The work from home backlash is in full swing. In what seemed like an oxymoron brought to life, the video conferencing company Zoom has asked employees to return to the office. Amazon is reportedly tracking employees to make sure they are at their desks.
The two companies are just the latest to sour on work from home (WFH), but does this mean the impending end of WFH as we know it?
Not according to Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economics professor and a longtime researcher of working from home. For workers who can do at least part of their job from home, WFH is here to stay and is being reinforced by some major changes in the work landscape.
For one, the workplace has been redefined by the pandemic. Nearly half of all employees in the US are working from home for at least some of the work week. Frontline workers, including those who work in retail, food services, cleaning, security or other jobs that are difficult to do remotely, are all working in person. But for the most part, everyone who can work from home is doing so at least some of the time.
This is a huge shift. In a working paper released last month, Bloom and his co-authors found that before the pandemic, people were working about 5% of their workdays from home. Now, it’s at least 25% of work days.
“That is massive because it was doubling about every 15 years before the pandemic. So effectively, you have 40 years of growth in the space of about two years,” Bloom said. “Almost half a century’s growth of working from home.”
The pandemic coincided with the widespread adoption of two technologies – cloud storage and video conferencing platforms – that make working from home much easier. Given how much work can be done from home with these technologies, “going to the office five days a week before the pandemic, that was clearly a mistake”, he said.
“We could have shifted to what we were doing in 2020 in 2015. We probably couldn’t have done it in 2010,” he added.
For many Americans who work desk jobs, returning to the office five days a week will stay a thing of the past. Most companies still only require employees to come in two or three days a week, typically Tuesday through Thursday, with Monday and Fridays being common WFH days. Such hybrid policies work well for both employers and workers. It does not affect productivity, and it keeps employees happy, helping companies with recruitment and retention. Flexibility to work from home has the same value as an 8% pay increase for workers, according to Bloom’s research.
There are still some people who want to work either fully in person or fully remote (about 20% and 30%, respectively, of people Bloom has surveyed), but a hybrid policy seems to be the best compromise, a largely “win-win” situation for employer and employee. So it makes sense to Bloom that Zoom and other tech companies that once declared indefinite WFH are bringing employees back to the office, at least part-time. Especially when they have huge, expensive offices they do not want sitting empty. Still, many of these employees have pushed back about going into the office at all.
With lots of background noise and awkward water cooler talk, many workers are still getting used to working in an office after years of WFH. This too is likely to reinforce the workplace shift. The function of an office is different under a hybrid WFH policy – said Bloom – as the office is no longer a quiet place for employees to work.
“The future of the office is you go in for only two or three days a week, and when you’re in, it’s about meetings, trainings, presentations, lunches, events and connecting,” Bloom said. “The office is for socializing. At home is for one-on-one Zooms and analyzing and thinking.”
“If you are working for hours quietly in the office, or trying to, you’re in the office too much,” he said, adding that it might make sense for people who have issues with self-discipline when working from home – but for others, the office is not the best place to be for head-down work.
As hybrid work becomes the norm, Bloom expects people will factor in how many days they have to be in the office when picking a place to work. Younger workers without kids may want more days in the office, while those with kids who live further out in the suburbs may want less. “By 2025, one of the huge choices when you sign up for a company will be what their work from home policies are, and you’re choosing to fit what you like,” he said.
And as technology improves – better laptop cameras and software – Bloom expects WFH will continue to grow, though at a slower pace than it has over the last few years. Much of the transition will come from currently in-person jobs that will turn remote, like drive-through employees and office secretaries.
An early advocate for working from home – he gave a Ted talk making the case for it in 2015 – Bloom recalls the days when people were skeptical about the practice.
“I have been working on work from home [research] for 20 years, and it was so hard to get anyone interested in it. Their eyelids would start to sag down when I talked about it. Pre-pandemic, I tried to organize a remote work conference – there weren’t even enough papers, I gave up,” Bloom said. “And then suddenly the pandemic happened, and amazingly, this thing has worked even better than I hoped for.”
