Do companies get more bang for their buck from having workers on site? It would seem like a seminal question to ask of the post-pandemic workplace. And there isn’t a clear-cut answer or at least the research (there have been dozens of studies) points in different directions.
A recent study from the University of Pittsburgh, which analysed S&P 500 companies that implemented in-office requirements for at least a few weekdays between June 2019 and January 2023, found employee or company performance wasn’t improved.
Another conducted by researchers at Stanford University found that fully remote work was associated with about 10 per cent lower productivity than fully in-person work.
“Challenges with communicating remotely, barriers to mentoring, building culture and issues with self-motivation appear to be factors,” it said.
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But can we really make some overarching judgment about remote work and productivity when there are so many different work types, some that could benefit, others that patently won’t. And that’s before you account for the personalities involved.
Perhaps the best answer to the remote work productivity puzzle was the one I got from several company bosses here. They claimed the people who were productive in the office remained productive at home and vice versa. The implication being those who tended to doss in the office tended to do the same at home.
Might much of the current drive to get workers back into office be secretly motivated by a desire to monitor slackers?
As a journalist, stay-at-home protocols during lockdown allowed me jump from meeting to meeting without trooping about the place. And given a lot of reporting tends to be done over the phone, on a straight wordcount I could argue I was more productive at home.
But this came at the expense of meeting fewer people, cultivating fewer contacts and missing those off-the-record chit-chats with Government officials and others on the fringes of meetings that can provide context and insight. In a world of saturating news cycles, insight is a valuable commodity.
My personal experience perhaps underscores the hybrid model that the post-pandemic work landscape seems to have landed on naturally (the three day in, two day out routine).
For many businesses, however, face-to-face human contact is simply not interchangeable with Zoom or Slack.
The initial remote-working narrative was that it gave people, particularly time-starved workers, a better work-life balance. Surveys consistently highlight people’s preference for avoiding the hassle of commuting. The downside is that it can be isolating. As author Malcolm Gladwell says, is “sitting at home in your pyjamas” really the sort of career you envisaged for yourself?
Besides missing out on the mentoring, younger workers are potentially missing out on workplace friendships, office banter, after-work drinks. Collegiality is an intangible office commodity that perhaps we took too much for granted.
It seemed plausible then that a generational divide might develop with older workers wanting more flexible arrangements (reflecting their stage in life) and younger ones looking for a more dynamic in-person work existence.
But that’s not how it’s playing out.
Older workers, perhaps with a deeper experience of the workplace, have, in many cases, accepted the return-to-work directives. In contrast Gen Z digital natives, used to communicating via DMs or video chat, are the ones pushing for greater hybrid work arrangements, even for total remote options.
According to a recent study by National Broadband Ireland in partnership with Grow Remote, over half (55 per cent) of Gen Z workers feel remote and hybrid working will have a positive impact on their career advancement compared to just 23 per cent of 45–54-year-olds.
Regardless of how this age divide plays out, there is potentially a bigger issue at play, particularly in Ireland.
Since the pandemic, more women have been able to work or at least have been enticed to take up roles. According to the latest Labour Force Survey from the Central Statisics Office, the participation rate for women now stands at a record 61.4 per cent. The assumption is that many women take responsibility for caring roles in the family, which limit their ability to attend the office on a conventional 9-5 basis. The new arrangements have provided a workaround.
Much of the additional employment driving Ireland’s economy at the moment is being facilitated by having more women working.
Of course, there are negative aspects: the decline in city centre footfall and the downturn in commercial property values. In Dublin, office leasing in the first quarter fell to a decade low. Facebook owner Meta’s decision to forgo occupying nearly 35,000 sq ft of the former AIB Bankcentre site in Ballsbridge, Dublin 4 is emblematic.
We’re long enough in the tooth to know that sometimes trends, even mega-trends, things we thought would last, fade and fizzle out as quickly as they came. The remote working trend seems more than a fad but how much more is still to be determined.
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