Remote-Work Experts Are in Demand as Return to Office Begins Anew

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- When Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom did his first study on working remotely in 2004, the field was an academic backwater. Less than 5% of all full workdays took place at home, making the subject a low priority for business schools and corporate leaders. Then came Covid-19. “In March 2020,” Bloom says, “the thing just took off.” Two years into the pandemic, Bloom still gets two or three calls a day from corporations, hospitals, schools, government agencies, and universities looking for guidance.

As the omicron variant recedes, leaders everywhere are grappling with whether—or how much—to make working from home a feature of their organizations. Should they go fully remote and save on real estate but take a potential hit to productivity or culture? Or demand that workers return full time to encourage teamwork but risk losing talent to more flexible competitors? For many, the hybrid model is most compelling but comes with its own vexing trade-offs.

The professors who study working from home are busy consulting with executives, collecting data, running research projects, writing books, and feeding the discoveries into their MBA courses, which means students are getting the latest findings. “My inbox is exploding daily,” says Tsedal Neeley, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of the forthcoming Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere. “Even more now because people are realizing remote work is not going away and they are concerned about doing it the right way.”

At least 70% of knowledge industry workers say they want a hybrid workplace, Neeley says, citing employee survey data, so offering such arrangements is becoming crucial to attracting and retaining talent as the trend of widespread job-quitting known as the “Great Resignation” continues. And fully 20% of staff are what she calls “remote natives” who’ve joined companies during the pandemic and expect to continue working from home, even once Covid-19 becomes endemic. That leads to a host of complex challenges: Should employees get to choose which days they come to the office? How do you coordinate schedules so the right people are in the same room at the same time? How do you ensure that managers don’t play favorites when scheduling or discriminate against remote workers when it comes to promotions and pay raises?

Lynda Gratton, professor of management practice at London Business School, says she wrote Redesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organisation and Make Hybrid Work for Everyone to help companies tackle these questions, rushing to complete it in less than a year. Gratton’s cover story in the May-June 2021 issue of Harvard Business Review caused “a number of publishers to come to me and say, ‘Look, you need to say more about how to do this,’” she says. Her book lays out a four-step process to help companies understand the challenges they are facing, imagine new approaches, test those ideas, and execute them. “In my 30 years at London Business School, I’ve never seen such an astounding opportunity to reimagine work,” Gratton says. “And it may never come through again.”

Academics such as Gratton who say we’re experiencing, as she puts it, “the greatest global shift in work for a century” appear to be more in demand than skeptics like Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. In articles, talks, and his book, The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face, Cappelli argues that while it’s clear most employees want to work remotely, it may not always be in a company’s best interest to let them. That’s a tension corporate America has yet to resolve.

Last year, tech companies such as Twitter Inc. and Facebook—now called Meta Platforms Inc.—got big headlines by saying many employees can work remotely on a permanent basis. But banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. still plan to haul most of their people back to the office as soon as possible. Salesforce.com Inc., meanwhile, talked about letting employees go fully remote a year ago but seemed to backtrack in November with an article on its website titled “Why Salesforce Is Bringing People Back Together In-Person, Now,” by Brent Hyder, the company’s president and chief people officer. Which way are most companies leaning today? “I think most are just ducking the issue and hoping it goes away,” Cappelli says.

With such a wait-and-see approach, Cappelli’s phone isn’t exactly ringing off the hook. “I’m ‘on the one hand and on the other,’ which is not great for consulting,” he says in an email exchange. “People who want to do something want consultants who will tell them that it is a good idea,” he says. “I had a cover story in HBR last fall and heard nothing from it except from academics.”

Among the experts, one of the biggest debates about remote work concerns productivity. Most employees say they’re more productive working from home, surveys show, but employers are divided on the question. In a 2015 study, Bloom showed that workers at a Chinese call center were 13% more productive when working from home, but Cappelli cautions that it’s not a typical office environment: “In the U.S., I haven’t seen any consistent evidence that productivity is up or down.”

Such discussions are finding their way into classrooms. “Remote work is just part of everything we teach now,” says Gratton. Her Future of Work program at London Business School recently invited the head of technology at an Indian consulting firm to speak about how tech is affecting the workplace, and the classes are conducted—appropriately enough—partly in-person and partly virtual. “I don’t think any of the business schools know where this is going to lead,” she says, “but there’s a great deal of experimentation going on.”

Over the next few years, as the global experiment with remote work continues, academics will be able to pivot from today’s surveys, theories, and predictions to analyzing real-world data. That’s an exciting prospect for Bloom, who’s eager to find out whether what he calls “choice or coordination” will prevail: Will employees get to choose which days they come in each week? Or will the top brass decide that people can work from home Monday and Friday, for example, but must come in on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday? “My prediction is the coordination battle will win out because when people come to the office they want to be with their colleagues,” he says.

While these questions are being fiercely debated, Bloom is convinced that the argument between in-person, all-remote, and hybrid has been settled. After talking to more than 300 companies over the past two years, he has reached some conclusions that confirm his decision to focus his energy on such a hot topic with enormous implications for the world economy. Allowing working from home not only increases productivity slightly, he contends, but markedly improves employee retention rates, giving organizations all the motivation they need to let employees log on. “That battle is over,” he says. “Hybrid won.”

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