The demands of social distancing have caused an unprecedented substitution of virtual interactions for physical travel. Surveys by MIT and Data for Progress found that by the end of March, more than a third of US workers had switched to working remotely. In addition, half of physicians have adopted telehealth to deliver patient care. Many employers expect these changes to endure even after distancing guidelines relax, which—if the region makes the right moves—could wrest from this crisis some lasting progress for Cascadia’s roads and skies.
The scale and speed of the shift to telework is staggering. Zoom, a digital conferencing services provider (whose name has become a buzzword of the lockdowns), saw its active users jump from 10 million to 200 million. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, reported a sixtyfold increase in the use of Microsoft Teams, the company’s online collaboration tool. Amid the public health crisis and economic devastation, technology has allowed parts of social and economic life to carry on.
But many aspects of economic life can’t go online, as evidenced by the breathtaking loss of at least 30 million US jobs in just five weeks—a scale of unemployment matched only by the Great Depression. Collectively, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington have lost more than 1 million jobs in that same period—losses that disproportionately affect Cascadia’s most vulnerable people. The coronavirus has amplified the already cruel inequalities in our society.
The Data for Progress survey from the end of March shows unequal adoption rates for work-from-home by income and education. Among high-income workers, 56 percent moved online while just 25 percent of low-income workers were able to make the switch. Because more high-income workers could work remotely, they were less likely to lose their jobs. While the official unemployment rate for April was an alarming 15 percent, nearly 40 percent of households earning less than $40,000 per year had lost a job according to the Federal Reserve.
There are no silver linings for people suffering from illness, death, loss of income, and the gnawing uncertainty of what will happen next. And yet forward-looking responses to the immediate public health and economic crisis could lay the foundation for a more equitable and environmentally sustainable economy in the next decade. A durable shift to remote work could help enable a more sustainable future if organizations make productive use of telepresence technologies part of the new normal.
Let’s look at what’s happened to work in technology and medicine in response to COVID-19 and, with those examples in mind, consider how a more permanent substitution of telepresence for many face-to-face meetings could alter future travel demand.
Big tech (mostly) working from home
Cascadia’s technology companies were among the first in North America to recommend and then require their employees to work from home. Amazon, Microsoft, T-Mobile, and the Pacific Northwest outposts of Facebook and Google all initiated work-from-home policies at the beginning of March. Since then, these enterprises have sustained and even expanded their businesses while most of their employees work from home.
In the midst of the pandemic, T-Mobile completed its acquisition of Sprint on April 1 and kicked off plans to invest $40 billion in wireless communication infrastructure over the next three years. Remote workers at Microsoft supported massive growth in the use of its cloud software platforms; the company now plans for all of its major events in 2020 to happen online. Amazon has supported a flood of new demand for its e-commerce services and started hiring an additional 100,000 workers. Even with a drastic reduction in face-to-face meetings, big tech companies have functioned at a high level, serving a new demand that’s helped raise their stock prices.
It’s not only high-income workers making the shift. By the end of March, T-Mobile had transitioned nearly 15,000 domestic and international customer service workers from densely packed call centers to their homes. By early April, all 17 of T-Mobile’s internal call centers had transitioned to home-based work.
Amazon’s hiring binge for additional warehouse workers makes clear that key aspects of the technology economy must occur outside the home, in conditions that can threaten worker safety. Indeed, the pandemic compounds existing inequities between white collar workers and those with jobs deemed “essential”—that can’t be done from home. But, concern over Amazon’s corporate behavior have prompted new alliances among workers to advocate for improved warehouse conditions and a reduction in Amazon’s environmental footprint. And whether it is labor organizing, delivering cell service, or building capacity to host more video conferences, people in tech now accomplish far more of their work remotely.
The rapid embrace of remote work and virtual medicine offers some hope that post-pandemic, Cascadia could see a reduced demand for road space from autos and corresponding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
By early May, Amazon and Microsoft had extended their work-from-home policy to at least October. Some tech companies, like Twitter, are going a step further and making work-from-home permanent. Across the country, employers now look to extend telework into the foreseeable future. In New York City the three largest commercial office tenants in Manhattan plan to reduce their leased office space as they adopt long-term work-from-home policies. A survey of 400 downtown Seattle businesses shows that a majority plan to delay a full return to work, stagger shifts or permanently adopt work-from-home.
A close-to-my-heart example: my niece leads a Seattle start-up company building cloud-based software solutions for the real estate industry. Following the example of Seattle’s tech giants, her company went fully remote in the beginning of March. After four weeks, she polled her staff and discovered a large majority preferred working at home. She plans to slash her office expenses and find lower cost venues for face-to-face meetings in the future when they are required for the business and allowed by public health authorities. One month of remote work proved they could be as or more productive as a virtual company, reduce overhead, and save her staff the stress, time, and expense of daily commuting.
