The great debate over returning to office life
Lesson summary
Hi there, thanks for joining us for Plain English lesson number 359. I’m Jeff. JR is the producer. And the full and complete lesson is available online at PlainEnglish.com/359.
Coming up today: How’s remote work treating you? If you’ve been working from home since about this time last year, you might be wondering how much longer it will last. And that depends on the type of work you do and the philosophy of your company. We’ll explore some of those issues today. The expression we review is “hand in hand.” And JR has a song of the week. Let’s get going.
The great remote work debate of 2021
Netflix and big banks are doing it one way. Salesforce, Dropbox, and Spotify are doing it another way. Microsoft, many large corporations, law firms, consulting and accounting firms, are splitting the difference. I’m talking about the great debate on how, or even if, employees should return to an office environment.
Let’s start by acknowledging that it’s not effective to do many jobs remotely. You can’t stock a supermarket shelf, grow crops, perform a laboratory experiment, or repair a car from home. But many jobs in today’s economy require a computer, internet access, and the ability to have video calls. The pandemic taught us that it’s possible for many people to do these jobs from home, even if they had traditionally been required to report to an office.
Every economy is different, but about 40 percent of the American workforce was able to work from home during the worst parts of the pandemic. Not everyone was equally productive at home. School teachers, for example, worked from home out of necessity , but that is not likely to be an option in the future.
But for tens of millions of workers around the world, remote work is a real possibility for the post-Covid world. The only question now is where the world’s bosses are on board .
There are compelling reasons to move to a remote model. The first is employee satisfaction and retention. Many workers found they preferred the flexibility of working at home. Bosses found that, contrary to their worst fears, employees maintained—or even increased—their productivity when working remotely. In addition, a remote model allows a company to hire from a much wider geographic area than simply the city or cities in which they operate. And workers farther from the most expensive cities are more affordable, too.
Another benefit is cost savings on facilities. Many companies that maintain expensive blocks of office space in the biggest cities are looking to downsize. Office leases tend to be five to ten years in the biggest cities around the world. Companies with large office footprints are putting space up for sublease, hoping to make a little money off space they don’t need. But look for large companies to take less office space in expensive cities in the future as all or part of their workforces go remote.
Not surprisingly, technology companies are leading the way in the all-remote model. Dropbox, Spotify, Twitter, and the payments company Square have all said they are remote-first. Some non-tech companies are going that way, too. Consumer banks and insurance companies are moving their call center operations to a remote-first model.
Those are the benefits, but not everyone is a believer. Large banks like JP Morgan and Wells Fargo believe they need their people to be in an office setting. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, says that all remote work can slow down decision making, harm team morale, make it difficult to onboard new employees, and inhibit creativity. Reid Hastings, the boss of Netflix, says he doesn’t see any advantages to an all-remote work arrangement.
Especially in knowledge-based industries, it’s not enough to have a lot of smart people—the smart people need to work together. And working together doesn’t just mean having meetings. It means generating ideas together, challenging assumptions, exploring options, trying and failing, and working side by side to create innovative products and services. That’s difficult to do in a remote environment.
But what about the success of remote work to date ? Some company bosses worry that the great remote work experiment of 2020 was successful because employees already had solid relationships to build on. But would you have been as effective remotely in 2020 if you had never met or worked together with your coworkers? How can younger workers get the training and mentorship they need if they can never interact in person?
That brings us to what many companies are calling the “hybrid model.” Under the hybrid model, remote work and office work go hand-in-hand . For many of us—and of course I’m generalizing—but for many of us, our days are a mixture of working together and working independently. When we’re working independently, some of us can be more effective at home. But when we need to work with our teams, being together in person is still valuable.
The hybrid model will feature a mixture of remote work and in-person work. For some people, it might mean a few scheduled days a week at home. For others, it might be a more spontaneous and flexible: come to the office when you have a team meeting or need to use common space, stay home on other days if you prefer.
This is probably a safer option. A hybrid model can let employees live farther from a city center if they don’t have to commute every day. Employees could even live in other cities or regions if they’re willing to travel in for meetings every so often. The office, under this model, won’t be a place to spend your full day doing all your work. Instead, it will be a tool in your toolkit for doing effective work. Teams will use it how and when they need to.
A changing workplace
I expect this is the model that many companies will take toward their employees who mostly do computer work and who need to work together in teams. I’ve mentioned before that my day job is with a large professional services firm, and I work in consulting. We have been able to do remote work very well, and I love working remotely. But it’s not the same. And we have definitely relied on our relationships, which we built in person, to get us through this year. I can’t see us all going back to a five-day-a-week in the office routine. But all remote wouldn’t work either.
If the hybrid model is where many companies are going, then that will have implications for workplace design. Huge floors full of tables and computer monitors may not be the best design in the future. So we’ll explore that on a future lesson—maybe next week or the week after.
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