Sun, Jul 23, 2023 page9

• Remote work is inevitable, but there is room for improvement

  • By Sarah Green Carmichael / Bloomberg Opinion
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  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. As a result, they work longer hours to keep up with their in-office peers.

  However, the researchers nevertheless predict people would see even more remote work in the future. That raises the question: If working from home has so many drawbacks, why can people expect more of it? And more importantly: If people are to do more of it, how can they mitigate its downsides?

  The 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 percent of workdays took place at home. That figure surged to 60 percent in 2020 and has now plateaued at about 25 percent. The authors say the change in levels between 2019 and this year amounts to fast-forwarding the remote-work revolution by about 35 years.

  They expect to see remote work decline slowly for the next couple of years as companies pressure workers to return before accelerating again for the next 20. In part, that would be continuing the long-term trend; and in part, it would be fueled 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 a crucial implication for corporate leaders: Exhorting employees to return to the office full time might be a waste of energy. Fast Internet connections have made at least a degree of remote work inevitable. Rather than trying to fight omnipresent technology, organizations might be better served by figuring out how to address challenges of fully remote work — disengagement, slower learning, even loneliness.

  Fortunately, those downsides do not always apply to what a lot of employees are doing, which is hybrid work: alternating days in the office with days at home. In fact, hybrid work is associated with productivity gains. The debate that is been raging since the COVID vaccines started going into arms is around how many days of face time matter.

  However, even if we could definitively answer that question, I am not sure the answer would influence behavior as much as people assume. A lot of work would become virtual, whether people like it or not.

  In fact, a lot of it already has. Some of the management problems that leaders have reported struggling with during the pandemic — meeting creep, employees who send a dozen e-mails instead of having a five-minute conversation, monitoring and giving feedback to workers in other locations and so on — have been around a long time, but they are going to become more common as technology sends more workers home.

  That might mean rethinking some assumptions about how to manage remote staff.

  For example, many managers have complained to me about the challenges of motivating their far-flung employees. A typical comment came from a senior executive who told me he 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.

  However, unlike other bosses who have tried to solve this problem by calling people back to the office, he has lit a fire under the slowpokes by prodding them with many short-term goals. And he makes sure his sprinters are running in the right direction — lest they end up halfway down the wrong football field before he notices.

  More fundamentally, managers could return to the mid-20th century research of Frederick Herzberg and find that the same aspects that motivated employees in the pre-Internet era probably still work today: achievement, recognition, interesting work and responsibility.

  Or consider mentoring. One of the challenges facing remote workers, Barrero, Bloom and Davis say, is that they do not have the same chances to learn as in-person staff members. A lot of on-the-job learning happens informally by overhearing colleagues working on the same types of problems. Early in my career, I learned a lot from listening to my bosses on the phone, interviewing sources or giving feedback to authors.

  Maybe eavesdropping is not the best way to learn — or to teach. Maybe more knowledge can be transmitted when we are intentional about doing so: taking the time to include junior colleagues on a call, walking them through the goals and debriefing afterward.

  Loneliness might be a tougher problem to solve. Studies have long suggested that it is important to have friends at work. It is good for morale and engagement. And those sorts of human connections are vital for a good life — indeed, they are the whole point, according to Marc Schulz, associate director of the decades-long Harvard Study of Adult Development.

  It is hard to forge those ties remotely; sharing memes on Slack is not the same as sitting next to someone daily. Wealthy companies can bring employees together periodically to renew those bonds, but a remote-work future might well be a more isolated one.

  That should be a reminder that although remote and hybrid work might have a lot of upsides, they would not be unalloyed goods. And in that way, the changing nature of work is not so different from the other changes the Internet has brought to our lives — the improvements are always accompanied by new problems.

  Sarah Green Carmichael is a Bloomberg Opinion editor. Previously, she was managing editor of ideas and commentary at Barron’s and an executive editor at Harvard Business Review, where she hosted “HBR IdeaCast.” This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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