let them stop working from home.
Office employees have spent years fine-tuning the argument in favor of work-from-anywhere policies, and publications including this one have shared countless posts with advice for winning over a skeptical boss. Now the coronavirus pandemic may turn the whole debate upside down.
That’s assuming more companies follow the example of Cloudflare, the cyberprotection and web infrastructure company, which plans to comply with social-distancing guidelines by reopening with just a fraction of its employees working in person at its 13 offices around the world. The company will decide who goes back first by reviewing petitions to do so.
And what might motivate these employees to make such a request when the virus remains a threat everywhere? “We are learning as we go, but it’s like, ‘I have three roommates and I can’t do a customer call and I’m in sales,’” says Cloudflare co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn. Or, she adds, “it could just be that people have a really stressful situation at home.” But they’ll first need to have their request approved by the company.
“We’re trying to understand why people want to go back and see if we can do it in a safe way,” Zatlyn says.
What could go wrong
Although it’s still early days in the reopening phase of this pandemic, we do know that Cloudflare is not alone with its methodology. Rob Falzon, vice chairman at Prudential Financial, told Quartz that about 2% of the insurance firm’s employees are in critical roles that can’t be done remotely, and they’ll be the first people invited back to the office. But “to go beyond that during this intermediate phase, there’s a process,” he said, “and it has to be approved at a pretty senior level.”
On the surface, this approach sounds sensible and sympathetic to the needs and preferences of employees, whether they wish to stay home because they like the flexibility or are nervous about commuting, or whether they long for a proper desk and reliable wifi or hope to escape to the office the minute they can restart their childcare arrangements.
However, the downsides of asking people to argue for a spot in the new, sparsely populated office are apparent, too. Namely, there’s a risk that such a policy could nudge people to share information about their private life that could leave them feeling singled out or overexposed. Or, if people are of the belief that being in the office is ultimately beneficial for their career in the long run, because employees who are visible to executives are most likely to be promoted, workers may be incentivized to push for a desk in the elite club they envision is forming at the firm’s headquarters.
Meanwhile, someone who doesn’t join the jockeying for a spot—someone who perhaps can’t raise their hand because of life circumstances—might have to worry about looking less loyal or ambitious.
Questions about commuting, when a company isn’t providing a safe service, only complicate the matter further. Without access to transportation that feels sufficiently safe, that allows commuters to spread out and reduce the risk of contracting the coronavirus from a fellow traveler, an employee may have little choice about returning or not. In the US, where even access to a car is a privilege that often falls along racial lines, white employees will enjoy a greater advantage. In that case, who goes back may not be representative of the company’s workforce, which could lead to a lack of racial and socioeconomic diversity among leadership ranks in the future, if this in-between stage of the recovery lasts long enough.