A thing that didn’t escape Facebook Ireland boss Gareth Lambe’s attention was the Microsoft Work Trend Index report last March. Microsoft surveyed 30,000 people to see how their working lives were going. 

For Lambe the most frightening statistic will have been that 40 per cent of the global workforce is looking for a change, and planning on leaving their jobs this year. A May survey of British and Irish workers found 38 per cent of them are ready to move. The number rises to 58 per cent among technology industry workers.

In a conversation I had with Gareth Lambe, Leo Varadkar and Aoife O’Connor last week, hosted by the London Irish Business Society and Údarás na Gaeltachta, Lambe stressed the importance of keeping staff happy at a time when so many are considering their career options.

“Even if that’s an exaggeration, and it’s 25 per cent, that’s a hell of a lot of movement across companies. And we want to be positioned as best we can in terms of the employee experience, what we’re offering.”

“There’s a big war for talent out there, in particular in tech,” he added. “This is going to be one of the battlegrounds, and we see it as a competitive advantage to embrace it.”

Facebook is embracing remote work to help it attract and retain its staff. Political leaders like Leo Varadkar see it as a vote winner, and a way to tilt the balance away from Dublin City. And remote workers like Aoife O’Connor, who moved her job back to her native Belmullet with the help of Údáras na Gaeltachta, stand to gain the most.

We’ve made a promising start to the world of remote work, but there’s a long way to go yet. There are big questions still to be answered and problems to be resolved. Here are five of the issues I raise with Leo Varadkar and Gareth Lambe. 

Who gets to benefit?

There’s a big disparity in who gets to work remotely. White-collar knowledge workers are at a big advantage. McKinsey, a consultancy, broke jobs down into discrete tasks and ranked the tasks by how much time a worker could devote to them remotely without their productivity dropping. It found white-collar jobs like IT, telecommunications, management, finance and insurance, and professional services could be done remotely most of the time without any drop in productivity. By comparison very little of retail, manufacturing, social care, transportation, hospitality and agriculture could be done remotely. 

That’s one thing. But even within industries, not all firms are equally able to offer remote work. Facebook has an army of HR personnel, sophisticated internal systems, managers, and accountants to deal with the headaches that come with international remote work. Smaller companies don’t have those advantages. A survey by Ricoh last year found European small companies were 42 per cent more likely than big ones to lose staff because of frustrations around remote working. Almost half of workers surveyed said they had to rely on their own technology to work remotely during the pandemic.

So the new world of remote work promises great things for the elite, the knowledge workers employed by big companies. But many are at risk of being left out. I asked Leo Varadkar what could be done to help level the playing field. 

Varadkar said: “I think the experience of the pandemic is that definitely, it’s not just for the big firms. Although big companies perhaps might get the best equipped to make it part of their model in the future.”

“And [the government] is definitely going to be there to support [small companies] with guidance from governments, we have real working guidelines, we have a remote working checklist, and we have a campaign that we’ve launched now to get that conversation going.”

Do technology capitals like Dublin matter less?

When technology industry executives comment in public about why they base themselves in Ireland, they normally say tax isn’t the main thing. They talk about the English language, the EU access, and the depth of the talent pool that’s available in Dublin. 

The technology industry is unusual in that it’s very concentrated in a couple of cities: the Bay Area, Seattle, New York, London, Eindhoven, Dublin, Taipei, Tel Aviv and Shenzen. It’s a bit like the finance industry in that respect. 

Industries like finance, technology and media cluster in certain cities because they benefit from spillovers. It’s helpful for Facebook to locate near Google, because Google attracts lots of good engineers. Then Facebook and Google engineers talk to each other, which makes them both smarter. Facebook and Google engineers have money to spend which attracts cool businesses, which attracts even more engineers.

