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Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon. Bank has encouraged the employees to come to office 5 days a week. Cranes New York
- The idea of permanent remote work is dying out.
- Bosses at companies such as Meta and Goldman Sachs are ordering employees to return to the office most days.
- The authors of some of the top WFH studies suggest that they are right on some measures.
The era of working from anywhere is over.
After nearly three years of relaxing work-from-home policies, CEOs are starting to bring their remote employees back into the office most days of the week.
“Companies have realized what they’re missing out on by not having people in the office,” Michael Gibbs, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, told Insider.
“They have now had enough time to try this experiment to realize that they have gone too far in working from home and need to re-balance.”
Major companies began announcing return-to-the-office policies late last year, and the rhetoric has intensified in recent months.
Amazon has made it mandatory for employees to attend office thrice a week; Goldman Sachs is pressing employees to return full-time, and Meta has said employees could lose their jobs if they don’t come to the office three days a week.
The CEO is giving vague reasons for the change. Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said early-career engineers perform better at the office three days a week, citing internal “performance data” that the firm has not made public.
And Amazon’s Andy Jassy described the company’s effort to bring workers back as a “judgment” call based on internal leadership talks and conversations with 60 to 80 other CEOs. During an internal fireside chat, he sidestepped questions about what data the decision was based on.
But are they correct?
The CEO’s case against working from home forever
Some early studies suggested that working from home was necessary minimal or positive effectwith one from Harvard Business School It was found that this increased productivity by 4.4%.
Recent studies have cast doubt on these early analyses, finding that workers are more distracted at home.
A study from the University of Chicagopublished in February, which collected data from more than 10,000 skilled professionals at an Indian IT company during the peak of the pandemic, found that worker productivity decreased by 8% to 19% among employees working from home, even That the number of working hours also increased.
“We saw a dramatic drop in productivity, not only immediately after the pandemic, but throughout the period,” said Gibbs, one of the study’s authors.
He says that employees’ “focus time,” the amount of time they spent per day working uninterrupted, declined dramatically, despite the company and its employees making improvements in terms of capabilities and equipment to work at home. were ideally suited to make adjustments.
Another study published in July The National Bureau of Economic Research similarly found that the productivity of workers randomly assigned to work from home was 18% lower than that of their office counterparts. The study evaluated nearly 200 data-entry workers in the Indian city of Chennai.
David Atkin, one of the study’s authors and professor of economics at MIT, told Insider, “We found that the longer the inactive time increased the greater the risk of distraction.”
“We found that the people who were most likely to say they would like to work from home were even less productive when they worked from home than in an office,” he said.
Both studies also suggested that working from home made collaboration and communication more difficult.
David Atkin said, “Often the most innovative conversations between people happen when you’re at the water cooler, walking around the office, or bumping into each other in the lunch line.”
but, but, but
Bosses who view face time as a stand-in for productivity have cited many of the above arguments.
But the pandemic changed our working lives so dramatically that even experts agree there’s no going back, and a complete reversal could hurt businesses in other ways.
“Employees really care about flexibility, so orders to return to the office seem top-down and insensitive,” said Harvard Business School professor Raj Chowdhury. A lack of flexible working in a company will make it difficult to attract talent, especially diverse talent, he added.
“People will have substantially rearranged their lives around the ability to work from home,” Atkin said. “You can imagine there’s going to be a lot of resistance to changing this. Often it’s very senior people who have made these changes in their lives, usually not 25-year-olds coming into the company. These are the people who Too much bargaining power.”
A The Washington Post and Ipsos survey this year Found that more than half of US workers will be completely remote willing to take a pay cut instead of returning to the office.
The concept of productivity itself is hazy as well, and it can be affected by how helpful a company is when employees walk away.
“Productivity in one company is not comparable to productivity measurements in a different company,” Chowdhury said, adding that results may depend on a firm’s management practices to support hybrid working.
“You can’t compare productivity or just look at productivity without seeing what kinds of hybrid systems are out there,” he said. “There will be good hybrids and terrible hybrids.”
The genie of remote work is out of the bottle
Influential remote work researchers, including Stanford researcher Nicholas Bloom, are advocating a flexible, hybrid approach as the way forward. Bloom told earlier insider That streamlined hybrid job is a “win-win” for companies and workers.
Everyone else Insider spoke to agreed, though some said the hybrid is also likely to be less productive than living in the office outright.
“I certainly think five years down the line hybrids will default,” Chowdhary said. “We probably won’t even debate that anymore.”
He noted that some high-profile examples of office withdrawal have been blown up in the media.
“The ground reality is that WFH has been very stable for at least a year,” said Jose Maria Barreiro, economist and co-founder of WFH Research, which tracks the level of working from home in the US. “My guess is that the majority of employees at most of those companies have actually been in hybrid mode for some time, and the companies are mostly just formalizing that reality.”
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