Why the 'Great Remote Work Experiment' may have been flawed.

This article is by Bryan Lufkin
August 2021

We've lived through a global remote-work experiment. But is our assessment of work-from-home flawed since we didn't have a choice?

Since the pandemic hit, people around the world have been taking part in a ‘Great Remote Work Experiment’. We’ve learned a lot, about things like productivity, communication, and boundaries. We’ve proved we can do get our jobs done, something that has fueled global conversations about work structures once Covid-19 subsides.

Yet there’s one thing we keep forgetting. We weren’t just working from home – we were working from home during a pandemic. The experiment began almost overnight, with minimal preparation or support. We worked at our kitchen tables, sometimes watching our children, as we sheltered from a virus. Everyone was in the same boat, working remotely without choice.

That means that although we did work from home, our experiences were shaped within a very specific, unique and communal set of circumstances. When the world re-opens, these circumstances will change – meaning that remote work may feel rather different. Some experts suggest we need to reflect on which parts of our ‘experiment’ may have been unrepresentative of long-term remote work in a pandemic-free society. Others suggest that our pandemic ‘experiment’ taught us more about remote work than we could ever have imagined, and propelled work-from-home into the mainstream in a vastly accelerated manner.

Both good and bad effects have come from the great work-from-home experiment occurring during a global medical emergency. Experts say pinpointing these could better inform our future work practices.

Why the pandemic isn’t the best guide

On one hand, we crash-landed into remote work because of the pandemic. This could mean we’re not best placed to judge how well or poorly it works under ‘normal’ circumstances.

“There was this enormous uncertainty – the stress that we all felt of ‘what’s going to happen to society?’,” says Martha Maznevski, professor of organisational behaviour at the University of Western Ontario. The last 18 months have been tough for many of us; some have faced health-related anxiety, loneliness and boredom, while others have been juggling children and homeschooling with professional responsibilities. And all of us had to rapidly adjust to new ways of working.

Workstations, for example, weren’t necessarily standing desks in home offices; they were stacks of books on kitchen tables, or even our beds. Zoom made conversations – professional or personal – feel foreign and exhausting, but we couldn’t leave our homes for fear of contracting the virus. It’s fair to assume these factors will have shaped people’s ability to work, and their resultant view of remote work, in diverse ways – and some may never want to work away from the office again. 

Not all of these ‘forced’ conditions were bad, however. Because knowledge workers went remote by necessity, regardless of company or industry, everyone was facing the same challenges, and people pulled together to find solutions. Yet this benefit may have been unique to the pandemic; once we return to a world in which people have different working situations, our ways of working will begin to diverge again, and integrating remote work may become more complicated. 

“The all-remote was fine; now we’re getting into the mix [of remote and non-remote], and that takes a lot more thought,” says Anita Woolley, associate professor of organisational behaviour and theory at Carnegie Mellon University, US. Now, as some firms begin hybrid working, employees may soon realise that it’s going to be harder to pull off remote work when some people are at home while others are in the office, where it’s easier to build relationships, collaborate and even advance in the company.

Additionally, the working hours we put in while remote were linked to the fact that we were stuck at home. While there’s data to suggest that we were more productive during the pandemic, and that some companies were more productive than others, that could be due to people working longer hours each day, to the point of burnout. There were few leisure options available, plus we were worried about our jobs, which meant many people defaulted to working longer hours. We can’t necessarily conclude that widespread remote work makes people more productive, even if we do save time on things like daily commutes.

So, does that all mean that we’ve conditioned companies and workers to think of remote work in a certain way that isn’t necessarily indicative of the future? We’ve developed preferences about working from home that might be based on experiences that aren’t necessarily representative of what remote work is supposed to look like – we’re not going to be glued to Zoom during lockdowns forever, after all. It could be that we’re in for a surprise – unpleasant or otherwise – when we experience remote work after the pandemic.

The all-remote was fine; now we’re getting into the mix [of remote and non-remote], and that takes a lot more thought - Anita Woolley

Don’t pull the alarm yet

Yet not all experts are concerned about whether our pandemic work-from-home experiences could distort our view of remote work. Some argue that the context in which we worked shouldn’t discount our experiment – if anything, it should help guide how we roll out long-term remote work policies going forward. “In what ways can we use this dataset and generalise from it, and in what ways can we not?” says Maznevski. “Not that we throw it all out – but what parts of it are going to generalise to a non-pandemic situation?”

