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Literature Review

Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020; two days later, on the 13th of March, the United States was put under a National Emergency status (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2020), which triggered individual states’ lockdowns. Since then, a number of things have changed in our daily routines; some in the form of temporary measures during the lockdowns (for example, store closures and reduced customer capacity) and some in the form of new habits that started to form as a necessity, such as the switch of office employees to work-from-home (WFH) mode and the adoption of Zoom as the major tool of communication.

T. Arcaris reminds that, “remote work isn't necessarily a new thing; according to the US Bureau of Labor, 15% of Americans worked remotely at least one day per week in 2018. But most companies lacked the technology and protocol necessary to deploy remote employees at scale”. Covid-19 came to accelerate a process that was already underway, albeit slow, toward more online education and remote work (Penrod, E., 2020).

Stanford Economist N. Bloom, who has been studying WFH since 2014, ran a survey last May to find out that 42% of Americans had switched to WFH within the first couple of months of pandemic-related lockdowns (Bloom, N., 2020). For this research, Bloom looked at full-time workers between the ages of 20 and 64 who were earning more than $20,000 annually, and who were thereby weighted by state, industry and income. Using these employees’ 2019 earnings as an indicator of their contribution to the US GDP, he concluded that WFH accounted for more than two thirds of all economic activity taking place in the country (Bloom, N., 2020). This allows us to understand the impact of WFH on the economy and its importance in the fight against the pandemic.

But what are the industries where employees are being “allowed” to work remotely? As Bloom notes, “not everyone can work from home. Only 51% of the survey respondents – mostly managers, professionals and financial workers who can carry out their jobs on computers – reported being able to work from home at an efficiency rate of 80% or more. The remaining (nearly) half cannot work remotely” (Bloom, N., 2020). According to A. Bartik and his team of colleagues at Harvard, industries with more educated workers exhibited higher levels of remote work and suffered less productivity loss than in industries with less educated employees. This can be explained and reinforced by the fact that, while knowledge-based work by professionals and business service providers lends itself to be performed remotely, front-line work or factory-related manufacturing areas or even fields like hospitality cannot be easily and massively adapted to a different work format. In this respect, the fields of education, finance and scientific/technical services were the industries that jumped right in adopting WFH practices, but this was not the case for agriculture, food services and logistics companies, who had no way to switch (Bartik, A.W. et al, 2020).

With remote work spanning a great number of industries and becoming an increasingly staple part of the labor landscape, the need to define it and identify benefits, drawbacks and implications becomes more essential than ever.

WFH employees report a long list of benefits that come with the new situation, but perhaps the most appreciated of all, is freeing themselves from their daily commute. According to a 2019 analysis by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute reported by the New York Times, the average American spends 54 hours per year in the car in order to commute to work (Cramer, M. and Zaver, M., 2020). Moreover, time spent in the car –especially during rush hour traffic – is associated with elevated levels of stress, depression and aggressive driving behavior (Bitkina, O. V. et al, 2020). Driving stress can be experienced at various levels: at the psychological level, it can lead to anxiety, frustration with work and lack of control; at the cognitive level, it can bring about feelings of helplessness and poor tolerance; at the physical level it can elevate blood pressure and body temperature; while at the social level it can promote job searching and foster lack of motivation (Lalithashree G., 2019).

Covid quarantine days also came with another benefit; saving money by reducing expenses. This was a direct benefit to everyone involved, regardless of their work status, but WFH employees seem to have benefited more than every category, since paychecks were still coming in, while expenses related to commuting and childcare were drastically reduced. According to a Global Workplace Analytics study, employees who work remotely half of the week can save between $2,500 and $4,000 per year, while this amount becomes even larger in the case of full-time WFH, which offers workers the possibility to move to cheaper, more distant areas (Lister, K., 2020). WFH can also potentially bring forth tax benefits, if considered as a long-term option; employees who choose to do so, may be able to claim a home office tax deduction in their income taxes, depending on their home’s square footage and the nature of their work (Baker, J., 2020).

Finally, this recent six-month WFH experiment proved one more thing: productivity was (surprisingly) not sacrificed in the face of convenience. WFH provided workers with the opportunity to follow a more flexible schedule, determining their own work hours and creating their own workspace to include pets, leisure clothing and background noises, if desired. According to evidence from VPN providers cited by Bloomberg, wake-up times for WFH employees have shifted later, while it’s not uncommon for workers to log in and respond to emails even late at night. Providers report that they have seen spikes in usage from midnight to 3am, which were not present before the pandemic (Davis, M.F. and Green, J., 2020). According to T. Arcari, “tasks must be completed and meetings attended, but nobody expects remote employees to be actively online and tied to a desk from eight in the morning to six at night” (Penrod, E., 2020). What is expected from them, however, is attendance. Especially during the lockdown period, excuses to not attend meetings or conferences were simply not available, a fact which contributed to a boost in meeting attendance in the recent months (Quenqua, D., 2020).

