Bosses weren’t being paranoid: Remote workers more likely to start own biz Companies with higher levels of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic saw more of their employees launch startups, economists have found. They argue this entrepreneurial spillover is a factor policymakers and firms should weigh when shaping remote work policies. In a research paper titled, "Entrepreneurial Spawning From …
Or perhaps ones in limbo on the cesspit that is LinkedIn while on furlough…. or latter remote work absolute guarantees being reneged on. Weasel corporate behaviour like saying remote is absolutely guaranteed whilst squirming on contract simple variation requests to reflect that. Personally even after my Office was closed down it was still my contractual place of my regular work.
The remote IP v’s LinkedIn usage seems a fairly tenuous data set for this speculation. Esp. With VPN’s and many IT Dept’s unable/unwilling to do split tunnelling.
Yeah... i kind of feel it's ignoring predictable user behaviour: I am certainly less likely to use LinkedIn or other sites for job search during work hours in the office, so instead I'll just wait till I'm back home. I would personally not do it in office time if I was on a VPN either, because I'm geeky enough to understand the browsing history being visible to work IT team...
There are two issues with employment:
1. Is the employer getting good value from their working employees, remote or in-office?
2. Is the employee getting good value from their employer?
#1 is what the employer should ask themselves, not what the employee does on their own time. If the employee has energy to put into family, a side gig, or creating a startup, as long as they do what their employer pays them for on time, that other stuff isn't the employer's business.
Suppose the employer is concerned about employee retention, which is the only aspect of employees meeting #1 above, that starting companies and leaving impacts the employer's business. In that case, there are plenty of mechanisms for addressing that, beginning with the employer recognizing #2 above is the other half of the employer-employee equation. This is why good employers have RSUs, career & education advancement programs, proper compensation, employee stock purchase plans, bonus programs, etc.
Bad management getting even worse isn't a solution to employee retention.
Also need to bear in mind that some (?many) RtOs are disguised redundancy-without-paying-for-redundancy operations. As these fail to take into account that the first ones out will be those who can get jobs elsewhere, including starting up on their own, this has to count as the objective being met.
That was my thought too.
Combination of shadow layoffs via RTO mandates plus overt mass layoffs in tech is causing a very toxic recruitment environment since the pandemic. That will naturally lead to a lot of people either retiring, changing career or launching their own business - if you launch a new business LinkedIn (for better of worse) is going to be updated to reflect that. Not so much the other two options.
...not people going "You know what I've come to realise? I fucking hate sitting in a soul destroying office environment, putting up with people I'd rather punch in the face than talk to. The place is run by idiots who struggle to make a pie chart for the next utterly pointless meeting. I'm going to do something with my life."
So I'm sure forcing people back into the office will kill that attitude
> So I'm sure forcing people back into the office will kill that attitude
Was happening long before Covid.
When the location of the 2012 Olympics was announced (in 2005) one of my co-irkers essentially stopped doing their paid-for job for several weeks. Instead, while using the company offices as a base - so lax / incompetent was t'management, they spent all their days in property speculation.
It was not because they hated their job - they did so little actual work there was nothing to hate. It was simply because they could.
Gosh! If you feel that about your current employment you need to get out.
Personally, I enjoy working from home but the office has a great buzz, too. I work with friends as well as colleagues. That's not to say there aren't candidates for the 'open window'.....
Highly motivated self-starters are the exact type of people that excel at remote work. Go figure they would also excel at entrepreneurship.
The study is meaningless. These people were destined to branch out and leave anyway. WFH gave them a taste and mandatory WFO just put them over the edge.
Cheers & best wishes to success!
Came here to say the same but less eloquently.
My last employer, nearly 20 years go, went bust. I was the only person who worked remotely. I jumped ship before they went bust and have since been self-employed. My office based colleagues all went to safe public sector jobs. Something I can't ever imagine doing.
> From firms' perspective, they might be hurt because they have key employees leaving.
Pah.
Clearly the ones leaving were never Team Players, did not have enough of the correct Loyalty To The Company and its Benevolent CEO. Key employees? Hah! They were just worming their way into the structure of The Company in order to take a bigger chunk when they inevitably fled. Better off without them, good to be shot of them sooner rather than later.
Now they won't be skulking at the back as we start the day with The Company Chant; all together now. "Rah-rah ..." (see, I was right, glad they are gone, now nobody is shouting out "Rasputin" in the first line! Never did understand that).
