When I started working from home in the late 1980s as a freelance technical writer, I was clearly an exception. At that time, even entrepreneurs mostly went to the office. Over time, however, this has slowly changed, and the pandemic – as well as shifts in generational views on work-life balance – have accelerated workers’ sense of going into a formal office every day, even though some CEOs wish this were not the case.
Today, 14% of American workers work from home full time (myself included), and that number is expected to increase to 20% by next year, according to data published by USA Today. In total, 58% of white-collar workers want flexibility in their work schedules to work from home a few days a week, according to the same USA Today data. Yet we continually receive mixed messages post-pandemic about returning to the office.
Some companies like IBM and Amazon have gone to great lengths to bring people back to the office, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reportedly telling employees that if they wanted to stay remote, it probably wouldn’t work well for them . Wayfair, the Boston-based online furniture company, focused on remote workers rather than office workers during a layoff earlier this year, according to a WSJ report.
CEOs of major tech companies like Jassy and Elon Musk have strongly opposed remote work; Musk called it “morally wrong” that some people work from home while service workers are required to report. Meanwhile, Michael Bloomberg suggested that remote workers weren’t actually working, but playing golf (which honestly seems like a projection to me). Even Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose company has championed the idea of a digital headquarters during the pandemic, has started preaching about a return to the office, blaming working from home for the lack of productivity, especially among new employees.
This represents a lot of leadership energy directed away from working from home and toward working in the office. Some have suggested that this is because these companies have invested heavily in office buildings and need staff to staff them. Maybe it’s simply the need to put employees in front of managers for control purposes, or if they sincerely believe that workers are more productive in the office. Whatever the reason, they seem determined to return to the office.
Do they have a point? Will workers be more productive under the watchful eye of their managers sitting in offices rather than in the comfort of their homes? Perhaps more importantly for results-driven CEOs, will their companies make more money? A study from the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz School of Business published earlier this year doesn’t necessarily suggest.
“Our findings are consistent with employee concerns that managers are using RTOs (return to office mandates) to seize power and blame employees for poor performance. We provide evidence that RTO mandates harm employee satisfaction but do not improve business performance,” the report states.
Karen Mangia, president and chief strategy officer of Engineering Innovation Group, who has studied and written extensively about remote work, says she was surprised to find that workers tended to prioritize flexibility over location; it wasn’t so much about where you needed to be, but rather your ability to control when you worked and maintain a good work-life balance.
“All the research I’ve seen shows the same thing: employees who have some degree of flexibility over where and when they work report higher levels of employee engagement. This is the group of people who are more engaged and more productive,” she said.
Additionally, Mangia found that companies that force employees to return to the office are, unsurprisingly, experiencing increased employee burnout. “The argument behind this return-to-office mandate time and time again is that employees will be more productive because we can collaborate in person and get things done. Well, being exhausted and maintaining a level of burnout is the opposite of being more productive,” she said.
There are also good reasons to encourage hiring more remote employees, including access to a much larger and more diverse employee base than you might get from a single geographic location.
“I heard a large consumer packaged goods company in the Midwest say, ‘We find all kinds of talent.’ Whereas before we insisted that all employees had to be local or in town, now we’ve opened the system wider and gotten much better candidates. We never want to go back and we’re going to open this up permanently,” said Dion Hinchcliffe, an analyst at Constellation Research, who has been watching this trend for a long time.
The next debate is about how long, if any, employees should spend in the office and for what reasons. Many tech companies leave it up to their employees to decide where they want to work, and that seems to work pretty well.
Gitlab is a great example of a fully remote company since its inception ten years ago. Other tech companies with a flexible approach include Dropbox, Atlassian, and Okta, none of which require a specific number of days in the office.
When it comes to startups, anecdotally the vast majority of founders I speak with are remote first. Hinchcliffe says this is part of a move towards a decentralized workplace where startups in particular avoid the usual overheads of having an office. Instead, they often rent space in the WeWork model to meet with clients, press and analysts, or with each other, as needed.
Mangia says the only demographic of workers that tends to struggle in fully virtual environments are new hires coming out of college, who benefit from being in an office. “When you recruit new employees, especially early in their career, they progress more quickly and report a better experience with a lower degree of burnout when they can come into a place where there are other people to help them ” she said. , giving credence to what Benioff was saying.
Even the most ardent advocates of working from home understand that there will be times when it is useful to come together to build a team, meet with clients, or collaborate and brainstorm in person, but despite the cries of big CEOs, employees have tasted working from home. this flexibility, and it’s going to be difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. For now, debate continues between unions and management over where and how work is done.
techcrunch
