Liking Remote Work Won’t Change Its Downward Trend

Although I think the working-from-home cons have more merit than the pros, there have been a significant number of articles favoring the latter.  What do they have to say?

Hiding his opinion even less than I do mine was Gleb Tsipursky, in the May 8^th Fortune piece “Why your boss is giving in to the siren call of the return to the office – and giving up on the flexible work gold mine.”  The author called the idea that “many organizations are struggling to foster strong communication, collaboration, and team bonding” when people worked remotely “startling,” and said that companies, as they became “faced with challenges,” “rather than learning to adapt,” were “tempted to go back to the cozy confines of the office-centric model.”  The piece offered no substantive suggestions for improvement, only that management should overcome “status quo bias” and “functional fixedness,” “adopt methods of building culture, collaboration, team bonding, and communication that are a good fit for a hybrid environment,” and “stop running” from “the future of work,” which is “here.” 

Paul Krugman, the columnist and Nobel-winning economist, told us, in “Working From Home and Realizing What Matters,” in The New York Times on May 22^nd, that the value of remote labor should be raised in our estimations, because of reduced commuting time, which is undercounted or not counted in other measures.  True – if work hours are no longer.  The same author had “Remote work hasn’t doomed cities.  It may even help them” in the same publication on June 2^nd.  His thought here was that “people who don’t have to commute to the office every day spend more time frequenting local shops, restaurants and so on, improving the quality of their neighborhoods,” although “remote work will surely shift metropolitan areas’ centers of gravity away from their central business districts.”

Similar in tone to the first article, Breck Dumas wrote in Fox Business about “Why some bosses hate remote work and what can be done about common gripes” (July 17^th).  The five major reasons the author saw were “inadequate communication and collaboration” (which called for managers to “reach out to their remote workers and stay connected with them in other ways, like through phone or video calls”), “task allocation and clarity” (by setting SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound – parameters), “time management” (by “providing workers with training on time management techniques and encouraging prioritization and delegation”), “workload and resource allocation” (“regularly assess workloads, redistribute tasks as needed and ensure individuals have access to the necessary tools, training and support”), and “recognition and reward” (find ways of celebrating achievements with “elements of fun,” even on Zoom calls). 

Finally, some advice on “Making a successful data-driven transition to hybrid work” (Louis Blatt, Benefit News, August 1^st), namely to “find out what your employees need” and “give workers some space,” along with habitually “explicitly dividing your project management into two categories:  focused/individual work and collaborative work.” 

How did you like the above?  If you did, you’re probably in favor of plenty of remote work.  If you didn’t, you saw blitheness, vagueness, superficiality, and confusing training with individual performance.  The pendulum between in-person and remote labor is still moving – it is now pulling strongly toward the office.  If it were not, there would be few calls for workers to come back, and little controversy about it.  Dressing as vegetables on celebratory video calls won’t change that.  Assuming that everyone will be focused and conscientious when faced with the temptation of being unsupervised won’t alter its back-and-forth nature.  That’s not only the present, but the future of work.  That’s what we have known since the first George Bush was president – and what, indefinitely, we will continue to know.