Is Remote Work Shortchanging Our Younger Team Members?

One of the big outcomes of the last several months under the pandemic is that we have learned that work-from-anywhere models really do work.

It’s always been a fallacy that workers are less productive from home—that they somehow are too sucked into watching The View, or too busy tending to the tomatoes in the garden, to put the proper amount of energy into their jobs. In reality, workers are likely more productive at home. For one, they don’t spend 45 minutes or more each way traveling to their jobs, time that they often put back into their work as well as into tending to home life. Second, they are more in control of the workday, removed from inter-office gossip sessions and watercooler gab fests.

When working from home, team members are also more likely to work outside the constraints of the 9-to-5 accepted work hours. They might take 20 minutes to drop the kids at soccer practice, but will still be checking on emails at 7:00 pm when they get back to ensure that things are running smoothly.

For working parents, those taking care of elderly parents, or those who work far from the office, remote work has been a godsend. And the data shows there has been very little decline in productivity during the forced experiment the pandemic has necessitated.

In fact, several studies support the idea that work-from-home models actually make workers more productive. A study conducted by Stanford University professors of 16,000 workers over 9 months found that working from home increased productivity by 13 percent. According to the study’s authors, this increase in performance was attributed to a quieter, more convenient working environment and to employees working more minutes per shift because of fewer breaks and sick days. Another survey, conducted by ConnectSolutions, found that 77 percent of those who work remotely at least a few times per month showed increased productivity, with 30 percent doing more work in less time and 24 percent doing more work in the same period of time.

Hold on a Second
Based on these numbers, companies should just wiggle out of their leases, close the office, and ask everyone to telecommute, right? Hold on. What about the downsides to working remotely? Certainly, we lose something without the unplanned interactions that happen in a dedicated office space. After all, those impromptu “aha!” moments that happen between co-workers chatting across open-plan desks are all office managers have talked about for the last ten years, as they jettisoned cubicles and kicked workers out their cozy offices in favor of open spaces.

What about the ideas that come out of employees from different functions having lunch together, or the bonds that those employees build with each other during office hours that facilitate communication, interaction, and consensus building? Those interactions just can’t be replaced by zoom calls, even the forced Thursday evening “happy hour” zooms where team members are expected to sit in front of a screen and chat with co-workers while they show off their adult beverage of choice and answer trivia questions.

As much as many of us have loved working in sweat pants and taking work calls out on the back deck, there’s much lost when we forego face-to-face interactions on the job. We simply can’t forget about the benefits of in-person team building, communication, and relationship building. I’d argue that in-person work lives are actually critical, particularly to younger team members.

So, the question arises: Are we shortchanging our newer entrants into the workforce and young staffers with this newfound love of remote work? I’d say, emphatically, yes we are!

Friends and Mentors
When I started my career as a business writer and editor working for a finance magazine, it was the friendships I built that were most valuable. Like many young workers, I spent a lot of time at the office and in many ways, my life centered around my job and getting my career off the ground. I can’t imagine what that would be like if each day it was done from the confines of my, at the time, tiny apartment.

I have, as most of us do, life-long friendships I have developed among former co-workers. These are the people that were at my wedding, and that still come to my house to sit around my fire pit. What do we talk about, more often than not? Work. That camaraderie doesn’t happen when we are all working at home. Work becomes less about the people you are working with and more about the tasks at hand.

So sure, we love the commute from the bedroom to the basement office or the kitchen-table work spot, and we love heading over to the field to catch our sons’ or daughters’ afternoon baseball and softball games. But we need to think about what we are losing too: those heart-to-heart sessions in a closed-door office about “getting after it” … that round of drinks after a hard day’s work where we help each other navigate difficult work situations or exchange ideas on how to deal with a particularly annoying boss.

And then there are the mentorships that are much harder to foster in a remote setting. I really think the time I spent in a chair tucked just inside the door across from a seasoned editor, first talking about the article I was working on, next navigating the overall process and getting into my development in the organization, and then, yes, even tangenting into the things I was dealing with in my life as a whole, were invaluable. I couldn’t have had those growth experiences on zoom. The little… “here’s how I ‘d play it” moments that add up to real mentorship and development just don’t happen remotely. I probably learned as much from those folks in such sessions about excelling in my life as I did about accomplishing the work-related goal.

Think back to those times as a young internal auditor learning the ropes. When you had a particularly hard issue you were working through, what did you do? You sought out your most trusted senior auditor—probably an informal mentor—knocked on his or her door, sat down across from their desk, and worked through what you should do. Would you do that remotely? You’d probably just suffer in silence and go through it alone.

Informal Networks
There isn’t a manger worth his or her salt that doesn’t say productive work is about the relationships we create among our fellow staffers. If that wasn’t true, workforce team-building wouldn’t be a billion-dollar industry.

In any company there is a top-down organizational chart. Despite the newfangled consultant speak about not having titles and working as peers on a team, most employees still have bosses and those bosses have bosses. And we all know too, that there is an informal network at any organization of influencers and influecees that is as or more important than the formal hierarchy. I’d venture that those informal networks are probably more influential than the formal org chart that most companies have. And where do those relationships take hold? Over a drink during after-hours sessions. During lunch outings of like-minded individuals who are naturally drawn to each other’s interests. The open spaces advocates aren’t wrong—informal human interactions is where the magic happens, not in scheduled meetings and certainly not when those meetings happen on 13-inch screens.

So What’s the Solution?
Clearly, we’ve become comfortable with work-from-home models. And I don’t think they are going away anytime soon, nor should they. But some companies are considering closing their offices forever and moving to a fully remote workforce. That would be a mistake. I think hybrid models are the best. When it’s safe, we need to reopen the office and encourage—maybe even incentivize—employees to come back into the workplace on a regular basis. Not every day, but a more balanced approach to onsite and at-home work.

Employees have shown that they can manage their workday outside of the office, factory, or jobsite, and can be counted on to be productive. So it makes sense to allow workers some additional freedom on deciding where they want to work. But we also can’t quit on the idea of working shoulder to shoulder, face to face. For all the reasons I mentioned above, I think it would hinder the development of those who are early in their careers and fray the connections we have to our employers and our jobs, not to mention the harm to innovation and informal development.

Work and home life has always been about balance. It’s only recently that we have realized that grinding away for long hours in a workplace away from family and home isn’t healthy or productive over the long term. It’s true too, though, that the pendulum swinging too far the other way and moving to a work environment where those workers never interact in person is an equally bad idea.

The next great innovation at your company isn’t likely coming from the forced zoom call you just planned. It’s going to come from the after-hours conversation over a beer, the pair that decided to talk about it over a sandwich at the corner deli, or the discussion across the desk that ends in, “I got it!” 

Joseph McCafferty is editor & publisher at Internal Audit 360°