Now that telecom and technology are covered, let’s look at the consortium of inventions, economic and culture shifts that brought the inevitable dawn of remote work. 

Knowledge-Based Work 

By 1920, electricity gained common usage and factories started utilizing it as a cheap and efficient source of power.  

This invention enabled faster mass production and in more ways than one, contributed heavily to the beginning of automation in factories.  

During the period between 1930 and 40, feedback controllers were applied to manufacturing processes and automation became a new reality – production with minimal need for human touch. 

Taking up factory jobs, at this time, was almost common. Manufacturing jobs were almost 26 per cent of the United States employment. 

But come 1950, the way information was exchanged started shifting rapidly. This was because of inventions like the hard disk, photocopier, optical disks, mobile communication, cloud computing and hypertext software. 

Naturally, the need for roles that use and manage the technology increased. This led to a decline in factory workers and the rise of the ‘while-collar worker’ (a term coined by Upton Sinclair way back in 1920).  

In 1960, Fritz Machlup, an Austrian-American economist confirmed that the period was marked by a sharp drop in factory workers and employees and knowledge-based workers increased.  

By the 1970s, the personal computer had entered the workplace and offices had started in full swing.  

After 1970, workplace technology and knowledge-based jobs only advanced and accommodated each other. 

It was not that land and physical labour lost their importance but knowledge and information became key drivers.  

In 1992, Peter Drucker wrote about knowledge jobs again and explained them very simply, “.…specialized knowledge by itself produces nothing. It can become productive only when it is integrated into a task. And that is why the knowledge society is also a society of organizations: the purpose and function of every organization, business and non-business alike, is the integration of specialized knowledge into a common task.”  In the article, he also said that knowledge will now remain the primary resource for individuals and entire economies (one more example of his prescience)

Consumer Culture  

Even though there was a short-lived wave of intensifying consumption patterns, consumer culture took off properly after World War II. People were still reeling from the deprivation and lack the Great Depression had subjected them to.  

Radio and television became the main mediums of advertisements for products, and corporates and companies utilized them strategically. 

As time progressed, consumerism became an important motivator for people to take up jobs and earn not just a living, but a living that satisfies their desires and makes room for more. This inevitably led to chasing education and Knowledge-based work.

Capitalism 

Consumer culture cannot be discussed completely without the mention of capitalism, or more particularly consumer capitalism.  

Although debatable, the theory claims an intricate connection between a capitalist society and its consumer culture. It establishes a complex cycle between capitalism pushing people to buy more by telling them what they need and consumers driving themselves to earn more to achieve the standard of living capitalism tells them is suitable. The ways and means to achieve these often passed through Knowledge-Based work.

Population, Healthcare and Cost-of-Living  

From 1950 to 2020, the world population grew by three times. It was 2.5 million in 1950 and 7.7 billion in 2020. 

Healthcare had a major role to play here. Expansion in healthcare and advancements in public health (control of infectious diseases, cleaner water, and safer foods etc) increased life expectancy.  

The world population kept growing and other improvements (social, medical and economic) made it become more and more urbanized. 

Urbanization, after all, is the only way most of us can afford the lifestyles we do. Imagine the cost of setting up a self-sufficient facility with electricity, water, sanitation, services and access to goods and medical care in the wild. With larger urban settlements comes a larger consumer base which attracts more and more goods and service providers, making the gap between what is available in urban areas vs rural areas increasingly wider and making it a self-feeding loop.

But with urbanization came the pain of higher costs of living as well as the higher costs of commuting to and from the office for the employees in the urban areas. At the same time, for most companies, property was the second biggest expense line item. Glued together with the adjacent rise in costs of properties and talent in the same areas, the spurt of remote work was inevitable but the risk of shifting to it kept people away until the pandemic, when there was no choice left. 

Waiting in the wings was the technological boom and developments that we covered in the previous blog without which these would have remained problems without solutions. 

That’s how the future of work came to be .

