SPECIAL | Remote work: Is it time to return to the office?

The COVID pandemic turned the traditional American in-office work model on its head as non-essential workers hunkered down en masse and worked from home. Remote work has brought many benefits to our employment reality, including increased flexibility, access to a broader talent pool and, for some, an improved work-life balance. Now that the pandemic is over, is it time to go back? We’re joined by Mark Mortensen, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and an expert on the changing nature of work and collaboration. 

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Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to 5 Things. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, September 28th 2023, and this is a special episode of 5 Things. The COVID pandemic turned the traditional American in-office work model on its head as non-essential workers hunkered down in mass and worked from home.

Remote work has brought many benefits to our employment reality, including increased flexibility, access to a broader talent pool and for some, an improved work-life balance. Now the pandemic is over, is it time to go back? Our guest, Mark Mortensen is a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and an expert on the changing nature of work and collaboration. Thanks for joining us, Mark.

Mark Mortensen:

Thanks so much, Dana, for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Amazon Chief Executive, Andy Jassy recently fired a warning shot to staff saying quote, "If you can't commit to returning to the office three days a week, it's probably not going to work out for you at Amazon," unquote. Do businesses need to prove to their workers that in-person collaboration has led to more growth and innovation within their own companies, or do employees need to somehow show that they're able to accomplish more offsite? Who's the onus on here?

Mark Mortensen:

Nobody holds all the power in this relationship. Employers obviously, they hold the power of the employment contract, the ability to, in some cases even hire or fire, to set the rules. They're also more closely the controllers of things like the organizational culture and the norms. At the same time, it's employees who are unfortunately or not fortunately, able to vote with their feet, to make decisions based on where they want to work and how they want to work, whether or not this particular offering at a given place is what suits their needs. Neither one has the full control of the situation. I think we have to own that and we have to accept that. What we need is more of a conversation, more of a dialogue between the two parties in order to find a common ground so that we can gain some of the benefits for both sides that people are looking for.

Dana Taylor:

One of the technological tools that took off at the beginning of the pandemic was video conferencing platforms like Zoom. Now even Zoom wants remote workers to return to the office. How do you think video conferencing altered what you've called the social fabric of the workplace?

Mark Mortensen:

I've been studying virtual work and remote work for the better part of about 20, 25 years. It's not new in the sense of, it's not like we weren't doing this before COVID. We actually had a lot of people who were working remote, working hybrid. Look, most of sales for most of history in organizations has been a at least partially remote part of the organization. So the technologies have accelerated. They've given us greater access, greater ease. And really what we saw during COVID was a greater penetration of that technology everywhere.

Dana Taylor:

Are companies and employees that are looking at remote work as an either or proposition coming at it the wrong way? And while it's true that Zoom wants its workers back in the office, they're going for a hybrid approach. Should everyone be looking for middle ground here?

Mark Mortensen:

Anybody who's claiming that the future of work is all going to be fully remote, let's be realistic, it's not all going to be fully remote. In the same ways, it's also not going back the way it was. I think hybrid is the obvious middle ground. That said, hybrid has a lot of latitude and a lot of flexibility. Is this three days versus two days or two days versus three days?

Do you give employees or do employees claim control over what days they get to choose to work remotely or not? Or is there sort of a fixed schedule? One of the challenges we get into is how do we align schedules across different people within a team, within an organization in order to ensure when we need more bodies, we need an all hands meeting, we need buy-in from people that we actually get that. So hybrid is the obvious middle ground, but even hybrid itself comes with some new challenges that honestly aren't even present in either fully remote or fully in-person work.

Dana Taylor:

And Zoom ramped up staffing during the pandemic and grew three times in size in roughly two years to manage increased demand. Do you think social conferencing is now an overused tool, and if so, why?

