The Advantage of Being at a Distance

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What It’s About: One of the interesting observations I’ve made in the last 10 months is what’s happening regarding work and location. Perhaps, since the post industrial world has now fully become the age of the knowledge worker, being able to do work for and/or run a business at a distance, is being acknowledged as a supreme advantage.

So What?: In Dec. 2020, I spoke to 100 plus senior HR leaders headquartered in Southern California. They shared a fascinating trend. One of the past advantages of having top talent located in SoCal was the climate. Historically, it was tough for organizations elsewhere to convince talent to leave for a career opportunity, expecting people to relocate to places with less favorable weather. Now, employers globally are hiring top talent from SoCal without asking them to relocate. Both organizations and employees now fully realize that most knowledge work can be well done from anywhere. Southern Californian companies are now regularly losing excellent talent to organizations that previously never had much of a recruitment chance.

Housing markets in many suburban, and even historically remote places are booming during the pandemic. One reason is that top knowledge working talent realizes that they can live in a preferred location, while doing their ideal work. Why commute hours per day, and pay ridiculous prices for urban housing, when you can do your work from a place that was formerly a resort community to be enjoyed primarily on vacation? And organizations competing for highly competitive roles in technology, etc., may want hybrid models. However, if they insist on people returning to campuses exclusively, talent will easily shift to organizations providing more work from anywhere. P.S. I live in such a resort community, and am seeing this happen real-time.

Now What?: Everyone needs to assess their ability to work remotely. If you can do highly value added work from a distance, your employment and opportunity market has now expanded dramatically. Keep refining your remote skills, and ability to leverage all remote technology platforms and collaborative capabilities. If your work is very much dependent on you showing up at a place, realize the limitations. If your work can be done by a machine, everything from radiology to grocery clerking, it will, and much sooner than many people realize. Be aware.

If you run an organization that depends on having office real estate, understand that competitors will attack your margins if they can do so with remote knowledge workers, and machines, to eliminate dedicated work space altogether. Think banks. How long will physical bank branches be needed around the world? Answer: Not long. However, even small firms that have had administration teams housed together need to reconsider.

Stop wishing for everything to return to what it once was. Creativity, compassion, and the ability to apply insight with actionable impact from anywhere to anyone, will become even greater differentiating characteristics. Of course, we cherish human contact and belonging. However, many organizations, totally or in part, can accomplish this from a distance if they put their mindsets to it.

Distance does NOT necessarily mean we have to be distant. In fact, leveraging distance in the right way is becoming a real competitive advantage,

Think Big, Start Small, Act Now,

Lorne

One Millennial View: The only foreseeable limitation is fixed mindsets that have been ingrained to forbid the notion that great work can be accomplished from anywhere. It’ll be like being on a sports team, and a co-worker has a home gym, but does not show up for weight lifting sessions in the communal space. Can you trust that they’re still putting in the same work for game day? Some will not be able to. However, the constant is that no results equals no job. This way, we can help break our mindsets that believe just because someone isn’t on campus, they’re not doing great, if not better work from anywhere.

- Garrett

Edited and published by Garrett Rubis

The Advantage of Being at a Distance

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