The future of work in America is inside office

Ever since the coronavirus sent millions of people home to work, people have been predicting that remote work will endure after the pandemic is over.
Color me skeptical.
I can’t imagine everyone not wanting to race back into the office the minute it is safe to do so. But my wife and I both have full-time jobs, and we have been home with our two young kids. The corporate world isn’t debating a post-pandemic future of continuing the lockdown, but instead of working remotely from home while kids are at school and cafes are open. So set aside the challenges of the last few months with school closures and social distancing, and consider whether traditional offices may be a thing of the past.
Some companies clearly think it is. Bloomberg columnist Tyler Cowen has bemoaned the tech industry’s apparent conversion. Slack, the messaging technology company, announced last week that most of its employees would have the option of permanently switching to remote work, and that it would increasingly hire people into remote-work positions. Facebook
expects that half its workforce could be remote in the next five to 10 years. Twitter announced that its employees could continue working from home permanently.
Other employers are changing policies as well. Nationwide Insurance is planning to close offices around the country by November 1, moving those employees to permanent telework status. Barclays CEO Jes Staley said in April that “the notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past.”
There is some preliminary evidence that remote work is working. Or, at least, that is isn’t failing. Upwork, an online staffing company, recently published results from a survey of hiring managers. The survey finds that over half of the US workforce is working from home. Fifty-six percent of hiring managers think the shift to remote work has gone better than they had expected.
Around one-third of managers think remote work has increased productivity, while 23% think productivity has dropped. Over six in 10 hiring managers report that as a result of the pandemic, their organisation’s workforce will be more remote than it was before.
But it’s critical that managers not overlearn lessons from the pandemic. This spring, managers were nervous that productivity would tank during the shutdown because telework would be unsuccessful. Employees would slack off during the day without colleagues and supervisors nearby, and given all the distraction of home.
Surely this anxiety was communicated inside businesses, and workers got the picture. Many likely ramped up their effort during the shutdown to prove to their bosses that they were still valuable as teleworkers. With the rest of the world shut down, too, people had to put off a lot of the functions of normal life, not just going out for social reasons, but also for important things like doctor’s appointments. Add to this workers’ worries about recession-driven layoffs, and it’s no surprise that many managers see productivity increases.

—Bloomberg