Mark Mortensen:

Oh, that's a tough one. Is it overused? It really depends on what your baseline is. We're seeing it used lots and lots and there I would more make an argument about being very thoughtful about when it's of good use, if you need to have very intense conversations, if you need truly collaborative, innovative work. That's less well-suited to being done in a remote fashion over video conferencing.

That said, there are lots of things that can be done remotely. And when it's quick check-ins, when it's those sorts of more incremental or more sort of step-by-step iterative pieces of the work, those are actually well suited. So I think organizations really need to think about when do they use it and be a little bit more thoughtful about this rather than saying, "This is now the default. Everybody should be working this way or otherwise."

Dana Taylor:

Okay. So we've talked about video conferencing platforms, but there are other technological advancements that have helped make remote work practical, cloud-based services, digital whiteboards for brainstorming, robust cybersecurity solutions. Do you think it's important for companies to continue using those innovations, the ones that help many pivot and remain productive during the pandemic?

Mark Mortensen:

Obviously many of these technologies have allowed them to do things they weren't able to do before. Some of the cloud-based computing gives greater resilience in terms of either catastrophic failures or others. Having things cloud-based gives you the ability to pivot, to relocate, to move. We saw this with some major transitions in organizations.

They're able to shift their location of their workforce fairly seamlessly. These are things that can't be done without some of these tools. The reality is during COVID, there was a scramble. We did whatever we could because we were forced to. Now we can stop and be a little bit more thoughtful and a little bit more intentional.

Dana Taylor:

And in terms of employee productivity, what are some of the known advantages of in-office work?

Mark Mortensen:

First question you need to ask about productivity is how you're defining it in the first place. And we see there are a lot of reports people talk about. When they're doing more kind of heads down, individual work, being remote works just fine. On the flip side as you're asking, "Well, what are the benefits of being in a collaborative environment for productivity?"

If what you need is an integrative solution where you give me a part of an idea, I give you another piece, the hallway conversations, the coffee pot, water cooler chats where I may come and just mention something that, "Hey, I just happened to do this on a project or in a program and it worked really well," and somebody else says, "You know what? That can help me with my problem," and it is a measurable, important piece of the productivity of any organization. Unfortunately, we tend to underestimate it because it's not planned. We didn't necessarily set a meeting, but being co-located in a space allows us to get those accidental connections that we otherwise would potentially miss.

Dana Taylor:

Mark, are there any specific industries or roles that are better suited to one type of work environment over the other, and what's the role of leadership in setting the example?

Mark Mortensen:

Industry is a tough one because even within any industry, it's I would argue almost more down to the level of the work that's being done, the job function, the type of task, et cetera. Take higher education, there are certain jobs if you are a faculty, you can teach things remotely. It certainly works. Do you lose something? Yes, but you also have some gains in other modalities.

Now that doesn't mean that everybody in higher education is going to be benefiting from being able to work remotely. The person who is making sure that the logistics of the program are running, they may need to be there face-to-face with participants. So what we see across very different industries is within an organization you have radical, radical differences that we need to think about in order to try to create not a one size fits none, but a more customized approach to get some of those benefits.

Dana Taylor:

An employment among adults with disabilities has reached record highs with a significant barrier removed where companies have embraced remote work. Are there potential downsides for companies to consider when deciding whether to require in-office work, especially for employees with unique needs or circumstances?

Mark Mortensen:

Obviously there is a very real potential cost of bringing everybody in or forcing everybody to come back into the office. I think what we need is a little bit more of a nuanced discussion and recognizing that if there is a particular reason that somebody isn't able to come into the office, that we work on how to accommodate that in a way that is also fair and equitable to those who do.

If I see somebody else has a benefit, even being able to work remotely that I don't get, my immediate reaction is, "Well, that doesn't feel fair." Even if for example, their job is one that allows them to be remote where I can't. We really have to make sure that that leaders are walking the talk and modeling the behavior that they want to see in their employees around how to do this.

