GitLab Remote Work, 26 Sep 2020

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From YouTube: Are You Ready For The Future Of Work? | Why It Matters 4 | Full Episode

Description

COVID-19 is pushing the world into the largest-ever workplace experiment - with remote work. Is this the dawn of a new era in the world of work?

8 in 10 Singaporean workers are currently working from home - and would like to continue doing so. Meanwhile, companies around the world are also toying with the idea of making a permanent shift into remote work. What will we lose from our face-to-face collaborations, when this seismic shift becomes permanent? Can technology make virtual collaborations as engaging and creative as real world interactions? How will this change to remote work transform office spaces or even whole cities? And when it no longer matters where employees are working from, how will that change the global job market? Joshua Lim finds out.

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About WHY IT MATTERS: Technology is advancing at an unprecedented rate. It is transforming the world we live in faster than ever before. Our inquisitive host Joshua Lim is back on a mission to sniff out the emerging trends and technologies, to ask the questions you have always wanted to ask, and some you have never even thought about.
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#CNAInsider #CNAWhyItMatters #Technology

More from Why It Matters: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkMf14VQEvTb20brFFm73-_ooi6i-QeGG

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https://www.youtube.com/cnainsider

A

Take my hand josh.

B

B

And scene staging plays from my living room is a new experience. You want a higher pitch, but as a freelancer and an artist I haven't, worked in an office in over 12 years. Why matters I record lines.

C

B

I edit scripts at home and rehearse well anywhere.

B

It works for me and now that my fellow singaporeans have a taste of working from home, many find that they like it.

B

According to a recent survey, eight in 10 singaporeans want to continue working from home even after the pandemic, and some employers are already moving to make work from home a permanent option. Are we ready for the new work.

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B

In pre-pandemic times, this 6 400 square foot office would be crawling with 50 to 60 employees. On any given day. This space designed to make employees feel at home, cleared out on 7th april.

B

Now many companies are looking at sticking with this shift permanently.

D

Working from home permanently has become a reality for employees of the social media, giant twitter.

B

Twitter was the first to make this call. In may ceo jack dorsey announced that twitter employees could work from home forever if they want to. So I'm checking in with twitter's managing director in southeast asia, avida gujral about the company's big move.

E

A

Arvinda welcome to my home office. I nearly bought this desk that you see the chair, uh the headphones and the earp earbuds for when I'm walking and talking.

B

Why did twitter make the decision to switch for their employees to work permanently from home.

A

Twitter is where the world comes and talks about topics and interest right if we are being used by people all over the world across boundaries and across time zones, we want to reflect that purpose of our product to our own company structure. So we want to give the same flexibility that if you want to work from anywhere in any time zone as long as your job distribution allows it you shouldn't be given that flexibility.

A

B

Have any productivity data you can share with us during this work from home experiment.

A

First thing we saw was the number of meetings declined, because people were still figuring out how to conduct these meetings. Oh I'm on zoom, but you are in webex, but I am on hangout uh you're on skype, but my organization doesn't allow this app, but I think it just took us, I think, 30 to 60 days for this to normalize and settle down once it did you've seen that most teams are back to pre-pandemic levels of engagement with their clients and customers, which for me, is very heartening because that's the leading indicator.

A

I think that data point gives us confidence that working from home or living at work, whatever you call it is, is working out. I mean globally, we've tracked it and globally. All our sales team around the world are doing almost as effective a job as they did in a pre-pandemic world.

B

In fact way back in 2013, a randomized controlled trial by a group of researchers at stanford university found that people working from home were actually more productive than their office counterparts. The researchers used a group of 250 call center employees of a chinese travel company as the proverbial lab rats hi. Sir, thank you for calling.

B

Yes, how may I help you today about half of them were randomly assigned to work from home and the rest became the control group that stayed in the office at the end of nine months, they found that those who stayed in the office were actually less productive by 13.5, meaning the company got an extra work day per week out of the home workers.

B

Today, I'm meeting with professor john roberts hi professor, the man behind this first of its kind experiment, remotely, of course, in the experiment with c-trip. Why is it that remote workers were more productive.

F

Being able to avoid commuting made them happier and happier, workers tend to be more productive. People were more productive at home because it was quieter and they could focus they weren't socializing during working hours,.

B

So the literal million dollar question is: are officers obsolete? Well, the data suggests that at least some think so occupied office. Space dropped by 55 000 square meters from april to june in 2020, that's equivalent to 20 floors of marina bay financial center tower 3.

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Steven lyon designs offices for a living, yet he doesn't think his job is under threat. He thinks what will change is the way offices are designed.

B

So then, what sort of design changes do you see through the office space.

