Almost 4 years after the COVID-19 pandemic started in earnest, we’re still debating remote work. I’m as sick of it as you are, but that doesn’t mean the debate isn’t consequential. There is a lot riding on what work setups companies decide on.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like even our best analytical thinkers are close to a consensus on the issue of remote work. This is due to the fact that studies on the productivity of remote workers have yielded very different results. Here’s how a recent NYT article sums up the state of the data:
“Studies of productivity in work-from-home arrangements are all over the map. Some papers have linked remote work with productivity declines of between 8 and 19 percent, while others find drops of 4 percent for individual workers; still other research has found productivity gains of 13 percent or even 24 percent.”
Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist who has studied remote work for over a decade, told the New York Times that remote outcomes depend on management: “It all comes down to how workers are managed. If you set up fully remote with good management and incentives, and people are meeting in person, it can work. What doesn’t seem to work is sending people home with no face time at all.”
A host of other factors also impact the productivity and happiness of remote workers. Geography, for example, is a big one. Workers in Asian megacities like Hong Kong are much more keen on returning to the office than their American and European counterparts. This difference has been attributed this to better public transportation infrastructure that makes commuting easier in Asia, cramped living conditions that make a day at the office more appealing in Asia, and the fact much of Asia boasted low transmission rates in the first two years of the pandemic which meant workers didn’t grow as accustomed to home work as people in other parts of the world.
Even within the USA, the picture of remote work is not monolithic. Remote work is much more common in big cities than in smaller cities and rural America. This is likely due to the type of work that’s being done and infrastructure variables similar to the ones mentioned above.
It’s not all about productivity either. Remote work has been credited with encouraging women back into the labor force. After many women quit their jobs at the beginning of the pandemic to take care of now at-home children, they started to get back to work thanks to the flexibility offered by remote, or partially remote, jobs.
Remote work, highly coveted by many workers, can also be used to entice talent that wouldn’t otherwise be interested in joining your company. This has become all the more true as remote work policies become more conservative over the past year. According to an article in Business Insider, in August of this year, “On LinkedIn, only 9% of job postings last month were fully remote, down from a peak of 21% in March 2022.”
According to the same article, “People are so desperate to work from home that some have taken pay cuts as steep as 20% to land a remote role.” That would be enough of a discount to quell my fears about any remote work productivity penalty.