Originally published on Medium on March 19, 2020. Read the original here.

My friend Nikhil Krishnan recently tweeted about whether people would want to work from home in a post-Coronavirus world. He was pessimistic.

Nikhil has a point: we're in a crisis right now, which is creating a frantic transition to people working from home. It's clearly necessary, but a suboptimal experience for everyone involved.

I'm optimistic about the WFH trend in a different way. I see working from home during Coronavirus as a golden opportunity and a forcing function for companies to lay remote-friendly business plumbing.

Here's my thinking.

Some knowledge workers prefer to work from home, but most enjoy going into an office. It builds camaraderie, breaks up your day, creates serendipity and collaboration opportunities, and allows for fun social interactions.

All of us in the technology industry are getting a crash course in working from home right now. (For most of us, it's mandatory at this point.) After the madness is over, most of us will go back to working from an office.

In this volatile time, everyone is setting up core remote infrastructure. A big part of it is collaboration software — Zoom, Slack, Trello, Asana, Invision, Figma, Google Docs, Airtable, and more. Zoom has become a household word, and it's no surprise that $ZM stock is up more than 50% over the past six months.

But another major component of this infrastructural is cultural and has to do with process. When everyone is in the office, a remote worker can feel like a second class citizen during lunchtime or during a quick huddle in a conference room to discuss customer problem. Now, everyone is remote, so nobody can be a second class citizen. Cultural norms around meetings and communications are rapidly changing. Documentation and disseminating information online are becoming mission-critical work functions, not just nice-to-have processes.

When things “go back to normal” (whatever that means, and whenever that is), the software, processes, and cultural norms won't just disappear. All of a sudden, companies can plug in employees from anywhere in the world more easily onto their teams. An engineering team in New York that went fully remote for three months — and built out the software and internal process to collaborate effectively — is more likely to now successfully onboard and manage a remote engineer in Nigeria or Mexico. A San Francisco-based sales team that learned to ring a “gong” on Slack during Coronavirus is better positioned to add a new sales associate in Salt Lake City or Nashville in the future. A product team in Boston that's become proficient at doing product review remotely would be more open to hiring a PM based in Baltimore or London. This benefit is compounded for companies in major coastal tech hubs that can now access less expensive remote talent.

All of this demonstrates a silver lining of the Coronavirus: it's forcing us to build systems and culture that will ultimately create a more highly-utilized and productive knowledge workforce. This will be a major benefit to businesses and in turn the global economy.