An analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of working for home.

This is an analytical essay that written in my coursework during my time at WGU. It was nominated for and received and excellance award from WGU. :

For many positions, it is beneficial to the employer, the employee, environment, and surrounding community to operate in a remote environment for work. It also has several drawbacks. Benefits of working from home include positive environmental impacts, reclaimed time, lowered expenses, and improved employee siloing. Drawbacks are limited creative discussion, data security risks, limited employee surveillance, limited revenue recapture, and the economic implications of workers moving to low-cost areas. The purpose of this document is to draw attention to the benefits and drawbacks, so that key personnel may make an informed decision during policy creation.

Starting off, working from home drastically reduces the commute for most employees during the working day. Most workers average a commute that is approximately half an hour each way, for a total of a full hour through the course of a 24-hour day. Working for home allows for that hour of commute time to be reclaimed, or for an average working year, 260 hours. Assuming a nominal day of eight hours, that is nearly a working month of time sitting in traffic that now can be used far more productively, both by the employee, and the employer. 

As alluded to in the discussion surrounding commute times, there are two other major benefits by just reducing the commute time. One being that there is much more time available to be utilized, and in the environmental impacts of forgoing the commute. On the topic of time reclamation, the employee has freed up approximately a working month, and the associated expenses from that commute. Employers can take great advantage of this, as increasing the working day by that amount would not increase the total time burden on the employee. This is of particular advantage for salaried employees, as the wage need not necessarily reflect the additional hours, or even can be reduced to compensate for the employee’s expenses dropping from lack of employment related transportation expenses. There are also the environmental considerations, as both carbon and non-carbon emissions are drastically reduced, demonstrated rather starkly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data shows that for nitrogen oxide pollutants alone, there was in some cases a 50% drop compared to pre-pandemic levels. As most nitrogen oxide pollutants are produced as a byproduct of burning carbon emitting fuels, this suggests that carbon emissions should have dropped significantly as well, and that was exactly what was observed. The observations showed that the pandemic, and its forced migration to a remote work environment, caused the largest ever recorded drop in carbon emissions.

There are also two other primary ways that employers can realize direct cost savings from a remote work environment. First, they are no longer limited to hiring in what tends to be “high cost of living” areas. If the daily living expenditures of employees can be reduced, it follows that employees in a lower cost of living area need not command as large of a payroll allocation. There are also discrepancies state wage laws that are advantageous, for example, minimum wage in Texas is slightly below half of what is required in Washington or California for example. The lower cost states also have some secondary advantages, in less cost state-mandated worker protections, such as Washingtons family leave payroll taxes, which is not a factor in a state such as Texas. The second major direct cost reduction would be the obvious lack of need for expensive commercial property in a major metropolitan area. It is difficult to generalize savings, as most cases are unique, however is generally well known that commercial property in major metros is prohibitively expensive.

The last major benefits that companies can realize from a remote work environment is far greater access controls, and near seamless onboarding and offboarding. In the case of access controls, this is not merely in the context of IT access control, but in employee access to one-another. It becomes practical for employers to greatly restrict the flow of information between employees, as the only practical means of communications can be limited to means established by the company. Furthermore, employees can be restricted further by means of limiting access to employee identities, meaning surface level employees do not know their coworkers name even, to interfere with unsanctioned side channel communications. This would practically eliminate leakage of information between divisions of the company, while greatly increasing security. This also has many positive implications for the company in legal exposure on the harassment and discriminations fronts, as it becomes near impossible for those situations to arise when no protected attributes of employees are made know to others. As far as onboarding and offboarding, in a BYOD and VDI scenario, it would be possible to never need to directly interact with an employee during onboarding, and offboarding. This also allows for nearly full automation of the training and initial setup of an employee, as well as for offboarding. In concept, it should be possible to make hiring and firing an employee as simple as a button press in a dashboard for a human manager, or for a fully automated middle-management, a set of criteria being met, after which access is granted or removed.

