Remote work isn’t perfect, but whether it’s worthwhile depends on what you value.

What’s Most Important? Choosing to Work Remotely

The number one thing that dictates whether working remotely will be valuable is if the person chose it. Having it forced upon you is a recipe for failure, or at least unhappiness and low productivity. That may sound straightforward enough, but keep in mind that in early 2020, hundreds of thousands of people started working remotely who didn’t make the choice.

Remote Work Causes a Decrease in Mentorship and Feedback

Among people who do choose remote work, including people with a hybrid schedule, productivity is almost always higher when they are remote. What’s often lost, as one recent piece of research noted, is mentorship.

You don’t even have to be working from home to lose mentorship. If your team is dispersed across two buildings, as a control group in the research paper was, the lack of proximity is enough to decrease the amount of feedback workers (in this case programmers) gave and received.

What the paper doesn’t explore is whether the feedback that the programmers got was qualitatively better or worse. Having less of something doesn’t necessarily mean you’re worse off. If your email inbox was full of only messages that were necessary and written efficiently, how much better off would you be?

Remote Work Causes an Increase in Productivity

One interesting point is that this research has more evidence in support of productivity increasing when people work remotely and decreasing when workers share a physical space.

The Tradeoff

The authors hint at the fact that the programmers, and therefore the organization that hires them, would do better to have workers who give up a little productivity day-to-day to be better programmers guided by more feedback and mentorship in the long run. I don’t know if you’ve paid attention to capitalism lately, but that’s not in fact how most companies operate. Short-term productivity and short-term payoff are exactly in line with how most companies in fact operate. Loyalty only makes workers exploited, not rewarded. And programmers are especially prone to being laid off every few years.

So before anyone makes the argument for in-person work on the grounds of long-term gains, they’d first need to make sure their organization has a consistent argument for valuing smart, experienced, long-term employees.

Image by Scott Graham on Unsplash