The era of remote work is ending. “You are more effective in the office”
The idea of permanent remote work is becoming a thing of the past. CEOs of companies like Meta and Goldman Sachs are telling employees to return to the office most days. Research shows they are right.
After nearly three years of looser work-from-home policies, CEOs are starting to attract their remote workers back to the office. Major companies began announcing return-to-work policies late last year, and the rhetoric has begun to heat up in recent months.
Back to the office
Amazon has made it mandatory for employees to report to the office three times a week; Goldman Sachs is pushing employees to come back full time, and Meta says employees could lose their jobs if they don’t show up to the office three days a week.
CEOs give unclear reasons for this change. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg said that entry-level engineers tend to perform better when they spend three days a week in the office, citing internal “performance data” that the company has not made public.
Remote work less effective
Some early research has suggested that working from home has a minimal or even positive impact on employee productivity, and one study from Harvard Business School found that it increased productivity by 4.4%. More recent research has cast doubt on these analyses, showing that workers are more distracted at home.
A University of Chicago study published in February, which collected data from more than 10,000 skilled professionals at an Indian IT company at the height of the pandemic, found that employee productivity dropped from 19% to 8%. among staff working from home, even though the number of hours worked has increased.
“We saw a dramatic decline in productivity not only immediately after the outbreak of the pandemic, but throughout this period,” said one of the study’s authors.
