The game changes for H1-B workers

Donald Trump recently raised the application fee for H-1B visas from $2000 to $100,000. That is a significant change and it affects the calculations for using H-1B visas to obtain labor from other countries. 

The purpose of the H-1B visa program is to admit foreigners with special skills into the US and to use those skills to assist US employers. Over the years, the actual purpose has changed to allow for low-cost workers with some skills (not necessarily rare or special) to work in the US. Employers have used the program as a means of reducing labor expenses.

With the increased fee, the calculations for an H-1B visa change. The increase more than covers the reduction in labor expenses, and the result is that workers on H-1B visas now cost more than native US employees.

Companies have three paths forward (assuming that they do not lobby for exemptions).

First, they can pay the fee and continue to use foreign labor in the US. If they were hiring workers with truly exception skills, this is still a reasonable (albeit more expensive) solution.

Second, they can hire native US workers instead of foreign workers. They have an incentive to avoid this option: It is tantamount to admitting that they used the H-1B visas for cheap labor. It is also a more expensive solution, but perhaps less expensive than continuing with foreign workers on H-1B visas.

The third option is to transfer the workers from the US back to their native countries, and continue to assign them work. This is the least expensive path, but it sets up many companies for morale problems.

Companies have, for the past year and more, asked -- or demanded -- that workers cease remote work and instead work in the office. The explanations from companies have been singular: they need the productivity that comes from in-person collaboration.

If a company sends its H-1B workers "back home" and has them work remotely, then the argument for in-person collaboration is severely weakened and morale among the remaining (in-house) workers will plummet. Managers might explain that contract workers (many H-1B visa holders are contract workers) are less important for collaboration, but this sets up a two-tiered mindset for workers and is probably dangerous in the long run.

If managers allow all workers to work remotely, then their argument for "return to office" falls apart and they look like fools. Managers will do almost anything to avoid looking foolish, so we can assume that remote work for all workers will not happen.

Each company will have to find its own way forward with this change to the H-1B visa program. The decision involves direct expenses for labor and visas, policies for working in the office or remotely, and employee morale.

Back to the Office

Amazon.com is the latest in a series of companies to insist that employees Return-To-Office (RTO).

Some claim that Amazon's motives (and by extension, any company that requires employees to work in the office) is really a means of reducing their workforce. The idea is that employees would rather leave the company than work in the office, and enforcing office-based work is a convenient way to get employees to leave. (Here, "convenient" means "without layoffs".)

I suspect that Amazon (and other companies) are not using RTO as a means to reduce their workforce. It may avoid severance payments and the publicity of layoffs, but it holds other risks. One risk is that the "wrong" number of employees may terminate their employment, either too many or too few. Another risk is that the "wrong" employees may leave; high performers may pursue other opportunities and poor performers may stay. It also selects employees based on compliance (those who stay are the ones who will follow orders) while the independent and confident individuals leave. That last effect is subtle, but I suspect that Amazon's management is savvy enough to understand it.

But while employers are smart enough to not use RTO as a workforce reduction technique, they are still insisting upon it. I'm not sure that they are fully thinking though the reasons they use to justify RTO. Companies have pretty much uniformly claimed that an office-based workforce is more productive, despite studies which show the opposite. Even without studies, employees can often get a feel for productivity, and they can tell that RTO does not improve it. Therefore, by claiming RTO increases productivity, management loses credibility.

That loss of credibility may be minimal now, but it will hang over management for some time. And in some time, there may be another crisis, similar to the COVID-19 pandemic, that forces companies to close offices. (That crisis may be another wave of COVID, or it may be a different virus such as Avian flu or M-pox, or it may be some other form of crisis. It may be worldwide, nationwide, or regional. But I fear that it is coming.)

Should another crisis occur, one that forces companies to close offices and ask employees to work from home, how will employees react? My guess is that some employees will reduce their productivity. The thinking is: If working in the office improves productivity (and our managers insist that it does), then working at home must reduce productivity (and therefore I will deliver what the company insists must happen).

Corporate managers may get their wish (high productivity by working in the office) although not the way that they want. By explaining the need for RTO in terms of productivity, they have set themselves up for a future loss of productivity when they need employees to work from home (or other locations).

Employee productivity and remote work

The first question is: how does one know that employees, working remotely, are in fact working?

It's not a trivial question, and the answer is far from simple. Too many managers, I suspect, think that their remote employees are "goofing off" during the time they claim to be working. Some managers may believe that employees are working only part time (yet getting paid for a full time job). A few managers may suspect their employees of working multiple jobs at the same time.

It is probable that all of the above scenarios are true.

The second and third questions are: Do managers care? And should managers care?

Managers probably do care. One can hear the complaints: "Employees are goofing off!" or "Employees are not working when they should be!". Or the shrill: "How dare my employees work for someone else!"

All of these complaints condense into the statement "That's not fair!"

Managers and companies have, naturally, installed mechanisms to prevent such abuse of remote work. They monitor employees via webcam, or -- in a particularly Orwellian turn -- use AI to monitor employees via webcam.

It strikes me that these measures assume that they can obtain good results (employees working) by eliminating bad behaviors (employees walking the dog or making a cup of coffee). They subtract the bad and assume that the remains is good. Theoretically, that sums.