But despite challenges, some experts say that the pandemic-era remote work experiment was more successful than anyone could have guessed

Nicholas Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford University in California, points to “three golden rules” that, pre-pandemic, were believed to be crucial for successful remote work. First, having a working space that wasn’t the same room as where you slept; second, having high-speed broadband; third, six or more months of experience on the job so that you knew what you were doing.

The pandemic proved all three were, in fact, not required – and if it weren’t for the unique nature of the pandemic, we never would have been able to figure that out, says Bloom. Now, moving forwards, we can look at the difficult remote-work conditions during the pandemic, and use what we’ve learned to improve our set-ups. Bloom says he thinks it’s “incredibly positive” that pandemic remote work has been “more successful than anyone ever predicted”.

He suggests that the forced remote-work experiment is like comparing two versions of a smartphone. Say you bought an original smartphone years ago, and thought it was convenient at the time, but then one day you buy the newest, shiniest model, and suddenly realised how much more convenient it is than the original. That’s what remote work after Covid-19 could be like – we’ll only be able to improve and iterate on what was surprisingly successful during the pandemic.

Bloom also believes that, without the unique pressure-cooker environment of the pandemic, there wouldn’t have been as many leaps in remote-work technological innovation. He and his colleagues point out in a 2021 working paper that the number of US patent applications for technologies supporting telework, video conferencing and working from home doubled between January and September 2020. Even “Zoom is a lot better now than a few months ago”, says Bloom.

Kevin Johnson, associate professor of management at HEC Montréal business school, says that the pandemic gave remote work a wave it wouldn’t have had otherwise. “We’ve got the momentum to use in the coming months, weeks, to try and build something more integrated in our management system and our leadership styles,” he says.

In the end, we can acknowledge both perspectives; that while working remotely during the pandemic distorted many people’s views of what long-term remote work would look like, the unusual ways the pandemic affected the telework experience can serve as learning points for the future.

It’s important to identify the pieces of the Great Remote Work Experiment that were unique to the pandemic. After all, we might be tempted to look at those elements, and assume that they’ll always be a part of remote work. That’s why we need to pay attention to the parts of the day-to-day that pan out better or worse than we think, and flag it with a manager early. Communication and flexibility will be key. Just because certain factors helped remote work spread more quickly than it would otherwise, doesn’t mean those factors will stick around forever.

What is the Great Resignation of 2021?

This article is courtesy of Hannah Cox via Fee

If you don’t spend your days on TikTok or Reddit, you may be blissfully unaware of a growing movement urging people to quit their jobs en masse this fall. It’s called “The Great Resignation of 2021,” and for businesses already struggling to attract workers back to the office, it could spell very bad news. The social media trend coincides with broader disruptions in the labor market.

Monster, a global employment website, recently reported 95 percent of employees are considering changing jobs. This is on top of the 4 million people who already followed through and resigned in April. The country’s labor market is in a precarious position. The policies of the pandemic spurred the sharpest economic contraction in US history, millions lost their jobs and are still out of work, and yet businesses have been unable to fill their open positions.

The Great Resignation

On top of all this, reports indicate employers may soon face more disruption from what is being described as “the Great Resignation,” as millions of workers prepare to say, “I quit.” According to TikTok user @Katieyowyow, a recruiter with over 300,000 followers on the platform, as many as 1 in 4 employees are planning to leave their job this fall. These employees, she says, intend to spend the summer months using their vacation days and enjoying the benefits of full-time employment before they jump ship and turn in their notice in autumn.

Daniel Zhao, a labor economist with the employment website Glassdoor said, “We haven’t seen anything quite like the situation we have today.” Why is this happening? A multitude of reasons. Large numbers of Americans transitioned to working from home last year, and now that they’ve enjoyed the quality of life increase that remote work brings they are unwilling to return to the monotony of a desk job. Lots of managers have announced plans to bring employees back to the office this fall, and it seems many people are simply unwilling to do so. And given the plethora of open jobs at the moment, the best workers have their pick of employment.

