Trish Jackson is the new interim head of development for The New School in New York City.
She leads a team of 21 employees and spearheads the 9,150-student university’s fundraising — from a spare bedroom at her home in Norwich and without having set foot in Manhattan.
Nor is Jackson sure she ever will as part of her new job.
“I hope I’ll get to the campus at some point, but I may not,” said Jackson, who previously held development positions at Brown University in Providence, R.I. – where she had to live during the week and commute home on the weekends — and at Dartmouth College. “I don’t think development officers, especially for fundraising, are going back to offices.”
Jackson’s observation goes for workers beyond academia, too.
The COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping the workplace for both employers and employees by upending what has been a daily ritual among white-collar workers dating back to tie clasps and stocking garters — going into an office — into a dispersed, off-site model where people work remotely from any place they wish.
Bolstered by technology, from high-speed internet to advances in communication platforms that enable easy conferencing and collaboration, entire segments of the Upper Valley workforce are now working from home. And many may be staying there.
Major Upper Valley employers such as Mascoma Bank and Lebanon manufacturer Fujifilm Dimatix are not only letting major portions of their office staff work from home but are hiring new employees from outside the Upper Valley without the expectation that they will relocate. The moves are part of a trend that has been growing for years but has accelerated during the pandemic.
“For some of our hard-to-fill positions, we found hiring (someone) to work remotely is a great opportunity to expand our network of potential employees,” said Melissa Carlson, vice president of human resources at Mascoma Bank.
She said the bank, where “nearly all” of its 370 employees not in retail branch positions have been working from home since March, recently hired a specialist to work in the bank’s residential mortgage lending division from his home in Connecticut.
Mascoma is also retaining a key employee who works on the projects team but who is moving to Washington, D.C., where the employee’s partner is taking a position to support President-elect Joe Biden’s administration. The same is the case with a mortgage loan assistant who relocated outside the Upper Valley but can keep her job by now working remotely.
“In the old days, we would have lost some really great talent,” said Carlson, who noted that distant workers at the bank are still “the exception, not the rule.” Nonetheless, she added, because “the majority of us in the organization are having to work virtually, it’s feeling very normal to have people in multiple locations working on projects…