G

This was an office presentation that we pulled together during the circuit breaker and in some ways this does represent the future, because there are very few focus desks in this: this office environment, it's it's mainly collaborative there's, training rooms, there's obviously boardrooms smaller focus pods. Here, there's food and beverage. There's breakout space, it's a very attractive environment for people to come, and collaborate socialize work together play together. So I think that we'll lose a proportion of the focus desks, I.e the place where we do focused work. I think that we'll see a reduction in that.

B

According to global workplace analytics, a typical company can save about 11 000 us dollars in operating costs for every employee who works remotely half the time.

B

That sounds like a good reason to allow more people to work from home. But what do we? The workers risk losing out on as we jump on the remote work.

B

B

Working from home, more like chucking from home work from home day, you mean no pans day.

B

Hey now, don't worry, I'm working hardening right now.

B

We have all seen the.

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H

Work from home.

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Remote work used to have a bad rep. The perception was that working from home would lead to slacking, but, as we have seen, people are often as if not more productive when they work from home. But what could be the real pitfalls of the remote work revolution?

B

Well straight up. I can think of snooze inducing zoom meetings as one obvious drawback.

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It's no wonder. Zoom fatigue has entered our lexicon. Apparently, video calls are so hard on us because we miss out on the non-verbal cues we rely on when we talk to someone face to face. We have to pay extra attention to the words and that can be exhausting.

B

One us-based startup thinks they may have found the answer to taking virtual collaboration to the next level, creating an avatar.

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Okay, that's my avatar.

B

Beam me up scotty nice, to meet you and being right next to someone across the world without leaving your living room, spatial allows people to enter a holographic workspace with ar or vr where they can talk to each other and share files in all sorts of formats.

B

You pull that screen up from your laptop, and you put it in here in.

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The virtual room correct, can share your screen files or powerpoint. Virtually anything.

B

The app also helps companies visualize spaces in 3d, allowing workers in different locations to collaborate better.

I

Bmp prairie bus is using spatial for real estate review planning, review.

B

Okay, what I'm looking at is like an architect's um model.

I

So let me actually like make it a little bigger so that now we can actually.

E

I

In this kind of store environment.

E

We are resizing the store so that now it becomes as big as us, and it's like we're in the store.

I

So the thing about video conference is that if you do like a zoom call, they have to like polish what they're talking about really well before they speak up versus. When you have an in-person meeting, I mean whether it be spatial or in a real offices. You can be like more raw and quickly express your ideas, so that really helps.

E

I

Innovating and being creative together, I believe creativity comes from when an idea meets another idea in a raw format and in an unexpected.

E

B

How about the other non-verbal cues.

I

In fact, we do have like eye tracking integration for some of the headsets to replicate your sort of eyeball movement, but.

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I

Our a hololens version, uh it actually has like a finer hand tracking, so you can do like thumbs up or point or something some of the facial expression. We do acknowledge that, like versus compared to the raw video, some of this facial expression may be missing. As more and more sensors are going to be like installed on the headset we can use. I will have more data to play, so we can replicate the facial expression.

E

My handwriting sucks.

I

Why matters back? I'm gonna put it in my living room to remember this day.

B

So that was a pretty interesting experience for me to meet jinha in the virtual world and it seems like spatial beyond making it easy to collaborate remotely is also helping with another potential pitfall. That's popped up with the rise in remote work.

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Burnout often leads to disengaged workers who can cost their employers 35 of their annual salary.

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Annabelle wilson founded living ashram in 2017 to help companies make sure this doesn't happen with science living ashram makes a company's employees take a survey. This helps them measure the starting point of their workforce's well-being. It then recommends specific solutions and then tracks the impact of the solutions on the workers.

B

Well, I work remotely sometimes a little too much.

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Let's give this a whirl and see if there's something to it before I try the app I first have to take living ashram's patented survey to check my baseline.

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I can't stop or control worrying okay.

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What's next, I often feel stressed and overwhelmed what no.

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I can freely voice my opinion and beliefs at work, even when others disagree with them. I don't know I can okay, all done now I'll, send this off to living ashram and try the recommendations in the app for a week. After that, I will do the survey again and see if it helped sent.

B

One of the recommendations suggested by the app to improve my well-being was doing activities I enjoyed as a child. For me that would be walking barefoot, silly dancing and skipping the app called such acts. Deeds of.

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J

Hey annabelle hi josh. How were the last seven days of using our well-being app and the survey.

B

um Pretty pretty nice actually, the deeds of appreciation were quite a surprise for me. Actually.

E

So one of the deeds of appreciation is to um take a walk to your destination. You know so got off earlier and then just take a walk.

B

I was walking home and I and I took in my neighborhood, which I tend to just shut out. If I was on the bus.

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J

Great, would you like to hear about some of the survey results.

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J

So in terms of need the thing that came up for you and your surveys was the issue around work-life balance and maybe setting boundaries for yourself. It seems like you're. Maybe most of your day is work focused and you are not incorporating as much in your of personal pursuits. I think.

E

That around the time.

