Early on, remote work looked like a win-win: Employees got to work where and when they pleased, and employers got more productivity.

It turns out only the first part of that bargain came true. Employees still love remote work, but recent studies find no boost to productivity and a decline for fully remote work.

And yet most employers have given up on prodding staff to return to the office full time. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 62% of employers offer the option to work remotely at least some time. The Census Bureau finds that 39% of workers are teleworking from home, half of them five days a week.



It is symptomatic of a broader shift in attitudes toward work since the onset of the pandemic. Despite a historically tight labor market, pay until recently wasn’t growing much faster than inflation. One reason is workers aren’t just bargaining over money. They are also demanding more nonmonetary compensation, such as paid leave and flexible hours. As a result they often put in fewer hours, or accomplish less in the hours they do put in.

This seems to have made for a happier workforce. The Conference Board in May reported that worker satisfaction rose sharply in 2022 from 2021 and reached its highest since the survey began in 1987. This isn’t because workers find their jobs more fulfilling, but because their jobs are consuming less of their life. Among the 18 components of the survey, “interest in work” made the smallest contribution to this year’s increased satisfaction; work-life balance made the largest. (Wages were somewhere near the middle.)

Memes such as “work your wage,” “quiet quitting” and “lazy-girl jobs” attest to the lesser priority many people today place on career. They are on a collision course with the chief executive who typically worked ungodly hours, sacrificing leisure and family time, for the sake of the company and assumes others should, too. The result: Executives who try to force employees back to the office often have a revolt on their hands.

The conventional wisdom is that happier workers are more productive. That isn’t necessarily because happiness increases productivity, but because an employer, to keep its most productive employees, must keep them happy—even if that means taking steps that make them less productive.



Artificial intelligence is taking on a larger role in white-collar work, with the ability to draft emails, presentations, images and more. Workers have already lost their jobs to the technology, and some chief executives are changing future hiring plans. WSJ explains. Illustration: Jacob Reynolds
There is nothing unusual about workers favoring something other than money. “Over the last century, the average job has become more pleasant and less onerous,” Valerie Ramey, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, said in an email. One reason is government regulations, “but part is…workers’ real income has risen over time and they have decided to ‘spend’ (by accepting lower wages) part of that income on better job amenities.”

In a 2009 study, Ramey and Neville Francis reported that the average number of hours men aged 25 to 54 worked per week fell from 49.8 in 1920 to 41.4 in 1940. That reflected a shift from the six- to five-day week—as famously implemented by Henry Ford and later enshrined in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which mandated overtime pay for more than 40 hours of work a week.

Hours continued to decline, though more slowly, until 1980. Separate data suggest they have been largely stable for the past few decades in the U.S., while trending lower in Europe.

There are signs that in the wake of the pandemic, Americans, like Europeans, are putting more priority on the “life” part of the work-life balance, and employers are responding.


Employees relish doing their jobs from home because it saves on commuting and other aggravations. PHOTO: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
According to SHRM, the share of employers offering paid time off has risen from 63% in 2019 to 70% now, and the share offering paid parental leave has risen from 28% to 39%. Leave averages seven weeks for fathers and nine weeks for mothers, according to human-resources consultants WTW.

Employees are also taking more vacation. Since 2021 some have enjoyed the first new federal holiday in four decades, Juneteenth.

The upshot is that even as employment grows rapidly, employees work fewer hours now than in 2019, according to monthly Labor Department data. Its annual American Time Use Survey, meanwhile, found the share of employed people actually working on a given day fell from 67.8% in 2019 to 66.1% in 2022, the lowest since at least 2003.



Meanwhile, the hours workers do put in are less productive. Output per hour in the business sector shot up early in the pandemic then trended lower through the first quarter of this year, though it likely recovered a bit in the second quarter (the Labor Department reports the latest data on Thursday).

These are notoriously volatile figures. But it is plausible some of this reflects a change in how we do our jobs. Employees love working from home because it saves on commuting and other aggravations, and lets them pursue personal matters during the day such as going for a run or picking up the kids from daycare. They can catch up on missed work at night or during the weekend.

