Employers that were fully in-office grew headcount by just 0.8%., the analysis found...gettyMany bosses seem convinced that remote work is hampering productivity. But companies with remote or hybrid policies appear to be hiring people at about twice the rate of employers that are fully in office, according to a new analysis.
Over the last three months, the analysis found, companies where the remote work policy is “fully flexible,” allowing full-time remote work or choice about how much workers come to the office, grew headcount by 1.9% on average, compared with companies that mandate full-time in-office work.
Those with “structured hybrid” policies—the most common arrangement, where workers come into the office between one and four days a week—grew by 1.5%, while employers that were fully in-office grew headcount by just 0.8%.
Over the last 12 months, there was a similar gap, with fully flexible companies growing headcount by 5.6%, hybrid companies growing by 4.1% and full time in-office growing by 2.6%, according to the report…..Continue reading…
Source: Remote And Hybrid Workplaces Are Hiring People Twice As Fast As Full-Time Office Employers: Report
Critics:
According to a Gallup poll in September 2021, 45% of full-time U.S. employees worked from home, including 25% who worked from home all of the time and 20% who worked from home part of the time. In 2020, 12.3% of employed persons, including 13.2% of women and 11.5% of men, in the European Union who were aged 15–64, usually worked from home.
By country, the percentage of workers that worked from home was highest in Finland (25.1%), Luxembourg (23.1%), Ireland (21.5%), Austria (18.1%), and the Netherlands (17.8%) and lowest in Bulgaria (1.2%), Romania (2.5%), Croatia (3.1%), Hungary (3.6%), and Latvia (4.5%). In 2021, in the US 91% of people who work from home said they would like to continue to work remotely in the future.
In Gallup’s September 2021 study, 54% of workers said they believed that their company’s culture would be unchanged by remote work, while 12% believed it would improve and 33% predicted it would deteriorate. Statistics for 2022 indicate that around 30% of people lived in nations where all workplaces had been closed, save for vital enterprises, and 42% lived in countries where specific firms or worker categories had been closed.
Almost 20% of people lived in nations where workplace closure was encouraged but not required. Gallup found in February 2023 that, among remote-capable employees in the U.S., 20% worked on-site, 28% exclusively remote and 52% hybrid. According to the United States Office of Personnel Management, in fiscal 2020, 50% of all U.S. federal workers were eligible to work remotely and agencies saved more than $180 million because of remote work in fiscal 2020.
In 2023, economist and telework expert Nicholas Bloom said about a third of all working days are remote, slashing corporate real estate expenditures, and up from 5% before the pandemic. Bloom believes quickly progressing technology has facilitated and will continue the trend, but drawbacks for some kinds of positions will remain.
Remote work has long been promoted as a way to substantially increase employee productivity. A 2013 study showed a 13% increase in productivity among remotely working call-center employees at a Chinese travel agency. An analysis of data collected through March 2021 found that nearly six out of 10 workers reported being more productive working from home than they expected to be, compared with 14% who said they got less done.
Since work hours are less regulated in remote work, employee effort and dedication are far more likely to be measured purely in terms of output or results. However, traces of non-productive work activities (such as: research, self-training, dealing with technical problems or equipment failures), and time lost on unsuccessful attempts (such as: early drafts, fruitless endeavors, abortive innovations), are visible to employers.
Remote work improves efficiency by reducing or eliminating employees commute time, thus increasing their availability to work. In addition, remote work also helps employees achieve a better work-life balance. An increase in productivity is also supported by sociotechnical systems (STS) theory (1951), which states that, unless absolutely essential, there should be minimal specification of objectives and how to do tasks in order to avoid inhibiting options or effective actions.
Remote work provides workers with the freedom and power to decide how and when to do their tasks and therefore can increase productivity. At least 50% of employers believe remote work reduces absenteeism.About 56% of employee have reduced absences and use less than 50% of fewer sick days. Overall 75% of employees indicate they have a better work life balance.
