Issue 139: Remote Work is Sticky
Welcome to Backstory, a weekly newsletter turning global technology shifts into a three-minute read. This week, we’re talking about Apple’s new headset. – Mary Ames, Director of Strategy
THE BIG TAKE
Remote Work is Sticky
Remote work is a strange and much-discussed topic. Many of us had no choice but to go remote during the pandemic. With the pandemic mostly behind us, the freedom of remote work is proving challenging to let go of for many worldwide. This is despite many attempts by massive companies to get their employees back to the physical workplace. The question is, what should we do with remote work? Aim for a hybrid model, abandon office space, or end remote work once and for all?
Work-life balance. The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece looking at data from the United States Department of Labor. Americans who worked any time from home spent an average of 5 hours and 25 minutes a day working from their residences in 2022. According to the Journal, that is two hours more than in 2019, the year before the pandemic. The data is clear, at least in the US. Remote work is widespread and likely here to stay. The primary reason for this popularity likely concerns employees' work-life balance.
New solutions. Finding a work-life balance is much easier when you don’t need to go to an office. Consider the time one saves in commuting to work. The inverse of this situation is employer concerns over productivity in a remote work environment. Are teams available and productive when they don’t see each other? The answer varies from company to company, but the message is clear: a healthy work-life balance is vital to employee satisfaction and productivity. Our goal should be to ensure this balance is achieved across multiple sectors of the economy.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.”
– Rollo May, American Psychologist
CHART OF THE WEEK
This week we are looking at concert ticket prices. Taylor Swift is making roughly $13mn per night on her current world tour, which means she is on track to net over $1bn. Taylor Swift might be an outlier, but ticket prices across the board are on the rise.
OUR VIEWS THIS WEEK
How I work: As part of our remote work series published at the start of the pandemic, we published a series of interviews with Xische team members about how they work. We’ve worked with partners on four continents and across time zones for years. Who doesn’t love a good list of the best apps and platforms to make your digital life easier? Stay tuned for insights that help our team members maximize productivity and stay engaged.
Resilience is key: Writing in The National, Mary Ames, our director of strategy, considered the role of urban resilience in countering the covid-19 crisis in the UAE. Urban resilience is the ability of a city to maintain continuity during crises and adapt to the future. The keys to urban resilience are great infrastructure, cohesive communities, and good governance. Moreover, Ames noted in the piece that the more vital functions that move online now, the easier these services will be administered in the future. Head on over to The National to read more of this critical perspective.
SPOTTED ELSEWHERE
Another social media app. Twitter is broken, and Elon Musk isn’t fixing it. Every week brings new self-imposed wounds, such as limiting the number of tweets that users can read in a day and forcing people to sign in to view tweets. Seeing blood in the water, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has launched a “friendly” version of Twitter this week called Threads. The platform is rough around the edges, but at this point, many users seem desperate for a Twitter alternative that works. Will you join?
Plastics are dangerous. Climate change is an immediate and pressing challenge for the international community. Our overreliance on plastics is an interconnected issue with climate change that profoundly impacts our everyday lives. In a long piece for the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert unpacks how plastics release and attract toxic chemicals, and appear everywhere from human placentas to chasms thirty-six thousand feet beneath the sea. She asked the question: can we ever be rid of them?
QUICK HITS
We rarely lose technology.
A 25-year-old bet about consciousness has finally been settled.
Concrete is killing us.