Will working remotely change how most people feel about it?

How to prepare your company for the impending remote work stress test — based on data

The remote work trend in the last few years has been reaching a fever pitch, but these days, the image of remote work is not a relaxed work-from-anywhere approach lauded by work abroad startups. Instead, the next few months may be gearing up to be a stress test on the possibilities and complexities of remote work as public spaces and offices are suddenly closed and business travel curtailed at home and abroad. The Wall Street Journal described the current public health concern as giving rise to “a massive experiment in telecommuting.”

Candidate responses to the job description language of remote work can teach us what employees care about when it comes to working away from the office. Since 2017, attitudes toward remote work are becoming more favorable, but recent data shows that the remote work perk is not about being away from the office, but always closer to something else. Language that focuses on distance, remote-ness or distributed teams performs significantly worse than work from home, a phrase that elevates the benefit of being closer to those you care for.

This language signal can also give us insight into how to make this massive telecommuting experiment less of a lonely experience for workers. As the conversation around remote work shifts from an optional perk to a temporary, restrictive reality, how can companies build virtual employee communities and to set themselves up for remote success?

Remote work still slows down hiring, but less than before

Last time Textio checked, writing about working remotely caused jobs to fill more slowly. In December, Textio looked at over a million jobs posted in 2019 to understand the impact of remote work.

Remote jobs overall are still relatively rare despite the media frenzy: out of all 2019 jobs sampled, only 3.5% had language that indicated that they were remote positions. In 2019, remote jobs still fill more slowly than non-remote ones, taking 3 days longer than the average job on the market. But that’s a whole day faster than the fate of the term in 2017.

Current public health concerns may have a forcing function on this existing trend. The remote work experiment under way now may accelerate favorable attitudes toward remote work. Companies that already have remote or flexible work capabilities may be better prepared for such a future.

So what does it mean if remote work is still slowing down hiring? Textio drilled further down to see the effect of more specific remote work related language, distributed teams and work from home, to see what the outcomes would be. The results reveal worker anxiety around distance and alienation, and that choice and proximity are the true benefits of remote work.

Remote or not, distributed teams slow down hiring

Mentioning distributed teams in your job descriptions slows down time to fill for both remote jobs and non-remote jobs. For non-remote jobs, the idea of having or working within a distributed team slows down time to fill by 7 days. For remote jobs, the impact is even greater—slowing down time to fill by 11 days!

In fact, non-remote jobs with this language fill 4 days slower than an average remote job. These results indicate language that implies frequent video conference with their colleagues across time zones is a negative experience for both remote and non-remote workers.

If phrases that imply distance from coworkers like distributed team slow down hiring (independent of remote status), what happens with phrases like work from home that instead celebrate a closeness to something outside of work?

Time to fill gets much, much better.

A work from home option fills jobs faster

Most benefits analyses put remote work and working from home in the same breath, but obvious differences show up when you consider how each of these terms impact the speed of hiring.

Unlike remote work, work from home fills jobs faster. Since 2017, it fills a full 9 days faster, the phrase went from 3 days slower than average to 6 days faster than average — a huge jump! While the current crisis may not change full-time work from home conditions, it may get companies and managers to be more willing to allow employees to work from home more regularly, for better hiring, productivity, and health.

The benefit of working from home has a positive impact on non-remote jobs, specifically. On average non-remote jobs that advertise the benefit of working from home in their job descriptions fill in 36 days compared to the overall non-remote average of 42 days. For jobs that are already remote, advertising work from home actually increases time to fill by 1 day, 46 days compared to the overall remote job average of 45 days. Still better than distributed teams in any case.

The stark contrast in the outcomes of remote work and distributed team language compared to work from home language may come down to their implications of choice and proximity. Are you forced to be far away from your team, or can you choose to be with friends or family?

Words aren’t just for words sake: language provides valuable signal into much broader cultural changes, nuances in work expectations, and what modern workers actually value.

Building a remote community at Textio

Here at Textio, our own remote work experiment is under way:

On our company Slack, my coworkers are proactively looking for ways to make this temporary remote default a more positive, less isolating experience. A flash Slack channel has been rolled out to discuss platforms for more collaborative writing or even virtual whiteboarding.

In other Slack channels, Textios are finding ways to make working from home feel less lonely. They share photos of homemade lunches or ecstatic pets, and even set up an ongoing conference call so the spontaneous chatter can make working from home feel more like a normal work day:

As technology and knowledge workers who sit at computers and type and talk, it is easier for us to work remotely than most. But as the language data shows, the need for a companionship and proximity remains even when workers log in from home.

Public health crisis or not, there’s no time like the present to stress test your organization’s remote work capabilities. That way, you’ll feel prepared for a more remote-friendly future, and be a good partner to your community now.