The Off Topic Topic

[Sheilbh]

A new luxury train has launched in Japan
https://lute.co/the-kyushu-courier-the-strangely-named-363-is-japans-newest-luxury-train/



From what I can see a ticket on this costs less than a ticket on the London-Manchester or London-Liverpool route (unless you pre-booked a far way in advance)

Slowly adjusting my life expectations to not include solving a murder on a luxury train

[Josquius]

Sign me up.

[Sheilbh]

Thought about going to a fancy barber post-lockdown as they re-open next Monday and I desperately need a haircut. Treat myself to the complementary continental lager and the not clearly illegal Sky Sports News stream.

Given everything my local fancy barber is only taking online bookings - and they've got no spaces until 21 April

[garbon]

I think I've learned that Gene Marks (of the 'unlimited PTO means employees take less vacation' fame) is full of odd takes for small businesses.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/08/working-from-home-is-a-failed-experiment

The evidence is in: working from home is a failed experiment

I have a client who runs a business that was not considered to be "essential" and therefore had to shut his doors during the height of the pandemic and send his employees home to work. This went on for a few months. When, last summer, things started to relax, he called everyone back to the office. No exceptions.

"Working from home isn't an option in my business," he told me. "I don't buy into it. I want my people here."

Is he out of touch? Perhaps. But this point of view is shared by more than a few clients of mine. Mostly, they fit a similar demographic: older, set in their ways, long time in business, family-owned companies. It's obvious that most companies will need to offer work from home options in the future. But what's more obvious, at least to me, is that so far, this has been a failed experiment. And, sooner or later, many small businesses are going to come around to thinking like my client.

If you don't believe me, then just consider the results of a recent, large study from Microsoft.

According to the study, almost two-thirds of the more than 31,000 full-time employed or self-employed workers across 31 markets said that they were "craving" (yes, craving) more in-person time with their teams and 37% of the global workforce complained that their companies were "asking too much of them" when out of the office.

About 54% of these people feel overworked and 39% are simply exhausted. Thanks to these new working from home arrangements, meetings are significantly longer, "chats" have risen 45% and 41m more emails were sent in one month alone (February 2021) compared with the same month last year (remember when email was supposed to be "dead"?).

While older workers and bosses seem to be handling things in stride (61% of them say they are "thriving" right now, a number that clocks in at a whopping 23 percentage points higher than those without decision-making authority), the younger generations – specifically the Gen-Zers (aged between 18 and 25) – are struggling to balance work with life and are simply more exhausted than their counterparts. They reported difficulties feeling engaged or excited about work, getting a word in during meetings and bringing new ideas to the table.

Worse yet is the killing of innovation. Microsoft reports that companies have become more siloed than they were before the pandemic. And while interactions with our close networks have actually been more frequent than previously, the fact is that even these close team interactions have started to diminish over time. "When you lose connections, you stop innovating," said Dr Nancy Baym, senior principal researcher at Microsoft. "It's harder for new ideas to get in and groupthink becomes a serious possibility."

All of this is taking its toll on workers and big companies are starting to take notice. Recently Citigroup announced a series of "Zoom Free" Fridays to encourage workers to get away from their screens and LinkedIn said it was giving its employees a paid week off to deal with the stresses that they have been enduring while working from home. It's also why the Goldman Sachs CEO, David Solomon, told a conference recently that working from home is an "aberration that we're going to correct as soon as possible".

So now do you see where my client is coming from? He wants his people back in the office where he can see them, talk to them, brainstorm with them, connect with them. He's old school. And he's probably not wrong on this.

Unfortunately, the work from home trend is too strong to resist. That's because there's this illusion of more independence, flexibility and control over one's life which is probably why 70% of the workers who participated in the Microsoft survey, despite all their concerns, still desire some type of flexible work options in the future.

There are also powerful interests at work to keep us at home. Big tech firms like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple love these arrangements because it ties their customers even further to their cloud-based collaboration subscription models. The giant media providers see more people at home clicking on their content. Big retail firms are enjoying the surge in online sales driven by bored, unsupervised workers. And corporate employers are sniffing big savings in real estate costs as well as the ability to hire better (and cheaper) talent regardless of geographic limitations.

And yet, study after study shows that people working from home are more stressed and less happy. The model has proven to create more disruption, less productivity and diminished innovation. Small businesses, however, are going to have to figure out how to balance the perceived benefit (and demand) of remote work options with their costs. I believe – based on the failure of working from home so far – most will be like my "old school" client. They will want their employees in the office most of the time.

[Tamas]

That's a lot of self-contradictions in such a small article.

I can sympathise with insecure people in management, however, who now need to take their powertrips remotely.

[Sheilbh]

There's some issues he's identified that are definitely there. I misss colleagues (and might not see them before I leave). WFH is far worse for younger people who are flat-sharing. I think there is a creep into work at more unusual hours.

But I feel like maybe we should just fix those issues when we can rather than try to turn back the clock and make everyone forget that we all know we can work as productively from home as in the office.

[Tamas]

But I feel like maybe we should just fix those issues when we can rather than try to turn back the clock and make everyone forget that we all know we can work as productively from home as in the office.

