The rise of remote workers in San Diego

The results are in: San Diego is a remote work city. How do I know? Kate Lister told me so. She’s a renowned tracker of how we work, and how many of us work without even going to work.

“About 65,000 San Diegans now spend half their time working remotely, usually from home,” she says. “That’s up 190 percent from ten years ago, compared to 140 percent nationally.”

So to what does San Diego owe this honor of making it to the top of the telecommuting pyramid?

Lister’s answer is surprising. “Our lousy transportation system,” she says. “People just don’t want to commute. It’s not because planners like SANDAG (the San Diego Association of Governments, a planning body) actively support telecommuting. SANDAG is stuck with its head in the sand. It still throws planning money at high speed rail, self-driving vehicles, serving people in the suburbs, all designed to exacerbate the problem. Telecommuting plays no big part of their plan.”

She should know. She lives and works (remotely) in Carlsbad, and sees the daily I-5 river of traffic sluicing north and south each day. Her company, Global Workplace Analytics, tracks the trends in the way we work. “San Diego is also a good candidate for telecommuting because we have a greater percentage of information-based industries in San Diego than many other cities,” she says. Even so, only 4.6 percent of San Diegans currently work remotely at least half of their time.

So why doesn’t every company promote telecommuting and save office space rental?

“Management inertia,” she says. “They don’t want to change. They still think in terms of sweat shops and typing pools. They want to be able to check on everybody. The new model is largely based on trust. Research shows you get best results if managers and telecommuting employees agree on goals, and then management just gets out of the way. With telecommuters, their biggest problem is often employees working too hard because there’s no-one to tell them to go home.”

The figures tell Lister that more people want to at least try remote work. “Survey after survey tells us telecommuting is #1 on people’s wishlist. Thirty percent say they’d take a 10 percent pay cut just to be able to work some of the time from home.”

And, she adds, herding staff into a centralized office space isn’t a panacea for productivity. “Office hours are when you see the highest use of porn, and the biggest online sales happen in working hours,” she says.

But what about the remote worker’s loneliness, not having work pals around? “Remember that more or less everybody telecommutes only half the time. There’s plenty of time for hugs on the other days.”

She thanks SANDAG for helping keep the daily commute as bad as it is. “That’s the ultimate enticement to telecommuting. Besides, OSHA says the commute is the most physically dangerous part of anybody’s day. So avoiding that is good for your health prospects.”

Yet at 4.6 percent, remote work has no way reached critical mass. “It’s crazy. According to SANDAG, the average San Diegan currently spends 22 work days sitting in his/her car each year. Eliminating that would be like giving yourself a 22-day vacation.”