Now that the pandemic has eased into an endemic, if that, the medical need for people to work from home has disappeared. Yet one thing it told us is that many employees would like to do that. Is remote work a good idea? Here are several pieces maintaining it is not.
In “You Call This ‘Flexible Work’?,” in the New York
Times on April 12th, Fred Turner contrasted the current
situation with the 1938 establishment of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which
“formally ratified the division of work time from free time.” Per Turner, “until recently, the physical
distance between workplace and home helped guarantee those terms. The commute enforced a boundary between
professional and personal time that millions observed every day. So, too, did the calendar, dividing days into
weekdays for work, weekends for leisure.”
Since then, people have spent less time on commuting, but in the past
two decades our homes’ “walls had been well and truly breached,” as “everything
we do online can be tracked,” and employers can even “peer into our living
rooms, learn a great deal about who we are and use it to alter the terms of our
employment.” And some wonder why unions
have made a comeback.
One chronic problem with employment beyond offices is “What
Young Workers Miss Without the ‘Power of Proximity’” (Emma Goldberg and Ben
Casselman, The New York Times, April 24th). Both formal studies and common knowledge have
told us that ample feedback is not only possible but achieved mostly when
people are physically near their bosses or mentors. The problem of remote workers being “out of
sight, out of mind,” has not been solved, and neither has the downside of
remote meetings.
There are plenty of objectors to people working from home on
the other side of the desk, as “Bosses are fed up with remote work for 4 main
reasons. Some of them are undeniable”
(Jane Thier, Fortune, June 14th). “The golden age of remote work seems to be
ending,” as there is “increasing anti-remote literature” and “even tech firms
(the first industry that told employees they could work from home forever just
a few years ago) are getting engineers and project managers back in the
office.” Thier’s four reasons are
“remote work is bad for new hires and junior employees,” “workers admit that
remote work (sometimes) causes more problems than in-person work” (with
unaligned office days), “remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared
to in-person workers” documented in a 2022 Liberty Street Economics report, and
“productivity plummets on days when everyone is working remotely (anecdotally)”
– especially on Friday afternoons? In
all, “the tide is turning.”
Though how individual workers manage it varies, working from
home provides a broader, richer, and more satisfying set of goofing-off
opportunities. Alyssa Place told us how
many protect themselves from inquiries into them in “Caught! Remote employees reveal their top excuses for
not working,” on April 20th in Employee Benefit News. They were “technical difficulties,” “family
or personal emergencies,” “illness,” “misunderstandings,” “distractions and
interruptions,” and “other work obligations.”
These all can be legitimate, but the same ones over and over, especially
from the same workers, can be telling.
Perhaps pithiest, and therefore most scathing, was “The
working-from-home illusion fades,” subtitled “It is not more productive than
being in an office, after all,” on June 28th in the “Free exchange”
column in The Economist. As “a
gradual reverse migration is under way, from Zoom to the conference room,” “new
research,” including a paper showing that workers handled fewer calls with less
efficiency when working from home, has shown that “offices, for all their
flaws, remain essential.” As a result,
“higher productivity” will direct supervisors to some combination of office
mandates and lower pay for remote-only positions.
The pendulum between work from home and work from offices,
as it has since the 1990s, is moving back and forth. Its motion was disturbed by Covid-19, but the
spirit of present times is toward the latter.
There are other sides to this controversy, but for now, awaiting a
possible 2030s rediscovery of the advantages of working from home, the office
is winning.