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- Bill Gates predicts that business travel and office work will not return to pre-pandemic levels in the future.
- The Microsoft founder and philanthropist estimates that about half of business travel will be taken, along with a third of office work.
- Many large companies are reconsidering the future of work.
- Twitter and Slack said employees could work remotely forever, while others, including Microsoft, plan to implement hybrid work models.
The drastic changes we have seen this year in office work and business travel will not go away, even after the pandemic is over, according to Bill Gates.
Gates described how he sees the future of work in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times DealBook on Tuesday. One of the biggest changes in doing business, Gates says, will have to do with work-related travel.
“My prediction would be that over 50% of business trips and over 30% of office days will disappear,” Gates said.
The type of business trip where it’s important to fly somewhere to physically sit in front of someone else to discuss something in person will no longer be the “gold standard,” Gates said. He predicts that most companies will have a “very high threshold” for making these types of business trips.
When it comes to working from home, “some companies will be extreme at one end or the other,” said Bill Gates, probably referring to companies like Twitter, who said their employees can work remotely forever, where you are.
Gates revealed one downside of virtual meetings over in-person events: the inability to meet new people. He told Sorkin that he hasn’t made any new friends this year because he never meets random people.
“We could do more on the software side to allow for chance hang-ups after meetings,” Gates said.
Many companies, especially those in the tech world where Gates hails from, are reconsidering the future of work now that the pandemic has disrupted the majority of travel and work in the office this year. Twitter isn’t the only company to say employees never need to return to the office: Slack, Stripe, and Facebook all said employees could move away from company headquarters, although in in some cases they would accept pay cuts.
At Microsoft, the Gates company founded with Paul Allen in 1975, employees will move to a “hybrid workplace” where they will only report to the office for half of the work week.
Gates’ predictions of business travel match research from industry experts, who estimated that it will likely take several years to return to pre-pandemic levels. Business travel is unlikely to rebound until “late 2023 or 2024,” according to a Bank of America study from October.
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