It is fair to say that the tide of opinion has shifted on the topic of remote work, and to be frank, opinion is more important than facts in driving decisions.
True remote, where employees are not expected to be in the office, remains a trivial part of the U.S. scene, mainly confined to smaller tech companies and some individual contributor roles. Most employers who have some kind of remote work have a hybrid model, which typically requires “anchor days” during the week when everyone is supposed to be in the office. They remain extremely common for office workers, especially in big cities.
My co-author Ranya Nehmeh and I pointed out last year that these models were not working very well, as many employees were simply not showing up for anchor days. One difficult—and underreported—reason is that many hybrid companies cut their office footprints so that it was literally impossible for everyone to be back in the office at the same time. The focus of our article was on how employers could manage those problems and keep some of the hybrid arrangements; tt was not an argument to return to the office.
What is different this year? A stream of headlines about major corporations calling all employees back to the office has changed the tone. When a major company like Amazon bringing its office workers back, this accounts for only a trivial part of the U.Sl workforce,; but the effect on other companies is huge. A stream of news stories since have focused on who is calling their employees back and covering the views of top executives as to why they felt the need to make a change. Our own paper is now a finalist for the best practitioner-oriented paper at the Academy of Management. And most amusingly, Brian Elliott, Nick Bloom, and Ray Choudhury, who claimed last year that our paper was biased (“trash”) and that everything about remote work was just ducky have now published their own paper arguing that employers need to manage around the problems hybrid policies cause. (They also think leaders just don’t understand how well remote works.)
Previously in HR Executive: Why it’s important to understand the problems with hybrid work
Remote work keeps young workers unhireable, recent studies show
Two recent headline stories added to the RTO push, both arguing that new hires struggle to learn in remote offices where no one is there to help them. I certainly see evidence of that. The stories also argue that remote work has caused companies to not hire young people. The first study is the more persuasive, in part because it begins with data on a single company, where they saw a shift in hiring during the pandemic shutdown that sidelined new grads and advantaged experienced hires. Once employees came back, the company returned to hiring new grads. The second, based on country data, finds that the expansion of remote work has been associated with less hiring of younger workers.
What’s important about these studies in the context of debates about the merits of remote work is that they assume that it is harder for young people—and presumably new hires in general—to learn without being around other employees in regular offices. They have also tied it to a broader social problem, all of which is bad for the “brand” of remote work. Maybe. Employers could manage the new hire problem with better onboarding and mentoring, but I don’t hear about that happening.
I don’t think many companies have done careful analyses of the costs and benefits driving their hybrid and RTO policies. As with most decisions in business now, they are driven by the CEOs personal view, and that is shaped by stories about leading companies dumping remote work, rather than stories about it expanding. I also worry that as CEOs turn negative against remote work, it contributes to negative views of the HR leaders who pushed the CEOs to retain hybrid policies.
Employers could manage the limitations of hybrid work, keep the flexibility they give employees and rebuild the social relationships that create the most efficient solutions to getting office work done. Whether it is too hard or not worth it, I don’t see companies willing to make that effort. For better or worse, it looks like there will be a slow creep not to reform hybrid work, but to dump it altogether.
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