Remote Work by Mark Stone

September 2023. Last month I wrote in praise of the corporate Ethos in America, which is often ahead of public policy on human rights. This week I'll focus on an issue that is more of a struggle for Corporate America: remote work, specifically for knowledge workers.

One camp argues that there is no innovation substitute for spontaneous brainstorming from face to face interaction. There's also a quiet part less often spoken, implying that workers behave with a higher level of accountability in office.

The other camp argues that workers are more productive when the toil of the daily commute is removed from their schedules, when focus time is less interrupted, and when flexible schedules allow better work-life harmony.

To date, the evidence is mixed. Some of the latest research suggests that workers may experience as much as a 10% drop in productivity when working remotely. Barriers to communication, difficulty in establishing mentoring relationships, and difficulty onboarding new workers into company culture are all cited as points of friction.

On the other hand, employers can save more than 10% on office costs through reduced office space and reduced operating expenses for the space they do maintain. And crucially, turnover rates for remote or hybrid workers are significantly lower.

Some caveats here:

  • The research period includes early COVID times, when remote work was still being figured out. Many companies have matured their strategies around communication and onboarding.
  • Productivity in knowledge work is notoriously difficult to measure.
  • Large companies with significant, long term real estate investments (Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon) may not be able to easily access savings on office space.

What's missing from discussions about remote work is any assessment of human rights and equity. To put it bluntly, demanding knowledge workers to be 100% in the office is sexist, and likely racist as well.

During COVID, 63% of those who left the workforce were women. Primary reasons cited were childcare, or the need to look after another family member, often for health reasons. Remote work eases both of those burdens, so the converse is that remote work benefits women, and the insistence on 100% in office work, for work that can be done remotely, disproportionately disadvantages women.

One of the side effects of long standing racial inequity in housing is that people of color generally have longer commutes, and are more likely to have extreme commutes (an hour or more each way). Insisting on 100% in office work thus disproportionately disadvantages people of color.

It's easy to focus only on overall cost versus productivity when assessing remote work. We should also consider the humanity and equity of office policies. On that front the case for remote, or at least hybrid work, is clear.

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