There are many lessons to learn from the past nine months and going forward, there’s opportunity for companies to increase both the diversity of their teams and productivity by allowing employees to work from the location of their choosing. Employees are demonstrating consistently higher levels of productivity working from home than previously thought possible. Across the high-tech sector, software developers are, on average, writing more lines of code than when they worked in the office. Not only are people engaging in productive tasks during time otherwise spent commuting, but video- and tele-conferencing is allowing employees to collaborate effectively across time zones from geo-dispersed locations.

This past spring my former employer, a Seattle-based company, was backfilling a few positions on our team with offers ready to go out to two Black candidates, one candidate in Columbus, OH and the other in Atlanta, GA. The last step prior to extending offers was to ask each candidate to relocate to either our corporate headquarters in Seattle or the major Operations hub in Nashville. Neither candidate was willing to relocate so the offers were not extended.