Working at home

As I was walking on campus to my office today, I encountered one of our school deans. We talked for maybe 3 minutes or so. No particular topic. Conducting no real business. But a renewal and strengthening of a small bond between colleagues.

There are many features of daily life that have yet not returned to a pre-pandemic state. Among those is the lack of stability in the size of the remote work force, the work-at-home population. We are approaching four years into this phenomenon, and most of us are disappointed in the lack of useful evidence of the pro’s and con’s of remote work.

In terms of the extent of remote work, a scientific survey of businesses by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is now little old but still relevant. It shows that, between August and October 2022, 25.5% of US business establishments had workers who teleworked all or part of the time, compared to 23.3% in February, 2020, before the pandemic hit. In short, despite all of the media about large permanent changes in work styles, the prevalence was not dramatically different before and after the pandemic.

However, the relative frequency of remote work does seem to be highly variable over occupational groupings. Staff in IT, finance and accounting, and sales and marketing appear to have higher fully remote prevalence. More prevalent than remote workers are hybrid workers, present at the workplace 1-3 days a week, each week. These tend to be knowledge workers, who part of their work is creation of written or other products and part is group work. A common occurrence is work at the office Tues, Wednesday, and/or Thursday, for days filled with group work and meetings. The other days are used for solitary work. More highly educated workers and staff with small children tend to exhibit more at-home work than others. At-home work is more common to urban areas than to rural areas.

The least likely to perform at-home work are those in food services, cleaning, security, building maintenance, transportation, and other roles that require at-site job duties irreplaceable by zoom or internet-assisted media.

A large amount of commentary addresses whether at-home work is more or less productive than work on the employer’s site. First, the word, ”productivity,” is a bit slippery across different fields. Economists have the notion of product (goods or services) produced per hour of labor. Obviously, this is most easily measured with countable products (e.g., number of calls taken by a service center, number of widgets produced). Such work organizations appear to have lower productivity with remote workers. Knowledge workers don’t have easily measured products. However, one randomized experiment did find that remote teams produced fewer creative uses of a product than did teams interacting face-to-face.

An important alternative viewpoint of productivity is more common among employees – it includes how many hours they devote to all job-related activities, including commuting from home to the work place. This more inclusive notion of work-related hours would obviously favor productivity advantages of at-home work.

Much of the research on at-home work is based on attitudinal reports. A common finding is that supervisors are less enamored with their staff working remotely than are the staff themselves. Some studies report greater “happiness” or satisfaction with work-life balance among at-home workers.

But as the trend to working at home stabilizes, there seems to be more commentary about attitudinal states that are negatively affected by at-home work. Much of it is related to a loss of social cohesion in remote-based work organizations in contrast to that arising from face-to-face work. Mentoring of new staff by more experienced staff seems to be a challenge remotely, as well as unintentional advantages for advancement that accrues to those who are in the office versus those remote, and difficulty with onboarding of remote employees. Some see a loss of social cohesion among remote co-workers. Isolation promotes an abundance of attention to oneself; zoom-limited interaction with others doesn’t reinforce empathy toward others. Some remote work organizations experience more interpersonal conflict among staff.

Computer-mediated communication strips many of the cues from people interacting with one another. Texts miss the inflection and emotion of a voice. Zoom strips out much of the body language so useful in understanding the intent of a speaker. Finally, chance encounters seem much rarer in computer-mediated interaction.

Bumping into a colleague walking across campus, having a 3 minute conversation, feeling reconnected, seems harder with colleagues linked only by the internet. It seems that institutions whose outcome requires group work will suffer more than those whose product is merely the sum of autonomous, individual staff members. It seems that each work organization needs to decide the relative importance of groups versus individuals for its outcomes.