I agree, we should see this for what it is: an unmet need to make WFH possible for more people and more job functions.
My two cents on how we might "use technology to raise up individuals who have been traditionally left out":
Our company employs 800-1000 "support"/"operations"-type roles, who normally commute to a call-center-esque "office" near Phoenix, AZ.
When COVID-19 happened, our (brilliant) IT team had them set up to work from home in a weekend, since our call center tech stack was based on chrome books, RBAC services, g-suite, and mostly self-hosted or non-proprietary business-specific software. This is not the typical story, but there's no reason it shouldn't be.
In the graphs shared here by the article, sales and operations-type roles are an outlier in terms of percentage of the economy, and percentage of the economy that "has no opportunity" to work from home. So, while the need for support centers is higher than ever, most call centers are letting people go or reducing their hours, because they can't fill their offices to capacity any more. This has a huge impact on those workers, because they are now either unemployed or are unable to make rent.
Call center software is really old, and its antiquity is currently holding these companies back in a way that hurts their bottom lines. If you can package this call-center-in-a-chromebook as a service, you can simultaneously reduce inequality and make the economy more efficient, by enabling a remote WFH call center job, for companies who hire support/ops roles in the 1000s+.
My two cents on how we might "use technology to raise up individuals who have been traditionally left out":
Our company employs 800-1000 "support"/"operations"-type roles, who normally commute to a call-center-esque "office" near Phoenix, AZ.
When COVID-19 happened, our (brilliant) IT team had them set up to work from home in a weekend, since our call center tech stack was based on chrome books, RBAC services, g-suite, and mostly self-hosted or non-proprietary business-specific software. This is not the typical story, but there's no reason it shouldn't be.
In the graphs shared here by the article, sales and operations-type roles are an outlier in terms of percentage of the economy, and percentage of the economy that "has no opportunity" to work from home. So, while the need for support centers is higher than ever, most call centers are letting people go or reducing their hours, because they can't fill their offices to capacity any more. This has a huge impact on those workers, because they are now either unemployed or are unable to make rent.
Call center software is really old, and its antiquity is currently holding these companies back in a way that hurts their bottom lines. If you can package this call-center-in-a-chromebook as a service, you can simultaneously reduce inequality and make the economy more efficient, by enabling a remote WFH call center job, for companies who hire support/ops roles in the 1000s+.