Other workers used their downtime during the pandemic to develop new skills or passions, and now they want to find roles that allow them to incorporate those interests into their day-to-day lives. Some are seeking roles that require less of their time out of a desire to allocate more time to their families or children. And then there are those who simply just don’t want to work.

Jeremy Golembiewski is one example of a worker who has already taken the plunge. The 26-year veteran of the restaurant industry realized just how much of his children’s childhood he was missing while he was furloughed over the pandemic. He decided it was no longer acceptable to spend so much time away from them and quit his job in search of a more steady schedule and a 40-hour workweek.

Angel Perkins is another case in point. She resigned her role as a recruiter during the pandemic over health concerns, and in the meantime, she launched an online jewelry business. She quickly replaced her income and found the financial and time freedom her old work would not afford.

An Employee’s Market

The reality is it’s an employee’s market. There’s never been a better time to job hunt. The Labor Department recently reported 9.3 million job openings and there are hiring signs everywhere you look. Taking that into consideration, it makes sense that workers might be experiencing more freedom and confidence in the job market than usual—leading them to make bold career moves they would be less likely to take under other circumstances.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Good employees should seek the greatest quality of life, highest pay, and the ability to spend their time on work they find meaningful. Those are strong incentives in a free market that encourage a good work ethic, innovation, and efficiency. What this means is that employers will have to compete with attractive incentives to earn the placement of the best employees, or even to fill openings in general.

Much of this can be seen in a favorable light. Competition is a good thing, and market incentives that encourage employers to offer better working arrangements create a better quality of life for all (and higher productivity in general).

Perverse Incentives

Unfortunately, though, trends like “The Great Resignation” are far from being fueled by market incentives and demands alone. Rather, they are the repercussion of bad, big-government policies that have severely tampered with the market for the past year.

The federal government has continued to send an increased amount of unemployment benefits to workers, even as the businesses they shut down struggle to open back up. Workers are responding to this perverse incentive in entirely predictable ways, choosing to stay home or work less—often for more pay than they were able to earn in the workforce—for an extended period of time.

Obviously, without the guarantee of a cushy taxpayer-funded unemployment payment, many of these employees would not have the luxury of simply quitting their jobs. They would have to increase their value if they wanted to demand new working arrangements on the market or build their way into new career paths while still holding down employment in the meantime.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy paraphrased a quote of F.A. Hayek’s like this, “no one can decide that people won’t respond in predictable ways to perverse incentives unintentionally created by a central plan, in the same way, that no one can decide that insects will not become resistant to an insecticide.”

Central planners were warned that these kinds of problems would result from their policies, and yet they persisted anyway. As a result, it is likely we will all continue to see supply shortages and an increase in the price of goods and services.

Don’t Let Employees Pick Their WFH Days

By Nicholas Bloom at smallbiz.com

It’s clear that as the U.S. economy reopens after Covid precautions that many organizations will be pursuing a hybrid future in which employees work from the office some days and at home on other days. While some managers may be inclined to let employees choose their schedules, the author recommends not pursuing this approach for two reasons. First, is the challenge in managing a hybrid team, which can generate an office in-group and a home out-group. The second concern is the risk to diversity.

Current surveys show that younger women with children at home are most likely to want to work from home permanently. The author’s previous research found that WFH employees had a 50% lower rate of promotion after 21 months compared to their office colleagues. The best solution is for managers to decide which days their team should WFH and which days everyone should be in the office.

As U.S. states and the federal government start to roll back Covid-19 restrictions, and companies and workers start to firm up their office return plans, one point is becoming clear: The future of working from home (WFH) is hybrid. In research with my colleagues Jose Maria Barrero and Steven J. Davis, as well as discussions with hundreds of managers across different industries, I’m finding that about 70% of firms, from tiny companies to massive multinationals like Google, Citi, and HSBC, plan to move to some form of hybrid working. But another question is controversial: How much choice should workers have in the matter?

On the one hand, many managers are passionate that their employees should determine their own schedule. We’ve been surveying more than 30,000 Americans monthly since May 2020 and our research data shows that post-pandemic, 32% of employees say they never want to return to working in the office. These are often employees with young kids, who live in the suburbs, for whom the commute is painful and home can be rather pleasant. At the other extreme, 21% tell us they never want to spend another day working from home. These are often young single employees or empty nesters in city center apartments.

