The Price of Working Remotely
Twenty-two million Americans ages 18 and older were exclusively working from home at the mid-point of this year.
“Fully remote,” a phrase touted with great flourish on Indeed and LinkedIn job listings, conjures an undeniably attractive scenario for current job seekers.
According to research from the Pew Research Center, as well as Gallup’s August workplace survey of 9,000 U.S. workers whose jobs are “teleworkable” or “remote-capable,” 38% reported great satisfaction with their full-time work-from-home settings.
For worried employers, desperate to recruit and retain staff, the conundrum of the post-pandemic workplace continues to confound beliefs about what makes a worker engaged, loyal, and committed to an organization’s mission.
In the Gallup survey, workers were quizzed on whether they agreed with the following statements: “1) I know what’s expected of me at work, 2) I have the materials and equipment to do my work right, and 3) I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.”
Results from each of the current work types—remote, hybrid, and on-site—yielded positive “engagement” metrics between 2022 and 2023. A fourth survey statement, however, showed a precipitous decline among fully remote workers: “The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.” Of the exclusively remote employees responding in Gallup’s poll, only 28% answered yes to the company mission question, an all-time low, according to Gallup.
After the Gallup survey release in mid-August, major news sites jumped on the revelation that, as the Wall Street Journal headlined the next day, “Stay-at-homers don’t feel tied to the mission of their companies.”
This lack of connectedness means employees “appear to be approaching their jobs with a gig-worker mentality, fulfilling the basic responsibilities of the role rather than anticipating the broader needs of their team or company,” according to Gallup’s analysis.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York in August released its own detailed study of remote work. Not surprisingly, the New York Fed concluded that the “degree and persistence of remote work will largely depend on the tightness of the labor market … [because] it has been particularly helpful for attracting and retaining workers.”
What was glaringly apparent from this regional analysis, encompassing business-heavy New York state and parts of New Jersey, is the desire of service-firm employers to ultimately offer fewer remote jobs, even considering the major real estate cost savings from less office space.
As in the Gallup poll, there was an insignificant difference in raw productivity numbers among remote, hybrid, and on-site workers. But both service-firm employees and their bosses agreed that “training and mentorship,” as well as “building a workplace culture,” suffered when no on-site interaction occurred.
Most distressing amid all this research, at least from a societal standpoint, is the somewhat casual reference to the “power of proximity,” a concept long recognized by the ambitious but unavailable to the home worker.
One’s workplace “culture” may well defy description (or interest) for the average worker, but failing to get a raise or promotion sparks immediate concern. Especially for jobs requiring communication and collaboration, initial research points to remote work as “potentially damaging to young workers and women” (the sectors most enthusiastic about remote work), who miss out on on-the-job training and the proximity traditionally favoring on-site workers.
The hackneyed phrase “out of sight, out of mind” more brutally describes the remote worker’s getting-ahead/proximity dilemma.
Despite these drawbacks, American workers will continue to demand, and get, flexible work options.
One that seems the most popular, including in the manufacturing world, is the four-day workweek.
Read more from this issue
In a July economic indicator poll, Bankrate.com found that 81% of American full-time workers favor a four-day workweek, a sentiment much greater than support for hybrid or remote work.
The Bankrate.com economists noted that people favoring a four-day workweek would willingly work 10-hour days the rest of the week to reap the benefit of having one day completely “off.”
While the survey didn’t reveal which day of the week is most popular for not working, anecdotal evidence indicates it’s that day we used to call “Casual Friday,” featuring a relaxed dress code.
Casual Friday, it would seem, has morphed into “No-Work Friday,” for which there is no dress code at all.
