The illusion of teleworking fades

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We are seeing a gradual reverse migration from Zoom to the conference room. Wall Street firms have been some of the most aggressive in calling employees back to the offices, but in recent months even many tech titans (Apple, Google, Meta and others) have required staff to go to the office. office at least three days a week. To teleworking supporters, that sounds like revenge from corporate curmudgeons. Didn't a flurry of studies during the Covid-19 pandemic show that working remotely was often more productive than working in the office? Unfortunately for the most convinced, the new research mostly contradicts that theory and shows that offices, for all their flaws, are still essential. A good starting point is a working paper that received a lot of attention when it was published in 2020 by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, then doctoral students at Harvard University.

Researchers detected an 8% increase in the number of calls answered per hour by employees of an online establishment that had switched to teleworking. A revised version of the same work published last May by Job Function Email Database the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has had much less impact. The efficiency increase has now become a 4% decrease. read also The Economist The researchers had not been wrong. He just so happened that they have now received more accurate data, including detailed work schedules. It turned out that not only were employees answering fewer calls from home, but the quality of their interactions also suffered. They kept customers waiting longer. And there were also more callbacks, an indication of the existence of unresolved problems. The review is published following other studies that have reached similar conclusions.



David Atkin and Antoinette Schoar of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Sumit Shinde of the University of California, Los Angeles, randomly assigned data entry workers in India to operate from home or the office. Those who worked at home were 18% less productive than their colleagues in the office. Michael Gibbs of the University of Chicago and Friederike Mengel and Christoph Siemroth of the University of Essex found a productivity deficit, relative to previous office performance, of up to 19% for home office teleworkers. a large Asian computer company. According to another study, even chess professionals play worse online than offline. And another study used a lab experiment to show that video conferencing inhibits creative thinking.