What we know about the effects of remote work

When workplaces are reshaped by a radical shift — the influx of women into the workforce, the rise of computing — it usually takes time for economists, psychologists, sociologists and other scholars to collect data on the effects of that shift.

So, when employers suddenly moved to adopting remote work during the pandemic, with the share of American employees working exclusively from home rising to 54% in 2020 from 4% in 2019, researchers jumped in to study the effects of remote work on employees and the economy nationwide. the world. big. Now the early results are starting to appear. They reveal a mixed economic picture, with many workers and businesses making real gains under remote work arrangements, and many also having to bear costs.

Broadly speaking, the picture that emerges is the following: brick-and-mortar companies suffer In the middle of urban cities, where many people have stopped moving around. However, some types of businesses, such as grocery stores, have been able to gain a foothold in the suburbs. At the same time, rents rose in affordable markets, as remote and mixed workers left expensive urban housing.

Working mothers in general have benefited from the flexibility of being able to work remotely — and more of them have been able to remain in the workforce. But it seems that remote work also brings some severe penalties when it comes to career advancement for women.

Studies of productivity in work-from-home arrangements are all over the map. Some research papers have linked remote work to decreased productivity 8 and 19 percent, while others find drops of 4 percent For individual workers. Still other research has found productivity gains 13 percent or so 24 percent.

The new set of studies shows that productivity varies between remote workplaces depending on the employer’s approach — how well managers are trained to support remote employees and whether those employees have Opportunities to work remotely. Casual encounters.

Researchers tend to agree that many workplaces have settled into a new hybrid phase, with offices coming to an end half Their pre-pandemic occupancy levels are around a a fourth Many American workdays are done from home. This suggests that some effects of remote work may persist.

as mr. “This is the new normal,” Bloom said.

Urban city centres

Images of urban downtowns during coronavirus lockdowns are eerie, with silent streets, withered offices and dusty cubicles.

When about 50 million Americans began working from home in the early days of the pandemic, brick-and-mortar retail stores clustered in urban downtowns took a hit. The number of downtown clothing stores fell 8 percent from late 2019 to late 2021, according to a study using transaction data from 70 million Chase Bank Client. General merchandise stores downtown — including anything from department stores to florists to booksellers — were down 7 percent, and grocery stores were down 2 percent.

Some of these companies followed remote workers to the suburbs. During that period, there was an approximately 3% increase in the number of grocery stores in the suburbs, slightly outpacing the decline in urban areas., Especially in the suburbs Where levels of remote work were high.

In the coming years, the move of retailers from downtown to the suburbs is likely to be difficult for low-income workers who cannot afford to live in these areas, some of which are affluent, where retailers may be hiring. This problem is already visible in the Gulf region. Take the case of Maria Cerros Mercado, who worked at a salad shop in San Francisco, a 20-minute walk from her home. She now commutes by Uber from the city to the store’s new location in Mill Valley, an affluent suburb in Marin County.

But some economists argue that many Americans will benefit from the effects of remote work because rents in rural and suburban areas are likely to begin to decline. A modern one Stady I used data from Postal Service address changes, Zillow rent changes and the construction industry to project the potential rent impacts of remote and hybrid work. The pandemic has seen rents temporarily spike in previously affordable areas — such as Dallas; Manchester, New Hampshire; And upstate New York — because many remote workers left more expensive housing markets once they stopped commuting. As the construction sector meets this new demand, economists say, rents will fall again.

“If you zoom out, one of the big problems in housing in the last 10 years has been affordability,” said Jack Lieberson, an economist at the University of California, Irvine. “This may help simply because people can live in more affordable areas, where we can afford construction.”

There could be an unexpected reward: a Stady In Britain, it showed that burglaries decreased by about 30 percent in areas with high rates of working from home, which researchers attributed to the increase in “street eyes” in those neighborhoods.

working woman

For decades, a working mother’s work schedule has seemed like an unbalanced equation. Many women are expected to remain at their desks until 5 p.m., at the same time when picking up from school. They’re supposed to be in the office, and also available at home when their kids cough and are turned away from daycare. (Amble Data This association appears to tend to constrain mothers more than fathers.)

Remote work alleviates this dilemma a bit, according to research Using pre-pandemic data from economists at the University of Virginia and the University of Southern California. In fields such as computer science, marketing and communications, which welcomed remote work from 2009 to 2019, employment rates for working mothers increased. There was an approximately one-to-one correlation: when telecommuting rose by 2%, there was a 2% increase in mothers’ employment. However, employment rates for working mothers still lag behind those of childless women, although remote work has narrowed this gap.

Claudia Goldin, who this week was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, has shown that women tend to look for more flexible jobs so they can take care of household responsibilities. This has contributed to the gender pay gap.

While some working women, especially mothers, may benefit from staying away, women tend to see greater penalties when they do. in Stady For engineers at one Fortune 500 company, remote work had a negative impact on the amount of feedback junior employees got about their work — and the penalties were more pronounced for women.

“Proximity has a greater impact on women’s comfort when asking follow-up questions,” said Emma Harrington, an economist at the University of Virginia, who conducted the study on the impact of remote work on responses, as well as the study on working mothers. The power of participation.

Men seemed more comfortable asking clarifying questions even if they were not physically near their colleagues.

Women may also face more undue questions about their productivity, wherever they work. in A series of studies With more than 2,000 participants, researchers in Wisconsin and Canada found that men and women were more likely to suspect women than men of shirking work. Some of these employees worked from home and others did not.

When study participants saw from video footage that an employee was not at her desk, it was attributed to something non-work-related 47% of the time; For men, this was due to non-work-related activities in only 34 percent of cases.

The woman added, “It is possible that the study participants are responding to the reality of a world in which women sometimes bear more domestic responsibilities.” Harrington, who was not involved in this study.

Whether work-from-anywhere setups hurt or help productivity has been a pressing question for executives.

Early evidence came in A 2013 paper from mr. Bloom and others reported on a call center in China that allowed some employees to stay away from home for 9 months, and found that productivity rose by 13 percent. Less than 10% of this boost was attributable to people taking fewer breaks, and 4% to them making more calls per minute because their work environments were quieter.

But during the pandemic, when millions of workers suddenly switched to remote work, the effects were more complex. The arrangements were not planned in advance. The move to remote work was not voluntary. Therefore the results were more scattered.

a Stady The Asian IT company’s remote employees during the pandemic showed an 8 to 19 percent drop in productivity. Another, looking at an American call center, found that when employees go far away, they do 12 percent Fewer calls. On the other hand, A. said: Stady Of the productivity of economic researchers in the United States during the pandemic, they found an increase of approximately 24% in their output.

These mixed results leave some questions unanswered. “How can you get more than 30 points between them?” Mr. – asked Bloom. “It’s all about how you manage workers. If you set up fully remote work with good management and incentives, and people meet in person, it can work. What doesn’t seem to work is sending people home without ever meeting face-to-face.”