After 11 months of positive experience with remote work, a large and growing share of employers is expecting and planning for it to become the new normal for many of their workers. But what if after the country and the economy recover, it turns out that remote work does not work as well as expected?
Indeed, there is a risk that many companies will regret jumping on the remote work bandwagon before too long.
The pandemic’s spontaneous remote work experiment has, to this point, gone better than expected. According to several studies, many employers have concluded that remote work works.
The shift to remote work also provides employers with other benefits: lower office space expenses and – no longer geographically confined – a larger pool of job candidates, which, in turn, will reduce labor costs by permitting hiring from cheaper markets. That is undoubtedly why executives are preparing for this new normal to extend well beyond COVID-19. Only about a quarter of organizations reported that more than 10 percent of their workforce worked primarily remotely (at least three days a week) before the pandemic, according to The Conference Board’s September survey of 330 HR leaders. More than one-third of respondents expect that 40 percent or more of their workers will continue to be primarily remote one year after COVID-19 has subsided.
But this forecast rests on the assumption that employers are right about the enduring success of remote work. Employers’ 2020 experiences have to be understood in context, however: It was an unusual year if there ever was one, with both a once in a century pandemic and one of the deepest recessions in US history.
Remote work’s effectiveness may well remain even after the pandemic is long gone and the economy fully recovers. But there are a couple of reasons to be cautious about making such a prediction.
First, changes in perceived productivity/performance in 2020 were driven by several forces and it is hard to disentangle them. To what extent, for example, were they spurred by the impact of the shift to remote work and how much by the impact of operating in an economic crisis? Many workers may have performed well in 2020 not because they worked from home but because the sense of urgency around completing tasks was elevated by many companies’ dire financial conditions.
Second, the quality of collaboration can remain strong when people still know each other well from the time they were together in an office. But this familiarity will weaken as the workforce churns and workers interact less in person with comparative strangers. And third, its not clear how feasible it would be to maintain corporate culture without all the informal interactions that occur in an office space.
In sum, there is a non-trivial risk that after several years of the increasing prevalence of remote work, some companies will conclude that it is not as successful as expected and decide to bring workers back to the office. But such a move would present its own, new complications.
A shift to remote work will prompt millions of Americans to relocate within the next decade, many leaving expensive housing markets in large metro areas for cheaper living elsewhere. Some will move far enough away from the office as to make a daily commute taxing, while others will move to places where a daily, or even weekly, commute would be impossible. Trying to readjust from that would be akin to squeezing toothpaste back into the tube. Many remote employees also value other benefits of working from home beyond reduced commuting, such as increased control of their daily work schedule, and having to dress less formally, especially from the shoulders down. Forcing workers back to the more structured environment of an office would have large retention consequences.
How should business leaders proceed?
First, to make a more accurate determination of how successful remote work is, many companies will need to improve their in-house performance analytics, such as work quantity and quality as well as clients’ and co-workers’ feedback, to determine optimal remote work rates. It is very likely that these rates will vary significantly across types of jobs. Thus far, for example, tech workers have worked remotely at much higher rates than those in other occupations.
Second, business leaders should make the shift to remote work more gradual and avoid promising that it will be the new normal. Managing expectations will be critical for executives and workers alike.
Third, companies will have to make contingency plans for a possible reversal if remote work proves less efficacious than expected. For example, companies may want to estimate the number of employees with a high risk of quitting, if a forced return to the office becomes necessary.
The experiences of the last year have been exceptional, for better and worse. They have created opportunities – but, as with emerging from any upheaval, we must be careful in how we define and adjust to a new normal. It will take thorough consideration and planning.
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February 05, 2021 at 09:19AM
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Companies May Regret Jumping On The Remote Work Bandwagon - Forbes
"work" - Google News
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