Given such radically different views, it seems natural to let them choose. One manager told me “I treat my team like adults. They get to decide when and where they work, as long as they get their jobs done.”

But others raise two concerns — concerns, which after talking to hundreds of organizations over the last year, have led me to change my advice from supporting to being against employees’ choosing their own WFH days. One concern is managing a hybrid team, where some people are at home and others are at the office. I hear endless 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 make 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 the risk to diversity. It turns out that who wants to work from home after the pandemic is not random. In our research, we find, for example, that among college graduates with young children women want to work from home full-time almost 50% more than men.

This is worrying given the evidence that working from home while your colleagues are in the office can be highly damaging to your career. In a 2014 study I ran in China in a large multinational we randomized 250 volunteers into a group that worked remotely for four days a week and another group that remained in the office full time. We found that WFH employees had a 50% lower rate of promotion after 21 months compared to their office colleagues.

This huge WFH promotion penalty chimes with comments I’ve heard over the years from managers. They often confided that home-based employees in their teams get passed over on promotions because they are out of touch with the office.

Adding this up you can see how allowing employees to choose their WFH schedules could contribute to a diversity crisis. Single young men could all choose to come into the office five days a week and rocket up the firm, while employees with young children, particularly women, who choose to WFH for several days each week are held back. This would be both a diversity loss and a legal time bomb for companies.

So I have changed my mind and started advising firms that managers should decide which days their team should WFH. For example, if the manager picks WFH on Wednesday and Friday, everyone would come in on the other days. The only exceptions should be new hires, who should come in for an extra office day each week for their first year to bond with other recruits.

Of course, firms that want to efficiently use their office space will need to centrally manage which teams come in on which days. Otherwise, the building will be empty on Monday and Friday — when everyone wants to WFH — and overcrowded mid-week. To encourage coordination, companies should also make sure that teams that often work together have at least two days of overlap in the office.

The pandemic has started a revolution in how we work, and our research shows this can make firms more productive and employees happier. But like all revolutions, this is difficult to navigate, and firms need leadership from the top to ensure their workforce remains diverse and truly inclusive.

Virus-sensitive industries are ready for the vaccine

There two groups: one that’s open for business and one that continues to be held back by the virus.

By Sam Ro, Sam is managing editor at Yahoo Finance.

While the U.S. labor market has improved substantially from its extreme crisis levels earlier this year, it nevertheless remains in trouble. According to the Department of Labor data released on Thursday, 10.6 workers were filing continued claims for unemployment benefits (unadjusted). This was down from 11.6 million the week prior.

“The report points to a wounded economy that’s not in good shape for winter,” Indeed Hiring Lab economist Ann Elizabeth Konkel said, adding that the number was “more than 1.5 times larger than their peak during the Great Recession."

The rate at which American workers are filing for new unemployment benefits also continues to be disturbingly high. On Thursday, we learned that 840,000 filed new claims last week.

"The decline in continuing claims is welcome, but initial claims offer a better read on the real-time state of the labor market, and the downward trend has stalled, more or less,” Pantheon Macroeconomics’ Ian Shepherdson said. “The last significant weekly drop in initial claims was back in the final week of August, and that happened only because the Labor Department changed the seasonal adjustment methodology and did not revise the prior data."

In a research note published on Wednesday, Goldman Sachs economist David Mericle offered a more hopeful assessment. “Scarring effects on the labor force have been less severe than feared,” he said, pointing to industry-level data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Unemployment has fallen sharply, and most of the remaining job losers are either still on temporary layoff or are in industries that should largely recover with a vaccine.”

Mericle estimated that 60% of the jobs that have yet to be recovered from the pandemic were in these “most virus-sensitive industries.” People are ready for things to get back to normal.

It’s a pretty crude way of distinguishing between industries. Nevertheless, it’s encouraging to see the degree to which industries less sensitive to the virus have recovered lost jobs. It suggests that the underlying economy is actually in pretty good shape and not broken by the imbalances that exacerbate recessions under — dare I say — normal economic cycles.

