For subscribers
The working-from-home delusion fades
It is not more productive than being in an office, after all
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Some of the co-ordination costs of remote work might reasonably be expected to fall as people get used to it.
PHOTO: AFP
The Economist
Follow topic:
A gradual reverse migration is under way, from Zoom to the conference room. Wall Street firms have been among the most forceful in summoning workers to their offices, but in recent months even many tech titans – Apple, Google, Meta and more – have demanded staff show up to the office at least three days a week. For work-from-home believers, it looks like the revenge of corporate curmudgeons. Didn’t a spate of studies during the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrate that remote work was often more productive than toiling in the office?
Unfortunately for the believers, new research mostly runs counter to this, showing that offices, for all their flaws, remain essential. A good starting point is a working paper that received much attention when it was published in 2020 by Ms Natalia Emanuel and Ms Emma Harrington, then both doctoral students at Harvard University. They found an 8 per cent increase in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes. Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4 per cent decline.
