The Back to the Office Movement

Aside from the fact that it was imposed by the pandemic, work from home was an experiment, something to try out, to see whether or not it worked.

By all indications, it has not worked. So we read articles in the London Daily Telegraph and Fortune magazine that attempt to put the movement to rest.

The Telegraph reminds us of those who touted this new way of working, and who were grievously wrong:

“History shows that when workers have more control over their time, and the balance between their home and work lives improves, companies’ bottom lines also benefit,” argued Julia Hobsbawn in The Washington Post. 

Peter Cheese – who as chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, an HR trade body, carries a lot of influence on how we all work – argued: “The step-change shift to home working to adapt to lockdowns has taught us all a lot about how we can be flexible in ways of working in the future. 

“This should be a catalyst to change long-held paradigms and beliefs about work for the benefit of man.” 

So, companies put it to the test. They evaluated the experiment’s results and decided that workers should return to the office.

And, like any experiment, we should be allowed to judge the results. So what happened? Output soared, right? Just like the experts told us it would? And employee well-being and creativity hit record levels as we all became far more passionate about our jobs and loyal to our employers? 

Well, er, no, not exactly. In fact, the results have been a disaster.

Among government employees the situation was especially bad:

In the public sector, where working from home was most enthusiastically embraced, and where in some corners up to 80pc of the employees don’t show up at the office any more, productivity has actually fallen, with a 1.6pc drop at the end of 2022 compared to a year earlier. 

The Telegraph continues:

But for most ordinary workers, it has proven a disaster. Staff lose motivation. They don’t create new ideas. They slack off, new employees don’t ever learn the culture of an organisation and they don’t feel any team spirit towards people they only ever meet in person once or twice a month. 

Indeed, probably the only people who managed to increase their output were the savvy few who took on two WFH full-time jobs, confident that their employers would not ever find out they were only working half the time. 

The Telegraph report comes to us mostly from Great Britain. The story in America is about the same. We examine a recent article in Fortune, again showing that the work from home fad has outlived its usefulness. Or better, that it has been more costly than anyone had imagined:

Among the reasons are these.

First, remote work is bad for new hires. Since they do not have the daily interactions that constitute workplace socializing, they do not feel like they belong. It refers to one Kevin Drum:

As a one-time entry-level product manager, Drum wrote, “I can’t even imagine what it would have been like trying to learn what I needed to know if everyone I had to work with was available only via Zoom or phone or Slack. It’s one thing for existing teams to continue working well from home; it’s quite another to get a new member of a team up and running.”

It’s a shame, because proximity bias poses an enduring threat to career advancement. But attempting to get around by staying home as an entry-level worker means you’ll be swimming against the current. 

Next, when people are working remotely, teamwork suffers. And when teamwork suffers, people start having mental health issues:

When executed incorrectly, hybrid work plans can create discordant, unproductive teamwork. That’s especially true when teams don’t make an effort to align their in-office days.  

Also, remote work has its fair share of downsides. Drum linked back to McKinsey research he had highlighted in his “midterm report on remote work” from December, which found that remote workers are much more likely to report mental and physical health issues and hostile work environments. That’s not the worst of it: 60% of bosses recently admitted that if they had to make job cuts, they’d come for their remote workers first.

Belonging to a harmonious group is far better than sitting alone in your basement.

Also, remote workers work less. They put in fewer hours because they are more easily distracted. They spend 3.5 fewer hours working than they would if they were in the office.

And then there is the lost productivity:

In March, Drum wrote a post highlighting what the CEO of an HR tech firm told the Wall Street Journal: On days his team is working remotely, new subscriber counts plummet 30%. But that’s just one anecdote; even Drum himself says the stat is amazing—“if [the CEO] isn’t exaggerating.”

A piece of hard data in Drum’s favor here is the shocking decline in productivity across five straight quarters, unprecedented in the postwar era. EY-Parthenon’s chief economist Gregory Daco told Fortune that he’s heard similar stories from clients across sectors of “reduced productivity because of the new work environment.” Daco added that remote work is only one piece of the puzzle here. “The difficulty is that there is no magic productivity wand.”

Those who prefer to work from home insist that they are just as productive. And yet, they also recognize that they are losing mentoring opportunities and possibilities for advancement. And working from home produces feelings of disconnection, which certainly do not improve one’s job engagement.

Finally, these two articles, for all of their many virtues, do not address the point that I raised yesterday. How do the differences break down by gender. Mothers who prefer to spend more time with small children have a different incentive to work from home. One does suspect that government bureaucrats are more likely to be female than are private sector employees, but that is merely a conjecture.