If you thought the ‘return to work’ debate would be settled by 2024, think again. The subject has been all over the headlines over the past couple weeks. Frustratingly, we seem about as far from a consensus on how to work as we were in March 2020.
The recent boom in remote work commentary owes itself in large part to a big study published in Nature late last year. The study seemed to put a nail in the coffin for remote work, using data to prove what many CEO’s had already intuited: Remote work stifles creativity and productivity. Here are some excerpts from a Business Insider article that sums up the study in that way:
“Now, though, a massive new study published in the journal Nature has shed new light on the effect of remote work on innovation. At the center of the study is a clever workaround. Even though remote work is a relatively new development in corporate settings, scientists and inventors have been collaborating over long distances for decades. So researchers at Oxford University and the University of Pittsburgh pored 20 million scientific studies and 4 million patent applications from around the world over the past half century. Who had the better track record of arriving at breakthroughs — teams that worked remotely, or those that collaborated in person?
What the researchers found is striking, and has big implications for employers — especially in Silicon Valley, where businesses can become irrelevant in the blink of an eye. Collaborating in person, the study found, really did produce more breakthroughs than remote work. And the farther away team members were from one another — even if they were in the same time zone — the worse chance they had of producing work that was groundbreaking. Teams located in the same city, for example, were 22% more likely to produce innovative patents than teams spread out by several hundred miles or more — and 27% more likely to produce pioneering insights in scientific papers. IRL beat WFH by a mile.”
As you might have already guessed, a host of journalists have responded with their own articles that poke holes in that Nature study and highlight conflicting data. A recent article in Forbes, for example, argues that remote work since 2015 has actually been more conducive of productivity and creativity thanks to technological advances:
“The shift in the landscape was illuminated by a critical follow-up study (completed in January 2023) conducted by Carl Frey, one of the original authors of the Nature paper (which looked into data up to 2020), and Giorgio President, both hailing from Oxford. Their research unveiled a striking transformation of the nature of remote collaboration after the landmark year of 2010. What they found was nothing short of revolutionary.”
“Analyzing trends from the 1980s to the present, the data reveals a fascinating trend: the previously wide chasm between the innovative outputs of in-person and remote teams has been steadily narrowing. The 1980s marked the debut of the first scientific remote collaboration platform. Back then, the data hinted at a somewhat bleak picture for distributed teams: they faced a 5% innovation deficit compared to their in-person counterparts. It was as if remote collaboration carried an invisible tax on creativity and breakthroughs.”
“But the real plot twist emerges post-2015. The previously negative coefficient, a marker of the remote work disadvantage, not only zeroes out but takes a surprising leap into positive territory. It’s a remarkable turnaround, a testament to the evolving efficacy of remote collaboration. This shift illustrates that distributed teams are no longer just catching up–they are paving new paths in innovation, rewriting the rules of collaborative creativity.”
It’s starting to look like remote work will be one of those seemingly simple questions that science fails to ever answer, like the perfect diet. After nearly four years of this argument, and with no end in sight, I think it’s best for employers to trust their own judgment and the judgment of their employees.
Despite what some polarizing journalists and celebrity CEO’s would have you believe, there probably is no one size fits all solution here. The business type, job market, geography, and individual preferences are all important.
Geography is a really interesting variable. Workers in Asian megacities like Hong Kong are much more keen on returning to the office than their American and European counterparts. This has been attributed to better public transportation infrastructure that makes commuting easier in Asia, cramped living conditions that make a day at the office more appealing in Asia, and the fact much of Asia boasted low transmission rates in the first two years of the pandemic which meant workers didn’t grow as accustomed to home work as people in other parts of the world.
Even within the USA, the picture of remote work is not monolithic. Remote work is much more common in big cities than in smaller cities and rural America. This is likely due to the type of work that’s being done and infrastructure variables similar to the ones mentioned above.
In some instances, you might know that a job would be better carried out in person, but making it remote may allow you to hire a much more talented employee.
There are countless other variables that will dictate the best work arrangement. And for that reason, I’m going to stop wasting my time reading articles and studies that claim to have finally cracked the code.