Capitalising on remote work, US cities draw in tech workers

NEW YORK – At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Jalissa Garland, marketing manager at an e-commerce startup, had the opportunity to relocate from the San Francisco Bay Area to Tulsa, Oklahoma. The city was not on his radar before.

It was a tempting offer: $10,000 in rehabilitation support and community-building opportunities provided by a recruiting initiative called Tulsa Remote. When the pandemic hit, his company got rid of its San Francisco office and allowed employees to work from anywhere. In October 2020, Garland moved to a south-central American city with a population of about 400,000.

“The pandemic was fundamental to shifting a lot of people’s decisions,” Garland said. “I couldn’t afford the Bay Area rent, the electricity—all those things add up. I have a lot of wiggle room here in Tulsa.”

According to two recent surveys, about 30 per cent of remote workers plan to move: an April survey of 1,000 tech workers by the nonprofit One America Works and a June survey of 1,006 national remote workers for MakeMyMove, over the next 18 months. focused on intentions.

Facebook and Twitter are among major tech companies that allow employees to work from home if their work can be done remotely. According to a Twitter spokesperson, embracing remote work is an effort to attract more diverse talent.

Smaller cities typically aim to support dozens or even hundreds of remote-worker moves annually, Reuters reported. This doesn’t threaten Silicon Valley’s dominance of tech, but it could allow California companies to become more diversified, and it could make them try harder to keep workers.

“The cost-benefit dynamic is moving away from us, and it must be addressed,” Jason Baker, senior vice president for transportation, health and housing at the tech industry’s Silicon Valley Leadership Group, said in a statement.

And that number makes a lot of sense for some towns and cities that have seen “brain drain” in large metropolitan areas, said Prithviraj Choudhary, associate professor at Harvard Business School.