| Half a year into the Covid economy, with a vaccine still months away, work arrangements are about to get even weirder. A host of corporate empires are extending work-from-home windows. A few days ago, Salesforce said it would let its 49,000 employees stay in their PJs until August of next year. Alphabet and Facebook have similar timelines, while Twitter and Slack are preparing for employees to be remote indefinitely. Small and mid-sized firms — those without flagship HQs — are letting leases expire, essentially playing the pandemic by ear (and saving scads on rent in the meantime). In a recent survey by the New York Times, one-third of respondents said they would move to a different city or state if remote work continued indefinitely. Six out of seven of those who weighed in said they were satisfied plugging in from their porch or kitchen or kayak. The tricky thing is that in-person employment has a pretty good track record. Innovation has thrived in the kind of casual forced proximity of Silicon Valley campuses -- if not in conference rooms, at the occasional karaoke team-building trip. We'll never know how many patents came from bad Journey ballads, but the number is probably larger than one might think. Beyond the office, there's also something to be said for a density of talent, a liquid labor force. The proximity of a pool of specialized employees is one of the pillars of Michael Porter's famous cluster theory of competition. Napa Valley is a successful center of the wine industry, not just because of the climate and grapes, but the vintners rubbing elbows at Dutch Bros Coffee, the barrel salesman flexing expense accounts at The French Laundry and the waves of laborers who descend, unsolicited, for the September harvest. Location looms a little less large in the knowledge economy, but it matters all the same when it comes to recruiting and retaining workers. And even in a remote-work world, proximity matters. There are still occasional trips to the office for housekeeping and meetings that are deemed worth the risk; there will undoubtedly be more of them as the pandemic wanes. Not surprisingly, the Covid migration patterns seem to trend to satellite communities -- from San Francisco to Sacramento, or from Seattle to Boise. Susan Wachter, a real estate and finance professor at Wharton, is making the case for "neighborhood nodes," where employees of a kind cluster hours away from the mother ship. Auto engineers, for example, may favor Ann Arbor to Detroit. Sneakerheads spooked in Portland may decamp to Bend. Meanwhile, hubs of massive regional offices, in some cases, are being broken up into a rash of smaller, disintermediated "micro offices." All of which could provide companies a new pipeline of younger, cheaper talent that may have thus far been too smart to burn $3,000 a month on a studio apartment. Executives weighing what their footprint will look like next year would do well to think about where these nodes might pop up and what they might mean for recruiting and retention. It turns out remote work might not be as binary as we thought. On the spectrum from suit to sweatpants, there's a lot of grey.  Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Aug. 17, 2020. Subscribe now. Photo Illustration by 731; Getty Images (9); Alamy (4) Photographer: Photo Illustration by 731; Getty Images (9); Alamy (4) | 
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