Remote work has the potential to disrupt this virtuous circle. If workers base themselves in Sardinia and dial in to Dublin, they won’t talk to other workers and make the other workers smarter; they won’t support cool businesses; and they won’t be as likely to get hired by the next Dublin-based company. Good news for Sardinia, and maybe Belmullet. But maybe bad news for Dublin? I asked Gareth Lambe whether the rise of remote working might lead technology companies to set up their bases outside the traditional technology clusters. While he was emphatic about Facebook’s commitment to allowing remote working, he said he still expects Facebook’s Dublin mothership to play a key role. 

“We still expect Facebook Ireland, both in our offices, and working remotely around Ireland, to grow extensively over the number of years,” said Lambe. “I don’t think there’s going to be any kind of massive exodus. We still have a lot to offer, we still believe in offices, we don’t believe vibrant offices and a healthy remote work policy is a trade-off. And we believe we can make them both work. The best analogy I have for this, is we’re moving into a 14-acre campus in Ballsbridge over the coming years. It’s a bit more like a university campus, where it’s still the centre of the employee’s universe. But they just might not be there nine to five, Monday to Friday.”

What about the go-getters?

Remote work will affect employees differently depending on their age and their ambitions. Older workers, already skilled, might be happier to work remotely than young workers still learning their trade. 

And then there’s raw ambition. It can’t be denied that face to face interaction is the best way to build relationships. The employee who spends time in the office getting to know his bosses would be expected to get ahead quicker than the employee who drops in once a month. Should the remote worker be penalised for not working in the old-fashioned way? Should the hungry in-office employee be penalised in the interest of fairness? I asked Gareth Lambe how he’s going to handle this tension.

“If I go back to myself 20 years ago, in my mid 20s, I’d think long and hard if I wanted to go remote. Because you do feel ‘I want to be in the office near the boss, near the other bosses, networking and all the rest of it’. Absolutely. That’s a mentality. And it’s something we’re going to really need to work out. There’s a lot of muscle to develop on this. And our people managers have a huge responsibility to make sure that people who are working remotely feel included, and aren’t excluded from learning and career opportunities.”

Are the roads good enough?

Remote work doesn’t work without good communications. Fast broadband is needed for multiple concurrent zoom meetings. And thanks to the rural broadband scheme, Fine Gael can take credit for being ahead of the curve here. 

But broadband is only one part of communications. In even the most distributed jobs, workers will need to be in the office ten or twenty per cent of the time. A remote worker based in Donegal or Mayo needs fast internet, but she also needs a fast road to get to her employer in Dublin, Galway, Limerick or Cork once a week. 

Earlier this month Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan said there would be no more motorway construction. I asked Leo Varadkar whether the roads are good enough for a future of remote work. 

“I think what Minister Ryan said about not building any more motorways probably is down to the fact that we’ve built them,” said Varadkar. “All our cities are connected by motorway already with the exception of Derry, and that is intended. 

“That’s not to say there won’t be any road upgrades. The A5 to Derry will help people get to Donegal, whenever the North gets through its planning issues.

“So it’s not that there won’t be any more road projects. It’s just that the focus will be on public transport, and improving buses and train speeds.”

How important are offices, anyway?

The trend in office design has been to get rid of individual spaces, and to pack more and more workers in. In the 1980s, in the US, offices were designed with 250 square feet per worker. In a modern WeWork, that was down to 75 feet. 

Even before the pandemic, people had started to figure out that this was a bad thing. Open-plan offices were shown to reduce innovation and generally stress workers out. 

Now with remote working, the pendulum has swung way back in the other direction. Workers have gone from tightly packed together to totally distributed. 

I asked Gareth Lambe how he sees the office. I asked whether there’s a goldilocks zone with just the right amount of human interaction; or whether Zoom had solved all that.

“First of all, I should say most of our employees don’t want to work fully remote,” said Lambe. “Most of them want the hybrid option, they want to be in two or three days a week and the other days at home. So I want to be clear about that. That’s overwhelming.

“What it just means is, for example, with our with our campus, we’re developing in balls bridge, we are changing the kind of design and layout to be a little bit more, I suppose I’d say it is the value of proposition of the individual desk has maybe gone down a little bit but the value proposition of meeting and collaborative and other spaces has gone up a little bit.”