A year or so ago, I reflected on my college professors’ practice of posting office hours so that we could go in and chat about our courses or anything related. In the same thought, I considered my team and the fact that they are scattered through X states in five timezones.
If we were all working in the same office building, I probably would have reserved an hour or two each week where anyone in my organization can stop in to talk about anything: current issues, projects, career planning, whatever.
Last year, I started weekly office hours – a virtual meeting that lasts 90 mins. Everyone in my org is invited, and attendance is optional. The purpose: my being available to answer questions, offer guidance, voice opinions, and so on. It’s also an opportunity for catching up on non-work topics as time allows.
In my tenure at McCaw Cellular Communications, later known as AT&T Wireless Services, I was placed on a task force in 2000 to study all aspects of working from home as a part of the company’s objective of shuttering numerous office buildings around the USA. We planned on identifying thousands of corporate workers who would work in their residences full-time, and developed a detailed plan on how to properly execute this vision from every conceivable perspective.
In this task force, we studied all aspects of WFH and had representatives from IT, Legal, HR, enterprise risk management (me), and others. The areas we explored deeply included:
Being a WFH employee – we identified the characteristics of a WFH employee, what it would take, what the employee needed where they live (a quiet and ideally-dedicated space), whether they would be distracted, and whether they had the discipline to work an 8 hour day when many things begged for attention at home.
Managing WFH employees – we explored how managers would manage WFH employees, since there would be apparent differences, particularly if they lived so far from an office that they rarely came in for anything. We identified the need to manage employees by measuring work products and milestones, versus just showing up.
Being a WFH manager – we explored the concept of managers being WFH themselves, and how they would manage from their remote perspective.
Information Technology – we developed an architecture for communications – what equipment would need to be at home and how it would be remotely managed. This was in the era before cable modems and DSL. The web was still quite new, and many business applications were still client-server and now designed for large numbers of dial-up users. We also considered voice telephony in this architecture.
Security and Privacy – our planning considered both physical security (theft prevention, confidentiality of printed matter) and cybersecurity.
Workplace Safety – we explored employment law, company personnel policies, and other legal aspects of employees whose workplaces were also their residences.
Insurance – we considered company and personal homeowners’/renters’ insurance and attempted to discern the boundaries and the rules.
This project, interleaved with many others, took more than a year to complete. It proved to be valuable for me in the future.
We did this in the era before videoconferencing, or should I say “affordable” videoconferencing. Our organization had numerous room systems that were ridiculously expensive, and did not scale down to the individual worker economically.
I joined a B2B SAAS company in 2005 as the global thought leader in cybersecurity and physical security, and was 20% WFH. There were few WFH employees in this company, and my background in WFH helped me navigate it successfully.
Fast-forward four years, when the SARS and MERS outbreaks threatened to become global pandemics, our larger customers asked us what our pandemic contingency plan was and whether we were prepared to execute it if a pandemic occurred. I responded by leading the effort to build a pandemic contingency plan. Not surprisingly, it mirrored guidance developed later by the CDC and WHO. This, too, would be valuable for me later.
In 2015, I changed employers and was 100% WFH. I thrived in this environment and was fortunate to have a separate, dedicated space for both my day job and my writing career.
In late 2019, having been immersed in pandemic planning, I recognized the early signs of what would later be known as the COVID-19 pandemic. In four days, I wrote a book summarizing all I had learned in the prior two decades and prepared to publish it on March 18, 2020. It was to be called WFH: Succeeding With Remote Work Through a Focus on Technology and Culture.
My employer said no. My book would have cut into the company’s revenue, as the company was also advising firms’ preparation and response for the highly-anticipated pandemic. So, this book sits on an SSD on my laptop, unknown to the world. It’s no longer relevant today, as anyone could publish an all-perspectives WFH playbook by just looking around to see how everyone else has already done it.
This was not an entirely wasted effort. I’ve used material in the book to help my current employer (where I am a WFH director, managing WFH managers who manage WFH employees) and to ensure we all succeed. The effort also gave me the experience I would need in 2022 when I published The Art of Writing Technical Books: The Tools, Techniques, and Lifestyle of a Published Author.
Chuck Nolan, after four years of WFH (source: Dreamworks Pictures)
Historically and collectively, the COVID-19 pandemic was one of the most impactful events in a generation. Entire industries were uprooted, resulting in significant shifts in how and where people live and work. The work-from-home (WFH) phenomenon was wrenching for some, welcome by others, and transformational for all. Workers and companies adjusted and continued to operate as best as they could, and WFH became the new normal for entire industries and professions.
Chuck Nolan readjusting to normal life (source: Dreamworks Pictures)
Return to the office (RTO) has been disruptive for companies and workers. Management in some organizations have insisted that personnel plan on working in offices part-time and full-time. We’ve seen the entire spectrum of compliance and non-compliance, and we’ve seen large organizations order a full- or part-time RTO and then backtrack when employees objected.
Workers are finding the transition from WFH to RTO nearly as disruptive in 2022 as WFH was in 2020. The routines established in WFH have become normal, routine, and comfortable. In many organizations, workers can choose whether to return to the office, continue to work from home, or adopt a hybrid arrangement.
