The future of “Work from home”

With the recent Amazon obligatory 3 day office visit policy, I’ve decided to reflect on the WFH phenomenon in hindsight and suggest a probable scenario of what awaits us in the future.
Last week tech social media was bustling with the news about Amazon introducing an obligatory 3-day office visit policy, which was met with a huge backlash from employees all across the globe (~25k Amazonians have signed a petition against such a policy). Corporations like Amazon have the leverage to pull off such bold changes, potentially spiking a wave of similar “reversal” policies from other Big-Tech players. As we’ve seen Meta, Snap, Walt Disney, and Walmart have already followed suit. But is WFH a common good and the next stage of corporate evolution or is it a temporary post-covid phenomenon? Let’s try to figure it out.
My personal story with WFH
I’ve been at the forefront of WFH policies. Initially, any remote work (besides a few exceptional cases — e.g. once I broke a leg and had to work remotely for 2 months) was met with skepticism/borderline hostility among the senior management. The key assumption was that collaboration within teams would be greatly disrupted if they were spread apart. This would in turn have a series of nasty spillover effects — emerging silos, resulting in reduced creativity, worsened mental states, and in the end halted throughput.
Then the covid hit and the teams were practically forced to learn to adapt to remote work and senior management had to rethink its stance.
A brief history of WFH
Once the pandemic hit the companies were forced to accept remote work as a necessary trade-off. Many have introduced WFH budgets and policies that allowed employees to establish a proper working environment from home (buy laptops/equipment e.t.c.).
According to the global Gallup study over the course of 2019–2022:
In pre-pandemic 2019–8% were fully remote while in 2022 that number hit 29%;
32% were hybrid while in 2022 number grew to 49%;
60% were employed fully on-site while in 2022 that number plummeted to 22%.
Another qualitative study notes that 74% of workers believe that remote work would be the new normal and 97% believe that some part of their work in the future would be hybrid/remote. Interestingly, by 2022 about 38% of employees were ok to work at least 2–3 days from the office (basically 4 out of 10). I would speculate that this number has fueled up confidence in Amazon’s decision.
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The current state of affairs
By the beginning of 2023, most BigTech corps had a loosened hybrid approach (work however many days you want remotely, but show up once in a while). A good example was Microsoft’s Hybrid Flexibility pledge.
Among startups or earlier-stage companies, fully remote work is more evident, but I would assume that the leading cause is related to costs (less administrative expenses for office and relocation). Moreover, young companies care less about the cultural dimension (which is the most affected by remote work) and more about enabling the business to work.
In reality (my current team included) modern-day collaboration is a mixed setup, where part of your employees works in a hybrid manner, part is always on-site, and part is fully remote and works from a hub/home located in a different country.
Hence, with the loosened grip on hybrid work requirements, such a move from BigTech is perceived by many employees (assuming 62% based on the Gallup data) as an unexpected threat. Surprisingly enough, this conflict translates into the manager and employee dynamics. While managers believe that remote work reduces efficiency, employees think exactly the opposite. One curious case is Google, which mitigated the potential backlash with a 4-week “work from anywhere” budget (and this was introduced back in 2022, essentially a pioneering move).
Why is the reversal happening?
Upon the inception of WFH, I started noticing a few interesting developments that impacted me and my teams.
We lost the luxury of watercooler conversations and quick in-office syncs. Now instead of spending 1 minute and exchanging the key information, we had to arrange 5–30 minute calls, and even despite the increased time spent, some areas had an informational vacuum.
Faster burnout. There’s no context switch to shift from working to home & family duties, office hours blend and eat up a chunk of your personal time, negatively affecting the work/life balance. I’ve noticed an unexpected spike in employee burnout. Gallup research numbers rhyme with that as burnout increased from 22% to 30% in 2019–2022 yy.
No relationship building. Engagement is partially driven by working relationships established within the team. With relationships comes trust and potential conflicts are becoming easier to mitigate. With fully/predominantly remote work the opposite becomes true.
Dilution of culture. Each respected BigTech corp has a set of internal values. Unless they are clearly displayed by the senior management and modeled by employees, there’s no other way to spread them within the rest of the company. Most employees wouldn’t bother to look for a list of principles, hidden somewhere in the depths of confluence or notion docs.
Essentially, if you hire a person for remote work you take on a tax of extra communication/inclusion efforts and travel costs (it is important that the employee immerses into the culture at least once in a while). On top of that, my personal experience shows that the long-term retention (2+ years) of remote candidates on average is worse. Scale that to the whole org and you have a gaping cost loophole. In practice, I’d only consider a fully remote employee if they’re seasoned, a great match in terms of skills, and have experience working independently from the team.
There’s a growing base of research on improved employee productivity in WFH. I would like to challenge it as well. So far the most representative is the longitudinal study done at Stanford, which shows a 5% in 2020 and 9% in 2022 increase in employee remote work productivity vs. on-site performance. There are two things (present in most studies) that I would agree on:
we have built up experience in remote work over the past 3 years;
On the other side:
most data is self-reported and should be treated with a grain of salt;
data doesn’t factor in the longer-term attrition trends;
those studies do not take into account the employer’s perspective and the tax it takes to build and manage an inclusive remote/hybrid work environment.
What’s next?
All things considered, I would speculate that three trends would be imminent:
Looking at remote work as a P&L cost, BigTech would be tightening the grip and reducing the amount of fully remote days;
In order to mitigate the potential employee backlash, an intermediary 2–3 day policies would be introduced with extensive comms of the value prop behind the office; later those 2–3 days can potentially translate into 4–5 with exceptions;
Earlier-stage companies would take on more flexible hybrid/remote work policies as a competitive perk to attract talent.