Dana Taylor:

The Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act was introduced in the house in March. It was a push by progressive Democrats to make four-day workweeks federal law. Dozens of countries have now attested it and many have adapted it permanently, arguing that it increases productivity. As society, are Americans late in reevaluating things like in-office work and the 40-hour workweek?

Mark Mortensen:

With any of these major shifts and transitions, we have to be careful about a novelty effect. If I give you a four-day workweek, it's not surprising if you're used to working five days a week that your immediate reaction is to say, "This is fantastic," and it probably makes you even more engaged, even more motivated. You put in more energy and effort into your work. Not all that surprising that productivity is going to see a bump.

One of the questions we have to see is what happens when this is commonplace, when this isn't a market differentiator, when this isn't something that feels radically different than the way we used to do things. Does it still give you the same sort of bumps? I don't think there's anything uniquely magical about a five-day week or a four-day week.

There's nothing mathematical that says, "This is the optimal amount of time for a human being to be working." This is a question about recognizing a trade-off between the amount of time you are in the office, what you're able to get out of that, and then also the balance between the other parts of one's life. There is work-life hopefully balance.

Dana Taylor:

And then what would you say to workers who do spend a lot of time at home working remotely and the ability to turn it off? Maybe you're actually working more when you're working from home.

Mark Mortensen:

I actually was just running a workshop earlier today. I actually asked the participants, "How many of you found that, especially during the pandemic and since then, you find it harder to delineate work and home?" And every single hand in the room went up. This is a unilateral reality. We all know this. But it's also not new. Ask yourself, how many of you out there in the audience sleep with your phone on your bedside table?

When that is the case it actually has a very big impact on our ability and our sense of whether or not we are allowed to turn off. Ask ourselves what do we want those boundaries to be. And then part of that is also within our work units to set norms and clear guidelines that say, for example, it's okay to not answer your phones after a certain hour, or it's okay to not be available for a family function or something else. Those need to be discussed so that they become a common ground. They become sort of public knowledge as opposed to something we're all wondering and guessing, "Am I going to get in trouble for this or will I not?"

Dana Taylor:

Well, in some cities, New York, LA, San Francisco, really any big city, office occupancy is still 30% below pre-pandemic levels. This set a huge impact on those neighborhoods with all of that foot traffic gone. Meanwhile, there's a crisis in housing in this country. Should we simply admit that we're never going to be back in the office like we once were and just convert that underutilized office space to housing to revive those areas? We're talking about trillions of dollars in real estate. What are your thoughts here?

Mark Mortensen:

I don't have an answer. I wish I did. I wish I could say, yes. Of course, it would be fantastic to be able to apply some of that unused real estate. I think one of the challenges is we don't know what is persistent and what is not, how much these things are going to change. I know for example, in many major cities, large scale employers got pressure from city officials during or immediately after the pandemic to say, "Please help us get people back into the office."

Because there's an entire ecosystem built around some of these large employers, whether that is restaurants, whether that is day cares, dry cleaners, laundry, delivery services, food, you name it. These all exist around the ecosystem of a large scale employer. As those employers leave, it's not just about the office space, it actually has a ripple effect into a lot of other related industries.

The other thing that is a challenge, and we've seen this with a number of, I've heard many, many stories of this, of people who have relocated away from major hubs because they're allowed to work remotely. However, if something changes in their job status, they decide though this corporation is no longer a good fit for them, they are let go, whatever else. They then find themselves living in a place that may not have anywhere near as attractive a job market, and they must take a remote job because they can't afford to move and relocate back in.

What we have to recognize is these decisions have long tails and they can have a really, really long and very difficult impact on some downstream decisions that we can make around how we use the space, around, again, as I mentioned, ancillary related businesses and even some of our own decisions on how we're planning out our life, where we want to live, et cetera.

Dana Taylor:

Mark, thank you so much for joining me.

Mark Mortensen:

Oh, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer Shannon Rae Green for a production assistant. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of 5 Things.