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Remote work looks inevitable: So let’s focus on fixing its bugs
WFH drawbacks like low in-person contact aren’t easy to address
Employees who work entirely from home are less creative and less productive, according to a new working paper from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Fully remote employees also receive less feedback and must spend more time coordinating, which makes them work longer hours to keep up with their in-office peers.
The researchers also predict we will see even more remote work in the future. If WFH has so many drawbacks, why can we expect more of it? How can we mitigate its downsides?
The Stanford paper, by Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Stephen J. Davis, notes that the share of people working from home at least some of the time has doubled roughly every 15 years since about 1980; by 2019, about 5% of workdays took place at home. That figure surged to 60% in 2020 and has now plateaued at about 25%. The authors say the change between 2019 and 2023 levels will fast-forward the remote-work revolution by about 35 years.
They expect to see remote work decline slowly for the next couple of years before accelerating again for the next 20. It will be a continuation of the long-term trend and will be fuelled by pandemic-era innovations. The number of patents mentioning terms like ‘telework’ tripled after March 2020, and in the past, those kinds of advances have sent more workers remote.
The findings hold an important implication for corporate leaders: Urging employees to return to the office full-time may not work well. Fast internet connections have made at least some remote work inevitable. Rather than trying to fight the technology, employers might be better off addressing challenges of fully remote work—disengagement, slower learning, loneliness.
Those downsides don’t always apply to hybrid work. It is associated with productivity gains. A debate raging since the covid vaccine rollout is how many days of face time matter.
Even if the question could be answered, I’m not sure it would influence behaviour as much as we think. A lot of work will become virtual, whether we like it or not. A lot of it already has. Some management problems that leaders struggled with during the pandemic—meeting creep, employees sending a dozen emails in place of a five-minute conversation, monitoring and giving feedback to remote workers—have been around a long time. They’ll become more common as technology sends more workers home, sparking a need to think about managing remote staff.
Many managers have complained to me about the challenges of motivating their far-flung employees. A senior executive feels as if he has two types of remote workers: lazy ones who do the bare minimum, and conscientious ones who do too much —or do the wrong things. Unlike other bosses who tried solving this problem by calling people back to office, he motivated slowpokes by prodding them with short-term goals and ensured that his sprinters were running in the right direction.
Managers could also go back to the mid-century research of Frederick Herzberg and find that the same aspects that motivated employees in the pre-internet era probably still work: achievement, recognition, interesting work and responsibility.
Or consider mentoring. A challenge faced by remote workers, confirm Barrero, Bloom and Davis, is that they don’t have the same chances to learn as in-person employees. A lot of on-the-job learning happens informally by overhearing colleagues working on the same types of problems. I myself learnt a lot from listening to my bosses on the phone, interviewing sources or giving feedback to authors. But eavesdropping may not the best way to learn—or teach. More knowledge can be transmitted when we’re intentional about doing so: taking the time to include junior colleagues on a call, walking them through the goals and debriefing afterwards.
Loneliness might be a tough nut to crack. Studies have long suggested the importance of friends at work. It’s good for morale and engagement. Those human connections are vital for a good life—they’re the whole point, according to Marc Schulz, associate director of the decades-long Harvard Study of Adult Development. It’s difficult to forge such ties remotely. Memes shared on Slack do not equal sitting next to someone every day at work. This problem could be solved by bringing employees together periodically to renew those bonds, but a remote-work future might just have to be a more isolated one.
Albeit remote and hybrid work has many upsides, they will not be unalloyed goods. The changing nature of work is not so different from the other changes that the internet has brought into our lives. Improvements are always accompanied by new problems.
Sarah Green Carmichael is a Bloomberg Opinion editor.
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First Published:19 Jul 2023, 09:42 PM IST
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