Employees think they’re 7.4% more productive working from home, according to surveys conducted by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and two co-authors. Their managers think the opposite, estimating workers are 3.5% less productive at home. The reason, according to the economists’ review of recent research, is that communicating with an employee at home is more cumbersome and time-consuming, while reduced social interaction and feedback diminish creativity and learning.

Many workers find distractions, from the fridge to the television, at home. The authors note international chess players perform worse remotely, despite the motivation of prize money and rankings, proof that “overcoming potential self-control issues may not be easy.”



Employers might be less willing to let employees work from home if the economy eventually slides into a recession and unemployment rises. “We’re probably not in steady state at this point, and some reversal of the movement toward remote work seems likely to me,” said Katharine Abraham, a labor economist at the University of Maryland.

Bloom is less sure. He and his co-authors concluded the loss of productivity was confined to those working remote full time rather than just a few days a week. And even if productivity suffers, that might be more than made up for by cost savings. Remote employees might need less office space, live in cheaper places and accept lower pay: The authors found employees value working from home two or three days a week as equivalent to an 8% pay increase. It will take more than the threat of unemployment to undo this shift in values.

LINK: https://www.wsj.com/articles/w...=3&mod=WTRN#cxrecs_s

There are like 6 jobs that legitimately are a good fit for remote work. We just pretend the others are too. How many times do you have to go to voicemail or listen to their kids in the background or witness any school related class to realize remote is just a bad idea. Good for workers bad for anything else. If you are one of the 6 good for you.

quote:

The reason, according to the economists’ review of recent research, is that communicating with an employee at home is more cumbersome and time-consuming, while reduced social interaction and feedback diminish creativity and learning.

“The reason, according to the economists’ review of recent research, is that communicating with an employee at home is more cumbersome and time-consuming, while reduced social interaction and feedback diminish creativity and learning.”

LMAO. We have email, soft phone, cell phone, instant messaging client. It’s never been easier to reach an employee. Going down an elevator or walking across a building takes longer than instant messaging, an email being sent, or actually using the phone.

I think the same people who are subject matter experts in their field are the same that are extremely efficient at work. These individuals, it doesn’t matter if they wfh or in the office, the productivity is the same. For myself, I can get way more done from my home office. I don’t have water cooler talk, people coming by my desk, and I don’t get sick from people in the office coming in with colds, flus, etc so I don’t take the medical leave I used to. On my end, saving on the commuting time, tending to the attire where I do it myself or pay the dry cleaners. I never went out to lunch anyway so instead of eating out of Tupperware at the office microwaving a precooked meal, at home I get to eat fresh cooked food which I can cook while staring at the laptop and responding to any requests that come in.

WFH is purely dependent on the individual.

While I realize it's heavily centralized in certain industries as well as likely being location-dependent, I'm surprised that so many employees - reportedly 39% - are still working from home.

Basically all of the major corporations in Northwest Arkansas (including really big names like Walmart and Tyson Foods) have made their employees come back to in-person work.

Nothing new about that.
There is something to be said about productivity due to the discipline of having to working in an office vs the remote work.
Pretty sure that is why Elon Musk put an end to it.
You also have to factor the benefit for the employer for potential less overhead costs.
This is not a new phenomena - been going on with self-employed and remote workers way before the Apocalypses Pandemic.
You have to stay motivated at home and yes that can be difficult.

The nature of my work pretty much dictates that I work from an office. I did some work from home and absolutely hated it. Home and work need to be separate in my mind. I require in person social contact, but understand everyone is different.

I browse through NextDoor every once in a while, and I see many requests, mostly from young women, for Work From Home jobs. It's painfully obvious that most of these are looking for a paycheck for doing little to nothing.

I work from home 100%. It’s very dependent on what you do.

Obviously, if your job involves physically interacting with either product or customers, then work from home is a non-starter.

For those who are white collar and in jobs that rely on communication or individual contribution, it makes more sense. Lots of lawyers, architects, engineers, marketers, consultants etc can easily work from home, heck even doctors with telemedicine can.

I hire people for a living, apart from flying up to HQ for final round interviews there is no need for me to be there.

