Remote and hybrid working: the job stops needing an office

1. Video calls, cloud storage and instant messaging mean the tasks of most office jobs can be done from any room with a connection, so the building stops being the thing that holds the work together.
2. The business gains on two fronts when it lets staff work at home or split the week between home and office.
   1. Lower premises costs: if staff come in on alternate days the firm can rent a smaller office and share desks, so rent, heating and cleaning all fall, and those are fixed costs that had to be paid whether trade was good or not.
   2. A wider choice of staff: a vacancy can be filled by someone two hundred miles away, so the firm recruits from a national pool instead of one town, and experienced staff who value flexibility stay rather than leave.
3. The same arrangement costs the business three things.
   1. Supervision is harder: a manager cannot see who is stuck, so a problem surfaces days later, and performance has to be judged on output rather than on hours visibly spent at a desk.
   2. A team is harder to build: a new employee at home picks up far less from overhearing experienced colleagues, so informal learning slows and loyalty to the team is weaker.
   3. Equipment and security must be provided: a laptop, a phone and a secure connection are needed in every home, and customer records now sit outside the office where they are easier to lose.
4. For the employee the gain is concrete, because losing a commute returns an hour a day and the £5 or so it cost in fares or fuel, and the working day can bend around childcare or a college course.
5. The cost to the same employee is isolation and a blurred line between work and home, since the laptop sits in the same room as the sofa and a message at nine in the evening is easy to answer and hard to ignore.

Flexible hours, automation, messaging and monitoring: a gain and a cost in each

1. Flexible hours only became practical once technology stopped work having to happen in one place at one time, and three further changes follow the same pattern of a gain with a cost attached.
2. Automation is the row with the sharpest split, because software takes the repetitive work and frees staff for tasks that need judgement, such as calming an angry customer, while some jobs disappear altogether and the staff who remain must be retrained on the new system.
3. Monitoring is the row most likely to backfire, since tracking output lets a manager see a falling delivery rate in days rather than months, but staff who feel watched trust their employer less, and demotivated staff work slower, which eats the gain the tracking was bought for.

Technology changes who a business can employ, not only how

1. The deepest change is to the labour market a business is fishing in, because a firm that allows remote working can hire someone hundreds of miles away and one that does not is limited to people within commuting distance.
2. A small accountancy practice in Norwich that accepts home working can take on a bookkeeper in Glasgow, so it appoints on skill rather than on postcode and is less likely to be forced into a pay rise to tempt the only qualified applicant nearby.
3. It cuts the other way for the employee, because a job that can be done from anywhere can also be done by anyone anywhere, so the competition for it is national rather than local.

What the technology costs to buy and to depend on

1. None of these gains is free, because laptops and phones have to be bought, software is usually charged as a licence per user every month, and someone has to be paid to fix it when it stops.
2. Training is the cost that is easiest to forget, since every hour a member of staff spends learning a new system is an hour they are paid for but not producing, and output usually dips before it improves.
3. Dependence is the sharper risk, because a business that has moved its orders, files and payments online has no paper system to fall back on, so a broadband or server failure stops everybody at once rather than slowing one department.
4. That is why the smaller the firm, the harder these costs bite, as a sole trader pays the same monthly licence fee as a large company but spreads it over far less revenue.