{"id":8066,"date":"2020-09-03T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-03T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aviancetechnologies.com\/blog\/working-from-home-hurts-young-people\/"},"modified":"2020-09-03T16:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-03T16:00:00","slug":"working-from-home-hurts-young-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aviancetechnologies.com\/blog\/working-from-home-hurts-young-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Working From Home Hurts Young People"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Working From Home Hurts Young People<\/h2>\n

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Moving to New York a few years into the job helped, but it didn\u2019t totally solve the problem\u2014I was still the girl on her laptop in her bedroom, trying to make people from Twitter like me enough to meet a stranger for an after-hours drink. After you\u2019ve left the ready-made social environment of school, an office is a natural place to look for new people who share your interests and outlook. But with no place to go to but just as many professional obligations, people working from home might have the flexibility to do everything except make new friends.<\/p>\n

Even those who self-select into the work-from-home \u201clifestyle\u201d report feeling distant from new professional opportunities, outside their companies as well as inside, Peditto told me. Deprived of desk neighbors, impromptu coffees, and any real way to, for a lack of a better term, read everyone\u2019s vibe, she said that new hires and young people who work remotely risk remaining unknown quantities. And unknown quantities don\u2019t become beloved colleagues, or get promoted. How you begin your working life tends to shape your professional and financial prospects for decades to come. Those who were just starting out during the financial cataclysm of 2008 and the recession that followed have had their fortunes stunted by it, and many will never recover. For recent graduates beginning work via Zoom in the twin chaos of a pandemic and a financial crisis, the impact could be even more profound.<\/p>\n

Women\u2014of all ages\u2014particularly suffer when telecommuting, Berg told me, with fewer promotions and slower wage growth. Employers already tend to assume that women, and especially mothers, are less dedicated to work than their male counterparts are, no matter how hard they toil. If those same women seek permission to stay home for good\u2014opting out of the \u201cface time\u201d that many of their bosses hold irrationally dear\u2014it could encourage the assumption that they\u2019re sitting on their couches eating SkinnyPop and watching HGTV.<\/p>\n

Good employers can account for those biases in their work practices, and theoretically, workers can organize their colleagues to pressure management toward better accommodations, such as expansion of parental leave and greater transparency in pay. But those efforts, including forming a union, are much harder when people can\u2019t meet face-to-face. A dispersed workforce means that employees have to go out of their way to compare experiences with one another, and that those with relatively little power have a tougher time sensing who their allies might be.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, that might be the biggest problem of working from home in perpetuity. Workplaces are complex social ecosystems just like all other places humans inhabit, and decentralizing them can obliterate the things that make them satisfying: knowing eye contact with a co-worker when a change you\u2019ve been begging for is finally announced. A slightly-too-long lunch break with your desk neighbor because your boss is in meetings all day. Giving a presentation to your peers and watching them receive it well. Figuring out whom you can rely on, and whom you can\u2019t. \u201cThere\u2019s so much unspoken that you absorb as an employee,\u201d Peditto said. \u201cYou don\u2019t get that right now with just a set of scripted meetings.\u201d At home, though, you probably get better coffee.<\/p>\n\n

This article appears in the October 2020 print edition with the headline \u201cA Cubicle Never Looked So Good.\u201d<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

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