tl;dr: In motion for 20 years, the notion of “remote” work creates a challenge for employers and changes the employee landscape.
There was an article in the WSJ a few days ago about employers getting pushback from employees who had relocated to other cities during Covid.
Workers Want to Do Their Jobs From Anywhere and Keep Their Big-City Salaries
The employers wanted to lower their salary, to make it commensurate with the lower cost of living.
The employees, however, argued that “I know my value, who cares where I am when I deliver it?”
As the subtitle says:
Employers see remote work as an opportunity to save money by cutting pay; employees argue that their work has the same value no matter where they do it
While a company could make some argument that, “having members of a team in the same physical location is a differentiator,” much of that argument has gone out the window in the last 18 months.
The idea that, “you live in a different city so somehow your value to us is less” is a relic of a pre-Internet mentality. You’re on the frontier, out in the sticks, not in the city where all the action is happening.
Today, the action is happening not in a city or an office, but online.
At Gtmhub, we call this a shift to the “Age of Outcomes,” where value is more reflective of what and how much you contribute to an organization, not “output,” which is what we measured in the Industrial Age.
I suspect we’ll see a leveling off of salaries between the traditional big city tech hubs and other parts of the country/world. It will change the talent game as well. Now, people will really think globally when they hire, which means that platforms such as LinkedIn, which require you to put a location for your job search, will need to reinvent themselves.
With rich employers able (and forced) to pay top dollar no matter where the employees are located, there will probably be consequences for other employers in those markets that were used to competing for talent on a more local level.
It will also change housing markets (as it has already) and probably the value of some colleges, as well as others I’m not thinking about.
The point of all of this is that Covid accelerated the shift away from an “office-centric” culture and now it’s accelerating the shift from a “headquarter city” culture.
Employees recognize that they have value and, if a company wants to pay them less because they live on a farm, those employees will find someone else who will pay them what they consider to be their fair market value.
We’re all free agents now.
