Recent moves by several large employers to eliminate home working are interesting. These are big companies, with highly-paid CEOs, lots of well-trained managers and loads of data. Some of them even advise other organisations on how to run their businesses.
So they must be right, then? Remote working reduces productivity?
An article by Anita Lettink summarises research that shows it's not that simple. Broadly, fully remote working is less productive whilst hybrid working and FTO (full time office) work are comparable.
So productivity won't change if I force my staff back to the office then? Not so fast; research by Liverpool John Moores University and others shows that doing this will reduce productivity and increase staff attrition. It is seen as a reduction in conditions and, unsurprisingly, this leads to resentment.
The argument from the return-to-office advocates is that people must be together in order to develop or ingest the culture, spark ideas and improve communication. It is not clear to me that having five days to do this is going to be any more effective than having three days to do it. In fact, if an employee spends forty hours absorbing culture, generating ideas and talking to other employees when do they actually do any work? If I cast my mind back to when I last worked in an office I can remember having a lot of fun and a lot of meetings - but most of the hard yards were achieved with the door shut or on a customer's site.
It seems to me that the two fundamental reasons underlying this forcing people back to the office full time are:
- Trust, or rather, a lack of it.
- A management mindset based on the number of hours worked and the ability to interfere, instead of one based on clear purpose, empowerment and measurable outcomes (which takes a bit more effort)
So why are all these highly-paid CEOs pursuing this course? Perhaps because the capabilities required to become a highly-paid CEO don't include anything to do with getting the best from your employees.
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