B

I did the survey at first. I was having 12 hour days for four days in a row on a project I was working on, so perhaps that was why I felt like I was just super overwhelmed by work during that time.

J

Now, after one week of using our app, the results were actually quite impressive. You were making more time for interest outside of work that you had slightly better boundaries in terms of valuing your time and your personal needs so allowing your full range of emotions to arise even when they're uncomfortable, you went from a five to a seven on that. So that's quite a good improvement. Josh. Okay- and this was a really positive development in terms of better emotional health.

B

Remote work was rising even before the pandemic, and now that it's gone mainstream, even the way we manage work stress is getting a tech update. I wonder what other changes are in store if companies start hiring more and more people to work remotely from anywhere. Are we at risk of losing our jobs to folks in cheaper.

H

B

So we heard that there was once when I was in raffle, why it matters.

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This is one of my many side: hustles, I'm a voice artist. I do voiceovers for tv programs commercials record audiobooks mainly for singaporean clients, but sometimes I've lost out on jobs when clients chose cheaper artists just because they didn't live in singapore.

E

Could that happen.

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B

Ian chang now works for a company that is completely remote. Gitlab employs over 1 300 people from 67 countries working from wherever they're located house everyone. So far, there is no hq anywhere on the planet. So what's it like to work in an all remote company? Actually, I would say.

E

It has been life-changing so far right as long as you. You know make sure that the output is there. You know you're free to shortcut your day. However, you want it.

B

Currently, all remote companies like gitlab only make up about 16 of the world's companies, but if more companies adopt the all remote model, will jobs be shipped out to less expensive labor markets to save on cost? Could it lead to a race to the bottom?

B

I am talking to darren murph, the head of remote at get lab.

B

So when you have access to talent across the world and what stops you from just hiring the most cost-effective person.

K

It's a combination of factors, we look for experience, we look for a portfolio of work and some of our roles we're looking for specific time zones to be covered, so that does impact things somewhat.

B

How is this access to a global hiring pool been good for gitlab if it isn't primarily about cost effectiveness.

K

And this approach allows get lab to hire the world's best talent, regardless of location and because we hire all remote. We are authentically diverse instead of a company building a headquarters in one place and then hiring people from other countries to come there. We hire people and allow them to stay wherever they are.

K

So one of the unique things about all remote is that it enables people who have been ostracized from the workplace to find opportunity military spouses, those that are caring for their elderly. It enables them to find work as well as those that have mobility challenges.

B

So, while in theory, the rise in companies embracing an all-remote model could lead to more competition for jobs, it also gives us access to more job opportunities around the world.

B

The rise in the acceptance of work from anywhere policies and all remote companies could help cities address a growing concern over crowding.

B

According to the un, the number of people living in cities is expected to increase by 2.5 billion by 2050..

B

Now, if you didn't have to move to a city just to have a job that could help bring those numbers down, but how would it transform a city-state like.

H

B

So what other changes do you think will happen to the city.

C

Well, I think we're going to see a change from the 70s thinking of isolated zones where you have cbd for all business, so I think everything will become more vibrant uh and it'll become your neighborhood as opposed to you know a regional one where you have to travel to it, and even the streets were designed for this much car capacity. That's going to change as well, because we might need a lot less cars and then the question is: what do we do with the space? They need parks, places for coffee, shops, playgrounds, etc.

C

Are we going to.

B

Demolish all these skyscrapers that we're seeing right now.

C

That would be a very typical answer: what about adaptive reuse? Let's take example, for example, the standard charter building, if we just stripped it of its cladding we'd end up with a building with about 50 floors that are all the same. Now we start cutting into that building we make calls we invest it with gardens vertical atria, escalators, etc, and then we start to infuse it with a mixed juice program. It's not just office. It's people living working playing.

C

There could be a theater level 40 there could be a park in level 20 crash facilities over here you wouldn't get this uniform building you'd have something like a vertical medieval city. I think we could have a radically different tropical low ecological footprint lifestyle inside the.

B

Tower the pandemic and the rise of remote work could change the face of our city. Instead of these sky-high office buildings all clustered into one part of town, we could see this a mix of residential and commercial spaces.

B

Fewer car lanes as road users drop, giving us more space to walk around and hang out in green areas. Each neighborhood, including the cbd, will become a space where we live work and play.

B

How we work is undergoing a cultural change before the industrial revolution. Most of us are craftsmen. We make things from start to finish, usually at home or nearby.

B

The industrial revolution changed things by breaking work up into tasks that workers could specialize in then, through the shift from manufacturing to service economies, people started to pile into public transport to get to economic activity hubs to earn a living fast forward till.

B

Now remote work has brought us full circle.

B

While it may look like a radical revolution in how we work, it actually really is just going back to our roots, and while there may be many perks of remote work, flexibility more time with family access to global opportunities from the comfort of our homes, we need to keep an eye on its pitfalls too, and that's why it matters.

B