Work-from-Home Challenges Aren't Cause to Rush Back to Traditional Offices
At the start of the pandemic, America was swept by a surge in remote work. Before the pandemic, just 7 percent of workers were laboring at home, a figure that peaked at nearly 42 percent mid-pandemic. By 2025, it is estimated that 22 percent of workers will be at home, more than three times where we were just a year ago. Other estimates show that moving forward, as many as a third of all workers will be remote in the post-pandemic world of work.
Over the past year, business leaders were enthusiastic about remote work. So enthusiastic, in fact, that we saw regular announcements from companies across the country express intent to expand telework options moving forward. Employees seemed to agree that distributed work — at least part-time — should be the new standard.
Today, some of the air has come out of the balloon. Employees around the world have sustained their interest in prolonged remote work, but executives seem to now be adopting a more cautious attitude. At the beginning of the pandemic, a survey of executives by KPMG found that 69 percent of companies intended to reduce their real-estate footprint and expand remote work programs. That same survey conducted again this past month found that just 17 percent of executives said they planned to do so, and only 30 percent are planning to extend existing remote work programs. This will be good for central business districts as employees return to offices, but will come as a disappointment to those workers who feel they have flourished in the flexibility and comfort afforded by remote work. Why the sudden change of heart?
Fortunately, it doesn’t appear to be either a productivity or trust problem. KPMG’s survey also showed that the primary reason for the shift among executives is concern about the negative impacts of remote work on employees. Shifting to remote work overnight and working in isolation for a year left more than half of us burnt out. On top of that, while productivity is up, innovation — which is most often spurred on by in-person collaboration in the office — is down. When companies cut back on spending and need to be strategic about how they conduct their work, the last thing they can afford is a tired workforce and a lack of innovation.
Particularly on the burnout problem, there’s a risk of succumbing to post hoc fallacy. Current worker distress is likely associated more closely with the general conditions of the pandemic — with extended closures of businesses and schools, as well as social isolation — than it is with the demands of the relentless Zoom calls associated with remote work. In fact, nearly three quarters of workers around the world want to continue working remotely at some level, demonstrating that workers don’t necessarily associate their stress or burnout with remote work itself. With regard to collaboration and innovation, advancements in digital workplace communications tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams over the last year have enabled team-based work to flourish by enabling the types of ad-hoc, drop-in interactions that help fuel innovation. We can take the lessons learned during this time to find new and better ways allow creativity to flourish in a remote environment, helping to replicate the types of collaborations that would normally happen in the office without having to leave our homes.
As Laurel Farrer, CEO of Distribute Consulting, recently told us, “what we are currently doing is not remote work… this is a workplace contingency plan in response to a global health crisis.” To execute more effectively in the future, employers may consider a more thoughtfully crafted approach to remote work. Taking time to plan more strategically to accommodate continued worker desire for such arrangements and to bolster resiliency for the next big crisis or workplace disruption using lessons learned from 2020 can help us unlock the true potential of distributed work.
It might be easy enough to look at the burnout and loss of innovation as reason enough to brush off the other benefits of remote work, but it’ll likely prove difficult to go back to pre-pandemic expectations of a fully centralized office environment. Advertisements for positions with remote are up sharply suggesting that employers see an opportunity to broaden their talent “catchment,” allowing even smaller firms to go national and sometimes international in their recruitment efforts. It is not difficult to imagine remote work becoming a matter for competition among firms seeking to attract talent.
After a year of extremes, it’s probably useful for everyone to take a strategic pause and ask deeper questions about which approach to remote work will best position companies and workers to flourish. Re-imposing a status quo ante that fails to acknowledge the benefits gained from a year of work-from-home could be a disappointment for employers and workers alike.
Brent Orrell is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Matthew Leger is a research analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.
