All Rights Reserved, This is a BETA experience. PreventEpidemicsNaija: Advocating for Domestic Resource Mobilisation to Strengthen, Addressing youth employability in Nigeria, Business case against proposed two-wheeler ban, Copyright challenges a ticking time bomb in social media age, Get the best of world News delivered to your inbox daily, How Africa can leverage art, creativity in push for climate justice, Delta job creation bureau ends search for youth applicants into STEP 2022 cycle, Stocks shed over N860bn as rate hike effect lingers, Parallex Bank collaborates with Kennis Music bites to support lifestyles, Business Day, established in 2001, is a daily business newspaper based in Lagos. Its a natural evolution. Ordinarily, commuting time generally doesnt shift significantly in the aggregate. Others, such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, are reverting to the tried-and-true office environment, calling everyone back in. Chicago Booth Review This should ultimately boost productivity, Booths Davis says. A study by Chicago Booths Jonathan Dingeland Brent Neimanfinds that while the majority of all jobs in the US require appearing in person, more than a third can potentially be performed entirely remotely. One of the biggest challenges facing leaders is ensuring the ongoing viability and profitability of a company, two factors that are tied to not only individual performance but also team performance as well. 2022 - Businessday NG. All Rights Reserved.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. It has both daily and Sunday titles. At many companies, the future will involve remote work and more flexibility than before. As employees work remotely, assessing productivity has become a topical issue, as perceived productivity does not always equate to actual productivity on the job. Working from home under the pandemic has been far more productive than I or pretty much anyone else predicted, Bloom says. Working remotely has given me more space for long-term thinking and helped me spend more time with my family, which has made me happier and more productive at work, Zuckerberg wrote. Sentiments vary by location, industry, and culture. And author and behavioral scientist Jon Levy argues in the Boston Globe that having some people in the office and others at home runs counter to smooth organizational processes. . These fragmented networks can be offset by something that existed within every organization even before the pandemic forced remote work. 
Ensuring team dynamics arent further eroded will take some planning and perhaps some ingenuity, but its an important commitment to make to ensure the long-term health of a company. According to KPMGs 2020 survey on The Future of HR in the New Reality, Human Resource executives second most critical capability is managing performance and productivity in a predominantly remote environment.. 
Regardless of what research establishes in the long run about productivity, many workers are already demanding flexibility in their schedules. Many others are less eager to do so, even quitting their jobs to avoid going back. Stunted creativity. Shittu is a Lagos-based, budding strategy consultant with varying interests and experience in the Consumer market, and Energy and Natural Resources Sector. To test that thesis, Jose Maria Barreroof the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Bloom, and Chicago Booths Steven J. Davislaunched a monthly survey of US workers in May 2020, tracking more than 30,000 workers aged 2064 who earned at least $20,000 per year in 2019. Many other factors come into play to determine which business model would be the most appropriate fit for a specific company within a specific industry. Is remote work a sustainable work arrangement during a pandemic and beyond? Opinions expressed are those of the author. Humans are predominantly social beings who crave interactions with peers, families, and friends.
Overall, though, do workers with more flexibility work fewer hours (as Barrero, Bloom, and Davis find) or more (as at the Asian IT-services company)? Workers could gain additional utility by relocating to a cheaper location, moving closer to family, or mitigating frictions around immigration or dual careers., He notes as well the potential advantages for companies that allow workers to be located anywhere across the globe. Remote work is not a fad. The effect of remote work on employee productivity is a double-edged sword. This might lead to a more equitable distribution of talent across geographies.. Take, for example, the auto manufacturing industry. And yet Davis, Ghent, and Gregorys model projects that after the pandemic winds down, highly skilled, college-educated workers will spend 30 percent of their time working from home, as opposed to 10 percent in prior times. Thriving in a remote work environment demands a refreshed application of skills, such as working independently, strong communication, collaboration, adaptability, and time management, Employee productivity refers to the total value/output an employee creates within a time frame or commensurate metric. Thriving in a remote work environment demands a refreshed application of skills, such as working independently, strong communication, collaboration, adaptability, and time management while leveraging digital technologies.
Some research indicates that working from home can boost productivity and that companies offering more flexibility will be best positioned for success. Are We Really More Productive Working from Home? This can lead to fragmented internal networks, which is supported by the studys findings. Hours on the job averaged about 32 per week, compared with 36 pre-pandemic, although the work time stretched past traditional office hours. Use video calls to discuss and find solutions to issues rather than trying to solve them through an email chain or instant messages. A June article in the MIT Technology Review by Stanfords Erik Brynjolfsson and MIT postdoctoral scholar Georgios Petropoulos corroborates this view. Perhaps, a hybrid model is well-suited for Ctrip. The proverbial water cooler talks, lunches in the corporate cafeteria or impromptu meetings are no longer possible. He has also said that he expects about half of Facebooks employees to be fully remote within the next decade. This may give threats from CEOs such as Morgan Stanleys James Gormanwho said at the companys US Financials, Payments & CRE conference in June, If you want to get paid New York rates, you work in New Yorka bit less bite. It is the only Nigerian newspaper with a bureau in Accra, Ghana. Some, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify, are leaning into remote work. It is easier to communicate and share ideas with office mates, which leads to more productive outcomes. While some employees are more productive at home, thats not the case overall, according to the model, which after calibration implies that the average high-skill worker is less productive at home than at the office, even postpandemic, he says. He was No. Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi, and Barbara Larson. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg isnt your typical office worker. Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia and Victoria Vernon. While many home-office technologies have been around for a while, the technologies become much more useful after widespread adoption, the researchers note. It is still early to draw strong conclusions about the impact of remote work on productivity. The work-from-home experience seems to be more positive than what people believed, but we still dont have great data, Fishbach says. This divergence between productivity and pay may very well come to pass regarding time, he told graduating Booth students at their convocation ceremony. PwC Cloud and Digital Transformation BrandVoice, How To Earn Cash Rewards For Everyday Spending. In Manhattan, the overall office vacancy rate was at a multidecade high of 16 percent in the first quarter of 2021, according to real-estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield. 3 on the 2020 Forbes list of the richest Americans, with a net worth of $125 billion, give or take. This, I believe, will aid transform The Great Attrition into The Great Attraction. The future of work is now. They estimate that, even after accounting for the loss of commuting time, employees worked about a third of an hour per day more than they did at the office. Respondents may devote a few more minutes in the morning to chores and childcare, while still devoting about a third of their old commuting time slot to their primary job. The pandemic, they write, has compressed a decades worth of digital innovation in areas like remote work into less than a year. The biggest productivity impact of the pandemic will be realized in the longer run, as the work-from-home trend continues, they argue. Remote work, by its very nature, means fewer connections between team members across the organization. John W. Barry, Murillo Campello, John R. