One of the hottest topics in the news related to coronavirus is working from home. Companies of all sizes are telling employees to work from home as a way to help curb the spread of the virus. Companies without work-at-home policies are scrambling to define how to make this work to minimize disruption to their business.

Allowing employees to work at home is not a new phenomenon. Most large corporations have some portion of the workforce working at home at least part-time. Studies have shown that home-based employees are often more productive than those working in the office. Those working at home enjoy big savings, both in dollars and time, from not commuting to an office.

There are a few communities around the country that have offered incentives to attract employees who work from home. The first such program I heard of was in 2018, where Vermont offered a cash incentive of between $5,000 and $10,000 for families with a home-worker to relocated to the state. The state has an aging population and wanted to attract families with good incomes to help energize the local economy. The state recognized that the long-term local benefits to the state from attracting high-paying jobs is worth a lot more than the cash incentive they are offering.

Since then, other communities have tried the same thing. I recently read about a similar effort in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which has been watching its population drop since 2016. In Tulsa, a foundation is fronting the $10,000 payments used to attract home workers to the community. There is a similar program in Topeka, Kansas and northwest Alabama.

I’ve been working from home for twenty years, and during that time, I’ve seen a big shift in the work-from-home movement. When I first worked from home, I didn’t know anybody else who was doing so. Over time that has changed, and in my current neighborhood, over a third of the homes on my block include at least one adult working from home. According to Bloomberg, about 4% of the full-time workforce, not counting self-employed people, now work from home. Adding in self-employed people means that work-from-home is a major segment of the economy.

Wall Street seems to have recognized the value of working at home. As I write this article the Dow Jones average has dropped over 11% since February 14^th. During that same time, the stock price of Zoom, a company that facilitates remote meetings, has climbed over 27%.

I’m sure that most of the people being sent home to work are going to eventually return to the office. However, this current crisis is likely to make many companies reexamine their work-from-home philosophy and policies. Companies that allow people to work from home, at least part-time, are going to be the least disrupted by future economic upheavals.

If you read my blog regulatory, you knew what’s coming next. The one group of people who can’t work from home are those who can’t get a decent home broadband connection. Huge numbers of rural homes in the country still have no broadband option or can only buy broadband that is not sufficient for working from home. Most corporations test the home broadband connection before letting employees work from home, and homes can be disqualified due to poor download speed, poor upload speed, or poor latency. A home broadband connection that meets the FCC definition of broadband at 25/3 Mbps might still be deemed by a corporation to be inadequate for working from home.

My consulting firm CCG talked to a homeowner this week who moved to a rural area looking for an improved lifestyle. The wife works from home, and before they bought the new home, they were assured that the broadband there was fast enough to support work at home. It turns out the home is served by a WISP that is delivering less than the advertised speed, and that working from home is impossible in the new home. This family is now facing a crisis caused by lack of good broadband—and there may be no solution for their problem.

Sadly, a whole lot of America is losing economically by not being able to attract and support good-paying jobs from those working at home. If a city like Tulsa is willing to pay $10,000 to attract one work-from-home employee, imagine the negative impact on rural counties where nobody can work from home.