From WXYZ Detroit:
On Wednesday, one of America’s corporate titans, Ford Motor Co., supplied its own answer: It told about 30,000 of its employees worldwide who have worked from home that they can continue to do so indefinitely, with flexible hours approved by their managers. Their schedules will become a work-office “hybrid”: They’ll commute to work mainly for group meetings and projects best-suited for face-to-face interaction.
Ford’s announcement sent one of the clearest signals to date that the pandemic has hastened a cultural shift in Americans’ work lives by erasing any stigma around remote work and encouraging the adoption of technology that enables it. Broader evidence about the post-pandemic workplace suggests that what was long called tele-commuting will remain far more common than it was a year ago.
A report this week from the employment website Indeed says postings for jobs that mention “remote work” have more than doubled since the pandemic began. Such job postings are still increasing even while vaccinations are accelerating and the pace of new confirmed COVID cases is declining.
“If job postings are a guide, employers are increasingly open to remote work, even as some employees return to the workplace,” said Jed Kolko, chief economist at Indeed.
The share of Indeed’s job postings that mention “remote work” or “work from home” reached 7% last month, up from just below 3% a year ago. But in some industries, the gains were far more dramatic, including those that haven’t traditionally welcomed remote work.
In legal services, for example, remote-work postings for jobs including paralegals and legal assistants jumped from under 5% in the second half of 2019 to 16% in the second half of 2020, according to Indeed data. In banking and finance, for such jobs as actuaries and loan underwriters, remote-work postings surged from 4% to nearly 16%. For mental health therapists, they rose from 1% to nearly 7%.
Such shifts could, in turn, trigger changes in where people live and affect the varying economic health of metro areas. Some highly skilled workers could migrate from high-cost coastal cities, where they had clustered in the decade after the Great Recession, to more affordable cities or small towns. Downtown offices could shrink and exist mainly for collaborative work. The tax revenue of large cities could tumble as fewer workers patronize downtown bars, restaurants and coffee shops.
“The pandemic has broken the social and cultural norms for how we work,” said Timothy Golden, a professor of management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “Remote work has become much more accepted.”
Ford is just the latest company to allow more work from home after the pandemic. Salesforce, Facebook, Google and other tech firms have said they’ll continue work-from-home policies indefinitely. Target Corp. will leave its main downtown Minneapolis office location because it’s moving to a hybrid model for 3,500 workers. It will keep other downtown offices.
Flexible remote work is hardly an equal opportunity perk. It is disproportionately concentrated among more educated, well-paid workers. The jobs of lesser-paid employees generally require on-site work or face-to-face contact with the public.
More than one-third of Asian employees and a quarter of whites worked from home because of the pandemic in January, according to an analysis of government data by the Conference Board, a business research group. Just 19% of Black workers and 14% of Hispanics were able to do so.
10 replies (most recent on top)
The irony here is that Ford Land is dictating how the workspaces of the rest of the company are going to look while having no real knowledge of how anyone outside of their organization works. How many of you think that they have a cross-functional team of IT/PD/marketing/purchasing/vehicle operations/finance/OGC/facilities in that 50-member group? They sit around and get their ideas from reading Architectural Digest and listening to presentations by Steelcase on what the latest business furniture trends are and what "everybody else" is doing. It's laughable.
@1auk+19UyT26k They already do that in IT (Ford of India). For the areas requiring repetitive tasks without deep IT skills it is perfect as the american groups had no real skills anyway. For the areas requiring deep IT skills it has not worked well in the past. The Smart Redesign eliminated the tech spec LL6 with deep IT skills so Ford may as well ship all the remaining IT jobs to India and/or let a vendor like IBM and Amazon run and manage the data center. It would be cheaper and much better run.
what concerns me is eventually mgmt will say this remote work can be done by offshore at $9 per hour why hire these Americans.
Boo Hoo the poor mistreated Ford salaried workers. Possibly 20% are really working hard. The reality is a bunch of entitled people who feel put upon when they have to do more than two hours a day of work. It is comical when the people leave Ford and learn they actually have to work at other companies. One guy quit his new job after a week as horror of horrors he got called after hours to fix a problem he caused.
The 20% who are working hard know this is true. It is your choice is to continue to do everyone else’s work (be a good team player). But stop complaining about being a door mat. It is your choice to shoulder the work load. If you don’t like the consequences of your choices, change your choices.
Flexible work schedule...lol! I have never worked so many hours or attended so many meetings in my life. The only thing flexible is that you can work all the extra hours you can handle for free.
How many people does it take to figure out to do with a multi billion dollar engineering facility after you decide everybody can work from home? 50 people.
@vdf+19UyT26k "the days of watching the same squad of folks pour into a conference room seated around the perimeter of the room rarely if ever offered any input into the matters being discussed are hopefully over"
I am truly sorry to break it to you, but we will have that same squad of folks, just this time from the laptop cameras during the Webex meetings. Believe me, after one year of working remotely, we just "changed the form, not the substance".
Thanks
Yeah the days of watching the same squad of folks pour into a conference room seated around the perimeter of the room rarely if ever offered any input into the matters being discussed are hopefully over and they have eyes on the folks who were skating by in some cases for decades. I could never figure out what some of their objectives could possibly be. How HR was talked into allowing some of these business units to build fiedoms of folks who did nothing most if not all day I will never understand.
Hopefully they ferret out the loafers scale back the campus and invest the future rather attempt to wash, rinse, repeat what they have doing for the the last 40+ years.
If you are an actual Ford employee you could have watched the Global Town Hall and have gotten the news first hand. I would recommend to those that missed it to watch it at a later date as convenient.
I think the more interesting news is that Ford has convened a 50 person advisor board to figure out what they are going to do with the Dearborn campus. Three years into the project and they still don't have a clue on what to build.
The most awesome news ever! Working every day chained to a desk, working on a laptop, with headphones on, dialing into meeting after meeting is arcain. Because of workload and scattered cross-functional teams, nobody bothered trying to travel to a conference room. Heck you couldn't even find one to meet in because they were booked for the year. You also never wanted to go to a meeting live because you could not easily multi task during the numerous non value add meetings &/or discussion. FINALLY we are using the tech we have for its invented purpose. Now if they eliminate at 50% of the unnecessary management and hire people to actually do work rather than spend their days Lording over others, having duplicate meetings, and standing in the way of productivity.