Home, Sweet Work

By Kim Bellard, May 21, 2020

If you’re lucky, you’ve been working from home these past couple months. That is, you’re lucky you’re not one of the 30+ million people who have lost their jobs due to the pandemic. That is, you’re lucky you’re not an essential worker whose job has required you to risk exposure to COVID-19.

What’s interesting is that many of the stay-at-home workers, and the companies they work for, are finding it a surprisingly suitable arrangement. And that has potentially major implications for our society, and, not coincidentally, for our healthcare system.

José Cong, a tech talent acquisition advisor, told The Wall Street Journal that, when it comes to increased remote work, the pandemic “is going to be the gasoline on the fire.”

It’s not just corporate benevolence or concerns about public health. It’s also about the money. Short term savings in office energy use/upkeep and business travel, and longer term savings in real estate costs, make work-at-home attractive to companies.

Entrepreneur Hiten Shah told Cat Zakrzewski of The Washington Post: “Everyone’s doing the math. Once you follow the money, it points to the fact that this is inevitable…The cost savings are just ridiculous comparing to have an office and all the things that come with that.”

There are real questions about the shift. “Companies will have to find ways to build culture remotely, which is really tough to do,” tech analyst Gene Munster told the WSJ. Zoom calls are all well and good, but “People like to come in and collaborate with and work with their folks,” said Jennifer Christie, Twitter’s chief human resource officer.

There are further ripple implications. Business Insider reported how suburban office parks were already becoming more deserted, posing problems not just for their commercial real estate owners but also for the cities and municipalities that relied on tax revenue from them — not to mention for the restaurants and other small businesses that served all those workers.

We’ve seen a urban-suburban competition for jobs, but now that fight has a new contender — workers’ homes — and no one yet knows all the implications of that shift.

Healthcare is less able than most industries to work from home, but it is doing its best through increased use of telehealth. Its problem is that its revenues are built around patients coming in for visits/ treatments/ procedures, and most aren’t. As a result, telehealth notwithstanding, hospitals say they are losing billions of dollars, and healthcare workers are, for the first time in decades, undergoing massive layoffs — well over a million in April alone.

When we think about all those deserted office parks and buildings, think also about hospitals and medical office buildings. The healthcare system will need fewer of them both from the demand side — patients preferring to use telehealth — and from the supply side — healthcare professionals able to do more remotely.

This pandemic will not last forever. Perhaps the sudden, massive work-from-home experiment will soon be just a memory, and we’ll all end up back to our offices.

But that’s a sucker’s bet. The prudent business leader would seriously consider, as Mr. Walker said, that this is part of a once-in-a-generation/once-in-a-lifetime, permanent shift. The prudent business leader would evaluate how much of their business could be done from home (or other settings), and how to best support that shift. The prudent business leader would be trying to drive and support the changes, not react to them.

The question is, how many such prudent business leaders there are in healthcare?

This post is an abridged version of the original posting in Medium. Please follow Kim on Medium and on Twitter (@kimbbellard)