The Work-From-Anywhere War Is Beginning
Who calls the shots on how many days you end up working in the office? It has gradually dawned on bosses that it isn’t them. The real power holders? The elusive “top talent” that every firm is trying to attract.
Raj Choudhury, an economist from Harvard Business School, argues that throughout history it’s been the most sought-after job candidates who end up shaping what our jobs look like. For instance, in the early ’90s, using email on our phones was a luxury exclusive to CEOs. Soon, however, top talent in companies started demanding it and, as a result, we now can’t escape email.
Today, Choudhury’s spidey-sense is tingling over the demand for extreme flexibility: Top talent doesn’t just want hybrid work, they want to work from wherever they want. “There are two kinds of companies,” Choudhury explains. “One is going to embrace work-from-anywhere, and the second is in denial—I feel those companies will lose their workforce.” He argues that the “companies that are trying to drag back time will lose some of their best talent, and that dynamic will force these companies to catch up.”
This might come as a revelation to workers who are currently experiencing a top-down model of 3/2 in their workplaces. This “three days in, two days out” model was certainly expected to become a norm when we first imagined, during the pandemic, what life would be like after Covid. But since emerging from our bedrooms and kitchen tables we’ve recognized that we’re not at the end of this story—we’re still at the beginning of it. Data by Stanford economist Nick Bloom backs this up: In June 2020, most companies expected employees to be working from home around one and a half days a week, but the subsequent two years have seen the expectation of homeworking go up each successive month—most firms now expect workers to be at home for almost half of the week.
