The war over work from home: Does remote work really impact success and productivity?

 

Welcome to Forbes Edge, your insider’s guide to career and entrepreneurial success, exclusively on LinkedIn. If you work from home, you don’t want to skip our top story this week. Forbes spoke with academic researchers, corporate advisers and business executives on what existing data says about remote work’s impact on productivity, creativity and more. Then we’ll tackle some networking tips for those who are introverted, shy or just hate networking. And finally, we’ll take a look at some different résumé formats—and the pros and cons of each.

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Success story of the week: The war over work from home: Does remote work really impact success and productivity?

Many remote and hybrid workers can hear the rumblings of a possible return to in-office work. CEOs of major companies have made headlines in recent months for calling their workers back to the office, eliminating the option for fully remote schedules. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been unwavering in his distaste for remote work, saying that “it does not work for younger people, it doesn’t work for those who want to hustle, it doesn’t work in terms of spontaneous idea generation.”

Is he right? It’s hard to say. Workplace norms continue to shift, and collaborative software tools are constantly being updated and improved. Productivity is notoriously hard to measure for white-collar workers, and a lot of existing data comes from employee surveys or academic research that studies niche worker categories.

Brian Elliott, who previously led Slack’s Future Forum research consortium and now advises executive teams on flexible work arrangements, says many CEOs still have “executive nostalgia” about a model that worked for them years ago. “There’s still this big CEO echo chamber aspect of it,” he says.

While some data may support the complaints executives have, other research suggests it does the opposite. But it does seem clear that the hybrid arrangement is poised to win out, inexperienced workers are more vulnerable to work-from-home’s downsides, and employees really don’t want to work full-time in the office.

Success Edge: “For whatever reason, we keep making where we work the lightning rod, when how we work is the thing that is in crisis,” says Annie Dean of Atlassian. 

Productivity and culture are two of the main sticking points for many companies when considering flexible schedules. And while there is possibly truth behind the idea of in-office workers being more productive, there are assumptions that have an impact on how those workers are viewed.

UC Davis professor Kimberly Elsbach has long studied “face-time bias,” or the career advantages of people who are physically present in the office. Her 2010 study found that when people are seen in the office, even when nothing is known about the quality of their work, they are perceived as more reliable and dependable, “subjective trait characteristics” that are tied to career advancement. 

As to the question of how much “work culture” can suffer when most workers aren’t in office, software firm Atlassian ran an analysis to see how often remote workers needed to come together to feel more connected. Internal surveys showed that remote employees who got together for in-person gatherings had a 27% increase in how connected they felt; the surveys suggested three times a year was the best frequency for preventing a loss of that connectedness.

“The truth is the flexible way of working is going to stick, but it needs new management practices,” says Harvard Business School professor Raj Choudhury, such as gathering for regular offsites or figuring out how to coordinate attendance so people aren’t Zooming alone in the office. “There’s good hybrid—and there’s terrible hybrid.” 

Read the full story here.