Winners and Losers of the Work-From-Home Revolution - The Atlantic⁠↗

The distributed office is not a placeless space. A Zoom call is a place; a Slack channel is a place; your manager’s inbox is a place. These are all “rooms” in which bosses can evaluate worker performance. It’s a fact of human diversity that different people thrive in different spaces, so we should expect that the virtual spaces of remote work will reward certain skills that went underappreciated in office settings.

If the pre-pandemic office was like a fine-dining experience—a large group enters, sits down together, and leaves several hours later—the post-pandemic office may be more like a neighborhood café. People will come and go, you’ll recognize some of them but feel estranged from others, and the office might convey a sense of both vague belonging and day-to-day transience. That’s not an ideal environment for new workers to feel welcomed into a community of peers.

According to Bloom, the average worker invested “15 hours of time and $561 in home equipment to facilitate WFH” last year. That’s an astonishing number—amounting to close to 1 percent of annual GDP spent on WFH amenities. And that figure doesn’t even account for all the money companies spent on telecommunications, back-end systems, and other tech to support WFH.

The remote-work revolution, therefore, is principally a revolution for the colleged class, which is disproportionately a Democratic cohort. If the college-graduate workforce evolves toward a certain kind of work that is off-limits to most noncollege grads, the cultural divide between graduates and nongraduates may widen even further, pulling apart a country that is already split by a diploma gap.