While one would expect WFH employees to feel too comfortable and potentially too distracted in the own environment to be productive, studies suggest the opposite. Prodoscore, a California-based company offering employee visibility software, compared 100 million data points from its 30,000 US-based users to data from the same period in the year before, to find out that telephone calling was increased to 230%; Customer Relationship Management system activity was up 176%; email activity was increased by 57%; and chat messages were up 9%. Overall, the company tracked a jump in worker productivity which amounted to a whopping 47%. “The common assumption is that remote workers are less productive than those who are in a traditional office. But our ability to capture, integrate, and analyze workplace data shows otherwise,” said C. Hajibrahim, Chief Product Officer at Prodoscore (BusinessWire, 2020). Another study, run by DeFilippis et al., explored the impact of COVID-19 on employee's digital communication patterns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe and the Middle East which were under mandated lockdowns. What they found were increases in the number of meetings per person and the number of attendees per meeting, but decreases in the average length of meetings, as compared to the pre-pandemic levels. Their research also revealed significant and durable increases in length of the average WFH workday, which increased by 8.2%, or 48.5 minutes, along with short-term increases in email activity. (DeFilippis, E. et al, 2020).

A study conducted by N. Bloom in 2014 had somehow foreseen this trend; in his experiment, Bloom worked with a Chinese online travel agency to study remote-work productivity, by allowing employees to work from home four days a week. The experiment was driven by the need of the company to lower real-estate costs, as office space in Shanghai was very expensive, without sacrificing on performance. Surprisingly, Bloom’s findings indicated a 13% increase in productivity for the remotely working group, as compared to the group of office-based employees over the span of nine months.

Before jumping to the conclusion, however, that WFH is the trend of the future, all the drawbacks associated with it have to be carefully spelled out and, where possible, dealt with.

One obvious part is that, for remote work to be productive, certain requirements will have to be met; first and foremost is the need for good connection to the internet, while others include a quiet place to work from and company tech support and equipment. These are not to be taken for granted, however; in the case of Bloom’s research, over 50% of those who were surveyed reported working from shared rooms or their bedrooms, while only 65% of responders felt their internet was fast enough to support Zoom meetings (Wong, M. 2020). These statistics make it clear that working from home is by far a privilege, fostering concealed underlying inequalities in terms of socioeconomic status. As Bloom himself put it: “this is generating a time bomb for inequality. Our results show that more educated, higher-earning employees are far more likely to work from home – so they are continuing to get paid, develop their skills and advance their careers. At the same time, those unable to work from home – either because of the nature of their jobs, or because they lack suitable space or internet connections – are being left behind. They face bleak prospects if their skills and work experience erode during an extended shutdown and beyond” (Wong, 2020).

Another phenomenon that emerged as a result of office staff switching to WFH mode, is “Zoom fatigue”; a term first coined by BBC to describe a general burnt-out and overwhelming feeling brought forth by additional focus required during video calls, as opposed to face-to-face interaction (Jiang, M., 2020). As the pandemic put a stop to gatherings, whether in the office context, or elsewhere, people had to turn to software meeting solution tools, like Zoom, Hangouts, Webex and others in order to coordinate projects, conduct meetings or even attend classes. Video conferencing allowed business to keep operating and became an essential tool during lockdowns. As CNBC reports,  video conferencing service daily users spiked to 200 million in March, up from 10 million in December (Evans, D. 2020). 

According to G. Petriglieri, an associate professor at Insead, that explores sustainable learning and development in the workplace, people’s brains need to work harder during Zoom calls in order to process and interpret non-verbal cues, such as body language, voice pitch and facial expressions. As employees attend remote meetings and do not gather around the same table, participants need to devote extra energy to pick up the moods of their colleagues. In the same sense, it gets hard to attribute meaning to pauses or delays, in the remote context. While, for example, silence would not necessarily be overbearing in the face-to-face environment, in the Zoom context, it triggers anxiety about potential connectivity issues and upcoming freezes (Jiang, M., 2020). In addition, and in sharp contrast to most physical get-togethers, Zoom brings the image of each participant in the forefront, creating a “mirror” effect, which leads participants to being constantly self-aware. As M. Shuffler, an associate professor, who studies workplace wellbeing and teamwork effectiveness at Clemson University, noted: “When you're on a video conference, you know everybody's looking at you; you are on stage, so there comes the social pressure and feeling like you need to perform. Being performative is nerve-wracking and more stressful” (Jiang, M., 2020). Finally, Zoom has its own “logic” when it comes to tiles arrangements; which essentially means no participant can control their place in the grid. Zoom says they order of meeting attendees in a first-come first-served order, depending on whose video was turned on at the time they joined. When the camera gets turned off, the user gets moved to the end of the grid and, if a group is too big to fit on one page, most recent speaker are placed onto the first page, replacing less active participants (Morris, B., 2020). This changes the dynamics of the office and cancels the implicit leadership of the power speaker / head of the table leader that used to dominate face-to-face conferences.

