One of the big questions about the shift to working remotely has been “what about new staff?”. To spell this out, the idea is that, while experienced workers can do everything they need to online, new employees will need personal contact to pick up tacit knowledge and firm culture. It’s inherent in the argument that these terms are difficult to define with any precision – if not, they could be formalised and taught.

This is part of a debate that’s been going on for a couple of centuries, between proposals for formal education in work-related skills and learning on the job, sometimes through apprenticeships and sometimes through “sitting next to Nelly”, that is, picking up the relevant skills by working with people who have already acquired them.

Before 1800, and with the partial exception of ministers of religion, on the job training was the only kind on offer. Since then, starting with lawyers and doctors, formal education has steadily expanded at the expense of on the job training, across a wide range of occupations and in many different countries with radically different labor markets. That includes some economies and industries where lifetime employment by a single firm has been the norm and others where work is largely done on a contract or ‘gig’ basis.

This process has always been contentious. Terms like “credentialism”, “overqualification” and “academic” (used pejoratively) have set the tone of much of the discussion. Nevertheless, there has been little evidence that the trend has been or will be reversed, and no one has managed to find, and sustain, a successful altern ative.

The work of hiring, ‘onboarding’, promoting and firing employees has not been exempt from the process. “Human resource management” emerged as a distinct profession in the second half of the 20th century, taking over much of this work from individual managers. HR departments have in turn begun to outsource some of these tasks to specialised firms such as headhunters and ‘separation management advisers’, though onboarding still appears to be done in-house for the most part.

The shift to remote working will provide another test of this process, at least when firms start hiring new staff on a large scale. Some of the concerns expressed about lack of in-person contact will probably prove to be well-founded (though not insuperable). Others, I think, will not. After a few in-person (and ideally one-to-one or small group) meetings to be introduced to new colleagues, most new hires will be able to learn the ropes through email and Zoom.

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One of the central features of the debate about working from home is that it leads to the loss of random, but productive, encounters with colleagues. I’ve responded with the observation that some of my best research ideas have come from largely unplanned encounters on the Internet.

It’s just struck me that there is a conflict here between the interests of workers and those of firms and managers.

A lot of universities (or, more precisely university managers), think of themselves as developing and promoting a corporate brand. In this context, research collaboration within the university (particularly if it is trans-disciplinary) is viewed very positively, while collaboration with other universities is less well-regarded. But for individual academics, the big rewards come from high-profile work within tightly defined fields, which implies a desire for collaboration with other people in the same field who will, in general, be located elsewhere. While intra-university collaboration may be rewarded in internal promotion decisions, the outside opportunities are greatest for people with external collaborators. Those outside options are routinely used as a bargaining chip in negotiations over salary.

This issue isn’t specific to universities. Labor market theory distinguishes between firm-specific skills and general skills (which are of value to any employer). Back in 1964, Gary Becker made the argument that firms would be willing to pay the cost of firm-specific training for their workers, but not for general training which increases their outside opportunities. (This seems entirely convincing to me, although the empirical evidence I found on a quick search is both limited and inconclusive).

What applies to training also applies to serendipitous encounters. Collaboration with co-workers can enhance productivity within the firm, but doesn’t do much for your market value outside. Conversely, if workers enhance their productivity at home by making more use of industry discussion groups, Skype chats with people in other firms who are addressing similar problems, and so on, that enhances their bargaining power relative to their employers.

In this context, it’s striking that the hardest push for a return to the office is coming from the finance sector, led by JP Morgan. Even though textbook finance is all about hard numbers on earnings, risk and so on, the industry actually operates largely on personal contacts, networks and exchanges of favours, particularly information. That’s why it’s concentrated in a handful of global cities, and why so much attention is paid to issues like “poaching” of staff, no-compete clauses and the like. It’s obviously in the interests of employers to build up internal networks and control external interactions.

As with all these issues, my ideas here are provisional and almost certainly wrong in some respects. So, feel free to correct me.