Erica Becker, a sales development manager at a technology company called Verkada, asks her boss at least 10 times a day. “Did I handle it right?” she asks. “What should I have done?”
Five days a week, 28-year-old Becker comes to her office in San Mateo, California, with all her colleagues. This routine is completely different from her previous role on Yelp. She worked from her home and often had one phone call with her boss during her day. Becker has rediscovered the positive side of her office. It’s feedback. a lot.
“It’s kind of like if you tell me if something happens to my teeth,” she said. “I want to advance my career.”
Since the pandemic began, far-reaching workplace changes have arrived much faster than studies examining their impact. More than 50 million Americans, mostly white-collar workers, have started working from home at least part of the time. Many of them, especially working parents, have become fiercely obsessed with flexibility. In recent months, big companies like Amazon, Disney and Starbucks have tried to bring workers back to the office, but thousands of workers have resisted, citing their productivity track record at home.
But remote workers may be paying a hidden professional penalty for that flexibility, says one researcher. working paper From economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the University of Iowa, and Harvard University. This study is his one of the first major studies to demonstrate the professional downsides of remote work.
Economists Natalia Emmanuel, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Palace studied engineering at large tech companies. As a result, while his remote work has increased senior engineer productivity, it has also decreased the amount of feedback junior engineers receive (in the form of comments on code). more likely to leave the company. The impact of remote work in terms of reduced feedback was particularly pronounced for female engineers.
Harrington, an economist at the University of Iowa, said: “Especially young and young engineers who have just joined this particular company will get less feedback from their seniors when they are away.“
The findings are preliminary and relatively limited, directly measuring only one form of interaction between one set of workers at one technology company. But the authors said their findings suggest a broader implication. So, for at least some white-collar knowledge workers, the office played an important role in their early career development. And the mentorship and training people receive in person has proven difficult to replicate in Slack and Zoom.
“That’s what my grandparents have been saying for a long time,” said Emanuel, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in an interview earlier this month. “Face-to-face meetings are very different from FaceTime.”
For some major employers, the survey confirms the sentiments that guided their decision-making about hybrid work. At Citi, most employees are in her office three or more days a week.
At Verkada, a Bay Area-based technology company that invites employees back into the office five days a week, interviews with several employees revealed that they wanted an office that fostered relationships and flexible work arrangements. It becomes clear why some people choose to quit their jobs. .
Morgan Shapiro, who joined Verkada in November 2020, previously worked at Lyft. There, he was struggling to manage a team of recruiters after the pandemic forced workers home. She worried about reaching out to her employees spontaneously when questions came up throughout the day.
After her first week at Verkada, when she returned to the office, she realized what she was missing. She runs into her company’s chief executive in her hallway, and he asks her to set up a meeting to talk about her department’s approach to compensation, which came up during her job interview. invited the She emailed her assistant to schedule a conversation right away.
“I knew his assistant because I had coffee with her,” said Shapiro, 36. “If I had been away, it would have been harder because she would have asked, ‘Who is this person trying to make time with her CEO?'”
Shapiro, who had a baby this year, noted that the increased flexibility in her field made it easier for employees at the company to prioritize childcare when the crisis hit. “Of course, if you need to stay home, stay home,” she said. “Home comes first”.
Shapiro’s experience highlights the specific challenges businesses and employees face as they navigate the tension of returning to the office. The career harm from remote work can be greatest for women, youth and people of color, who often lack the professional networks in the office. can provide. But many studies show that those same groups of employees value flexible arrangements the most and are also the least likely to voluntarily return to the office.
Director of the McKinsey Global Institute, where he studied how remote work affects career development.
Worse, Ellingrd said the costs of flexibility may not become apparent to workers and companies until wage and promotion gaps emerge.
Jackie Gonzalez, 36, works remotely for Social Impact at Best Buy and is enrolled in a mentoring program for employees of color. She was told that participants meet regularly to discuss career development. But a month after she signed up, she realized that an invitation to a meeting on her calendar had been accidentally left out.
“Being remote makes me blind and insane,” Gonzalez said of the experience, adding that while she felt generally positive about flexible working arrangements, it was “increasing pain.” I was.
The intangible benefits of face-to-face work have been difficult for researchers to study because they are by definition difficult to measure. Existing research on remote work tends to focus on call centers or similar workplaces where productivity is easier to define and measure, while creativity, collaboration and mentorship may be less important.
Emmanuel and her colleagues focused on software engineers at Fortune 500 technology companies. Before the pandemic hit, some of the company’s engineering teams were working in the same building, holding face-to-face meetings and mingling with colleagues in the cafeteria. Other teams were split into multiple buildings and held most of their meetings online to avoid his 20-minute walk across the company campus.
The Economist was able to measure feedback by looking at the number of comments engineers made on each other’s code. This is a regular and essential form of interaction for most software companies. They found that before the pandemic, an engineer who worked in the same building received 21% more feedback than an engineer who worked in a different building. With the pandemic coming and everyone working remotely, the feedback gap has virtually disappeared. This suggests that physical proximity, rather than other differences between groups, led to greater feedback in face-to-face teams.
The “force of proximity,” as the researchers called it in the paper’s title, was especially great for newly hired engineers, young workers, and women. For example, engineers under the age of 30 tended to receive more feedback, especially from more experienced colleagues, but only if they were all in the same building.
“These effects are really concentrated,” said Emmanuel. “The ones who benefit most from actually meeting are the junior engineers, the young people. Those are the groups you might imagine, who have the most to learn.”
In particular, engineers, especially younger workers and women, who had previously been on teams in the same building, were more likely to leave their jobs once the pandemic sent everyone home. There hasn’t been such a spike in turnover among people who previously worked in teams across multiple buildings. Emmanuel said this suggests employees missed out on face-to-face interactions.
The challenge for businesses is that remote work offers real benefits for many employees, especially working parents and others juggling work and home responsibilities. According to a survey by remote job search site FlexJobs, 60% of women and 52% of men said they would consider looking for a new job if they could no longer work remotely. 62% of women and 56% of men say better work-life balance is a benefit of working remotely.
Reyhan Ayas, senior economist at Revelio Labs, which collects and analyzes job postings, layoff notices, and other workforce data, said: “Employees prefer to work from home if it’s possible.”
Many companies are adopting a hybrid model, allowing some employees to work remotely and allowing or requiring others to be in the office. Yet the “Power of Proximity” paper casts doubt on that approach. Economists have found that the benefits of working face-to-face only apply when the entire team is physically together.
“Having even one remote teammate can lead to less collaboration among the rest,” says Emanuel.
Still, many hybrid work experts argue that companies can find creative ways to support remote workers. Technologies are emerging to make this possible, such as video conferencing platforms that ensure equal speaking time for all meeting participants, among other features such as Gatheround. Lisa Conn, chief executive of Gatheround, says companies that offer flexible work can now have hybrid meetings with in-person participants on their laptops, even if several are in the same location. I advise you to participate.
Back at Verkada, Becker attributes part of her growth at work to the time she spends in the office. She became a more critical manager, accustomed to prompting 19 sales reps to discuss ways they could improve.
“When I became manager, I was everyone’s number one cheerleader,” she said. “What I struggled with is having tough conversations.”
She changed jobs on the advice of her boss sitting next to her. do they implement it?