And so we have two labor markets: one that reflects an economy that’s open for business and one that continues to be held back by the virus. “These [most virus-sensitive] industries will likely benefit from a surge in demand once a vaccine becomes widely available, which we expect in the first half of 2021,” Mericle said. “That should produce quick job gains in these industries, largely solving the temporary ‘mismatch’ problem created by the virus.”

The phrase “once a vaccine becomes widely available” is doing a lot of work here. Once again, we’re reminded that it comes down to having a vaccine for COVID-19. Let’s hope that comes sooner than later.

DaMar Staffing Solutions takes an unconventional approach to recruiting and staffing solutions for clients. As a strategic partner, the DaMar team is constantly on the hunt for those rare people who are among the best at what they do. DaMar Staffing is located at 8900 Keystone Crossing, Suite 1060, Indianapolis, IN 46240. DaMarStaff.com

Mass Firings Have Slowed, But So too Have Mass Re-Hirings.

By Myles Udland, reporter and co-anchor of The Final Round.

The U.S. labor market continues to rebound from a washout in the spring. But the road back to anything resembling pre-COVID 19 levels still appears quite long. Job openings were up in July, layoffs were steady, but hiring slowed.

Job openings at the end of July stood just north of 6.6 million, a solid improvement from the 6 million jobs open at the end of June and up significantly from the 4.9 million jobs that were open at the end of April, the labor market’s nadir. July’s openings, however, were down sharply from 7.3 million a year ago.

Layoffs totaled 5 million in July. In March and April, layoffs totaled 14.6 million and 9.9 million, respectively. Another relative bright spot in the report was the number of unemployed workers per open job. The raw data that takes those unemployed divided by jobs open shows there were 2.5 workers for each open job. Before the pandemic, there was fewer than 1 worker looking for a job for each job available.

 But Indeed economist Nick Bunker notes that if you take out those temporarily unemployed from this number, there are closer to 1.4 jobs open for each unemployed worker. This offers a slightly more positive outlook for those who have been permanently laid off and are looking for work.

Another increase in job openings is a heartening sign for workers who have permanently lost their jobs. While the outlook for workers looking for a new job is far worse than earlier this year, their prospects might not be as grim as the headline numbers would indicate. Still, this situation could deteriorate significantly if the economic damage from the coronavirus lasts. If the vast majority of workers temporarily laid off can return to their former jobs, the outlook for people permanently out of work may not be as dire as some think. But that assumption might be a big one.

And while rising job openings indicate that more businesses are re-opening, resuming previous expansion plans, or setting up shop for the first time at a higher rate, the pace of hirings in July also slowed down as the snapback seen in May and June tapered off. Some 5.8 million hires were made in July, down from 6.9 million in June and 7.2 million in May. In July 2019, there were 5.9 million hires made. Another 1 million non-farm payrolls were added back to the economy (excluding hiring related to the Census), though overall employment remains 11.5 million jobs below February. Damage in the service-sector specifically where employment levels are about 9% below pre-COVID levels are particularly troubling given the sector accounts for about 80% of overall employment.

The Federal Reserve’s latest Beige Book published last week also painted a mixed picture for the labor market with manufacturing employment looking strong while the service sector revealed, “rising instances of furloughed workers being laid off permanently as demand remained soft.”

Additionally, data published by Indeed on job openings released Wednesday — a data set the Morning Brief has previously covered — show a bifurcated labor market recovery, similar to what was suggested by the latest jobs report. Indeed’s report showed that in construction, for instance, job postings are actually up 7.7% against last year. Hospitality & tourism related job postings, however, are down 46% from last year.

And while this is certainly an intuitive finding given the boom we’ve seen in housing and the challenges of traveling right now, this data serves as a reminder that while the recovery is chugging along the benefits are not evenly spread and overall output is still depressed by almost any measure. “It remains difficult to understand why various measures related to layoffs have sent different signals in recent months, but several of the key measures suggest that we have moved past the worst of the layoffs associated with the virus spread,” said Daniel Silver, an economist at JPMorgan.

But moving past the worst of a historically deep contraction in the labor market and economic growth will require a more robust and sustained rebound than a mere steadying of the labor market and overall activity.