The social impact of remote work
Summary
Remote work impacts not only standard capitalist measures such as productivity and access to talent, but also social aspects.
Companies can extend inclusion programs beyond gender and race.
The environmental footprint of work gets smaller.
Cities have a chance at decongestion.
Reverse brain drain to smaller towns can rejuvenate those communities.
From two of my recent posts (here and here), it may appear that I’m a remote work “bothsider”. Nothing’s further from the truth. I remain an advocate for location and time independence, albeit with some nuances. The debate about remote work often limits itself to standard capitalist measures, such as access to talent or productivity. And while these measures are important, I don’t believe they’re the only ones we must consider.
Remote work also has a social impact. In the last decade, I have seen a louder chorus about ESG - environmental, social and governance aspects of a company’s operating model. Of course, we can all be cynical about how much social good can happen in a capitalist firm, but I take heart from how we’re at least having a conversation about these issues. So, in today’s post, I want to outline how I see remote work as a way to create a positive social impact.
The impact on employees
I work for a company founded by a socialist. While our founder has moved on to more significant challenges than running a tech firm, I hold on to some ideas he advocated for. There are some I disagree with.
Our founder, Roy, had a unique model for corporate social impact. He believed that you're already a privileged lot if you work for a tech firm. Roy didn’t care about pampering people he considered “privileged”. Of course, despite his worldview, Thoughtworks was a great place to work because Roy could balance his socialist worldview with the fact that when building software, people matter most.
In the present day, ESG includes how employers treat their people. Inclusion, for example, matters far more than it did when I started my career. Location independence has a massive impact on inclusion. Here's what I found when I surveyed technologists as part of my book’s research.
½ of all parents wanted to work remotely all the time.
9/10 of all women parents wanted to work remotely for at least three days each week.
⅔ of all people with disabilities wanted to work remotely all the time.
As a single parent to my daughter, I can’t tell you how much this echoes my sentiments. I’m sure women parents, who often shoulder most of the parenting responsibilities, will agree that remote work can help with child care.
However, inclusion has many other parameters, too. When speaking of disabilities, we don’t always consider neurodivergence. I recently learned that I’m on the autism spectrum. Moreover, I’m an introvert. The personal space that remote work affords me is a blessing, not just for my mental health but also for my productivity and job satisfaction.
Despite his worldview, Roy was acutely aware of the different notions of diversity in my country. I’ve spoken about the diversity of languages - we have 24 official languages and over 700 recorded languages. Everyone doesn’t speak English the same way or with the same fluency. A location and time-independent way of working, which calms things down through writing, allows people with varying degrees of English fluency to participate at work.
But India’s also unique in that we carry the legacy of caste beyond the visible difference of race. Race often shows a visible privilege. Caste comes with invisible privileges or an invisible lack of privileges. People usually have different paths to a tech career, and I can tell you that some paths are full of struggles. Depending on where people come from, an office can make them feel safe or intimidated. The freedom to choose one’s work location helps individuals who come from different backgrounds create a safe space for work.
The impact on the environment
With its massive social inequalities, India sits at the sharp edge of environmental impact. Every step in either a positive or negative direction makes an enormous difference to millions of people. Take our national capital, Delhi, for example. The poor air quality in that city makes it a veritable gas chamber. During the pandemic, when people worked remotely, Delhi experienced a sharp drop in air pollution, with a 48% drop in PM2.5 and a 55% drop in NO2. The study concludes with a poignant line.
“While the whole nation was terrified by the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, nature, on the other hand, was healing temporarily.”
Offices consume 8% of the total electricity in India. This statistic looks worse when you notice that over half of India’s energy is coal-fired. Since Indian office buildings aren’t the most regulated regarding design and energy efficiency, the carbon footprints of these glasshouses can be massive. The fewer people use offices, the more energy we save and the lower our dependence on fossil fuels.
And don’t forget water in this conversation. India is in the middle of a massive water crisis. This crisis is a matter of life and death. Two hundred thousand people die every year because of a lack of access to clean water. Six hundred million people live under water stress. Between sanitary facilities, cooling systems, food services, and landscaping, offices and tech parks consume vast amounts of water. Imagine how many lives we can impact if most knowledge-working firms become remote by default.
The impact on society and communities
Even if you’ve never been to India, you’ve probably heard about the traffic we face in our cities. My erstwhile home, Bangalore, is notorious for its traffic snarls. Be it Silk Board Junction or Hebbal Junction, being stuck in traffic is now beyond the hilarity of internet memes. A 2023 report says that Bangalore loses ₹20,000 crore (2.4 billion USD) yearly to traffic problems.
A traffic snarl at Hebbal Junction, in Bangalore (credit: The Hindu)
Many of our cities can’t accommodate the stress of a burgeoning IT sector, which requires workers to use private transport to commute to work. Road widening and public transport often displace thousands of people and take decades to complete, by which time they’re already trailing their demand. Delhi dwellers can tell you how crowded the metro is. Mumbai, famous for its “spirit”, is infamous for how far people commute to work, against all odds, in local trains. Are these costs necessary for work? Or are they acceptable only because they’re externalised?
When you cast your gaze away from the cities, I urge you to think beyond the famous hubs. These could be Chicago, NYC, and San Francisco in the US or Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Delhi in India. An office-bound work model forces people to migrate from their hometowns to these hubs. This migration renders the big cities costly, overcrowded and often unlivable, while the smaller towns and villages suffer the government’s inattention.
As we saw during the pandemic, people prefer to live closer to their extended families and away from big cities when they can work remotely. This reverse migration helps society in a myriad of ways. It creates a fertile ground for programs like Tulsa Remote, where either governments or foundations can incentivise the development of local communities. Instead of having people drown in housing debt, the government can provide home-buying incentives to catalyse smaller towns like Newton in Iowa. The reverse brain drain from this migration back to small towns can also bring skilled professionals close to the next generation of artists, engineers, scientists and craftspersons. Imagine the possibilities!
None of what I’m telling you is new. The world knows all this and more. But as we hurtle towards irreversible climate change, with dissatisfying lifestyles, weak communities and corporate monocultures in tow, I believe that the clarion call for location-independent work should only get louder. Is anyone listening, though?