Employees who work entirely from home are less creative and less productive, according to a new working paper from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Fully remote employees also receive less feedback and must spend more time coordinating. As a result, they work longer hours to keep up with their in-office peers.
But the researchers nevertheless predict we’ll see even more remote work in the future. That raises the question: If WFH has so many drawbacks, why can we expect more of it? And maybe more important: If we’ll be doing more of it, how can we mitigate its downsides?
The paper, by Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Stephen J Davis, notes that the share of people working from home at least some of the time has doubled roughly every 15 years since about 1980; by 2019, about 5percent of workdays took place at home. That figure surged to 60percent in 2020 and has now plateaued at about 25percent. The authors say the change between 2019 and 2023 levels amounts to fast-forwarding the remote-work revolution by about 35 years.
They expect to see remote work decline slowly for the next couple of years as companies pressure workers to return before accelerating again for the next 20. In part, that will be the continuation of the long-term trend; and in part, it will be fueled by pandemic-era innovations. The number of patents mentioning terms like “telework” tripled after March 2020, and in the past, those kinds of advances have sent more workers remote.
The findings hold an important implication for corporate leaders: Exhorting employees to return to the office full time may be wasted energy. Fast internet connections have made at least some degree of remote work inevitable. Rather than trying to fight omnipresent technology, organisations might be better served by figuring out how to address challenges of fully remote work — disengagement, slower learning, even loneliness.