What the article doesn't address is that employers have been benefiting from increases in productivity for decades without a correlating increase in wages. If you are an employer and the wages you offer haven't kept up with inflation, then you ought to expect a decrease in productivity. If you want to pay effectively 10 percent less adjusted for inflation, expect a 10 percent reduction on productivity.

quote:

Originally posted by pedropcola:
There are like 6 jobs that legitimately are a good fit for remote work. We just pretend the others are too. How many times do you have to go to voicemail or listen to their kids in the background or witness any school related class to realize remote is just a bad idea. Good for workers bad for anything else. If you are one of the 6 good for you.

What are those 6?

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:
I browse through NextDoor every once in a while, and I see many requests, mostly from young women, for Work From Home jobs. It's painfully obvious that most of these are looking for a paycheck for doing little to nothing.

I know a woman who started working two jobs because she works both of them at home. If she was the business owner she would be appalled. She will throw babysitting in there a couple times a week as well.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: 1s1k,

I was a software developer. In April 2020 they told us we all needed to go work from home. But it was only going to be for a month or two, until the Covid panic blew over. When I retired 2 1/2 years later, we were still working remotely. The company was trying, so far unsuccessfully, to lease out about half of the building we were in downtown (enough other companies were/are also WFH that nobody's looking for office space these days).

At first I hated working from home. Too many distractions. My 2 dogs, a nice handy kitchen, neighborhood noise, deliveries, etc. But I adapted to it and by late 2020 I'd got to point that I actually preferred it. My commute changed from 16 miles one way to about 40 feet. Productivity didn't take a hit. We all still had the same work to do, and it still got done on time. I think if anything we actually developed a tendency to work longer hours, because we didn't have the late afternoon "Damn, I gotta get outta here NOW or I'm gonna get stuck in rush hour traffic" mentality.

Now for someone with a manufacturing job, yeah obviously remote working wasn't going to be viable. Some of those folks were able to keep working as before, a lot of them lost their jobs. As others have said, it just depends on what your job is.

In my case, if the company and said 18 months ago that it was time for us all to come back to the office, would I have been happy about it? No, not at all. Would I have quit over it? Probably not.

Being in sales, my job is inherently and permanently remote; have laptop & smartphone, I'm good. Skype, Zoom, Teams, LifeSize, Duo...no problem.

2020-21 was a nice experiment. Trying to get our in-house operations people functioning from home was a giant hurdle, once that part got solidified, it became obvious who was CAPABLE of working from home, and who was entirely distracted and undisciplined. There's a certain mindset that's necessary for remote work regardless of field of work, you've got to be disciplined in routine, being able to trouble-shoot or, solve issues on your own, at the very least being resourceful. If you require a lot of personal hand-holding, aspects of the job are not intuitive or, your personal life is a mess...than remote work is not going to work.

Most people are not cut-out for it, not because they're undisciplined but, more so they require the interpersonal communication of physically being there; its much easier to walk down the aisle and ask about something, than sending a email and waiting for the response within the hour, possibly within 8-hrs or, the next day. The only people I've seen that are demanding remote work are either slackers or, they're devoid of those necessary interpersonal skills and I would suspect they're on the spectrum at some level.

If I recall, and this may have changed, the airline JetBlue, their customer service personal are located around the Salt Lake Area. The idea was because of the high population of Mormons and stay-at-home mothers, the company could tap into that under-utilized talent base. Either during the day or, in the evening, once the kids were out of the house or, put to bed, mom could put-in 4-6-8 hours/day in the call center. I know Overstock dot com did this, and I'm sure there's a few others.

A) Lots of people, traditionally, worked from home - but they built their homes to have a professional environment/separation - they did "go to work" just with a short commute.

Mentally, lots of people need to go to a shed/workshop/office house/etc.

And, I think the families need it too.

B) Most of the jobs which are new to "working from home" will be AI, shortly.

My daughter works remote in pet insurance. She’s never been to the office in Seattle. Plus she works graveyard. Customers are often surprise to have their call answered by a live, cheerful person. Her production (calls, emails, resolutions, customer feedback) is monitored and the calls are played back for quality. More often the not, she makes bonus each month.
At the same time the staff turnover is high.if someone sits or takes too long on a call, it shows.
Working remote can work. From what I’ve seen customer service is an important measure and workers have to be motivated with rewards.

If you want a fuckin' paycheck, you have to work.

Don't like it? Tough shit.

Employer to worker: GTFO!! You're fired.

