Choosing your remote-hybrid working policy
As businesses and everyday life return to pre-pandemic activity, one point is becoming clear, the home office isn’t about to shut down.
Research and discussions with hundreds of managers across different industries, show that about 70 percent of firms — from tiny companies to multinationals plan to maintain some form of hybrid working arrangements so their employees can divide their time between collaborating with colleagues on site and working from home.
Hybrid arrangements balance the benefits of being in the office in person — greater ability to collaborate, innovate and build culture — with the benefits of quiet and the lack of commuting that come from working from home.
Companies often suggest employees work two days a week at home, focusing on individual tasks or small meetings, and three days a week in the office, for larger meetings, training, and social events.
Recent research evidence show that small meetings can be as efficient by video call as in person. In-person meetings are typically easier for communicating by visual cues and gestures. But video calls save the travel time required to meet in person. And since video calls for two to four people mean everyone occupies a large box on a Zoom screen, it is easy to be seen.
In contrast, almost half of respondents to the research survey reported large meetings of 10 or more people were worse by video call. People are allocated to smaller boxes making it harder to see the faces and gestures of participants with attendees often having to mute, leading to stilted conversations.
Who has the choice?
How much choice should workers have in the days they work from home?
Many managers are passionate that their employees should determine their own schedule. At the two ends of the extremes, again research shows 32 percent of employees say they never want to return to working in the office whilst another 21 percent say they never want to spend another day working from home.
Demographics clearly have a part to play. Within the 21 percent there is a high level of younger, single workers living on their own whilst the 32 percent has a predominance of employees with partners and or family commitments outside of the work environment.
Small meetings can work by video conference; large meetings are best in person.
Question: “How do meetings compare by video call (Zoom, Teams, etc.) versus in person in terms of how efficient the meetings turn out to be?”
Employees are hugely varied in how many days per week they want to WFH.
Response to: “In 2022+ (after COVID) how often would you like to have paid work-days at home?”
Given such radically differing views, it seems logical to let employee choose.
However Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University has concerns borne from hundreds of conversations he has recently had with employers. Concerns which have led him to change his advice from supporting to being against employees’ choosing their own WFH days.
A management nightmare?
One concern is managing a hybrid team, where some people are at home and others are at the office. Many workers are expressing anxiety about this generating an office in-group and a home out-group. For example, employees at home can see glances or whispering in the office conference room but can’t tell exactly what is going on. Even when firms try to avoid this by requiring office employees to take video calls from their desks, home employees have told me that they can still feel excluded. They know after the meeting ends the folks in the office may chat in the corridor or go grab a coffee together.
The second concern is that given a choice, most employees will take Monday and Friday off.
It seems only 36 percent of employees would choose to come in on Friday compared with 82 percent on Wednesday. This highlights the severe problems companies potentially face over effective use of office space if they let employees pick their days to work from home. Providing enough desks for every employee coming in on Wednesday would leave half of these desks empty on Monday and Friday.
Efficient use of office space will require central coordination.
Question: “If you got to work from home for two days per week which two days would you choose?”
The third concern is the risk to diversity in the workplace. It turns out that who wants to work from home after the pandemic is not random. For example, among college graduates with young children, women want to work from home full time almost 50 percent more than men.
Figure 4: Women and men with younger children differ in the number of days they want to WFH post-pandemic.
Response to: “In 2022+ (after COVID) how often would you like to have paid work-days at home?”
Note: College educated employees with children under 12.
In Nicholas Blooms 2015 study he conducted research with a large multinational company and randomized 250 volunteers into a group that worked remotely for four days a week and another group that remained in the office full time. His findings were that WFH employees had a 50 percent lower rate of promotion after 21 months compared with their office colleagues.
This huge WFH promotion penalty resonates with candidate experiences when we ask why they are looking to move from their current employer.
In conclusion then, there is real peril, if allowing employees to choose their WFH schedules exacerbates a lack of workplace diversity. Single young men could for example all choose to come into the office five days a week and rocket up the promotion ladder, while employees who live far from the office or have young children and choose to WFH most days could be held back.
This would be both a diversity loss and a potential legal time bomb for employers.
Based on the evidence to date Quantum are now working with client management to help decide which days their team should WFH and build a compelling proposition around the decision to appeal to the wise possible talent pool.
If you would like to know more about our cutting-edge talent solutions please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
References
Barrero, Jose, Nicholas Bloom and Steve Davis. “Why working from home will stick,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 28731, April 2021.
Bloom, Nicholas, Paul Mizen and Shivani Taneja. “Returning to the office will be hard,” CEPR VOXEU, June 2021.
Bloom, Nicholas, James Liang, John Roberts and Zhichun Jenny Ying. “Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2015.
