One of the lasting impacts of the global pandemic has been a long-term shift to remote work, particularly among knowledge workers like those in the technology field. After months of stable and occasionally increased productivity with workers away from the office, many of the old productivity-related arguments against remote work have been rendered moot.
However, many companies are now mandating returns to the office, including the tech industry, which was an early proponent of remote working arrangements. The rationales offered for this shift vary from the somewhat mercurial desire for “ad-hoc-innovation”-driven-by-change meetings in the office to more quantifiable concerns about onboarding new team members.
While most companies were forced into remote work arrangements in the early days of the pandemic, we now have a chance to take a more thoughtful approach to remote working versus banket policies or following what the large companies are doing. It might even seem tempting to regain control over employees that held the upper hand during the post-pandemic boom in salaries and benefits in a cooling job market.
Finding Balance
Arbitrary biases are often easier to implement than thoughtful balance. Externalities forced a bias toward remote work, and changing economic circumstances—and perhaps a desire for more control over employees—are causing some companies to employ equally one-sided return-to-work policies. Neither remote work, in-person work, nor hybrid work policies are inherently perfect across all situations and companies, and assumptions that blanket policies or one-size-fits-all approaches will be effective are short-sighted.
There may also be unstated factors that should be irrelevant to workforce decisions that nonetheless influence these decisions. For example, a significant existing investment in real estate and office space might create unstated pressure to use that space, despite this argument being a variation on the sunk cost fallacy.
Clearly, there are certainly areas where in-person collaboration is generally easier, if not superior, just as there are areas where remote work is superior. For example, most organizations struggled to onboard new employees remotely, amplifying the attrition that usually accompanies a poor onboarding experience.
Conversely, few workers find the open-seating plans in most offices a particularly effective place to get focused work done as they contend with chatting colleagues or myriad other distractions. Few workers miss the time and money required to commute to an office, and the quality of life and even environmental benefits of reducing commuting are obvious.
While these natural advantages exist, in both cases, organizations can be successful regardless of the physical working location. For example, fully remote companies like BairesDev have invested significant resources into their onboarding process, both internally and externally, when beginning work with a new customer. This ability creates a competitive advantage both for the company and its customers, who can quickly and successfully collaborate with remote talent.
For organizations struggling with these decisions, it’s important to remember that there’s no perfect policy that will universally benefit every worker. Even individuals in similar positions, career levels, or roles might thrive in very different working environments.
Avoid Punitive Policies
Perhaps the biggest challenge of many of the blanket “return-to-office” policies is the perception that these are driven by some form of vengeance by cruel corporate overlords. During recent hiring booms, workers had a short spate of unprecedented negotiating power, demanding pay increases and perks. As hiring demand has stabilized, so too have worker-focused benefits, among them generous remote work policies.
Whether true or not, blanket policies create the appearance that bosses care little for employee performance, let alone well-being, and are more focused on the direct control that comes from having people in the same physical space.
Bosses certainly have the right to mandate policies and working conditions, just as employees have the right to leave a company they view as unreasonable; however, creating flexible policies, or at least attempting to understand which conditions best foster what types of work, can go a long way in keeping workers productive and happy.
Multiple studies indicate that happier workers are more productive workers, creating a wonderful scenario where doing the right thing from a human perspective also results in beneficial outcomes for the organization. Seeking remote work policies that are solely focused on productivity and have no concern for worker satisfaction might backfire, with any productivity gains being erased by malcontent workers.
Use Experimentation to Guide Policy
In the remote work debate, too many of the motivators are driven by hunches and anecdotes. Proponents of remote work cite “improved well-being,” while advocates of office work frequently cite “improved collaboration,” neither side bringing any concrete data to support their claims.
We do have increased data about productivity, with COVID forcing one of the largest experiments in modern history around remote working. Now that much of the passion around this stressful period has calmed, it’s worth analyzing data from your organization in conjunction with the population-level data being published by many academic and government entities.
Where there are unclear indicators, consider running experiments to guide your remote work policy. Experiments could be as simple as identifying teams or vendor organizations that currently work 100% remotely or 100% in-office and gathering quantitative data or using tools like surveys or simple interviews to gather qualitative data. For more complex questions, seek individuals or teams that are willing to volunteer to test a working arrangement and assess some metric to monitor its effectiveness.
Not only does experimentation help gather real results, but also these results are taken directly from your organization, reducing concerns that a policy is being applied without regard for the nuances of your team or company. Furthermore, you can use the feedback from your experiments to not only guide policy creation but also to ease any complex transitions. Individuals who participated in the experiments can share their experiences and knowledge gained during the experiment to help coworkers understand the motivation and application of policy changes.
If you find these experiments indicate that innovation is truly increased through in-office days, you’ll have direct data to back up this claim and perhaps even some tools and tricks to foster this collaboration. You might have a weekly “innovation day,” or use in-office days for formal cross-team collaboration rather than mandatory office days that result in dozens of people shouting into Teams or Zoom calls from an uncomfortable bullpen rather than their home office.
Do as You Say
As a leader, it behooves you to set an example for your team, whether you’re the CEO or a first-year manager leading a junior team. If you passionately believe that remote or in-office work is the right approach for your team, avoid showing the opposite behavior. Leaders who mandate in-office days and then work from their home office are likely to undermine even the most well-intentioned and informed policies.
If you find that the policies you have helped create as a leader don’t allow you to be at your best, perhaps the policy requires a revisit.
While remote work is not without its faults, ranging from challenges onboarding entry-level or new hires to free-form collaboration, it’s unreasonable for software development companies to abandon it as an effective way for employees to be productive and also have more balance in their lives. Whether these companies are feeling pressure to mirror industry peers or worried about innovation, being thoughtful and using informed experimentation to set balanced policies can allow them the best of both worlds.