Exactly.

I am very curious to see how life will look when there's no lockdown but my company will maintain remote working - at least I hope they won't change their minds in a hurry. And I hope many companies will follow suite. A lot of people seem unable to separate the issues of lockdown and work from home, so it shall be interesting how things turn out.

[Josquius]

My big interest is on digital nomads and the potential for more countries to follow Barbados' lead and specifically court people with high paying city jobs to move there.

[alfred russel]

There's some issues he's identified that are definitely there. I misss colleagues (and might not see them before I leave). WFH is far worse for younger people who are flat-sharing. I think there is a creep into work at more unusual hours.

But I feel like maybe we should just fix those issues when we can rather than try to turn back the clock and make everyone forget that we all know we can work as productively from home as in the office.

There are significant advantages to working remote that isn't brought up in the article. If my team is fully remote and just dialing into video conferences and firing off emails, is there any reason when hiring for future positions I can't tap lower cost markets with a lot of well educated people--for example India?

[Sheilbh]

There are significant advantages to working remote that isn't brought up in the article. If my team is fully remote and just dialing into video conferences and firing off emails, is there any reason when hiring for future positions I can't tap lower cost markets with a lot of well educated people--for example India?

Yeah - absolutely that's an option. It's the next level of outsourcing, I suppose. So the same risks are present - you have less control over culture, there's more resilience risk (if I build a service centre in India I can guarantee a certain level of infrastructure v relying on people's home internet), risks of losing IP and risks of accidentally finding yourself getting taxed or subject to Indian laws etc.

Having said that because of those risks there's been a lot of on-shoring in recent years. So it may be a while before WFH pushes to hiring people internationally. But I think there's definitely a market for companies that enable small businesses to take more advantage of it.

But I can definitely see it happening domestically very quickly.
Obviously tapping India or Ukraine would be significantly lower cost but you could save a lot without even going overseas. I know someone in the US where it has happened (they're based in the North-East, company's in the south and they'll pop in in person once a quarter) - and when I was job-hunting recently a lot of jobs I saw were advertising themselves as basically location-agnostic. I think companies will start to look at the Facebook model of your pay being linked to the cost of living of your location, but they are not precious about where you locate.

[Tamas]

My big interest is on digital nomads and the potential for more countries to follow Barbados' lead and specifically court people with high paying city jobs to move there.

For freelance works maybe but I don't think people will be eager to deal with the tax and regulation implications.

[Sheilbh]

For freelance works maybe but I don't think people will be eager to deal with the tax and regulation implications.

Yeah that's the big issue. From an EU law perspective a single employee can constitute an establishment and suddenly you're subject to, say, French law by accident.

I was looking at it with my current employers and for it to work I would need to be a "consultant" rather than an employee.

[alfred russel]

Yeah - absolutely that's an option. It's the next level of outsourcing, I suppose. So the same risks are present - you have less control over culture, there's more resilience risk (if I build a service centre in India I can guarantee a certain level of infrastructure v relying on people's home internet), risks of losing IP and risks of accidentally finding yourself getting taxed or subject to Indian laws etc.

Having said that because of those risks there's been a lot of on-shoring in recent years. So it may be a while before WFH pushes to hiring people internationally. But I think there's definitely a market for companies that enable small businesses to take more advantage of it.

But I can definitely see it happening domestically very quickly.
Obviously tapping India or Ukraine would be significantly lower cost but you could save a lot without even going overseas. I know someone in the US where it has happened (they're based in the North-East, company's in the south and they'll pop in in person once a quarter) - and when I was job-hunting recently a lot of jobs I saw were advertising themselves as basically location-agnostic. I think companies will start to look at the Facebook model of your pay being linked to the cost of living of your location, but they are not precious about where you locate.

In the real world larger companies don't have to go overseas themselves: there are companies that will provide them services with those services being supplied by people in lower cost markets. You have a company like Genpact, where if you visit their offices in India you have floors where you may think you are visiting Alcoa or GE or Ford but really they work for Genpact, though the employees are integrated into the companies they support. No one needs to worry about internet outages at Genpact facilities, and Genpact handles the administrative burden of the foreign operation. The infrastructure costs are even shared across companies.

This all existed before covid, but Genpact's stock price is up 50% since March 1, 2020.

I think 15 years from now you guys are all going to see this. At the end of the day a manufactured product still has to be put on a boat and transported in, adding cost and time to the whole operation. An excel jockey can email that file from Hyderbad at the same cost and speed as London.

[Josquius]

The thing is with sending work to India is the savings aren't as huge as you might expect for true value add work.
For just standard data entry and other things that don't quite much thought then sure, you save a lot sending work to India. This has been ongoing for eons.
But in the higher value more demanding jobs the cost difference isn't as big as you might expect. And people know their worth, they won't accept massively less.

[Sheilbh]

But isn't that traditional outsourcing? It's been going on for decades and will carry on as will on-shoring when there are issues or the risks and costs are too high.

I'm not sure it's necessarily that affected by the move to WFH - my point on internet outages is exactly that with traditional outsourcing you have less reslience risk than if you move to a sort of global WFH model.