Elon Musk reportedly issued an ultimatum recently that remote working or working-from-home (WFH) would no longer be tolerated for Tesla employees. Is this a ‘return to normal’ or is it flying in the face of the ‘new normal’? What are the statistics around WFH productivity and the impact of remote work on employees and organisations?
A Forbes article from February this year found that while some companies continue to thumb their noses at The Great Resignation and insist that employees come back into the office, data scientists at Ladders think the writing is on the wall. Remote work is here to stay. According to their projections, 25% of all professional jobs in North America will be remote by the end of 2022, and remote opportunities will continue to increase through 2023 [1].
Closer to home, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported in August 2021 that 41% of employed people regularly worked from home, up from 32% in August 2019 [2].
Of course, the incidence of working from home or remote working varies enormously between regions, industries, type of role and organisation. For every Elon Musk at Tesla with a zero-tolerance approach there are exceptions at the other end of the scale. Big organisations like 3M and Atlassian have embraced the change and offer 100% work-from-home options. For example at 3M the Work Your Way plan lets employees create a work schedule that helps them do their best work from wherever they want, whenever they want.
At the moment it seems most companies are embracing some form of hybrid approach – allowing most employees to work from home a certain percentage of the time unless there are exceptional circumstances.
So what does this mean for those of us managing projects in this new world? How do you ensure delivery of a quality outcome on time and on budget when physical co-location of the project team is becoming increasingly rare?
Well, for many of us, not much has really changed. Those who are used to working on large projects or projects within large organisations will be used to having a project team that is geographically dispersed. The dream of having daily stand-ups in person and moving Post-It notes around a wall is nice if it can be arranged, but if you are managing a project with representatives around the country or even across different countries, you will have already worked out how to manage virtual meetings. Often too, some portion of development or other work may be offshored and so we’ve become used to dealing with vendors at a distance.
For IT projects, studies have shown that the productivity of the majority of developers (84.8%) in terms of all the metrics is not significantly different from when working onsite [3]. In fact this same study found that for [some] developers, the company should encourage them to work from home for more time since remote work can improve their productivity.
However, dealing with a geographically dispersed team is a slightly different challenge to dealing with a team in a prolonged work-from-home situation. Some studies suggest that the isolation of working from home can have negative impacts on the mental health of employees [4].
So, while dealing with a dispersed team may not be an unusual situation for many project managers, care must be taken to ensure continued care for the health – mental or otherwise – of teams where there is an extended work-from-home arrangement in place. As mentioned previously, most employers have opted to have employees come into an office setting at least once or twice a week if for no other reason than to ensure there is some team-building and genuine human interaction maintained.
Where on-site work is not a possibility, studies have shown that relationships and use of social media were the most important factors among remote workers [5]. In other words, making an effort to maintain relationships through virtual meetings and the use of social-media like collaboration platforms can help ensure project team members continue to feel valued and important parts of the team.
While there will be companies that buck the trend, remote working and dispersed teams are likely to be more and more common over coming years. Organisations that recognise this and accommodate these changes with simple, common-sense tactics are likely to benefit in relation to their competitors in terms of employee engagement and retention. Furthermore, project managers experienced with the tools and techniques for dealing with dispersed teams can ensure there need not be a negative impact on project delivery capability.
[1] Remote Work Is Here To Stay And Will Increase Into 2023, Experts Say, Bryan Robinson, Feb 1, 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2022/02/01/remote-work-is-here-to-stay-and-will-increase-into-2023-experts-say/?sh=2649e1fb20a6
[2] Characteristics of Employment, Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics, August 2021, https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/characteristics-employment-australia/aug-2021
[3] Bao, L., Li, T., Xia, X. et al. How does working from home affect developer productivity? — A case study of Baidu during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 65, 142102 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-020-3278-4
[4] Botha, F.; Butterworth, P.; Wilkins, R. Evaluating How Mental Health Changed in Australia through the COVID-19 Pandemic: Findings from the ‘Taking the Pulse of the Nation’ (TTPN) Survey. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19, 558. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19010558
[5] Wontorczyk, A.; Rożnowski, B. Remote, Hybrid, and On-Site Work during the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic and the Consequences for Stress and Work Engagement. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19, 2400. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19042400