But do managers want merely an employee sitting at a computer for an eight-hour shift? (And doing nothing else?) If so, I am willing to work for such companies. I am quite capable of sitting at a computer for hours. I can even appear to be busy, typing and clicking.

Managers will answer that they want more than that. Managers will (rightly) say that they need results, actual work from the employee that provides value to the company.

Can managers quantify these results? Can they provide hard numbers of what they expect employees to do? For some jobs, yes. (Call centers rate employees by number of calls taken and resolved, for example.) Other jobs are less easy to measure. (Programming, for example. Does one measure lines of code? Number of stories? Number of stories weighted by size? Does quality of the code count? Number of defects found during testing?)

It's easy to take the approach of "remove the bad behaviors and hope for the best". One can purchase tools to monitor employees. (It's probably easy to justify such purchases to budget committees.)

But perhaps some of the effort and expense of monitoring bad behavior could be redirected to measuring good results. Business is, after all, about results. If Programmer A produces the same results as Programmer B, but in 75 percent of the time, why not let Programmer A have some time to make coffee?

Another thought:

Lots of employees in the tech world are paid as salaried employees. Compensation by salary (as opposed to hourly wages) implies that the employee has some discretion over their work.

If employers push the monitoring tools, employees may decide that their compensation should be hourly, instead of salary. Companies won't like that arrangement, as they have been using salaried compensation to extract unpaid overtime from workers. But workers have some say in the issue. If employers focus on hours worked, then employees will focus on hours worked.

After the quarantine, think

The 2020 quarantine, with its spate of "stay at home" orders and closure of offices, has enabled (forced?) may companies to implement "work from home" procedures that allow employees to, well, work from home. For some companies, this was a small change, as they already had procedures and infrastructure in place to allow employees to work from remote locations. For other companies, it was a big change.

As various parts of the country rescind the "stay at home" orders, companies are free to resume work as normal. It is my position that, instead of simply requiring employees to report to the office as before, companies (and their managers) think about what is best for the company.

Companies now have experience with remote work. In the past, one reason to stay with "work at the office" (the traditional arrangement of everyone working in a single office) was that managers could not be sure that "work from home" (or, more generally, "work from anywhere") would work for the company. The lack of experience made such a change risky. That excuse is no longer valid. Companies now have several weeks of experience with remote work.

But I am not suggesting that companies blindly adopt "work from home" for all employees. Nor I am suggesting that companies abandon remote work and require employees to work in the office.

Instead, I recommend that managers review the performance of the past few weeks, identify the strengths and weaknesses of remote work, and agree on a plan for the future. Some companies may be happy with remote work and decide to continue with it. Other companies may revert to "work at the office". A third group will choose a middle ground, with some employees remote and others in the office, or remote work for a portion of the week.

I am sure that managers are aware of the costs of maintaining an office building, and will view the path of remote work as a way to reduce those costs. Remote work also allows for expansion of the workforce without a corresponding expansion (and cost) of office space.

"Work in the office" on the other hand allows for all work to be done in a single location, which may make it easier to interact with people. Face-to-face communication is more effective than e-mail, voice phone, and video calls. A single office building also keeps the IT infrastructure in one place, with no need (or cost) for remote access and the accompanying security.

The 2020 pandemic and quarantine gave us information about remote work. It would be foolish for managers to ignore that information when deciding how to run their company.

Remote work is different from at-office work

The recent outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus has forced many changes upon us. One of the biggest changes is the forced shift to remote work. Remote work is different from face-to-face work, as many organizations are now learning. Remote work has challenges, and it also offers the ability to change our work patterns.

Two ideas come to mind.

Companies with project teams, and specifically those with weekly status meetings, may learn that those weekly status meetings can be replaced with status e-mails. One can, of course, replace a face-to-face team meeting with an online team meeting, and I am sure many companies do. But status meetings often have one-way flows of information: individuals report on their current activities, and the manager provides information to his team. These one-way flows can be handled with e-mail, which allows for archiving and easy retrieval of content. A manager could have one-on-one sessions with individuals to ask follow-up questions, and to "touch base" with team members.

Colleges and universities, specifically those with graduate programs, may learn that they can adjust their class schedules. Graduate classes are often held in the evening, and often one night per week. The reason for this schedule is that graduate students have other commitments (such as a job) that prevents them from attending during the day. (Colleges also use the same classrooms for undergraduate studies during the day.) The one-class-per-week arrangement is also convenient, as graduate students do not live on campus and have significantly longer commute times than on-campus undergraduate students.

But with remote studies, there is no need to hold one long class per week. The time to connect to a remote session is short. One could just as easily hold three short sessions per week, instead of one long session. (The need for evening classes still holds, as many students still work during the day.) Multiple shorter sessions may be more effective than a single long session (they seem to be for undergraduate students) and may be more convenient for teachers and students.

But people being people, I expect little to change in the short term -- on colleges or in corporate offices. Professors have organized classes and materials around the one-night-per-week schedule. Scheduling systems (probably) have built-in assumptions that graduate classes occur on a one-night-per-week schedule, and changing those systems may be nontrivial. Corporate managers are used to the idea of seeing all of their employees in a single meeting (and possibly feel that they are more efficient holding a single meeting than multiple one-on-one sessions).

Remote work and remote studies do not have to be copies of their face-to-face counterparts. Someday they may not be.