The Future Of Work From Home: The Data CEOs And Workers Need To Know

foreign is it good is it bad is it going away is it here to stay we just can't get on the same page about work from home I'm Rose Marie Miller here with Jenna McGregor a senior editor here at Forbes here to give us some work from home data thank you so much for joining me today Jenna thanks for having me Rosemary good to see you absolutely so Jenna based on your reporting is work from home here to stay I think hybrid work is here to stay um I think some time spent working from home is here to stay I think a lot of the problems that we have around this debate of work from home or remote work often has to do with people not using the right definitions right and thinking that this is is full-time remote work working from home five days a week is that here to stay and I think that that will become pretty not rare but but not not increase in number so Jenna what did your reporting find about working from home's effect on productivity so what we set out to do with this story is you're hearing from CEOs over and over again with these fairly opinion-driven statements about work from home um and we wanted to do they're kind of coalescing around four themes productivity is getting worse creativity is not as good if people are not in the office mentorship is suffering and our culture is getting worse and is that really true and so one of the biggest ones as you asked about is productivity you're hearing a lot of debate and there's been a lot of headlines recently that productivity is is CEOs are worried that productivity is declining because people are working from home and when you look at the data it's really a mixed bag and it comes with all kinds of caveats there's some data that says people who work entirely from home never in person that there are some slight productivity declines about 10 to 20 percent but those are looking at very specific groups of workers they were looking during the pandemic when people had a lot more going on and they very hard to extrapolate also most of us do see each other in person whether it's at an off site or once or twice a week or in some capacity and that data actually shows relatively flat numbers so really no hit to productivity or maybe a boost in some cases so what are Business Leaders saying about work from home's impact on the workforce well as you know we're I don't think a day goes by where you don't hear a CEO with a something about why people need to come back to the office and you know a lot of them I think are driven by their what they see you know what they sense um there's kind of a one person I spoke to described almost like an executive Nostalgia of like the way things used to be and wanting it to go back to the way it used to be but you're hearing a lot of it kills culture it you know um you know I think I think Jamie dimon the CEO of JP Morgan Chase has you know hit all of these themes in his uh complaints about about about work from home and and it's just it's a lot more nuanced than that mm-hmm so what is the current state of work from home like do we know how many U.S employees are working from home versus those that are in a hybrid setting there is some pretty good data out there um there's a research group uh that includes several academics including Nick Bloom at Stanford he does a monthly report surveys thousands of employees and the data is you know big enough group of people that it says um the most recent one this is all employees right so not just office workers um or people who might be able to work from home and that one is uh 59 fully on site 30 hybrid 12 work from home um but then if you look at just college graduates it ships because you've got a different group of people right um you've got people with different kinds of jobs and in that case there are a little fewer fully on site hybrid number goes way up to like 42 percent and again full-time work from home is about 15 it kind of depends on the set of numbers you looked at but that one is one that's often cited so what did your research find about how employees feel about company culture as it relates to work from home I know you touched on this how it you know maybe it's ruining the culture a bit but is that the case and if it is the case is that really a bad thing I think it would be a bad thing if you're ruining the culture but I think that most employees don't think it is um slack had a um the company slack had a research Consortium called future Forum um and some of their data shows that actually people really feel like uh being able to either work hybrid or from home remotely improves culture they felt like a stronger connection to their workplace because they had that kind of flexibility flexibility is like the number one thing that employees want and if you're not giving to that to them there they are going to assign some feelings about the culture and about the organization that they you know that they wouldn't otherwise so that data really actually showed an improvement in culture but I don't think we could definitively say is culture better or worse because of work from home so much of culture has to do with leadership it has to do with how a place is managed it has to do to deal with um individuals own bosses and their colleagues but it's not that the kind of fear that culture is going to be ruined because everybody's working from home I think has been shown that it's not necessarily going to be the case so let's focus on young workers for a minute what about their impact on mentorship opportunities I know I met my mentor shout out to you Diane Brady by coming to the office and I went up to her one day and I asked her can you be my mentor I wouldn't have that opportunity if I worked from home every single day so could you speak on that I I think this is one most of the themes that we looked at there's really a mix of results this is one that I think most people are are somewhat concerned about you know if you're if you don't have young people or or new people to the company right either young people or kind of newcomers to an organization um you really lose something early on and so what the data says on this there's a um there's a an interesting study that looked at Engineers kind of before um a group went went work from home and and during the pandemic and it really showed that people got more feedback when they were working in the same office um but there's a trick here that you have to put the time and it's like it's not an immediate everybody has to come back to the office because so many organizations are so Global and so big that everybody's not going to be in the same right you you know you work in The Newsroom with Diane but in a lot of organizations your boss might be based in San Francisco and you're in York or you're my boss my face of London or there may be two buildings in the same things and there's so much distribution industry attributed work today that um it's not as simple as saying okay if everybody's back in the office it'll be great for young people too so we have to make sure we find ways to bring people together wherever they've been living that makes a lot of sense and I remember when I first started working here and I was far more remote than I am now now I'm kind of hybrid I remember feeling as my first job out of school feeling anxiety because I didn't know how I was performing I mean when you're coming from school and you're getting letter grades and you're always aware of your standing I don't know it messed with my head a lot but when I would come to the office and I would see my boss face to face that made a difference so I I can see the pros of a young worker going to the office but I'm still a young worker and I can see the cons as well there's something about Freedom these days anyways well there's also there's also a big difference he is flexibility that if there was anything that came through it's some level of hybrid work with some combination of work from home and in person is going to stay and that what people want is flexibility it's like not that they don't ever want to come to an office that they don't ever want to be in person it's that they want um they want the choice and the flexibility to make that fit into their lives so all in all hybrid work is what the future will look like I don't think there's any question thank you so much for joining me today Jenna absolutely thanks for having me

Channel: Forbes

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Keywords: Forbes, Forbes Media, Forbes Magazine, Forbes Digital, Business, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Technology, Investing, Personal Finance, Jena Mcgregor, work from home, WFH, hybrid work, fully remote, hybrid work environment, Larry Fink, Bob Iger, Disney, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase CEO, Slack, Hybrid arrangements, CEOs, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, Raj Choudhury, Mentorship, Ken Griffin, Howard Schultz, Zoom, Starbucks, Leadership Strategy

Id: yPY-yiUG6gY

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 23 2023