Remember the start of the pandemic and all that talk about the “remote work revolution” that would change how and where we work forever? Mothers and fathers could spend more times with their kids, companies would be saving millions of dollars in leasing office space, there would be less commute stress, and with far fewer cars on the road, it was a very green alternative.
All that may be true. But a paper written by the National Bureau of Economic Research found the best reason not to switch to a remote workplace: working from home is just less productive than working in the office, on average.
The authors of the paper examined the data entry sector in India. If there is an industry that lends itself to remote work, it would be data entry. But the authors found that working from home causes an immediate average 12% loss in productivity and accuracy, increasing to 18% over time.
Obviously, that’s not sustainable. The loss in productivity cuts into profits, which offsets any savings in not paying for office space. Big companies have known this for a while, which is why they’ve been trying to coax their workers back to the office.
Pew Research conducted a survey on remote work and found that 43% of workers who have jobs that could be done remotely said they worked from home in January 2022. By February 2023, that number fell to 35%. And the Biden administration announced last week that they were making a concerted push to get federal employees back into their offices as soon as the end of the year.
Many workers have been resisting the move back to offices, but companies have very little choice. The way work in the office has been organized in recent decades means that most tasks are given to teams of workers. “Team production” is the key, and without it, productivity falls off dramatically.
Insofar as people work more cohesively in teams when they are physically present together, the benefits of team production will increase. It’s important to note that those who are in-office still have access to all the tools for teamwork remote workers do. You can Zoom the person in the room across the hall. But you can also walk down the hall. If walking down the hall enables better teamwork, it can mean a more productive team unit.
Team production comes with a problem, though. If Jon and Patrick can move a total of 50 boxes individually, but they move 70 when working as a team, who is responsible for the additional 20 boxes? In some sense, the team itself as a unit is responsible. The extra 20 boxes would not be moved without the team.
The “team production problem” can only be addressed when the team is working in the same space.
My belief is that the ways managers often solve the team production problem require physical office spaces. For example, a shared company culture which motivates employees to put forth a little more effort may be easier to foster when you see your coworkers frequently and talk about your lives. Similarly, physical, visual monitoring may simply be a more motivating form of monitoring than others.
There are also cultural and economic reasons to fill up the office buildings in large cities again. The emptying of urban downtowns is causing thousands of small businesses to close. Bars, restaurants, and businesses that cater to offices supply most of the energy to a city and also make cultural life like theaters and museums possible. There have already been huge changes to cities’ downtowns, and whether or not they can make a comeback is unknown.
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