In the past 5 years, home office have become the reality of many people. After COVID hit, many jobs had to adapt to this idea of working from home. What people wouldn’t expect is that many of these jobs would never go back to “normal”. Many companies realized that it was more beneficial to have their employees working from their homes, since they could avoid the cost of maintaining an office. Furthermore, the comfort of not having to commute every day was definitely appealing for everyone, besides not having to worry about transportation, traffic, food, or even clothing. Because of that, after the pandemics, many of these jobs remained remote. According to a 2023 working paper by researchers at Harvard Business School and the University of Illinois, survey data from U.S. firms and workers shows that the shift to remote work was not temporary but became a persistent feature of post-pandemic labor arrangements (Bartik et al. 2023), showing how home office came to stay.
The Collapse of The Boundary
This change collapsed a huge established boundary in our society, the one between our personal and professional space/life. Activities and subjects that were before kept inside offices and among coworkers moved to domestic spaces such as bedrooms and living rooms, being shared with family members. As a result, it gets harder to cross the line between personal and professional life, possibly causing loss of privacy and identity (work becomes who you are), besides constant availability, and, consequently, faster burnout. Therefore, home office has been making many people’s lives easier, however it has a side effect that has to be considered. Is it worth it?
How was it possible?
But let’s take a step back for now. We know that COVID marked the rapid increase of home office jobs, but technology - video conferencing platforms, cloud storage, messaging systems - is what made this shift possible, while economy is what allowed it to persist. When I say that, I mean to answer the question some might have: “why didn’t society just ‘go back to normal’?”. And the answer is because economic incentives reinforced this change. As I mentioned before, companies could cut the cost used to maintain offices while workers benefited from the flexibility provided by home office. This allowed both employers and employees to accept the collapse of the boundaries between their personal and professional lives.
Connecting to Course Themes
When trying to relate this to what we’ve discussed these past weeks, the first thing that comes to mind is the character Case from Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984). His ability to work depends on his nervous system. When it’s damaged, he is no longer able to work. The Cyberspace, where Case works, is accessed through his nervous system - there’s no physical office. This means that there is no boundary between his professional and personal life. And that’s what all of this is about. Just like Case had his nervous system damaged because of work, modern workers might be risking their personal lives as professional demands enter intimate spaces.
Important implications
Who benefits: employers, Tech companies, workers (do they actually?).
Who is impacted: workers’ privacy, mental health.
Finally, I want to clarify that this is not a rejection of home office. I am actually a supporter of this work style and want to pursue it myself. However, I believe it is a very important topic to be taken into consideration.
Sources
Bartik, A. W., Cullen, Z. B., Glaeser, E. L., Luca, M., & Stanton, C. T. (2020). The rise of remote work: Evidence on productivity and preferences from firm and worker surveys (Working Paper No. 20-138). Harvard Business School. https://www.hbs.edu/ris/download.aspx?name=20-138.pdf
Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. Ace Books.
AI: no use of AI for this assignment