You have to be impressed by the precision of the statistics you normally get from academics. Breaking every number out into its appropriate bucket. Comparing across multiple dimensions of socioeconomics, carefully sliced into all the expected groupings. Exquisitely graphed. So that we can easily compare and contrast the way that the amount of time spent working from home varies with all these commonly encountered factors, such as age brackets.
Okay, hit me with those results, baby: "Americans" (did we look at anyone else? come back to that) "aged" (here it comes, here it comes) "20-64" (ah. right. do you need some more time to prepare? no, that's it? that's al we get? ok, ok, sure we can make a press release out of this with, give us s moment)
I have been a remote worker for 22 of the last 25 years.
Sun Micro taught me the ropes -- I remember thinking as I left : "I never want to work for a company again".
But I cooled it after 13 years; I only work remotely, and prefer not having to dig up clients.
The crux is that if you are working remotely, it is entirely transactional.
You aren't going to lunches, beer blasts, or humiliatingly cringe-worthy 'organized fun'.
You get a pay-cheque for work done, and if the gig ends, you fedex your gear back.
At my previous gig, my office access had expired, so when I went to drop off my gear, I couldn't get in.
I fedex'd it from across the street.
Sweet memories.
… during the same working hours.
I’m not saying I do this, of course not, but it’s certainly relatively trivial to do and is absolutely happening.
“Cameras on in meetings please” - even that is trivial to hack with a recording.
Whilst a meeting is droning on you are busy with your other job. Clearly this depends on how much you need to participate, but you can wing it. Get AI to generate a meeting overview which you can skim read later.
WFO is generally accepted that you get max 5 hours of useful work done each day. The reality is about 3.
Everyone was/is fine with that.
WFH? If you can get 6 hours of useful work done a day you can handle two jobs and collect two salaries.
> an unidentified "data partner" ... infer their place of employment.
So really this is just a technique of espionage. As well as inferring a target's person's place of work, the very same process can (and therefore does) infer many other things, too.
Some of which might even be correct
"Based on our firm-level estimate, we calibrate that at least 11.6 percent of the post-pandemic increase in new firm entry can be explained by spawning from remote work,"
For that to be a helpful stat, they would need to quantify how much of a post-pandemic increase there was. A million? 12? And even if they did that, anther way of putting it is 90% of the post-pandemic increase in new firm entry would have happened regardless.
I also know of a number of businesses that went under during Covid. Presumably a fair number of those started new businesses once things settled down - possibly even the same businesses.
So in summary, this report thinks that millions should be returning to an office location, just in case 3 people go off and start a business. Seems reasonable.
1) This is capitalism at work, and it benefits the company (at least in theory)
To do the job with an internal person, they have a cost:
salary of person
+ cost of management
+ cost of overhead
---------------------------------------------
cost of job
But by outsourcing they save money
cost of job = salary of external contractor
2) Companies might want to evaluate their employees for "stability"
It's possible that they could look at demographics and discover that workers less likely to go "lone wolf" are perhaps
- Married
- Female
- Older
- With family
"cost of job = salary of external contractor"
Wrong. Cost of job = contractor's billing. That is not the same as contractor's salary.
Out of the invoiced amount the contractor has to provide his own expenses, provision for being on the bench between contracts*, sick (including health care costs in the US), holiday pay, employment taxes as well as salary. It's disregarding all that that brought us IR35.
* From the engager's PoV this is "availability". The standard pimp to contractor greeting is "Are you available?"
Critics of "return to office" mandates note that there are other possible motives, including office occupancy requirements as a condition for local tax breaks
Any jurisdiction seeking genuine green credentials should take a look at that one. Granting tax breaks to employers imposing unsustainable commuting requirements is jut plain stupid. Tax braks encouraging less commuting should replace them.
"The authors cite various other studies on remote work showing how it frees up time by reducing commuting, increases productivity, offers more flexible hours, "
Which tells you what you need to know about the work getting done
"and reduces employee monitoring."
Which tells you all you need to know about middle managers and why they push for return to office.
I haven't visited this site for a long time. Tried to go into it, succeeded, but what a dog's dinner. The list of people in my network is scrunched up against the left margin. Never mind. Just on a quick inspection, at least two of the people on my list are deceased for certain*, another person appears twice (once with her maiden name, the other her married name). There are so many more out of date entries on there. My point is that this cannot be considered a reliable dataset to glean useful information from.
*Edit: Make that three - sad to hear "Mr Airfix" (Ralph Ehrmann) passed away in early 2023 RIP.
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