Remote working can hurt working relationships between remote workers and their coworkers, especially if their coworkers do not work remotely. Coworkers who do not work remotely can feel resentful and jealous because they may consider it unfair if they are not allowed to work remotely as well. Remote workers miss out on in person companionship and do not benefit from on-site perks.
Adaptive structuration theory studies variations in organizations as new technologies are introduced .Adaptive structural theory proposes that structures (general rules and resources offered by the technology) can differ from structuration (how people actually use these rules and resources). There is an interplay between the intended use of technology and the way that people use the technology. Remote work provides a social structure that enables and constrains certain interactions.
For instance, in office settings, the norm may be to interact with others face-to-face. To accomplish interpersonal exchange in remote work, other forms of interaction need to be used. AST suggests that when technologies are used over time, the rules and resources for social interactions will change. Remote work may alter traditional work practices, such as switching from primarily face-to-face communication to electronic communication.
Sharing information within an organization and teams can become more challenging when working remotely. While in the office, teams naturally share information and knowledge when they meet each other, for example, during coffee breaks. Sharing information requires more effort and proactive action when random-encounters do not happen. The sharing of tacit information also often takes place in unplanned situations where employees follow the activities of more experienced team members.
With remote work, it may also be difficult to obtain timely information, unless the regular sharing of information is taken care of separately. The situation where team members don’t know enough about what others are doing can lead them to make worse decisions or slow down decision-making.
From an anthropological perspective, remote work can interfere with the process of sensemaking, the forging of consensus or of a common worldview, which involves absorbing a wide range of signals. Feedback increases employees’ knowledge of results. Feedback refers to the degree that an individual receives direct and clear information about his or her performance related to work activities. Feedback is particularly important so that the employees continuously learn about how they are performing.
Electronic communication provides fewer cues for remote workers and thus, they may have more difficulties interpreting and gaining information, and subsequently, receiving feedback. When a worker is not in the office, there is limited information and greater ambiguity, such as in assignments and expectations. Role ambiguity, when situations have unclear expectations as to what the worker is to do, may result in greater conflict, frustration, and exhaustion.
In other studies regarding Job Characteristics Theory, job feedback seemed to have the strongest relationship with overall job satisfaction compared to other job characteristics. While remote working, communication is not as immediate or rich as face-to-face interactions. Less feedback when remote working is associated with lower job engagement. Thus, when perceived supervisor support and relationship quality between leaders and remote workers decreases, job satisfaction of the remote worker decreases.
The importance of manager communication with remote workers is made clear in a study that found that individuals have lower job satisfaction when their managers remote work. The clarity, speed of response, richness of the communication, frequency, and quality of the feedback are often reduced when managers remote work. Although the level of communication may decrease for remote workers, satisfaction with this level of communication can be higher for those who are more tenured and have functional instead of social relationships or those that have certain personalities and temperaments…
Related contents:
- What is telework?, United States Office of Personnel Management
- “Differences Between Telecommuting and Telework”. Lifewire.
- The Underground Guide to Telecommuting.
- “Mobile Worker Toolkit: A Notional Guide”
- “The Good, The Bad, and the Unknown About Telecommuting: Meta-Analysis of Psychological Mediators and Individual Consequences”
- Online Conferences: Some History, Methods and Benefits”.
- “How WeWork Has Perfectly Captured the Millennial Id”. The Atlantic.
- “Telework legislation”. U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
- Work from anywhere’ is here to stay. How will it change our workplaces?”.
- “Zoom Towns And The New Housing Market For The 2 Americas”. NPR.
- Millions of Americans stopped working from home in 2022: Labor Dept”.
- “Working remotely: How organizational leaders and HRD practitioners used the experiential learning theory during the COVID‐19 pandemic?”.
- Learning to work from home: experience of Australian workers and organizational representatives during the first Covid-19 lockdowns”.
- Workers are refusing to return to the office, and they are ready to face the consequences”.
- “Why Working from Home Will Stick”.
- The uneven energy costs of working from home”.
- Remote Work Persisting and Trending Permanent”.
- How usual is it to work from home?”. Europa.
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