There are some drawbacks from a remote environment, which may make it such that it not ideal for many businesses to adopt. The drawbacks are mainly focused on the limiting of creative discussions, limitations on data security, limits on the amount of employee surveillance, limiting employee revenue recapture, and the economic implications of shifting expenditures.

Starting off the drawbacks, there is the limitation of creative discussions. In a fully remote environment, side-conversations become increasingly difficult, particularly between corporate silos. This can have the knock-on effects of limiting innovation and creative problem solving within an organization. In an environment where these factors are business critical, hybrid or a fully onsite environment is likely the best choice. There are some mitigations that can be done, such as cross training and forced interaction between silos, but this may not be within the organizations capabilities to implement.

This moves us into the second issue, which is the limitations on data security. In a on-premises environment, control of what the employees are allowed to take into the workspace is maintained. There are many environments where proprietary and secret information is worked with, and as such there are many rules that are enforced to protect those secrets. Common rules that are enforced are no cameras, storage devices, or documentation. These rules can also be enforced rather stringently in extreme cases, in ways of physically destroying cameras on phones that need to enter the site and searching employees entering and leaving the premises. In a fully remote environment, this is not the case. In a remote environment, employees taking a camera into a home office cannot be practically enforced, and as such there would be little means of stopping an employee that is not concerned with the legal ramifications of breaking confidentiality. Then there is the issue with increasing the attack surface on the company, as there are few means to prevent employees’ devices from having some sort of interaction with company-owned devices. Effectively, from a technical security standpoint, the devices assigned to the users would be in a public untrusted zone continuously, whilst still having the access to company resources that would be needed to facilitate the employee performing their duties.

The third major drawback would be in the restrictions imposed on employee surveillance. Organizations have been increasingly turning to AI based cameras, that can track down to the second the employees time off task, and weather the employee is working in the companies’ interests. Most states have laws against employers deploying this technology in employees’ homes, and when not prohibited, has often been misused by employees and managers in positions of power. This has the effects of opening the company to severe legal liabilities when misuse does occur. A good example of this would be a logistics company that had cameras facing the sleeping quarters of long-haul travelers. A manager decided to profit off adult content inadvertently generated by the camera systems. This opened the company up to several lawsuits, and several employees to criminal liabilities. The company also received an injunction from the courts limiting employee surveillance indefinitely.

The fourth issue is the limitations of recapturing revenue from employees. If there are no employees onsite, how is the company store and company housing business model going to work? Many companies are turning towards company run cafeterias, paid parking, vending machines, employees paid uniforms, and other means to recapture a significant portion of an employee’s paycheque. This is difficult to impossible without having some means of direction employees to company-owned resources, either by proximity or forced requirements. Additionally, larger employers have started to implement company owned housing and apartment options. This allows a substantial amount of an employees pay to be recaptured, whilst also limiting employee career options outside of the company, aiding retention.

The last major issue is with the economic implications of shifting both corporate and employee expenditures. If a remote work model becomes prevalent, this will decrease demand for property and services in traditionally high-cost areas, driving down the price, while the inverse is true for traditionally low-cost areas. For companies invested in real-estate in high-cost areas, this can lead to significant investment losses as valuations fall. In higher cost areas, tax liabilities on owned properties can skyrocket as property valuations rise, as that is directly calculated from property valuation in most cases. There are also the implications for local vendor prices fluctuating from said effects, or for the case of high-cost areas, vendors on thin margins moving or closing operations entirely.

In conclusion, working from home has some major benefits for an employer in some circumstances. It may help a company in achieving environmental goals, allow greater productivity, reduce costs, and improve inter-division compartmentalization. In contrast, working from reduces the employee monitoring options, limits creative discourse, decreases revenue recapture from employees, and has economic implications. The need for working from home will vary drastically from one organization to the next, security minded or physical production will likely not be able to implement a remote work policy whilst organizations without such concerns may be able to with great effect, as such, a clear blanket recommendation cannot be made. The best option is for key decisionmakers to evaluate their corporate environment, and to act in the best interests of their particular organization.