** I realize there are those industries that can support work from home. If the employee is a conscientious employee, everything works out fine. More often that not, however, the company has to deal with moronic dead-asses that take advantage of the situation.

quote:

Originally posted by pedropcola:
There are like 6 jobs that legitimately are a good fit for remote work. We just pretend the others are too. How many times do you have to go to voicemail or listen to their kids in the background or witness any school related class to realize remote is just a bad idea. Good for workers bad for anything else. If you are one of the 6 good for you.

Curious what the six are. I full time telecommuted for about seven years while working as a software engineer. Some aspects were much more productive, (It is a lot easier to concentrate and crank out code when folks aren’t wandering by your cube with questions (or at least if they are you don’t know about it because you aren’t there. )). At the same time something is lost. Sometimes you are working on discrete, well defined pieces - this is ideal for telecommuting. Sometimes more collaboration is needed - this is tougher when telecommuting.

I don’t know how “black & white” most jobs are for remote work. I suspect many if not most are a grey area of pluses and minuses.

ETA: As others have pointed out one needs to want to work to be effective working remotely. One thing that became apparent as more folks started telecommuting was that many managers have to change how they manage. If they weren’t providing clear objectives and monitoring progress toward those objectives they had to start when people went remote.

Edited to fix s/were/weren’t/ in the ETA. Silly fingers.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: slosig,

I’ve been 100% remote for 3+ years. I conduct business at all times including client calls during bus hours and some clients even call me nights and weekends and are astounded when they get return calls nights and weekends. It’s 11:45 my time and I just finished for the day about 10 minutes ago. But I’m salary and only get paid for 40 hours. I guess I should quite quit. I do make myself available for my bosses texts and calls 24/7 partly because I do want to appear available for them letting me go remote. Also becuase I’ve worked for her for 18 years and never had an issue.

Watching LinkedIn work trends, Chris Herd posted the predictions below. The same week Wells Fargo put six of their buildings up for sale in Des Moines. They supposedly employ about 13,000 people in Des Moines and around half of them now have no office.

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"I've spoken to 2,000+ companies about the future of work in the last 12 months. A few predictions of what will happen in 2023

1/ Office Death: leases are expiring & not being renewed, companies will try to cut their office footprint by 50-70%. Few companies will have enough space for 100% of their employee base to go back to the office full-time

2/ 9-5 Disappears: The war for geographic independence has been won. Workers can access the best opportunity from anywhere. The next war is for time independence

3/ City Flight: workers will continue to leave the cities their offices are located in, reduce their cost of living, increase disposable income, and improve their quality of life. Many will quit vs. go back.

4/ Hybrid Conflict: what companies think hybrid work is & what workers think it is are two different things. Workers think it means being able to work remotely whenever they want. Companies think it means telling workers when they must attend. Huge resentment will happen

5/ Global Hiring: almost every company will begin expanding where they hire. Remote work will democratize access to the best opportunity even more rapidly over the next 6-12 months

7/ Access talent: The reason they are going remote-first is simple – it lets them hire more talented people. Rather than hiring the best person in a 30-mile radius of the office, they hire the best person in the world for every role.

8/ Pollution reduction: More & more companies will share stories about the positive environmental impact remote work has let them have. From cutting the commute, eradicating the office, this will be a major green revolution post-pandemic

9/ Remote pressure: a growing number of companies will decide to be more remote than they initially intended because their competitors already did it. They are doing it because they know if they don’t, they will continue to lose their best people to their biggest competitors

10/ Flattened orgs: middle management is in trouble, an unnecessary bottlenecks that serve no tangible purpose inside async organizations. New types of leaders will emerge: managers who lead with empathy and inspire rather than command and control

11/ Diversity & Inclusion: The most diverse and inclusive teams in history will emerge rapidly. Companies that embrace it have a first-mover advantage to attract great talent globally. Companies that don't will lose their best people to their biggest competitors

12/ Private Equity: the hottest trend of 2023 for private equity will see them purchase companies, make them remote-first. The cost saving in real estate at scale will be eye-watering. The productivity gains will be the final nail in the coffin for the office

13/ Personal AI: Generative AI will transform work for individuals. AI tools that operate like Satellite Navigation will provide shortcuts in work which leads to an explosion in individual productivity