I don't think people are ignoring the half of the population that does not benefit from working from home. It's that, historically, we've been ignoring the half that prefers it. The default in America is to come into the office every day. Yeah, great, there are people that work better that way, but the current situation has forced us to re-examine that way of doing business and we are realizing that there is at least as many people who don't work better that way. This half of the population, up until about 6 weeks ago, was the one being steamrolled into the office culture.
In a broader context, it opens up lots of questions about tangentially related questions. Things like climate change, or urban planning. In my area, sprawl is a problem. Lots of people live in the suburbs and commute. This combined with the harsh winters mean the roads are constantly getting chewed up, and there is always a struggle to find the tax dollars for proper maintenance. Growth is up, and so there are debates between those who want to expand highways and those who want to use tax dollars for something else. The desire to eliminate a commute is leading to gentrification and people being priced out of their communities.
Additionally, requiring a physical presence limits career opportunities. My field has a lot of jobs concentrated in a few hubs like SF and Boston. But there are lots of reasons to not want to live in those areas, and for those who don't wish to, career prospects are severely limited.
We also make lots of concessions to our quality of life in order to be able to work in the same physical space. Lots of Americans spend hours commuting to and from work. At the same time, we don't exercise enough, we eat poorly, and we work too much. All of these are at least somewhat related to not having enough time in the day, and working from home would at the very least give back people the hours of the day they spend traveling between work and home.
I think the honest take on remote work preferences is that there is no one size fits all solution. But up until a month ago, we were largely forcing a single solution on everyone. There's always been excuses: worries about decreases in productivity, claims that we don't have the internet infrastructure, insistence that real work is done face to face. But the reality is that in many cases those simply aren't true, and we are making lots of sacrifices by propping those excuses up.
In a broader context, it opens up lots of questions about tangentially related questions. Things like climate change, or urban planning. In my area, sprawl is a problem. Lots of people live in the suburbs and commute. This combined with the harsh winters mean the roads are constantly getting chewed up, and there is always a struggle to find the tax dollars for proper maintenance. Growth is up, and so there are debates between those who want to expand highways and those who want to use tax dollars for something else. The desire to eliminate a commute is leading to gentrification and people being priced out of their communities.
Additionally, requiring a physical presence limits career opportunities. My field has a lot of jobs concentrated in a few hubs like SF and Boston. But there are lots of reasons to not want to live in those areas, and for those who don't wish to, career prospects are severely limited.
We also make lots of concessions to our quality of life in order to be able to work in the same physical space. Lots of Americans spend hours commuting to and from work. At the same time, we don't exercise enough, we eat poorly, and we work too much. All of these are at least somewhat related to not having enough time in the day, and working from home would at the very least give back people the hours of the day they spend traveling between work and home.
I think the honest take on remote work preferences is that there is no one size fits all solution. But up until a month ago, we were largely forcing a single solution on everyone. There's always been excuses: worries about decreases in productivity, claims that we don't have the internet infrastructure, insistence that real work is done face to face. But the reality is that in many cases those simply aren't true, and we are making lots of sacrifices by propping those excuses up.