What we lose with remote work—and how to minimize the damage

While most employees seem to love it, the initial optimistic assessment during the pandemic that remote work was a success has given way to a more-sobering reality for many organizations: Performance, collaboration, innovation and workplace culture are taking a measurable hit.

It’s easy to think of the office as just a physical space, but it’s much more than that. Offices function as social infrastructure where relationships and trust are built, informal learning happens and problems can be solved quickly across desks and departments.

Before the pandemic, “office work" had never been separated from “an office" at scale. Now we know that when we separate them, we aren’t just shifting where work happens, we’re weakening the relationships and connective tissue that hold teams and organizations together.

What used to happen organically now requires effort to reproduce—and, unfortunately, too many organizations are failing at it.

Office evolution

How did the office become such an important physical and social institution in the U.S.?

It started with the growth of clerical work and the corporate enterprise in the 1920s. Early offices were designed to centralize access to the explosion of paper documents from thriving industries like insurance, and to enable the supervision of workers, much like factories did for industrial labor. The rise of skyscrapers with their wide-open interior spaces made it possible to organize offices and desks following scientific management principles to improve productivity, even down to how workers stuffed envelopes.

Starting in the 1930s, a growing awareness that office work was more than just moving paper led to a rethinking of office designs to support interaction, creativity and employee well-being. Researchers found that what managers actually did was resolve conflicts, build internal networks and negotiate priorities with other people. Even many rank-and-file workers had to informally negotiate, coordinate and problem-solve with others, reminding us that workers don’t get their work done just by themselves.

Corporate offices adapted by adding break rooms and creating spaces for informal meetings and discussions. By the 1960s, the prevailing wisdom was that offices should be designed with human needs in mind, factoring in light, noise, views and privacy to enhance performance. Some of these efforts were comical: Long, narrow corridors were intentionally designed to spark spontaneous conversations believed to promote innovation, as exemplified by the former Bell Labs Headquarters now featured in the TV show “Severance."

Of course, getting work done wasn’t the only benefit of being together. About 22% of older employees report they met their spouse at the office, too.

Shrinking offices

By the 1980s, restructuring and cost-cutting efforts reversed all that. The average size of an office has shrunk roughly 50% since then. Consultants and sales staff who work in the field started losing their offices altogether. The notion of hoteling, where employees reserve office space on an as-needed basis, started in Silicon Valley during the dot-com era in response to a shortage of office space. It died there because employees hated it, but now it is back with a vengeance.

Indeed, the work-from-home push that some thought was temporary during the pandemic has continued on in part because employers used the opportunity to cut office space and real-estate costs. In mid-2020 with the pandemic still in full swing, a KPMG survey showed that nearly 70% of CFOs already planned to reduce their office footprint permanently. Many did, making it impossible to bring everyone back to the office.

Capturing the state of remote work—and what employees are doing in practice versus what their employers’ policies are—is complicated, but there is clear evidence that a much higher percentage of employees are working remotely than before the pandemic. Virtually all employers who still allow remote work embrace “hybrid" approaches, which require people to spend at least some time in the office.

But even though many employers allow hybrid schedules, some are unhappy with how it is working out in practice.

The most obvious concern is that whatever a company’s stated policies are, many hybrid employees aren’t working in the office on their designated days. In one survey, for example, almost half of business leaders say their workers don’t show up on their “anchor days," while others report problems with “coffee badging," meaning workers come in, grab a coffee and then go home. Another obvious problem is that employees are swamped with far too many unproductive, virtual meetings. That’s partly because meetings are taking the place of quick conversations that used to happen in person and partly because online meetings are so much bigger because anyone can join at the click of a mouse.

The complaints from CEOs, however, tend to focus on more fundamental issues: Our people aren’t learning, we aren’t innovating, we are slower to get things done and so forth. Those concerns have been bolstered by recent academic studies documenting precisely those negative effects associated with remote work. In fact, many companies have indicated they plan to unwind hybrid and remote work. A survey by KPMG in July and August 2024 found that 83% of 1,325 CEOs of large companies in 11 countries expected their organizations to require a full return to the office within the next three years.

What can be done

It is too soon to know how many will follow through on those plans, so it is likely that hybrid and remote work will continue to play a role in the workplace landscape, at least for now. That raises the question: How can companies avoid the negatives that come with a hybrid workplace? Many of the problems with hybrid work lie with management, specifically bosses who don’t know how, or haven’t been trained, to manage teams that aren’t located together. But there are some simple things employers can do to make hybrid work more effective. They include:

• Enforce attendance on the days employees are supposed to be in the office and set rules for meetings, such as limiting attendance and requiring that cameras be on if joining remotely. When cameras are on, participants can’t multitask or pretend to be paying attention when they aren’t. These changes start with supervisors. Wharton M.B.A. students told us that in their hybrid offices, if the boss came in, they did too; if the boss’s camera was on in meetings, so was theirs. Otherwise, they didn’t do either.

• Take on-boarding seriously. It has to be in person and more intense for hybrid employees who have limited opportunities to learn from others on the job. Assign new hires to experienced partners, make a list of people they should meet and give them introductions. Bring these new hires back together periodically for social events or classes. Remember, almost everyone who says they can handle working remotely began their careers working full-time in an office where they met people who could help them.

• Redefine job responsibilities. During the Covid lockdowns, when many offices were completely shut, tasks associated with individual performance became the focus for managers—and often the basis for promotions. While that certainly made sense during the crisis, it came at the expense of tasks that require collaboration, such as group projects, helping colleagues and mentoring new hires. Now, with most employees working in-person at least some of the time, bosses need to make clear that collaborative work is just as important as individual work, perhaps by tying it to performance reviews and promotion prospects.

• Make it useful to be in the office. Schedule meetings on anchor days, which inevitably will squeeze down their length. Encourage relationship-building by organizing purposeful activities that help teams and the groups that support them get to know each other better.

• Stop cutting office space. A smaller real-estate footprint means fewer employees can work together in-person at a given time and increases the likelihood that new hires won’t live anywhere within commuting distance of an office where they can get to know colleagues. Efforts to build critical work relationships then get harder.

These suggestions will be easy to blow off if they are left to local managers to execute and enforce. As we have long known, change has to come from the top.

Peter Cappelli, the George W. Taylor professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Ranya Nehmeh, a senior HR strategist, are co-authors of “In Praise of the Office: The Limits to Hybrid and Remote Work." They can be reached at reports@wsj.com.