We are witnessing a gradual reverse migration from Zoom to the conference room. Wall Street firms have been some of the most aggressive in calling employees back to offices, but in recent months even many tech titans (Apple, Google, Meta and others) have required staff to go to the office at least three days a week. To supporters of telecommuting, that sounds like revenge from the corporate curmudgeons. Didn’t a barrage of studies during the covid-19 pandemic show that working remotely was often more productive than working in the office?
Unfortunately for the most convinced, the new research mostly contradicts that theory and shows that offices, despite all their flaws, are still essential. A good starting point is a working paper that received much attention when published in 2020 by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, then PhD students at Harvard University. The researchers detected an 8% increase in the number of calls answered per hour by employees of an online establishment that had switched to teleworking. Much less impact has had a revised version of the same work published last May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The increase in efficiency has now turned into a decrease of 4%.
The researchers had not been wrong. It so happened that they have now received more accurate data, including detailed work schedules. It turned out that not only were employees answering fewer calls from home, but the quality of their interactions also suffered. They kept customers waiting longer. And there were also more redials, an indication of the existence of unresolved problems.
The review is published in the wake of other studies that have reached similar conclusions. David Atkin and Antoinette Schoar of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Sumit Shinde of the University of California, Los Angeles randomly assigned data entry workers from India to operate from home or from the office. Those who worked at home were 18% less productive than their peers at the office. Michael Gibbs of the University of Chicago and Friederike Mengel and Christoph Siemroth of the University of Essex found a productivity deficit, relative to previous office performance, of up to 19% for home office telecommuters. a large Asian computer company. According to another study, even chess professionals play worse online than offline. And yet another study used a laboratory experiment to show that video conferencing inhibits creative thinking.
The reasons for such findings probably won’t surprise anyone who has spent a good part of the last few years working from their dining room table. Collaborative work is more difficult from home. Employees who participated in the Federal Reserve study mentioned noticing the absence of “coworkers to turn to for help.” Other researchers who analyzed the communication logs of nearly 62,000 Microsoft employees found that professional networks within the company were becoming more static and isolated. Teleconferences are a pale imitation of face-to-face meetings: Harvard Business School researchers, for example, concluded that “virtual water dispensers”—spaces created by many companies during the pandemic to mimic chatting around the actual water dispenser) often invaded very busy schedules with limited benefits. To use the terminology of Ronald Coase, an economist who focused on the structure of companies, all of these problems represent increased coordination costs and make the collective enterprise more difficult to manage.
It is reasonable to expect that some of the costs of coordinating telework will decrease as people get used to it. Since 2020, many will have become experts in the use of Zoom, Webex, Teams or Slack; but there is another cost that can increase over time: the underdevelopment of human capital. In a study of software engineers published in April, Emanuel and Harrington, PhDs, along with Amanda Pallais, also from Harvard, found that feedback between colleagues dropped dramatically after the move to remote work. Atkin, Schoar, and Shinde documented a relative decline in learning for teleworkers. Those who worked in the office acquired knowledge faster.
The origins of the view that, contrary to all of the above, remote working increases productivity can be traced back to an experiment conducted almost a decade before the pandemic and reported in 2013 by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford and others. . Call center workers at a Chinese online travel agency (now called Trip.com) increased their performance by 13% by working remotely, a figure that continues to appear in the media today. However, two important things are often overlooked: first, more than two-thirds of the performance improvement is explained by employees working longer hours, not more efficiently; Second, the Chinese company ended up stopping telecommuting because those who didn’t work in the office had a hard time getting promoted. In 2022, Bloom visited Trip.com again, this time to investigate the effects of a hybrid work trial. The results of that experiment were less surprising: It had minimal impact on productivity, even though workers worked longer hours and wrote more code than in the office.
There is much more to work (and life) than productivity. Perhaps the greatest virtue of teleworking is that it makes employees happier. People are spending less time on the go, which from your point of view may seem like an increase in productivity, even if conventional metrics miss it. It’s also easier to drive or pick up the kids to school and medical appointments, not to mention the occasional break or mid-morning jog. And some tasks, especially those that require uninterrupted concentration for long periods, may be better accomplished at home than in an open-plan office. All this explains why so many workers have become very reluctant to go to the office.
In fact, several surveys have revealed that employees are willing to accept a pay cut in exchange for working from home. On the other hand, having satisfied employees at a slightly lower salary can be good business for corporate managers. For many, then, the future of work will continue to be hybrid. However, the balance of the work week is likely to shift back towards the office and away from home; but not because the bosses are sadomasochists with a perverse inclination for rush hour traffic, but because there is greater productivity in it.
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Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix
