I don't see how business travel goes away. You just can't effectively build relationships over zoom, phone calls, and email. It's just not possible. Ask anyone who's been in a long distance relationship.
Long-distance is not impossible, it's just known to be objectively inferior to in-person interaction. I think it is silly that mainstream tech is flirting with this idea of "remote 100% forever". The best people want to be in the same room as the best people. This is human nature. The only people promoting "remote 100% forever" are the people working in big tech that stand to gain from forced-remote.
People don't want to sit at home all day in zoom calls. You can try to prevent people from being able to see each other in person, but those attempts will always eventually fail.
As someone who's been in working and failing long distance relationships, I'm not sure they are a good comparison.
The issue in LDRs is mostly lack of intimacy these days, since you can easily be connected all the time.
I'm not sure you would need this from someone in sales from company X.
As you say the problem would be _building_ relationships, which is different from _maintaining_ them.
People have been leaving their parents' place for a very long time, but this rarely means become estranged, because the relationship is already there, and it's not that hard to maintain.
It's not a perfect comparison, but I think it will always be true that trust between two human beings is more strongly built in person than through an app.
And trust is the foundation of both romantic relationships and business relationships.
If WFH becomes more of a norm, I can imagine facilities / office budgets being re-purposed towards more travel for offsites, visits, and other activities to stay better connected. Work from home doesn't necessarily mean never seeing coworkers or clients in person.
Pre-pandemic, most fully remote companies like Basecamp had people get together a couple times a year. I expect that to be the norm. (Also at bigger companies. I'm on a team that's very distributed and we fly to get together for offsites.)
I don’t know about that. Most people won’t enjoy being on the road. Even I who has done a lot of long form travel for fun got sick of it once I had to constantly travel for work.
Like most conversations with WFH, this wouldn't need to be an all-or-nothing proposition. I wouldn't want to live on the road forever. But I'd love to take three or four weeks a year and live somewhere entirely new and learn about a new culture. I'm sure there are some people that would want to travel more than that, and some that would want to travel less. The key is providing flexibility to allow people to live the life that they want for themselves.
After this it’s going to be more like the opposite.
- company pays to fly me out (biz class)
- puts me in a decent hotel for a week
- I need to get from hotel to wherever we go (rideshare) hopefully it’s walking distance but not always.
This happens once every quarter or so given covid has stopped.
We might have real offices again some day but till then it’s all ephemeral stays and juicing the industry you say is fucked.