REMOTE WORK WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AND THAT'S A GOOD THING

The home office you’ve occupied for months could be the wave of the future.

- CHANDRA STEELE

Pivot is a word you hear a lot in business, and in particular, the tech industry. The thing with pivoting, though, is that if you do it enough, you find yourself back where you began. The founding myths of Silicon Valley are regularly based in garages. Success spun out of them to create an entire region of business parks and campuses that serve as a shorthand for technology. Until now, when COVID-19 quarantine has driven everyone into their homes.

It will take a vaccine and a considerable amount of time before the world begins to resemble anything familiar. Even when it does, with so much time spent away from offices and the concept of them as necessary being debunked, the way we work now could become the new normal.

“For some companies, the investments they’ve made to support working from home are likely to be sustained moving forward and result in a complete culture shift,” Kelly Reynolds, department chair of community, environment and policy at the University of Arizona, told us.

Here’s one example: With quarantine orders still in effect in most states, Twitter declared that working from home would become the new norm for the majority of its employees. Twitter Chief Marketing Officer and Head of People Leslie Berland tweeted about the company’s decision: “Decentralization and remote work was a top priority for us pre-COVID. We’ll continue to learn and improve to make the experience even better, but it starts with empowering people to work where they feel most creative, comfortable, and safe.”