Will remote working survive the pandemic?

Remote working has been a reality for millions of employees worldwide for the last two years. Usually, residents of the USA, Europe or Australia extrapolate their reality to the rest of the world and upgrade Western world phaenomena to global.

However, remote working is an exception to that rule as it is really worldwide, as it is Covid’s reach. Many employees worked remotely this time in China, India, and Latin America.

The universality of the remote working capability applied in a world connected via global and complex supply chains allowed humankind to survive Covid.

After the initial shock from the pandemic, most companies praised the technology, the level of connectivity we experience today, and remote working as the reasons for them to overcome the crisis and even thrive. A simple look at the investors’ reports of the listed companies worldwide is enough to make the point. Some companies claimed that they managed to continue innovating despite the pandemic. We all witness some of the innovations coming to life (mRNA, QR codes, e-gov, robot deliveries). And data show that the overall innovation effort and investment continued to grow. And all this continuation of operations was possible because of the capability to work remotely. However, despite this solid proof, we still hear or read about remote working killing innovation, creativity, or productivity.

Lately, as Covid concerns seem to slip down in the priority list of urgencies and preoccupations, the question is what is the role of remote working in that "after Covid" environment.

Paradoxically, the same companies who praised the benefits of remote working have started calling people back to the office. For the moment, it looks like their policy is one of the two leading hybrid approaches: (a) remote first, then a few days in the office, or (b) at the office first, then a few days remote. Fully remote is still a rare exception. Depending on your geography, this trend is stronger or weaker, but it’s there.

This swift in policies pushed many employees to quit their jobs and look for another employer with fully remote or remote first working schedules. There were some high-profile cases, like Apple’s Director of Machine Learning, who left the company because of the return to office work policy.

I see an oxymoron when Apple and other tech companies praise the office as a place of creativity and innovation, as they are the ones who created the connected world, made remote work a reality, and continue to gain billions from it while steadily pushing innovation in an environment of remote working.

I believe remote working stunned the world in a moment of global despair. This capability’s efficiency, speed, safety, and convenience made it the only solution to face the pandemic, the only lifeline. As soon as the situation improved and the alternative of working at the office became available again, we fell into the habits trap. Additionally, remote working exposed much of the nonsense of our previous working arrangements, environment, and establishment. It is, therefore, normal to see those who contributed to building and embedding this nonsense in our work life feel uncomfortable with it.

But let’s see what is exposed and the primary arguments against remote working. I’ll refer to a sample of recent studies or articles that echo the anti-remote working arguments and sentiment. There are thousands of similar writings with identical arguments.

One cannot be productive away from the office

I think it is absolute nonsense even to use this argument. The same productive remote workers during the lockdowns became unproductive overnight when the lockdowns lifted. I believe Satya Nadella rightfully describes it as productivity paranoia.

Nevertheless, I tried to find a recent study that could provide some meaningful data and insights in favour of such an opinion. I only found this one, a study published on November 2019 cited quite often as a reference. All the references in it were to other older studies made in the pre-Covid environment when remote work was the exception and not the rule.

The studies do not consider the tremendous progress in remote working related software and corporate investment that completely changed the efficiency of remote work after Covid. I’d love to find a recent study based on data from 2020–2022, concluding that remote working is not productive to assess the results ( it looks that more recent studies emerge, and the findings still favour remote work).

Can’t trust employees to perform their jobs away from the physical office environment

The feeling is that micromanagement increased due to remote working. Yes, there is an issue here! The issue is a lack of trust, one of the basic ingredients to building a strong, high-performing team. The issue is the insecure manager who cannot trust the team and micromanages. Remote working brought to the surface the issue of micromanagement. For many years, proximity offered a perfect carpet to sweep the problem under it.

Insecure managers were hiding in plain sight for ages, camouflaged in the office jungle. Away from it, their weakness is exposed. The Gartner article I just mentioned offers five questions to check if one is “micromanaging in the world of remote work”:

1.    Do I often have concerns about or question (outspokenly or silently) employees’ productivity?

2.    Do I find myself constantly wanting to be informed of every bit of progress made?

3.    Do I peek into systems records to check that someone actually did what I asked?

4.    Do I find myself limiting others’ authority to keep myself engaged with initiatives?

5.    Do I find it difficult to delegate tasks because I don’t trust they will get done?

If the answer to anyone at these is “yes” then you’re a micromanager (and blame it on the remote work, who turned you into that monster).

