Commentary: Remote work risks making low-wage jobs worse
Most work-from-home employees aren’t high earners, and managers find it all too easy to ignore their input, says Sarah Green Carmichael for Bloomberg Opinion.
Some flexibility is important for workers but a complete work-from-home system has negative impacts on team dynamics and an individual's career. (Photo: iStock/surachetkhamsuk)
BOSTON: The popular image of the remote worker is often of a highly educated, laptop-toting professional comfortably situated in a large suburban home or in some Instagrammable Airbnb. The reality is different.
Of the roughly 10 per cent of employees who say they always work from home, most are lower-paid workers in support roles - wearing headsets and logging in from their apartments, probably in the cheaper outskirts of a large city. Their numbers are expected to increase in the years to come.
“These jobs are mostly computer-based, often involving mostly individual tasks, and usually easily monitored,” according to a recent Stanford report. Think payroll, benefits, finance, HR, IT support, some coding or data processing jobs, and call centres.
WFH EXACERBATES DEHUMANISING ASPECTS OF LOW-WAGE JOBS
Companies can save money by hiring home-based workers, often recruiting from areas where labour costs are lower.
But if businesses focus only on short-term cost savings, remote work could exacerbate the dehumanising aspects of these jobs that so often lead to higher turnover and poorer customer service.
Instead, companies sending their low-wage jobs remote should invest in communication and cross-training so that these roles create more value for companies and their customers, as well as providing a career path for workers.
It’s common to hear business leaders lament that remote work hurts their organisations - by reducing creativity and on-the-job learning, eroding culture or making it tougher to communicate. But those concerns are typically expressed with professional employees in mind.
Low-wage workers, often viewed as easily replaceable, rarely factor into the equation. No one seems to care whether two call centre workers have a water cooler chat that results in an innovative solution to a customer problem.
Zeynep Ton, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of a new book, The Case For Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay And Meaning To Everyone’s Work, thinks it’s a mistake to underestimate the value created by low-wage workers - and a costly one.
Ton has helped executives reduce employee turnover, boost profits and increase customer satisfaction by redesigning their companies so that their low-wage jobs, in her words, let people “feel human, not like a pair of hands, and to have enough pay so that they can have control over their lives”. Pay, benefits, a stable schedule and a clear career path are all essential, with sufficient pay trumping them all.
Yet executives will often tell her that they can’t afford to pay low-wage workers more. When she responds with examples of companies that have successfully done so - Costco, Trader Joe’s, Mercadona, QuikTrip - those executives will object that they are the exceptions, not the rule.
HIGH TURNOVER STRATEGY
Most companies have adopted what Ton calls a “high turnover strategy”, essentially accepting that they will regularly churn through a significant portion of low-wage workers.
It’s true that creating good low-wage jobs isn’t as simple as raising hourly pay. That’s why Ton emphasises that such jobs are a product of a series of interlocking strategic and operational choices.
Companies that succeed in elevating low-wage jobs standardise routine processes and solicit ideas on how to improve customer service. They avoid stretching staff too thin because they recognise that doing so results in sloppy service, mistakes and lost revenue. “You can’t apply just one element of the good jobs system and expect the results the system produces,” as Ton writes in her book.
These choices are still possible if lower-paying jobs, already often relegated to sites far from corporate HQ, increasingly become WFH positions. The sticking point is that leaders have to want to make them.
She shares the cautionary tale of a bank where a third of customer service calls were generated by the poorly designed online bill-paying system. The obvious answer: Fix the system. But the bank didn’t see the point. Their way of growing was through acquiring other firms and splashing out on advertising, not improving their offering, Ton explains. “If winning with their customers is unimportant, they’re not going to prioritise making the worker experience better.
By contrast, at Quest Diagnostics, implementing the good jobs strategy reduced call centre staff turnover rates by 50 per cent in 18 months. Despite spending more money on representatives, the changes reduced costs by US$2 million. Of this, about US$1.3 million in savings came from ideas generated by the workers themselves. Customer satisfaction scores increased.
FRONTLINE WORKERS ARE IMPORTANT
It should be a reminder that the people with the best ideas for pleasing customers are the ones who spend the most time with them. And that’s frontline workers, not CEOs - according to a 2018 study by Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria, chief executive officers spent only 3 per cent of their time with customers.
But as pressures to reduce costs push more of these low-paying jobs to go remote, I worry that fewer leaders will focus on these workers. Out of sight, out of mind after all. According to Porter and Nohria, senior leaders spent just 6 per cent of their time with rank-and-file employees. And that was before the pandemic-era surge in remote work.
Remote work offers substantial benefits to lower-paid workers. For one, these workers tend to have the longest commutes because the cost of living is cheapest in far-flung neighbourhoods. They’re more likely to rely on public transit, which is correlated with longer commutes than driving.
That also makes their work attendance especially susceptible to cancelled trains, broken-down buses and other mishaps that are out of their control. Child-care emergencies - a burst pipe at the day-care centre, a sick kid who needs to stay home - can mean losing a day’s pay.
And because low-wage workers are often subject to strict attendance policies, missing work can result in disciplinary action or even the loss of a job. So if companies can find ways to offer remote work to lower-wage staff, it will likely be popular.
Nonetheless, companies should ensure those bottom-rung jobs offer a step up to the rest of the career ladder. While employing all-remote support staff can save money, these are still valuable employees doing important work. Whether they work remotely or in person, low-wage workers deserve dignity - and a chance to help the business run better.
