their employees like it. Companies also have experienced clear positive returns, argues Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economic professor who started studying remote and hybrid work arrangements years before the pandemic. In addition to the aforementioned possibility to reduce payroll costs by up to 7 or 8 percent, quit rates also are down, said Bloom. “In the randomized control trial we are just wrapping up, quit rates are down 35 percent,” he recently told Time magazine. Productivity, meanwhile, has been driven up by 3 to 4 percent, according to several studies. These gains, said Bloom, largely are due to the fact that workers use a significant amount of their time saved from not commuting for work-related duties – to the tune of about 30 minutes out of the total 70 minutes recouped on average each day from the lack of a commute. The other 40 minutes is spent doing personal things. Extremely high-accuracy data on minute-by-minute activity also showed that well-organized athome workers are more efficient, taking less and shorter breaks, shorter lunches and working quicker, said Bloom. Lastly are the savings in real estate costs, which initially were considered to be the biggest potential benefit but are just starting to materialize. Commercial vacancy rates in Manhattan ticked up 3.2 percent year over year, show second quarter numbers from the Partnership of New York City, while 22 percent of organizations surveyed this summer by PwC expressed plans to decrease investment in real estate. That was a significantly higher decrease than any other investment area presented. Hybrid Here to Stay Similar to what many remote work proponents expected during the early days of lockdowns and mandates, the percentage of workforces operating fully remote, five days a week, has settled into levels that are about two to three times the levels seen before 2020. What was less expected was the impact of hybrid working, which has emerged as the dominant arrangement among those capable of remote work. It’s unlikely that will change anytime soon. Hybrid work has steadily increased throughout 2022, from 42 percent of remote capable workers in February to 49 percent in June, show Gallup surveys, and the firm expects it to increase to 55 percent of remote-capable workers by the end of 2022 and beyond. Findings from WFH Research largely concur. Between February and June of this year, the percent of RCEs who worked full-time remote and full-time on-site both declined slightly. The chunk of hybrid workers jumped from 39 percent to 50 percent. In other words, hybrid workforces are here to stay. So, moving forward, it’s less and less about when organizations will force RCEs back into the office and more about navigating the next chapter and developing long-term remote work strategies that accommodate the needs of both employees and employers. It won’t necessarily be easy. Even when hybrid is the preferred arrangement for both RCEs and their employers, figuring out how many and which days could be tricky. After all, the primary reason employees value hybrid work is the flexibility it provides. For a company to say, “workers can work from home these days and must come into the office those days” detracts from that flexibility. On the other hand, it’s inefficient for workers to come into the office on the two or three random days of their choosing. “The biggest mistake is ceding full control over choice of days to employees,” Bloom recently told Time. Except for the most introverted, the majority of hybrid workers want to see and interact with their coworkers when they come into the office, Bloom’s research suggests. It can be frustrating for them to come on-site only to be forced to socially distance or end up on another Zoom call. “[I]f you let people fully choose, you’ll find that in a team of 10 people, you never get a day when everyone’s there,” Bloom continued. “So, every single meeting that the full team has, has to have people on Zoom. It’s uncomfortable. It leaves people out. There’s cliques that form. It’s frustrating. The meeting ends, people on Zoom disconnect and of course the meeting continues in the corridor.” Bloom recommended in-office days be coordinated at a team level, maximizing the opportunities for teams to come in on the same day. “I think it’s going to settle down into typically team by team when it makes sense to come in together,” he said. Another common mistake is making decisions on the number of in-office days based on justifying sunk costs in office space. Ann Mukherjee, chairman and CEO of Pernod Ricard North America, suggested in a recent LinkedIn post that employees come to the office “with purpose,” when their presence is beneficial and always mindful of when it makes more sense to work from home. Clearly, there still are logistics to figure out and agreements that must be made surrounding hybrid work arrangements. And the sooner companies turn their attention from “when” they should mandate a return to the office to “how” they should move forward in the new work reality, the sooner best practices will be realized. J 29 REMOTE WORK SOLUTIONS rwsmagazine.com
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