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What I’ve Been Reading This Week: Work From Home Edition


Yet another week of (work from home) work has come and gone.  With that comes the opportunity to look at a few articles which have taken a deep dive into the dynamics of work from home...both from the perspective of those impacted by the large number of workers that are currently working remotely as well as from the viewpoint of the workers themselves.

As always, below are a couple articles that caught my eye this week.



On Monday, Google announced that it was extending the option for most of its employees to work from home through June of 2021.  As The San Francisco Chronicle reports, with many of the company’s employees already working remotely, there has been a noticeable dip in the housing market in the Bay Area, a plunge in leases in the area, and a direct hit to San Francisco’s bars and restaurants.  (With much of the company’s employees being located in the Bay Area, this would undoubtedly be an area severely hampered by having many of Google’s employees not in the office.)   With this announcement of an even longer work from home option being provided to employers, it is somewhat sobering to think of the effect this will continue to have on the Bay Area over the coming months.



Eleanor Cummins at Vox write a recent article which tracked the emergence of work from home as an option for workers from some of its earlier roots in the 1970’s through today.  In the article, attention is paid to large scale employers such as Yahoo, IBM, and FaceBook in an effort to show that while work from home has curtailed in recent years (before the coronavirus pandemic started, only about 14% of workers in the country worked from home five or more days per week), that has taken a sharp reversal.  However, with nearly half the workforce working from home now, the prevalence of distractions from work abound.  Although the article does not give employers or employees a full proof guide on how to cut out the distractions, it does provide a few stories about how some workers are coping that I believe are worth a read.

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