Silicon Valley Undergoing a Pandemic Paradigm Shift and It May Become Permanent

May 14, 2020 – For much of my business life I worked from my home office. I was connected to the world by modem from the late 1980s to the present. As technology became more sophisticated and the data feeds and speeds accelerated I eventually graduated from telephone meetings, document sharing, and emailing, to video chats and conferencing with clients all around the world. I still got on airplanes to fly out for introductory face-to-face meetings, but I was in time able to limit my travel frequency.

Today businesses are rethinking their operations in light of COVID-19. The pandemic and countrywide lockdowns have forced employees to work from home. Among the companies affected are the giants of Silicon Valley.

This week Facebook and Google told their employees they need not return to their offices for the rest of the year. Twitter announced that employees could work from home permanently.

For employees who moved to the very expensive Valley area in cities like Cupertino, Los Altos, Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Jose, and Santa Clara, the idea that proximity to the central campus was no longer a requirement has profound implications. If working from home becomes permanent will many consider leaving the Valley to work in places where the cost of living is lower, and where connectivity is not compromised?

One of the attractions of working on the large campuses of Silicon Valley is being immersed in a corporate culture. These companies have fostered work environments that encourage employees to stick around well beyond the end of the workday because of amenities and other perks. But moving to a remote working model will change all that. Who will benefit? Possibly many small towns and remote rural areas of the United States and elsewhere where housing affordability and cost-of-living proves to be an attractor.

For managers who oversee the work being done by employees every day, the change is likely to be more difficult. Managers will have to come up with new ways to measure productivity. Companies will have to look at compensation differently. Silicon Valley required large salaries just to be able to pay for housing. An employee, however, who chooses to live in Upper Michigan may not need the same level of compensation. The cost savings in salary and benefits alone will give companies reason to consider the move to remote work a significant benefit to the bottom line.

In the end, as Silicon Valley employees relocate to remote locales they may plant the seeds for new entrepreneurial high technology pursuits with startups sprouting all around the world. And then there is the environmental benefit. Less commuting means less pollution.

The biggest challenges no doubt will be behavioural. Every company with a sales organization already has remote-working road warriors. I was one of them. But for many people in a business, working from home will require a significant adjustment. Centralized offices provide structured environments where meetings are regularly scheduled, and where gatherings at the water cooler or in the lunchroom are part of the ambiance. There is no accounting for what may happen when an employee becomes self-directed and no longer within face-to-face talking distance of others in a team, or with management. And for managers who will have to embrace a very different way of providing direction, the change will be disorienting.

Twenty-five years ago I used to work with clients across the globe. My travel took me to face-to-face meetings in five different technology hubs in North America: Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, Richardson, Research Triangle Park, and San Jose. With cloud computing and high-speed connectivity, I could have met virtually and saved the planet’s atmosphere tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Would I have been as effective in my consultations? I don’t know but I’m certain I would have adapted to this new paradigm just as I believe those working in high technology fields can today while never leaving their home office.

Will the business world adjust to virtual one-on-one and one-to-many relationships online? Already, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are moving in that direction. I won’t be surprised if many other businesses follow that same path, and it took a virus, not fighting to mitigate climate change, to make this happen. Who would have thought?