I agree with that conclusion. If the answer is “yes”, one micromanages. But how this relates to remote work? A manager who answers “yes”, to all those questions has this attitude already. If one is bad at delegating, he/she was bad before, and they continue. If one checks all details and wants to be informed about everything, he/she was like that before, and they continue.  They always called unnecessary status meetings or asked for meaningless and detailed status reports; and they continue.

Remote working kills creativity and innovation

The argument is that the absence of face-to-face interaction negatively impacts innovation.

First of all, let’s suppose, for a while without prejudice, that this is true, and let’s see who really innovates in a company. Does the accounting department of Apple innovate? I am sure they are excellent professionals (probably less paid than others in R&D, for instance) and strive to do their work the best they can. But what was the last meaningful, life-changing, far-reaching innovation that came out of that team? In reality, the argument is valid for a small number of employees.

Hardcore supporters of office work insist that “face-to-face interactions lead to knowledge spillovers”. I don’t doubt that it can happen. In real life, I saw it happen only when there was a context like a brainstorming meeting, a problem-solving activity, and a context built around a topic. Haphazard discussions out of context rarely produce knowledge spillovers. Someone with context can always call for a face-to-face meeting. The difficulty is always finding the context, i.e., asking the right question.

Regarding the substance of the argument, one can have serious doubts just by looking at the methodology used in the study I used as a reference. Researchers correlated the proximity of two smartphones in the Silicon Valley office with the submission of a patent, hypothesising that they are linked with the submission of patents. There’s no proof of causation.

On the other hand, this study examines the positive impact of remote working applied to the personnel working at the US Patent and Trademark Office (the people who would receive the patent the team in the first study will submit) and found it extremely positive. So the people who submit the patent are less productive because of remote working, whereas those who receive and review the patent are more productive because of remote working.

I rest my case, my Lord.

People feel exhausted, lost and empty

This article summarises the essence of the argument: you finished the work, and “instead of feeling accomplished after an intense day…, you sometimes simply feel exhausted, lost and empty”.

Are you suggesting that you felt, at the end of the day, fresh, fulfilled, and happy when you worked in the office? Were you not tired and frustrated from the time spent in endless, pointless meetings? Weren’t you stressed rushing to hit the road on time to avoid traffic jams, be on time for dinner, pick up the kids, or run to the next obligation?

Remote working exhausts people because they tend to be disrupted by emails and notifications and try to multitask (apparently, none of this existed before), they say. However, this study (of the same organisation) explains how workplace interruptions lead to physical stress.

An additional argument is that remote working wears out people because the lack of commuting means a lack of sensory stimuli. But one can use the savings from commuting to do things one couldn’t do before because of lack of time: go to the gym, the movies, meet friends and socialise with the people one likes. That will be enough sensory stimuli in a healthier mental environment.

Opponents of remote working say that “working in an office also provides a formal start and end point to the working day…useful boundaries as more and more home-workers report difficulty ring-fencing personal and professional lives.

Having all that office building infrastructure for people to have a visual limitation and reminder of where work starts and ends is a highly egocentric approach, I should think, and it shows how spoiled we are.

Moreover, working long hours is a symptom of other inefficiencies, so we should fight the root causes, not the symptoms.

However, there are two facts that none can deny and can lead to people feeling exhausted: video fatigue and the inability of everyone to have a decent place to transform it into an office space. Regarding the first, there is now enough experience, analysis, studies, tips, tools, and methods to fight against it. The second is a hard rock, objectively. Few employees can fight it alone (repurposing another room or space, buying or renting another house with a fitting layout, etc.). And few companies can bare the cost of helping employees.

Remote working kills social interaction

A software engineer at Amazon wrote that “working from home is slowly killing me… I’ve gotten lazy and anti-social. It feels like I wake up, go to the next room, work, log off, go back to the next room, rinse and repeat…I don’t feel like myself and feel very emotionless.”

I recognise the feeling, and I am sure many of you do. It was true and inescapable during the lockdowns. We had no choice; it was like imprisonment. Now, we can go out and socialise. We can visit friends or call friends in and socialise. Using this argument now is a pure excuse to divert the focus from the real issue that has nothing to do with remote working. A person with social interactions only within the work environment does not have a healthy social life, remote working or not.

