The Other View of Remote Work

The topic of remote work is getting a lot of attention these days. You hear big-time CEOs like Elon Musk (#Tesla, #Twitter) Tim Cook (#Apple), and James Gorman (#Morgan Stanley) talking about it. 

There are clearly pros and cons to this way of work.

However, if you believe everything you read in the media and studies published by consulting & recruiting firms, you’d get the impression that it’s the direction everyone is going to, is irreversible and the only way to attract, engage and retain a workforce in the future.  

Remote work got a big jump start during the pandemic, and rightly so, as it was a way for many companies to continue operations safely.  The movement had started years ago but failed to gain much traction among employers before COVID. 

Recently though, a number of prominent companies have been trying to rein in remote work as the COVID pandemic moved into being an endemic. Most these companies have been transitioning to more of a hybrid model at least for now. 

Just last week, the CEO of Morgan Stanley said ‘employees can’t simply choose to work remotely‘ .  Quite a statement.

I have no doubt most employees like remote work as the many benefits it offers are personal. For example, more flexibility, less commute, able to work from anywhere and at any time, more time with family, less interruptions, chance to live/travel to a foreign country while working online, work in your pajamas 😊   , and maybe sometimes even work that second job for more income. 

Some mention ‘benefits’ for the company being lowered facilities costs and being able to attract employees from all over the country and the world.   However, lower costs is only a savings if the company moves completely away from the onsite or hybrid model as same amount of facilities would still be needed in those cases.   As for attracting employees from a wide range of locations, companies have been recruiting nationally for decades so I’m not sure how much of a benefit this will be.  

The media and ‘expert’ consulting firms seem to be the wind behind this ‘movement’.

Most of what we hear from them are how much more productive people are from home, how more engaged they are with companies offering this, and how companies that don’t offer remote work are going to lose out on the best talent in the future. 

How many “surveys” have we seen just on sites like Linkedin, asking if members feel they’re productive with remote work and if they think that’s the future?  Or articles in support of remote work in general?    

However, when you step back from these ‘surveys’  and think about it, what do you expect the results of such ‘surveys’ to be?  Who is the audience?  People who mostly support it in the first place.  Its like asking coyotes if they like hens 😊   No wonder the results usually show between 50-70% in favor of remote work.

For me, like everything else, the answer to the question of whether remote work is a good or bad idea is ‘it depends’.

Let me explain.

First of all, though you hear it everyday in the press, the percentage of people who have jobs that are able to work remotely are a small percentage.  According to the census, at least in the US, the percentage of people who can work anywhere are a relatively small fraction.  There are jobs in manufacturing and service for which remote work is not possible and employees in these sectors have to work onsite to either produce a product or provide a service (think restaurants) to the public. 

This then brings up the issue of fairness (or equity).  Elon Musk has said that he wants all employees working in the office at Tesla.  I believe its at least partly because the majority of workers in his company are directly related to producing the product so its just a basic issue of fairness that within the same company, and in the same locations, he doesn’t want to create two classes of employees. The majority who have to work onsite and a smaller minority who get to work remotely. 

Other than fairness, lets examine the claims of increased productivity of remote work.  In actuality, the verdict is still out whether of not remote work employees are indeed more productive than those going into an office.  How many large, actual data derived studies have there been on remote vs onsite work in terms of actual productivity?  Everyone assumes people are more productive but there is no hard evidence.  

In addition, there is also the current thinking that claims its outrageous to use online productivity tracking tools to track remote workers.  The thinking is that this just doesn’t show trust, is just more ‘old fashioned’ micromanagement and not something enlightened leaders should be doing.

However, without some forms of measurement, how do companies ensure appropriate productivity levels for remote work employees?  How do they evaluate performance without measurement and without even physical presence when it comes to determining the basic things like who needs training, who gets promotions or merit increases or layoffs? So, let me try to understand, we want workers to work from home, we don’t think online productivity should be measured BUT we believe that remote work is more productive?  Hmmm ....

Personally I believe what’s not measure does not get improved nor managed.

Now on to the other main proclaimed benefits of higher engagement and retention. No doubt remote workers will feel more engaged to their jobs and probably more happy overall as well. No doubt at all !!!

Retention? Not 100% convinced. It possible to imagine a scenario where less interactions with colleagues in both formal AND informal setting leading to more social/emotional distance to the team and company.  As such, there  will be fewer bonds to break when a new remote working opportunity comes up.  

Will this create a class of employees where they care more about their job than the company who employs them?

I wonder if it has been unequivocally proven true that remote work is more productive, gets higher engagement, higher retention rates and higher attraction, why would any CEO want their employees back in the office?   I wonder what companies are seeing in terms of productivity right now? Maybe these consulting firms should go and ask these CEO’s what their metrics are showing.

We are in the middle of tech layoffs now. How are companies able to layoff thousands of employees if everyone is fully productive and yet suffer no noticeable difference?

For me,  there are a few things I believe will be true in the short to intermediate term:

1.     The percentage of employees who can do remote work are going to be a small percentage of the total workforce. Growing maybe but still a small percentage. 

2.     The functions where this is possible will be limited for now.

3.     The issue of fairness for companies that has a large percentage of onsite workforce will continue to push companies towards limiting remote work and returning onsite.  Do they really want to alienate the much larger percentage of the onsite employees who can’t have similar benefits?

4.     When we have enough data, I predict that remote workers will be, AT BEST, on par with onsite workers in terms of productivity. Why would we expect anything different? 

5.     The retention of remote  workers  will be more difficult as these employees will feel like free agents tied more to their professions than their companies. 

6.     It may be easier to attract talent in certain functions when remote work  is offered but that will not be a deal breaker for most talent you want to recruit and retain.

I’m not saying that, for specific functions in specific non-service, non-manufacturing companies that remote work is a bad idea.  I’m just throwing out the possibility that a lot of the claims of the benefits have really not been proven over a period of time.  

I’m sure there are individual circumstances where remote is appropriate on an individual case-by-case basis. For example, someone with a very special hard-to-get skill who, for whatever reasons, cannot make it into a local office . But these, by definition, are case-by case .

Just because the press or internal/external  ‘experts’ push remote as inevitable and irreversible  doesn’t make it so. 

Just because a small percentage of the total workforce prefers something doesn’t mean its a more productive way of working.

Each company has to decide for itself based on many factors. A simple analogy in sports could be basketball. How successful will the team be if all of the team members practiced solo at home and just showed up for the game?   Do you want  build a team or a collection of individuals?

#leadership #management #organizations #future #motivation #human-resources #worldofwork #prediction