For reasons like the one just mentioned above, remote work has resulted to an unquestionable change in the culture of the (redefined) office. WFH comes with the isolation that the pandemic was trying to impose; but workplaces are social, buzzing networking spaces, with ever-evolving personal and professional relationships which often define the outcome of the work and the success of a project. According to Lynda Grattan, a professor at London Business School who specializes in the future of work, says that in many offices “quite a lot of the ways that we make decisions in organizations aren't made in meetings. They're made in the corridors” (Lufkin, B., 2020). The new office will need to redefine collaboration between employees and managers and will require some sort of replication of unstructured interactions of the office in order to help employees feel part of a coherent team. As former IBM CEO L. Gerstner puts it, “Culture isn't just one aspect of the game - it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.” (CityBusiness Guest Perspective, 2020).

Where culture has resulted to severe impediments, is in workplaces where managers (perhaps of a more authoritarian style) were under the belief that WFH allows employees to slack around, hurts productivity and hinders innovation (Barkin, D., 2020). Allowing staff to work remotely cannot be achieved without trust; it is perhaps the most vital component that separates strong organizations from weaker ones. Atkinson & Burger (2020) point out that “Cultures don't just evolve. Strong positive cultures must be led and nurtured”. And that’s the challenge for the future leader – developing, fostering and implementing a positive culture that will promote the organization’s performance, effectiveness, personnel retention and, ultimately, growth (Atkinson, P., & Burger, D., 2020).

There is, however, one factor that, in the case of Bloom’s 2014 experiment, led employees to request they return to their offices: Social isolation. J. Olson, a professor of informatics at the University of California, who has been studying "distance work" for about 30 years, notes that “It's easy to feel like you have disappeared from the heart of the company, missing out on the casual chats and the important decisions” (Berliner, U., 2020). For Bloom, the solution to this lies in the golden medium.“A good rule of thumb”, he notes, “is to let employees have one to two days a week at home. It’s hugely beneficial to their well-being, helps you attract talent, and lowers attrition” (Bloom, N., 2014). This solution would also help establish face-to-face communication lines with co-workers and supervisors in order to promote team cohesion.

All the above beg for the question of what’s in store for the future. Are we in a point of no return when it comes to remote work or are we all going back to the familiarity of a structured workplace after the Covid threat is over?

This pandemic certainly removed the “stigma” associated with WFH. N. Bloom has stated that, before the pandemic, he would often hear comments like “working from home is shirking from home,” or “working remotely is remotely working” (Bloom, N., 2020). With 42% of the population working from home and keeping the economy moving, this notion of slacking from home no longer exists. According to a research from the Federal Research of Atlanta, WFH is expected to triple post-Covid in comparison to pre-Covid levels.  With firms interviewed noting that about 10% of their full-time employees worked from home at least one day a week in 2019, the research team expect this number to jump to nearly 30% after the crisis ends. (Altig, D. et al., 2020). This pandemic-imposed experiment forced businesses to try the WFH pill and some found it enticing, especially considering the real estate benefit of paying for less office space, the added bonus of increased productivity and the elimination of call-outs due to extreme weather or mild sickness.

But, what would employees choose, if they were given the option? Obviously, WFH is not for everyone, and different people perform differently under different conditions. What Bloom found out during his 2004 China experiment, was that people who have established social lives—older workers, married workers, parents – were more eager to assume WFH positions. In contrast, younger workers’ social lives were more connected to the office and tended to not want to work from home as much (Bloom N., 2014). According to a recent survey by Robert Half, 74% of remote workers said they would like to have the option to continue working remotely after the restrictions are lifted (Penrod, E., 2020). And Global Workplace Analytics estimates that 25-30% of the workforce will be working-from-home multiple days a week by the end of 2021, noting that “the longer people are required to work at home, the greater the adoption we will see when the dust settles” (Lister, K., 2020).