I recently read an article about a city employee who requested to work remotely two days per week. The human resources department rejected the employee's request. But here's the catch. The city worker who had made the request was a gardener, tasked with the upkeep of the public green spaces around city hall, including landscaping, pruning bushes, cutting the grass, etc. The city appropriately asked how the worker thought that he would be able to perform these duties while working remotely. It almost sounds too crazy to be true, but this is apparently the world in which we live in today!
Some jobs just aren't made for either a remote or hybrid option, but for those that are, there's a concern that remote work may impact an employee's productivity. Studies show that productivity can either increase or decrease when an employee works from home. Several of my posts in the past have touched on this important question (see, in particular, "The WFH question", "Remote work, again..."), "Big Brother is watching", and "The evolution of working from home").
What is clear is that employees prefer a flexible schedule with the option to work remotely. A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research ("Home sweet home: How much do employees value remote work?") found that many job applicants are willing to accept less pay for positions that are either fully remote or allow a hybrid schedule. The study was conducted by researchers at Harvard, Brown, and UCLA, who surveyed 1,400 workers, most of whom were software engineers, product managers, and data scientists, who had at least two job offers (and accepted one offer) between May 2023 and December 2024. Those workers who accepted a remote or hybrid position accepted a salary that was on average 25% less than what they were offered for a similar position that did not allow remote or hybrid work.
Several organizations that embraced remote work (or even hybrid work) during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic are now changing their tune. For example, Amazon has had a five day per week in-office policy since January 2025. Microsoft told its employees last September that they will be required to work in the office at least three days per week. Google and Facebook have instituted similar policies in the past year.
Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington published another study in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports in 2023 ("Working remotely? Selection, treatment, and the market for remote work") that provides additional context to the productivity of remote work question. They studied a U.S. Fortune 500 firm's call center operations that employs both remote and on-site workers for the same jobs. They took advantage of a so-called natural experiment provided by the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, remote workers answered 12% fewer calls per hour than on-site workers, despite handling calls randomly routed from the same queue. Emanuel and Harrington surmised that one of two things could be happening. On the one hand, remote work could in fact be associated with lower productivity. For example, remote workers could be less motivated or more distracted when working outside the office. On the other hand, it is also possible that less productive workers choose remote jobs. Economists would call this adverse selection, but I would call it a chicken/egg problem ("Which came first, the chicken or the egg?").
The call centers closed during the pandemic, and everyone moved to remote work. The workers who were previously in the office full-time answered 4% fewer calls relative to the already-remote workers! In other words, the shift to remote work led to a decline in productivity for the formerly in-office workers (note that productivity declined even more in the formerly fully remote workers). With these results, Emanuel and Harrington concluded that at least a third of the initial productivity gap between fully remote and fully in-office workers was "caused" by the shift to remote work, which means that two-thirds of the initial gap was due to adverse selection (in other words, less productive workers chose remote job options).
The quality of the service provided by the call center also declined following the shift to remote work. The workers themselves reported that working from home made it more difficult to quickly consult with their co-workers, which directly led to an 11% increase in customer hold-times following the shift to remote work. Customer callback rates (which usually indicates that a customer's questions or concerns weren't adequately addressed) also increased by 3 percent.
There are certainly other disadvantages to remote or hybrid work. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon is pushing back hard on employees who recently petitioned for hybrid work following a change in company policy that mandated working in the office five days per week. Dimon argues that when employees opt to work from home, new or inexperienced employees miss out on essential on-the-job training. He said, "I'm not making fun of Zoom, but younger people are being left behind. If you look back at your careers, you learned a little bit from the apprentice system. You were with other people who took you on a sales call or told you how to handle a mistake or something like that. It doesn't happen when you're in a basement on Zoom." The lack of professional development can certainly lead to lower promotion rates for remote or hybrid employees, which has been observed in a number of studies, including the one from Emanual and Harrington.
These are important results to consider. I'm not sure we will ever be able to return to 100% in-office work, that is, for those jobs in which remote work is a feasible option. What remains clear to me is that we, as leaders, will have to learn to address all of these concerns. Most importantly, perhaps, are the concerns around professional growth and development. We will need to make sure that remote and/or hybrid workers are productive employees have the same opportunities for development (and promotion) that the in-office employees have in the future.
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