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The Uneven Odds for Promotions With Hybrid Work

WFH may reduce your chances for promotion. (WSJ, July 2021)

Why 20% of working days will be from home

"COVID-19 drove a mass social experiment in working from home (WFH). We survey more than 30,000 Americans over multiple waves to investigate whether WFH will stick, and why. Our data say that 20 percent of full workdays will be supplied from home after the pandemic ends, compared with just 5 percent before. We develop evidence on five reasons for this large shift: better-than-expected WFH experiences, new investments in physical and human capital that enable WFH, greatly diminished stigma associated with WFH, lingering concerns about crowds and contagion risks, and a pandemic-driven surge in technological innovations that support WFH. We also use our survey data to project three consequences: First, employees will enjoy large benefits from greater remote work, especially those with higher earnings. Second, the shift to WFH will directly reduce spending in major city centers by at least 5-10 percent relative to the pre-pandemic situation. Third, our data on employer plans and the relative productivity of WFH imply a 5 percent productivity boost in the post-pandemic economy due to re-optimized working arrangements. Only one-fifth of this productivity gain will show up in conventional productivity measures, because they do not capture the time savings from less commuting." https://www.nber.org/papers/w28731#fromrss

What CEOs think about WFH

Quotes from WSJ, Sept 2020.

Is the future of work a blend of working @ "work" and WFH?

Tech companies are finding ways to bring people physically together to create "opportunities for collaboration and focus workers can’t get at home" (WSJ, Sept 2020).

Advantages of working @ work

One company thinks that Zoom meetings are poor substitutes for putting folks together in a room (WSJ, Sept 2020).

Lessons firms are learning about WFH

"Perhaps the biggest lesson is that we’re in the middle of a gigantic, unplanned experiment, and companies need to continue to try new things while rapidly discarding what doesn’t work" (WSJ, July 2020). Read the article for 5 more lessons.

Cracks in WFH

Working from home is not a panacea (WSJ, July 2020).

An intelligent piece on the future of WFH

Big tech and universal telecommuting

by  Tyler Cowen June 20, 2020 at 2:12 am in 

• Economics
 
• Web/Tech

It has gone great so far, but I don’t think it is socially optimal to be doing this forever.  Here is my latest Bloomberg column on that topic, 2x the usual length, excerpt:

If Twitter, Facebook and other tech companies shift toward everyone working from home, it will mean less reliance on esprit de corps and morale to ensure performance, and more management using direct financial incentives and project- and output-based monitoring. Virtual tools can help organize teams, but they simply can’t replicate the intellectual frisson of “gathering the smart people” together, and this could damage performance and innovation.

And:

There is some evidence that when employees work at a distance, they don’t put in extra hours or extend themselves for the benefit of co-workers. That probably means a better work-life balance for many people, but perhaps also inferior performance from a lot of companies over the longer haul.

This move away from workplace morale as a motivator will help self-starter employees, but it may not be good for tech labor overall. In essence, without a local workplace ethos, it is easier to commoditize labor, view workers as interchangeable and fire people. The distinction between protected full-time employees and outsourced, freelance and contract workers weakens. A company can make the offer of, “If you hand in your project, we pay you,” to virtually any worker around the world, many of whom might accept lower wages for remote roles.

Bringing new workers on board is an especially difficult problem for this model.  In the short run, of course, that is a minor concern but over time it grows.

Post-coronavirus office space

How will office space be different when people return to work there (WSJ, May 2020)? Will it even be there?

Investment bankers WFH

This article describes how investment bankers are working from home during the coronavirus pandemic and discusses the reasons that they may or may not continue doing so after the pandemic (WSJ, May 2020).

Why Remote Work Sucks, According To Science

Planet Money explains. Here is a key paragraph.

"Now, with COVID-19, about a third of the workforce is working remotely, and this transition hasn't been easy. At Planet Money, we're facing issues like how to replicate studio-quality sound at home and how to maintain team comradery through cameras on our computers. We're not alone. According to a recent survey by the Society of Human Resource Management, over 70 percent of employers report struggles with shifting to remote work. Another survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers finds that about half of companies believe they are witnessing a dip in productivity with this shift."

The report also mentions the study that formed the basis for an earlier post, "Does Working from Home Work?"

This opinion discusses ways that employers can protect workers from coronavirus (WSJ, April 2020). The list is long.

Does working from home work

This article illustrates some of the questions that economists ask about working from home (WFH). It reports some answers. It appears in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, one of the most prestigious journals in the field. Here is a summary, courtesy of Marginal Revolution:

A rising share of employees now regularly engage in working from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to ‘‘shirking from home.’’ We report the results of a WFH experiment at Ctrip, a 16,000-employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency. Call center employees who volunteered to WFH were randomly assigned either to work from home or in the office for nine months. Home working led to a 13% performance increase, of which 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter and more convenient working environment). Home workers also reported improved work satisfaction, and their attrition rate halved, but their promotion rate conditional on performance fell. Due to the success of the experiment, Ctrip rolled out the option to WFH to the whole firm and allowed the experimental employees to reselect between the home and office. Interestingly, over half of them switched, which led to the gains from WFH almost doubling to 22%. This highlights the benefits of learning and selection effects when adopting modern management practices like WFH.

Big Brother is Watching

Firms are using software to monitor employees as more of them work from home (WSJ, April 2020). The piece reports several advantages and disadvantages. Here is a money quote.

"'We realized we didn’t know what was going on.' he says. 'We were just worried that we were losing productivity.'”

This opinion has good advice for firms who want to have employees work remotely (WSJ, March 2020). Here is a money quote.

"In a world we anticipate, a world where work never really returns to the office, the most important factors for success will be ample trust, mutually agreed-upon norms, good communication and a strong and validating work culture.

"Technical collaboration tools are important too, but not nearly as vital as a good foundation. It might seem daunting to build that foundation on the fly, as we are (sometimes literally) changing the way we work overnight. But a great deal of it is transferable. Every office, physical or otherwise, runs more smoothly when lines of communication are open, when guidelines and rules are clear. Now, we will need to be that much more explicit about articulating those norms."