Following the COVID-19 lockdown, many workers were forced to telecommute and work from home to help keep Silicon Valley’s mainstays afloat. While many tech giants were already supporting telecommuting as their regular way of conducting business, others were forced to adopt methods to accommodate the Silicon Valley workers’ telecommute as jobs move online.
As inconvenient to the tech industry as the pandemic was, the environment began to repair itself from many years of abuse caused by the industry’s commute. This is being witnessed throughout the earth, as the world heals itself during these trying times.
The businesses, like Apple, were shocked at the nearly 20% increase in productivity of workers who were able to take their former office jobs to their homes, and as many businesses have already noted, this is a huge incentive to promote telecommuting and working from home, as opposed to having to bear the added overhead costs associated with maintaining a group culture at a physical location.
Silicon Valley’s Bay Area Transportation Department says, the impact on the environment has been so spectacular, that they are launching a program that will mandate that San Francisco area businesses will be required to maintain 60 percent of their workforce as telecommuting and working from home.
While this is good news for reducing the cost of doing business in the San Francisco Bay Area, there is an entire infrastructure sub-industry in place which supports the pre-pandemic commuting workforce that is at risk of crumbling.
Already, many of the restaurants who rely on the former commuting workforce to support their endeavors, without the means to support themselves through the COVID-19 lockdown, have closed their doors without the intention or the ability to reopen after restrictions are lifted.
Many businesses and transit agencies which depend on workers who commute to and from work are being lost, possibly never to return.
Companies like Google are joining the ranks of others such as Facebook, Twitter, and Square to adopt and continue to embrace the work-at-home model as part of their method of operations in the foreseeable future. In fact, Twitter and Square are leading the pack by not caring that their employees ever return to work. They are perfectly content with the new work from home model.
This is good news for Silicon Valley workers who live and work in one of the most expensive areas to live in the USA. For them, the commute is expensive and reduces their overall quality of life. Some live far enough away from the core of the Bay Area to reduce their monthly overhead costs of having to pay high rental fees or mortgage payments.
And for those workers who were willing to pay exorbitant rental rates and mortgage payments to stay close to work? They are rethinking their strategy. Many are looking to relocate outside the area or are putting their homes up for sale to move altogether. While it may have relatively easy to sell a home in the pre-pandemic Bay Area, many listings are not being seen, for at present many people are giving pause to the idea of moving into prime real estate in San Francisco.
A two-hour commute to and from work is considered an average commute. That’s four hours a day of your life lost forever, driving to and from work.
Telecommuting and moving your job online is a highly advantageous method of increasing your quality of life, especially if you’re balancing living and working in Silicon Valley.
As we see this trend emerging from California’s Frisco Bay, this is a foreshadowing of things to come for many, if not all areas of the United States.
Will you be ready for the change?