After almost two years of the pandemic, teleworking has already become something common in the lives of many companies and workers. The question is: what will remain of all this when the health situation is definitively overcome?
What seems clear according to the most recent studies is that one of the big ones, the lack of productivity that an employee could have when he was out of the office,
The myth of lack of productivity falls
According to a center linked to Standford University, the productivity of remote employees has improved, making them 3% more productive than when they worked in the office on average.
To carry out this study, the researchers have carried out monthly surveys since 2019, up to a total of 5,000 of them each month.
“There’s a Perfect Storm”
Nicholas Bloom, one of the authors of the study, however, believes that the dissonance between what employees and companies want has increased due to telecommuting.
Flexible work arrangements have become non-negotiable for both job seekers and employees, to the point where people value such flexibility as much as a 10% raise, according to the same study. But not all companies are on the same page as their employees when it comes to remote and hybrid work.
Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, notes in his data that about 50% of respondents who have worked from home during the coronavirus pandemic said they would prefer a hybrid schedule once the virus is under control.
“If you look at who are the decision makers in large companies, they are usually older men, not minority, who do not have small children at home,” Bloom explained in
In his opinion, there are several factors that drive the gap between the perceptions of executives and employees about remote work.
He also has doubts about hybrid working: “There are going to be big battles over what days you work from home and who decides it,” says Bloom. “This has already been a problem for companies that have returned to in-person work: how do we align everyone’s schedules?”
Bloom warns that these deals could be difficult to coordinate and “bad for productivity.” “How do you make sure there aren’t too many people out at once, or what if an employee wants to work remotely every other Friday instead of a month?” he says.
Employees already value flexibility more than some pay raises
In December, the WFH research team surveyed more than 900 employees who had recently left their jobs and found that inflexible work arrangements were the number one reason people quit, with about 39% of those surveyed citing the “ability to work from home more” as their top priority.
“It’s a perfect storm,” Bloom finishes. “You have executives pushing to get back to the office, while employees want to keep working from home.”
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