I have posted this on Reddit (askeconomics) a while back but got no good replies. Copying it here because I don’t want to send traffic to Reddit.
What do you think?
I see a big push to take employees back to the office. I personally don’t mind either working remote or in the office, but I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit and I haven’t seen a convincing explanation yet of why they are so keen to have everyone back.
If remote work was just as productive as in-person, a remote-only company could use it to be more efficient than their work-in-office competitors, so I assume there’s no conclusive evidence that this is the case. But I haven’t seen conclusive evidence of the contrary either, and I think employers would have good reason to trumpet any findings at least internally to their employees (“we’ve seen KPI so-and-so drop with everyone working from home” or “project X was severely delayed by lack of in-person coordination” wouldn’t make everyone happy to return in presence, but at least it would make a good argument for a manager to explain to their team)
Instead, all I keep hearing is inspirational wish-wash like “we value the power of working together”. Which is fine, but why are we valuing it more than the cost of office space?
On the side of employees, I often see arguments like “these companies made a big investment in offices and now they don’t want to look stupid by leaving them empty”. But all these large companies have spent billions to acquire smaller companies/products and dropped them without a second thought. I can’t believe the same companies would now be so sentimentally attached to office buildings if it made any economic sense to close them.
My department works almost entirely on the computer but is made up of knowledge workers. We found that our metrics also reflected improved efficiency. However, our metrics didn’t (and likely can’t) measure knowledge sharing interactions and training effectiveness to compare working from home with in the office. Most of our department has noticed and believes that knowledge sharing and training interactions decrease when working from home. This is not good for long term health and efficiency of the department. In 5 to 10 years the quality of work we provide will go down (or at least not improve as much as it could) without these interactions. So a small sacrifice in efficiency now could be worth it in the long run.
It’s hard to quantify exactly what is being sacrificed one way or the other. The only way to really find out is to experiment and see what happens long term.
As someone who was a new hire during WFH I still don’t know a lot of the random tribal knowledge. It’s been getting better since we’ve been back to office, but I’m absolutely behind the curve because of it.
Thanks for sharing. I think this is a really important factor that I feel most people don’t understand or care about.