Ten years ago, I got my first non-academic job as a market researcher and writer. The commute was only about 30 minutes in each direction, but parking was expensive and public transportation wasn’t an option. I rarely had meetings; I communicated with my manager and my colleagues—all seated in the same open-plan office space—almost exclusively via email and chat.
After several months of noise-canceling headphones, I asked my manager if I could work from home sometimes. From a 2023 perspective, he reacted as if I’d made a ridiculous request, like reducing my working hours to 15 minutes every other day or keeping a baby tiger under my desk. He eventually agreed to a trial period, but the solution that seemed obvious to me was a hard sell for him.
A decade of technological progress and one pandemic later, there’s much less reflexive resistance to the idea of working remotely. But over the last year or so, especially after the official end of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency in the United States, some of that hostility toward working from home (we’re lazy! we wear pajamas!) has returned. Headlines, blogs, internal message boards, and LinkedIn feeds are dense with discussion about whether we should all go back to the office, continue working remotely, or navigate some kind of middle ground.
We spent the last few months consuming the news, diving into the research, and chatting with colleagues to bring you some perspective on the return-to-office (RTO) conversation and to get a handle on the relationship between developer happiness, productivity, and remote work. We’ll also touch on the downstream effects of RTO mandates on diversity, recruitment and retention, employee satisfaction, and overall performance.
Workers don’t want to be forced back to the office
Flexibility is a excessive precedence for builders and different information employees. It shouldn’t be a shock, then, that RTO mandates are usually not widespread with staff, a few of whom are merely quitting in response.
Our personal annual survey {of professional} builders discovered, for the third yr in a row, that flexibility is a very powerful cause why builders keep in a job (or search for a brand new one). One other latest survey discovered that one in three builders would give up in the event that they have been not allowed to do business from home.
And it’s not simply builders. Almost half of staff in one survey stated they’d give up if their employer ordered them again to the workplace full-time, and most employees would ditch an office-only job for a distant job even when it meant a pay minimize, in line with one other survey of greater than 8,400 US staff. That survey discovered that 17% of employees stated they’d hand over 20% of their paycheck to work remotely, whereas 10% would give up greater than 20%. That is true regardless of the price of residing disaster.
Most CEOs want workers to return to the office
CEOs, statistically talking, are usually not on the identical web page as their staff. A KPMG research of greater than 1,300 international CEOs discovered that 64% imagine that everyone shall be again to working from the workplace by 2026. Plus, 87% of CEOs stated they have been extra more likely to lavish “favorable assignments, raises, or promotions” on staff who got here into the workplace than on those that labored remotely.
There’s a big disconnect between what organizations and CEOs see as the advantages of working onsite and the advantages staff really report receiving. Unsurprisingly, there’s an additional disconnect between how women and men entry these advantages. McKinsey and Firm’s 2023 Girls within the Office report discovered that “whereas 77 p.c of firms imagine a powerful organizational tradition is a key advantage of on-site work, most staff disagree: solely 39 p.c of males and 34 p.c of ladies who work on-site say a key profit is feeling extra related to their group’s tradition. On prime of this, males usually tend to profit from working on-site.”
The research isn’t as simple as you might think
Among the many first questions that comes up in any dialog about distant work is whether or not persons are kind of productive working from dwelling. One downside with this query is that “productiveness” is clearly not a simple metric. Does it imply strains of code? Imply change lead time? The variety of hours you log on the workplace?
Nor do all productiveness research use the identical methodology. Some contain “worker time use captured by monitoring functions on work units”, whereas others merely requested individuals how productive they thought they have been when working remotely.
And naturally, the selection isn’t essentially (and even often) between “work full-time from the workplace” and “work full-time from dwelling.” Many individuals have hybrid schedules, the place they work from the workplace on some days and remotely on others.
Given these ambiguities of that means and methodology, it’s not a shock that many research on distant and/or hybrid work have complicated or apparently contradictory findings. For instance, a Stanford research discovered that totally distant work was related to a ten% drop in productiveness, however that hybrid working “seems to haven’t any impression on productiveness.” The authors word, nonetheless, that their research doesn’t consider the cash firms save with a remote-first method, from lack of actual property prices to international hiring. The research authors additionally word that hybrid schedules enhance recruitment and retention—as a result of, once more, flexibility is essential to individuals.
A latest working paper from the Nationwide Bureau of Financial Analysis means that distant employees are much less productive, however as one knowledgeable who unpacked its shortcomings exhibits, additionally fails to deal with elements like the price of actual property, the impression of RTO mandates on retention and recruitment, and a variety of accessibility and variety considerations.
