Should Remote Work Be a Benefit Extended Only to Workers with Seniority?

The connections between productivity and WFH production are tricky.

As the adage goes, when a headline is posed as a question the answer is always “No”. And I agree the answer is no. Still, I’d like to explore the topic along those lines.

I think that work from home is a trend that is here to stay. I've said for a while that the Covid experience simply accelerated this trend and put it where it would've been anyway several years ahead of schedule. But I’ve also said it clearly went too far from the standpoint of long-term sustainability or desirability.

Certain job functions work fine if not better in a remote capacity. Namely these are sales, some aspects of customer service, occasionally consulting, and some transactional processing including coding. But be careful what you wish for as that which can be done more efficiently remotely implies a logical extreme—remotely could include outsourcing you entirely, and that’s before we consider how AI threatens these jobs. International and AI outsourcing are not the point of this post, but these relates to my proposition.

The more experienced you are the better your chances of success in a remote environment all else equal. So the biggest beneficiaries of remote work in the long run are the most experienced workers. And by extension, the most threatened by it long term are inexperienced (young and entry-level) workers. Therefore, perhaps full work-from-home or just some degree of a flex or hybrid schedule is a feasible arrangement for experienced workers.

That is a reasonable starting assumption, but we have to think about this in terms of what's good for all involved including especially the firm itself. In fact it is ONLY the firm that truly matters here. “But, but . . . what about the employees!?! You callous capitalist! How can you possibly leave out these stakeholders?”

Well, I’m not once you think about the big picture. What is good for the firm is good for employees, or they won’t be employees. If the arrangement isn’t good for employees (or an employee specifically), then this is not an employment fit for them. If a firm makes its offer uncompetitive enough, it won’t have employees (or at least not very good ones) and will find itself out of business. The job of the firm is to earn profits, not to run a charitable jobs program.

So thinking about the firm, we must consider what it needs to first survive then to potentially thrive. Importantly, the firm needs sustainability in the form of worker training and development. Today's young workers will be tomorrow's seasoned veterans.

When I was starting out as a financial analyst with an MBA and a lot more knowledge than sense, I benefited a lot from those experienced, older workers I engaged with. I had more analytical tools at my disposal, a fresh point of view, and better educational credentials if not outright IQ advantage (occasionally). And I didn't know shit.

I certainly found opportunities to add value early on, but I equally found myself continually tempered by reality. Theory as taught in school is only as good as the reality it can be deployed into. Let me be frank: Many, many times I had ideas or a framework that looked great on paper but simply would not work without at least some adaptation to the real world that I was yet to experience and understand.

To be clear, I'm not saying that reality was wrong. I'm saying that I was naïve—much like Doc Hollywood. That was me like 1,000 times just with stakes 1,000 lower.

I'm very thankful for the people who had been doing what I was coming in to tell them could be done differently as they would very often patiently and open mindedly help me see what I didn't yet know.

Sometimes this was as simple as not knowing how to communicate or see the bigger or hidden picture including office politics. And sometimes this was in the form of a flat out mistake. Often a beautiful, well designed spreadsheet that I worked hours on could get completely uprooted if not destroyed by the correct calculations an experienced veteran could do in his mind in a matter of seconds sending me back to the drawing board. I very quickly realized analysis is an iterative process rather than a once-and-done proof.

I don't credit the successes I did have or the value that I contributed as much to what I came in with but much more so to being a fast learner among good teachers. I'm glad they weren't entirely remote as it would've been hard for me to learn from them through the occasional Zoom meeting, and they would've rightly dismissed most of what I had to offer without themselves picking up a few pieces that were valuable.

I have to think that time and again they said to themselves, “This kid is smart and he'll be helpful once we teach him everything he doesn't know.”

Maybe the title of this post should've been "You've got to get your hands dirty."