Image: Charles Deluvio via Unsplash
The future of how we work boils down to one question.
“So…when do we get to move to Bali?”
That is the running joke with the programmers at Tinkoff, one of the largest digital banks in the world, in discussions about remote work, CEO Oliver Hughes said during a recent panel at the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce’s RussiaTALK Online 2020 conference. The fact that employers increasingly face the possibility of their staff jetting off to work from remote locations across the globe says it all about the future of work: things are changing.
The technologies that enable digital work, video conferencing, financial transactions and e-commerce have long been in place. Yet until recently, concerns about productivity declines in a dispersed workplace persisted, even in the tech companies that provide these very services to others.
The coronavirus pandemic, which necessitated remote work to battle contagion, changed the context. And one silver lining of the pandemic era is that it forces companies to embark on a huge social experiment of employees working from home. Now, the results are starting to come in.
Yandex, the technology giant that offers everything from food delivery to music streaming to ride-hailing services, provided essential services for many Russians during the lockdown. At the RBCC conference, the company’s Chief Operating Officer, Greg Abovsky, said the pandemic experience showed that most work could be done remotely with no impact on quality – in fact, according to a company survey, 79% of employees reported to being equally or more productive working from home during the first months of remote work.
According to Abovsky, the company has seen significant advantages to distance working. The shift to online has expanded opportunities to hire people living beyond Yandex’s home base in Moscow, and boosted demand for the company’s online educational initiatives as more people consider careers in tech. In addition, Yandex will be able to retain more highly skilled employees who want to stay with the company but relocate to different regions for personal reasons, according to Abovsky.
Tinkoff, meanwhile, hired 500 new staff since the beginning of the year who were able to integrate into the Tinkoff community without stepping foot into the office, CEO Oliver Hughes said. The office will remain important but will need to be repurposed to play a different, more social role. The new office space will follow a kind of “palace of culture” model, Hughes said, using a tongue-in-cheek reference to centrally-planned multi-functional buildings developed during the Soviet era where workers could come to socialize and relax.
The pandemic experience has also changed the rules of the game in financial markets, where in-person events such as company presentations and roadshows have long been the norm. Dmitri Sedov, Co-CEO of Goldman Sachs in Russia, says the bank participated in several sizable capital markets transactions, including IPOs, during the lockdown. “The covid crisis has just accelerated changes that have long been overdue to many people in the industry,” Sedov said. “Some of the inefficiencies in the way big banks were doing business” – including unnecessary travel and continued reliance on legacy telecoms and video-conferencing systems – “became obvious long before restrictions were introduced.”
In one example of a successful transaction carried out online, Yandex worked with Goldman to raise more than $1 billion during a recent shares sale. “The whole fundraising was done fully remotely, with Goldman offices helping us around the world,” said Abovsky of Yandex. “It was just as efficient, if not more so.”
So what will happen to traditional office space as the work moves online? The office will become “the place where the fun stuff happens” – including brainstorming, relationship-building, and celebrating – while more routine tasks like checking one’s email will be just as easily accomplished at home, according to Malachy McAllister, CEO of HSBC in Russia. McAllister predicted that companies will significantly reduce their commercial real estate and reshape the remaining space to prioritise spaces for teambuilding and socialising in the post-covid work environment.
Not all jobs can be done remotely, however. Agriculture is an example of one industry that remains very labor intensive, according to entrepreneur Naum Babayev, Chairman of one of the largest agriculture businesses in Russia, DAMATE group.
In response to the pandemic threat, DAMATE companies applied new technologies to enhance safety measures, including sinks outfitted with artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor how employees wash their hands. The service, provided by one of Mr Babaev’s other businesses, Connectome, is installed at food processing and medical sites where hygiene is paramount. Computer vision, heat sensors and AI can do everything from alert when cattle will calve to monitoring employee performance – resulting in a nearly twofold increase in worker productivity, according to Babayev.
Looking at the work environment more broadly, the future work space will require organizing mass numbers of personnel in a way that maintains channels for teamwork and communication, even as everything moves online. Even in tech companies, which are considered cutting edge, the switch to distance working during corona was a real and legitimate concern, according to Hughes. Yet things worked out.
“Nothing broke,” Hughes said with a relieved smile, recounting the experience.
And now, we may all be one step closer to Bali.