Welcome to the new world order

Welcome to the new world order

This morning whilst out on my morning run, which I am really making the most of during the current lockdown, ensuring I maintain my social distancing, I was listening to the Sam Harris podcast Waking up. On this podcast, his guest was Matt Mullenweg who most of us have probably never heard of but most of having heard of the companies that he has set up with the likes of Wordpress which power something like 36% of all websites on the entire world wide web. He runs a company behind the scenes called automatic, which is a distributed workspace with 1,200 collaborators working from ‘remote’ locations in more than 50 countries. 

The podcast was fascinating not just from listening to what Matt had to say and his experiences but even more so from the fact that Matt and his company have been working efficiently and effectively whilst making a profit for the past few years. This is super interesting in the fact that many companies are having to have many of their workers working from home. 

If you think about the benefits it brings, it’s really a no brainer. Why would you not have where possible all of your workers working from home? Well, let’s take a look at the arguments and then address the benefits to see whether or not the future should include more companies adapting to having their employees working from home.

Firstly there obviously is a huge market in office rental space and retail units. But if you take a closer look at the entire housing market, housing and residential properties are in huge demand and there is a constant shortage or properties yet even during an economic boom often office space is always lagging behind and there are many more office spaces to rent than there are businesses, leaving many office spaces empty. Therefore a simple pivot in the industry whereby people working from home and converting many office spaces into residential units would solve a huge problem. 

Companies fear workers would become less productive if they didn’t have a manager to oversee them during working hours. This was discussed during the podcast and I agree with what was said. It is much easier to hide in an office work situation and do very little work over time whereas in a home environment where progress is necessary it is actually much harder to hide and not submit the work. Plus with the world so interconnected and multiple different time zones, how is the standard 9 to 5 even applicable? 

Many of your employees could become progress and activity orientated instead of hourly based. The typical business hierarchy with vice presidents and deputy managers and the like would cease to be necessary and companies could flatten the work structure whereby using technology companies would become much leaner and productive focusing on outcomes and results rather than people working for the sakes of working. 

This does not mean that you would require less employees but merely your output would be much greater. There is of course the effect of the security staff and workers that are currently used to maintain the facilities of all the current offices. Well I live in a large residential complex and we have security and cleaning staff, so although there may be a drop in employment in this sector there are also greater opportunities. 

There are most likely many more excuses I mean arguments as to why it is not feasible to have employees work from home but let’s take a look at the clear benefits. 

Since the beginning of the lockdown transport in the Capital has dropped massively to less than 25% of its usual peak. Air transport has also dropped to nearly zero. This has led to some unforeseen effects such as a massive reduction in pollution and clearer air. Not all companies in the future can or would like to have many of their staff work from home but the benefits to just the environment are incredible in such a short amount of time. 

How much does your company currently pay in office rent and other facilities costs? How much of this is completely unnecessary? How many vice-presidents, deputy managers, department managers do you pay? How much of this could either reduce your bottom line, spent on improving your technology or simply could be better used to pay your staff. 

One thing we do know is that the future is going to be difficult and whether people like to acknowledge it or not this crisis has changed the world in many unforeseen ways. If you as a company are not seriously looking at ways in which you can improve and progress into the next decade then you may find you are left behind. The old way of thinking is dead. Looking for fancy offices in prime locations with wonderful furniture in their lobby is going to be a thing of the past. 

In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.

Albert Einstein 

What will you do to adapt to the future?