Lastly, loads of these urging RTO, together with the pinnacle of the world’s largest industrial landlord, have a vested curiosity in individuals returning to industrial actual property properties and patronizing the companies on which these properties rely. They’ve a monetary stake in preserving white-collar enterprise districts even when the info doesn’t help the rivalry that day by day in-person interplay is critical to supply revolutionary, inventive, and significant work.
What’s missing from the conversation?
It’s value asking why, in most conversations about distant work, we ask about productiveness first, as a substitute of main with accessibility, range, or happiness. Productiveness isn’t essentially a simple or revealing metric, and a seemingly squishy idea like happiness can have a quantifiable impression on an organization’s efficiency. Nor are range and accessibility considerations mere background noise within the RTO dialog; they’re essential factors to think about.
People are happier working from home
A latest research reported in Forbes discovered that “employees who labored from dwelling 100% of the time have been 20% happier on common than those that didn’t have the flexibility to do business from home.” That research additionally discovered “a powerful correlation between work happiness and total happiness.” One other research discovered that “individuals who have the chance to work remotely at the very least month-to-month are 24% extra more likely to really feel completely happy and productive of their roles.”
Happiness at work isn’t a nice-to-have with no relationship to organizational efficiency. Quite the opposite, enterprise psychologist Dr. Camille Preston argues that selling worker happiness advantages everybody, with completely happy staff working extra productively and producing extra gross sales. She’s hardly alone. “Happiness raises almost each enterprise and academic final result: elevating gross sales by 37%, productiveness by 31%, and accuracy on duties by 19%,” writes Sean Achor, writer of the guide The Happiness Benefit.
RTO mandates are bad for diversity
At Stack Overflow, we take it as a on condition that range, fairness, and inclusion are essential. Earlier this yr, we wrote that the rounds of tech layoffs in 2022 and 2023 have been a big blow to range in tech, disproportionately affecting ladies and folks of coloration. The identical systemic inequities are in play in terms of how RTO mandates have an effect on range in tech—for example, the above-mentioned McKinsey and Firm report discovered that ladies reap fewer advantages from working on-site than males do.
Prithwiraj Choudhury, a Harvard Enterprise Faculty professor, instructed The Washington Put up that by implementing inflexible RTO mandates, “you’re risking your prime performers and variety. It simply doesn’t make financial sense.” Choudhury additionally emphasised that ladies are resigning at larger charges in response to RTO mandates than males are. This reality isn’t solely confirmed by the analysis however frankly intuitive, contemplating the gender wage hole in the USA and the truth that ladies shoulder extra family work, significantly childcare, than their male companions even when each work full-time.
Individuals with disabilities and advocacy teams have additionally warned that RTO mandates disproportionately harm employees with disabilities, together with neurodivergent individuals. The choice to work remotely makes work extra accessible to a wider vary of individuals, and when employers take away the choice with out regard for the way it impacts people, they’re rendering their workplaces much less accessible and fewer numerous. (To not point out, much less engaging to potential staff.)
Our view
Stack Overflow has embraced a remote-first philosophy from the start. We wrote about why enabling distant work was essential to us and the way we made it occur means again in 2017. In March 2020, with so many individuals adjusting to distant work for the primary time, we shared our distant staff’ finest recommendation for working from dwelling. It’s baked into our tradition, and the well-honed async communication, respect for work-life stability, and emphasis on outcomes over hours-spent-at-desk attracted a lot of our staff, together with yours actually.
At organizations the place not all staff work remotely, management tends to “systematically [undervalue] the productiveness of hybrid and distant employees,” in line with analysis by Nick Bloom, a preeminent scholar of distant and hybrid work. Bloom’s findings counsel that many in-office managers haven’t been correctly educated to handle distant staff. In accordance with an article in Fortune discussing Bloom’s analysis, “supervisor coaching is the most important impediment to efficient hybrid work efficiency for organizations–and a serious driver of the continuous ratcheting up of days within the workplace.”
Maybe the issue is much less about staff carrying pajama pants and extra about managers struggling to use an outdated framework to how individuals really wish to reside and work in 2023.
As an alternative of unilaterally ordering staff again to the workplace, organizations may take this chance to determine the right way to make distant work work for them. If our expertise is something to go by, an openness to distant or hybrid work is the way you entice the most effective expertise and earn a fame as a stellar place to work.
