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Culture

China Must Embrace Remote Work

May 13, 2021 Nancy Qian

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred a far-reaching shift to telecommuting throughout the West. But China has not followed suit, even though the social and environmental payoffs would be far larger than in the US and Europe.

CHICAGO – Before the pandemic, firms and workers around the world used emails and conference calls to reduce communication costs. But a lack of coordination made using these technologies fully difficult. Firing off an email was easy, but there was no guarantee of when the other person would respond. People were reluctant to break old habits. Holding a virtual meeting might be interpreted by participants to mean that the topic wasn’t particularly important. More broadly, low demand discouraged product development, leaving much to be desired in many workplace apps.

By forcing entire economic sectors into virtual work, the COVID-19 pandemic has resolved many of these earlier coordination problems. Everyone in these sectors has had to invest in new technologies and learn how to use them. And with everyone in the same boat, there is no longer any risk that a virtual meeting will be interpreted in a negative light. Better yet, workplace apps are becoming more user-friendly with every passing week.

In the United States, companies such as Google and government agencies such as the Federal Reserve have embraced virtual workplaces and announced that a significant number of their employees will continue to work remotely after the pandemic. This makes sense: companies lower their real-estate overhead, and employees gain more flexibility in their work schedules and choice of where to live. Moreover, fewer commuters imply less air pollution and urban congestion.

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j. von Hettlingen May 17, 2021

Nancy Qian says the Covid-19 pandemic has reshaped our office schedules in the West, changing how and where we can work. With hundreds of millions of people living under lockdowns, many have made the abrupt shift to working from home, while millions have lost their jobs. Remote work has become so widespread that telecommuting may be here to stay. As a result, many economic sectors have to invest in new technologies to meet the challenges.
According to the author, “China has not followed suit, even though the social and environmental payoffs would be far larger than in the US and Europe.” Teleworking could be “a creative way to address two of China’s biggest problems - declining urban fertility and air quality. Chinese policymakers and firms should allow more employees to work remotely as much as possible. It is a low-cost strategy that can be implemented flexibly, according to the individual needs of firms and workers. The potential economic and social benefits could be immense.”
In China, “many sectors have been able to function relatively normally over the past year.” As early as late March, 60 % of office-based employees were already back at their desks, according to one report. “As a result, there has been neither a wholesale shift to virtual work nor much discussion of new workplace models for the post-pandemic era. Paradoxically, the benefits that China risks foregoing would be even more advantageous for its economy than for those of the US or Europe.”
The author explains how “virtual technologies can reduce the cost of living for many workers. Raising children in urban China is prohibitively expensive. In Shanghai, residential real estate costs $1,453 per square foot in the city center, on average, but the average annual wage income for a full-time employee is only around $12,000. Worse, a typical professional in these areas works a “9-9-6” schedule: nine in the morning to nine at night, six days per week – a 72-hour workweek.”
Compared to their US counterparts in New York, “Chinese urbanites must work far more,” and earn “much less while paying similar housing prices.” Urban parents also “face substantial time scarcities. Because the average Chinese primary school student spends seventeen hours per week doing homework and six hours per week with tutors, parents need a lot of time to cajole and monitor their children (all the more so if they need to take them to enrichment activities or extra tutoring).”
For many parents, working from home could “make all the differences.” Normalising virtual workplaces “can help address China’s demographic and environmental challenges. The reason for declining fertility is obvious: child rearing is too expensive. More telecommuting would cut the cost of child rearing and housing by enabling more families to move farther away from the city center. Parents, freed from commuting, could spend more time with their kids. And reducing the number of commuters would lower air pollution,” which accounts for an estimated 1.24 million deaths in 2017.
Chinese companies - especially tech firms - “that have experimented with telecommuting have found that productivity for some types of work is similar regardless of where it is carried out. And the pandemic has already demonstrated many of the environmental benefits of reduced commuting. To ensure that car ownership does not increase in the post-COVID move to suburbs, the government should expand the provision of public transportation into these areas.”
The problem is that overall, information technology spending accounts for less than 4% of China’s GDP in the first three quarters of 2019 – compared with more than 10% in the US.
The country, which relies on its 30 million SMEs for more than 60% of GDP, doesn’t have a standardised enterprise service provider anywhere near the same scale of Salesforce. Other western companies – like IBM and Oracle – have long been available, but they only target large firms.
Despite promising signs, investors say it will take China some time to catch up. One reason is the more fragmented market situation - startups can not rely on standardised procedures and have to invest considerable resources toward tailoring their programmes to different needs. They also offer services for free or at a discount to win new customers, which raises questions about future revenues.
But there is hope that Chinese companies are more willing to pay, and the pandemic is making them realise the benefits of their investment.
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