The Hybrid Workforce
Over a year into the pandemic and as vaccinations proceed apace, countries around the world are beginning to define what life and work mean to them in this “new normal”. While governments explore ways to restart their economies, employers and employees are thinking deeply about what a desired return to work will look like.
COVID-19 & the Great Work From Home Experiment
As employees were forced inside their homes, repurposing whatever flat surface they could find to become their new semi-permanent offices, managers were left to wonder what impact a workforce at home could have on productivity.
Nearly 80% of employers expected some negative impact on worker productivity. Instead, workers surpassed expectations, not only tending to their jobs as normal but spending more time on work than they ever did before working in offices. Some reports found the workday lengthened by somewhere between one to three hours.
However, only looking at employee productivity as a measure of success obscures some of the significant challenges and effects of remote working on the wellbeing of employees. Burdened with digital exhaustion from an onslaught of virtual meetings, the lack of a distinct end to the work-day, and the removal of social interactions and connections with colleagues and peers have led to employees increasingly reporting feeling ‘burned out’ and overworked.
A survey from Microsoft of over 30,000 workers in 31 countries found that 41% of the entire global workforce could be considering handing in their resignation by the end of the year. Not only do over a third of employees feel overworked and exhausted, but 20% think their employers don’t care about their work-life balance.
Groupthink is another distinct risk of remote working. The planned nature of online meetings limits casual interactions outside of one’s team. This can result in siloed working environments, potentially limiting innovation and creative thinking in the long run. These off-hand interactions and water-cooler talk are also vital to cultivating “weak-social-ties”, which can be powerful enablers of both personal wellbeing and professional development.
The benefits of remote working and the power of choice
Despite its challenges, there still remains a clear demand for remote working in some shape or form. The fact that 70% of workers want some form of remote working implies that there are benefits it can confer.
Studies have found that workers who choose to work remotely may experience higher job satisfaction, lower work-role stress and work-related exhaustion, as well as provide greater general wellbeing when compared to working in an office environment.
For certain segments of the population, including parents and caretakers, remote working allowed for especially standout benefits such as having no commute and greater flexibility over working arrangements. For example, in our study of 70,000 ASEAN youths, we found that workers who had kids were more likely to think that remote working was perfect for them and that travel and meetings were unnecessary for work.
However, an important caveat in the research is that these benefits are conditional on the agency and autonomy employees receive over the decision to work remotely. In other words, working remotely can be incredibly beneficial for those who willingly and actively choose it.
As such, these benefits may not appear in cases where having to work remotely is not a choice. The authors also contend that for some this may even result in adverse effects.
Rethinking the future of workplaces
In light of these findings, employers are grappling with how to balance the needs of their employees and those of their businesses.
For example, Google reports that 62% of its workers would like to return to their offices at some point, but not on a daily basis. As a result, the company will now let 20% of its employees work remotely, while another 20% can work in an office location of their choosing.
Google is among the many companies, predominantly in tech, that are looking to adopt a hybrid model. Similarly, Facebook is allowing all employees to work remotely and expects up to 50% of its workforce to be remote workers in five to ten years.
With some level of remote working becoming the norm, governments are also looking to provide legal protections. Countries like France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Chile have some form of a “Right to Disconnect” law that protects a workers right to enforce a healthy work-life balance.
Additionally, Spain and Chile have also provided safeguards to ensure that remote workers are not disadvantaged due to not working in the office. This includes having companies cover home office expenses and ensuring equal wage and career opportunities as their in-office counterparts.
Going forward
As flexible working arrangements become more popular and normalised, we will need to start thinking beyond only the technical considerations of remote working. We instead need to re-imagine traditional office-based practices to suit a world where work goes beyond the office.
To truly make the much-requested hybrid workforce a successful and lasting institution, we have to first begin changing the way we approach working and the workplace. This may mean reconsidering not only what job roles can be done remotely, but also their specific and disaggregated tasks and responsibilities. Identifying these can help inform employers on how to best re-design workplaces to focus on and facilitate aspects that can only be done in person.
Understanding what tasks can and cannot be done remotely also allows employees to divide their time between working from home and the office more effectively. Soon enough, you too could be waking up each morning and asking yourself “where do I feel like working from today?”