Remote working harms company culture

It is an argument that often appears in studies and discussions. Still, it is usually quickly bypassed because today, there are plenty of resources and ways to ensure this won’t happen. After all, Culture is something that evolves.

Remote work is an IT threat

The reality is that cyber security threats existed even before remote working. When a company decides to offer remote connectivity, a security threat exists. The organisation is exposed as of the moment the first laptop or the first smartphone is connected to a company’s network. In our days of hyper-connectivity, and IoT, the IT function must have a robust cyber security environment regardless of the magnitude and the number of connected devices.

Those were the basic arguments against remote working. Let’s look at the positives.

Remote working is a natural evolution and good news for everyone

Let me start by acknowledging that remote working is not covering 100% of the workforce. People working on the floor in a factory or a warehouse, people working in customer-facing jobs at the point of sales, truck drivers, farmers, builders, etc., cannot work remotely. However, the boundaries of what can be done remotely are shifting fast.

For example, a nurse treating patients at the hospital should be at the location. But a nurse who works in telemedicine can perform the job from anywhere. This is an example where remote working can benefit both (employees and employers) and create new revenue streams for hospitals. Today, even a farmer can complete a few tasks remotely (i.e. not going to the field) as automation and smart equipment are applied in the farming industry.

Remote working has a positive impact on the time people dedicate to commuting. I think this is obvious. Anyone who used to go to a workplace spent some time commuting, from a few minutes to several hours. It is a clear and indisputable gain for every person. What they do with the time gained is another big topic. But the odds are that people who commute less contribute less to CO2 emissions (even if they used to go to work with their expensive “green” electric bikes), and that’s a gain for all of us. And as of the beginning of the war in Ukraine, commuting less is also helping reduce the demand for oil (or energy for EVs).

The time gained, if properly used, can help improve the person’s quality of life: more time to spend with friends and family or just use it for themselves (gym, meditation, reading, acquiring new skills, rest, sleep, etc.). For instance, sleep deprivation is often cited as a cause of many mental and health problems. People’s hectic schedules are usually one of the root causes of why people cannot get the right amount of sleep. Or think of the obesity issue. Again, many times one of the root causes is people not having time to cook a meal.

Companies who promote that they are concerned about their employees’ mental health should promote remote working instead of wondering what they can do to “ensure that their staff have access to mental health support”.

Remote work can positively impact Diversity and Inclusion, although some managers think remote workers find it harder to advance than their in-person colleagues).

Remote working leads to a redistribution of workers' residences. People can improve their quality of life by moving to another place outside the urban network. This is beneficial for them financially, but it is also good news for the local community as more money will flow into the local economy. Unfortunately, this relocation is not always easy and gets more complicated if one wants to cross a border.

Conclusion - The future of remote working

I believe that remote working - given the scope limitations I've mentioned - will take a more significant share gradually, mainly in the hybrid form of “remote first, office occasionally”; in ten years, it may be just work.

The powers at play are evident. On one side, most of the employees are asking and will continue asking for it. The newest generations coming into the market will appreciate some office time to create connections and a feeling of belonging. However, these highly digital-savvy generations who grew up with global friends and global networks will find it extremely hard to get into an office 5 days a week for things they can do remotely. As the most senior generations, who are now at the middle and senior managerial levels, get on retirement, the incomers will have a totally different perspective on the matter.     

Moreover, the governments started looking at the topic and examining legislation. This indicates a phenomenon that came to stay. Some countries prepare legislation to recognise employees’ right to request remote work while others resist.

I believe countries will resist complete remote work setups because of the short-term impact it will have on the local economy, especially in the city centres. And because it is too complex from a legal perspective. It will require them to act and take courageous decisions, meaning they will have to displease some voters.

But in the end, remote working (hybrid) will prevail.

I believe that companies will revisit in parallel the definition, the purpose and the set-up of “office”, as this new approach offers cost-saving opportunities that no company can disregard for a long time. And at a certain point, companies will realise that remote working, if set up properly, can considerably enhance the employee proposition and make their offer more attractive and economical for the employee without them having to spend any significant amount of money.

Things are changing all the time; it is just the magnitude of change that differs. Today we witness a change of the greatest magnitude our species faced in the millions of years of existence.

The true believers in the change will survive, and the phoney ones will vanish and extinguish.

It will happen slowly and gradually, marching at that slow, still, fatal pace nature follows as it progresses on her unstoppable way forward.