One of the most divisive questions raised so far this decade is whether people need to be “at work” in order to do their jobs. In the process of interacting with over 400 companies in the last year, I’ve had chats with over 650 people, and I think this has given me some insight into the issue, from both sides.
One thing that’s pretty clear is that working from home (WFH) is predominantly a white-collar strategy. People involved in production, retail activity, and many other occupation classes simply cannot avoid being in a facility. Even in cases where it might be possible (home visits by healthcare practitioners, having someone come to your home to fix you car), the cost and efficiency consequences would be crippling, in no small part because of time lost in travel and the need to transport specialized equipment. My data suggests that roughly 18% of workers could work remotely with relative ease, and that another 11% could be facilitated to work remotely. A final 14% could work partly remotely and partly in-office/facility.
Less than a fifth of the potential WFH is currently realized, spread roughly proportionally across those three job categories. Enterprises say that this is because of two issues.
The first issue is loss of productivity, which for over two-thirds of enterprises includes “goofing off”. Enterprises themselves believe that only 10% of their workforce can actually work remotely with equal or better productivity versus in-office work. That’s a quarter of the potential remote workers. Some, for sure, do goof off while unsupervised, which is also true for those in the office. No company willingly shared any study they’ve done on the “goof off rate” for remote versus in-office work. Some of my own work in software development suggest that in-office “theft of time” activity involved less than fifteen percent of labor hours, while that associated with remote work involved about 22%. However, neither figure represents production necessarily lost; most workers did meet production requirements, though companies believe that without supervision, remote work is less productive for three-quarters of employees.
I think the loss of productivity companies believe is present is largely avoidable, but perhaps at a cost. Remember that companies say 11% of their workforce could be “facilitated” to effective WFH. Part of the facilitation is the ability to supervise activity, which employees tend to view as surveillance, and part is supplying necessary application access, devices and equipment, etc. The latter point is seen as a cost item, which then means that remote productivity has to be higher to establish a compensating benefit, and it also leads to the second issue.
Which is security. This issue ranks first with many enterprises, but ranking here is subjective and companies may be reluctant to talk about productivity and theft of time issues. The obvious concern here is that having company information projected to a remote site, one not under facility control, and to devices whose security is harder to guarantee is a problem in itself. The fact that this projection is almost always via the Internet is another concern, given the Internet’s intrinsic openness, and any time you expand application access you expand the threat border. It’s no wonder there’s a concern here.
Since the WFH expansion due to COVID, 14% of enterprises said they had experienced security issues with WFH, but no major breaches were attributed to it. Companies say that the expanded use of the Internet to support shopping and customer support was already expanding their threat borders, and that BYOD was introducing personal devices to their network too. Thus, while there is a concern about the security of WFH, it’s not yet considered an active issue to many enterprises.
Are there any compensating benefits for enterprises? There are two that are most often mentioned.
First, WFH allows enterprises to broaden the pool of job candidates, something that can be vitally important in geographies where population density is low and so the pool of qualified job candidates may not meet local hiring goals. If the worker doesn’t have to be local, that problem is less likely to cause acute shortages of skilled staff.
Second, WFH can make it possible for caregivers to participate in the job market, and to improve the net contribution they can make to household income by eliminating or minimizing the need to hire someone or use a day care facility. It can also help a company meet diversity goals by improving job access to females (most often the caregiver), the handicapped and disabled, and even allow injured or ill workers to continue with their jobs pending recovery.
Do these benefits offset the risks of WFH? Right now 88% of enterprises say that they are either holding WFH commitments at current levels or seeking to get more people back into the office. That leaves only 12% who are prepared to expand WFH. However, 95% of enterprises said they had not expanded WFH in 2024, which suggests that most of that 12% are perhaps willing but not committed.
Neither are workers. 73% of the workers I chatted with said they were not interested in full-time remote work, and 18% said that they were prepared to work at home two to three days per week, maximum. Only 9% indicated they would like to work remotely/from-home full time. But there’s an important point to be made here; the people I chat with are senior technologists, management, or executives. My contacts feel that “networking in person” is important to their own professional development and advancement. I do not have contact with any other job categories, but I’d speculate that in general, non-professional, non-management positions could have a different view.
WFH takes discipline, and I think it’s also something that normally social people will have to adjust to. I think that companies are prepared to accept that there are benefits, and many are prepared to say these benefits justify offering WFH where there isn’t a firm need to have a worker in a company facility. However, I don’t think it’s going to be universally accepted, and I’m not sure that there’s much more than a limited additional WFH opportunity in the near term. If we were to popularize the metaverse concept, that could change, and I’ll consider that point in a future blog.