WFH is probably here to stay. During the pandemic lockdown, many organizations began recruiting workers from wider geographic areas who live hundreds and even thousands of miles from workplaces. Organizations have discovered that they can compete for workers across larger areas. Workers have found that they can live almost anywhere and do their jobs effectively in full-time, permanent WFH arrangements.
It’s difficult to know whether a gradual shift back to in-office work will occur, or if work-from-home will be a permanent fixture in today’s workforce. Time will tell.
When we all worked in corporate offices, our enterprises (if they were large enough) developed DR plans for power and Internet connectivity, enough that it took a significant event to take a workforce offline. Through economy of scale, workers were all covered by DR plans for power, Internet, and environmental controls, resulting in a decent level of resilience.
APC UPS for laptop and WiFi
But now that many of us are home, our DR is not what it should be. In our home offices, we lack multiple ISP and power feeds. In almost every respect, our critical infrastructure at home (power, Internet, environmentals) are N+0: if our power goes out, or our Internet goes out, or if our heat or A/C go out, there are probably no backup systems.
We are each responsible for our own DR in our home offices. If we want resilient power, we need a UPS and/or a generator. If we want resilient Internet, we have to have a fallback plan. If we want resilient heat or A/C, we must have another source of heating or cooling.
We live in the country, where there’s no landline, no cable, and no fiber. We’ve lived in WA for decades, and are accustomed to extended power outages due to severe weather events. For us, Internet outages are infrequent, but they happen, particularly at harvest time when farm equipment parks in front of our fixed wireless antenna, or when our local ISP is doing maintenance on network elements such as patching routers.
Fixed Wireless Internet Antenna
Here are the details of my primary and backup plans:
Resource
Primary
Backup
Internet
Fixed Wireless WiFi (12Mbps/12Mbps)
iPhone tethering (3Mbps/3Mbps)
Power
Utility Power
Cyberpower UPS for Internet POE (5 hrs) APC UPS for WiFi and Laptop Computer (6 hrs Honda EU2200 Generator Future: 10 circuit transfer switch + larger generator + EMP circuit protection
Our utility power does go out from time to time. Since living here in our present home since mid-2020, we have had one outage lasting ~30 hours, and three outages lasting 1-3 hours. In the more prolonged outage, we fired up our larger generator (not pictured) to run our freezers and charge the UPSs.
Our source of water is a well that is on our property. When the power goes out, we have no water. For this reason, we have purchased a transfer switch that can enable us to run our well using our larger generator (I doubt that the little Honda can power it).
Gas generator
All of these measures have given me confidence that we will have power and Internet for short-term outages. For longer-term outages, the larger generator and transfer switch will enable us to run water and remain in our home for as long as we have generator fuel.
Since I do not work in a corporate office in a commercial building, I must implement my own resilience strategy. No one else is going to do it for me.
Smartphone WiFi hotspot
From a cybersecurity perspective, I’m pretty confident in our setup, but I’m not going to go into details here. We have a commercial NG-Firewall protecting our entire network, advanced anti-malware, secure DNS from cleanbrowsing.org, and other safeguards.
As we turn the corner in the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies are beginning to bring their workers back on site. This return to the workplace phenomenon is starting a conversation at the worker level, the company level, and in society as a whole.
Many companies have succeeded with the transition to WFH. It may have been awkward at first, but millions of workers have tasted a better quality of life without a commute, and without many other related costs of money and time. Many workers do not want to give up WFH, now that they’ve seen that they can be effective while working from home.
I’ve been part-time WFH for almost twenty years, but I’ve also had jobs where I was commuting three to four hours each day, so I’m intimately familiar with both ends of the spectrum, as well as the middle. I am working today for an Alaska-based company while living in Washington State, so I’m a living subject in the great WFH experiment. And in the nine months since starting this job, I’ve hired workers on my team who live in Idaho, Texas, Arizona, Washington, and, yes, Alaska.
For workers, WFH represents a savings of hard money in terms of vehicle, mass transit, work wardrobe, lunches out, but also expenses to equip and maintain a home office. The soft benefits include commute time, quality of life, but also there’s the ability to work in person with colleagues and develop better in-person relationships than can be done only on video calls.
One can draw up a long list of WFH pros and cons. For most of 2020, we had no choice. But from now on, better organizations realize that WFH has many benefits:
Workers often put in more hours.
Organizations’ office space expenses are lower.
Employers can draw from a significantly larger labor pool when looking for new employees.
Existing staff have the freedom to relocate their families to other communities while keeping their same jobs.
Organizations unwilling to consider WFH workers will have a more difficult time finding qualified workers, as they will be drawing from a far smaller labor pool. Employers will have to pay more for people to work in the office to compensate for their additional time and hard expenses – AND employers will have the added cost of providing workspace for those workers they require to be on-site (and those workers who want to). Many workers will be willing to work for less if they can WFH as it is a fair exchange for a better quality of life.
One thing is for sure: the WFH genie will not be going back into the bottle. Ever.
Peter H. Gregory 