The Problem: The change is upon us but the ability to risk-manage the change hasn’t developed as quickly as needed. Till risk-management is taken up in a more scientific manner, overly simplistic approaches will continue to trip up effectiveness and cause the friction we see today even as large-scale adoption and acceptance continue. 

P.S.: Dogs have remained steady companions all through. However, the advent of remote work and the ability to spend more time with their masters seems to have been an impactful side-effect on the plus side. So Happier Dogs are yet another benefit of the future of work – who would have ‘thunk it

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(s)

A senior banker from the complex global markets space, Mr. Nishant Shah has worked for more than two decades across Citibank, Standard Chartered and JPMorgan Chase before taking over as our Managing Partner. Passionate with word and pen about finance, technology, macro-economics and future trends, he is a Chartered Accountant by education and the winner of various prestigious awards during his career, including the ‘India Awards for Excellence’.

The post Remote & Hybrid Work – How it Came to Be – Part II  appeared first on Jackstien Practices, India.

But a lot of successes had to happen and even more failures were needed to allow us this saving grace.

What were the events that even enabled us to leverage remote work to begin with? Sometimes a reminder of the basics help. These reminders can also help you understand the differences between enablement and adaptation.

Adaptation, whether to remote or hybrid work, requires risk management; a fact nothing can wish away. And to improve the present, one must understand the past

But moving back to enablement, many many factors have contributed (there always are; unless one is satisfied with easy but incomplete answers) ..,

…for today, let us just look at the technological developments that led to this shift.

Before the Industrial Revolution, craftsmen, traders, artisans and painters worked from the comfort of their homes. This was natural to them because there were no fixed workplaces at that time.  

After the Revolution, however, people moved to factories and they were now required to be present there to work. The concept of travelling from one’s house to a fixed office space was born here. 

If we look at World Wars I and II and the technological advancements that took place during that time, the list is long.  

But in the context of communications, radio, telephone and telegraph were the most used mediums for civilians and soldiers alike. By 1957, the space race had further given impetus to communication and satellites became a key part of the global communication realm. 

In 1969, J.C.R. Licklider developed the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) which was the first-ever network that enabled the sharing of digital sources between computers located at different physical locations.  

And by 1973-74, cell phones and personal computers made mobile communication a reality. 

These were all major developments that went on to support remote work eventually. 

‘Telecommuting’ as a phrase was first introduced by NASA engineer Jack Nilles in 1972. Even then, he had believed that it was a feasible alternative to work that would resolve issues of nonrenewable resources and traffic. 

In 1979, five employees of IBM started working from home as part of an experiment. In just another four years, over 2000 IBM workers were remotely working and this made the company one of the pioneers of remote working. By 1987, roughly 1.5 million Americans were telecommuting.  

Then came the 21st century and along with it the Internet Age which accelerated the growth of cloud computing, the World Wide Web and therefore, the easy access, distribution and browsing of information.  

By 2000, the Department of Transportation and Related Agencies Appropriations made it a compulsion for companies to introduce and have in place telecommuting policies for their employees. 

The year 2005 saw the first official co-working space in the world. It was created by Brad Neuberg in San Francisco.  

Remote work further took on because of the emergence of garage startups where young entrepreneurs worked on their laptops with a small set-up.  

In 2010, remote work, Artificial Intelligence and SaaS companies evolved. In the same year, President Barack Obama signed into law the Telework Enhancement Act. It requires all federal agencies to create work-from-home policies for every eligible employee. 

Since then, remote work has only grown through the years and innovations like social networking tools for enterprises like Microsoft Teams and quick video and messaging chat platforms like Zoom and Google Meet have supported it. In the last decade, remote working around the world has increased by 400 per cent. 

To conclude, the remote and hybrid team model of working has a rich history. For long, small groups of individuals, leaders and companies have been practising the model. But the Covid-19 pandemic has brought remote and hybrid work to a point of no return. 

The coming years will see a clear shift towards enhancing remote work policies, investing in security technology, effectively accessing larger pools of talent and creating a work culture that thrives on inclusivity. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The post How Remote & Hybrid Work Came To Pass  appeared first on Jackstien Practices, India.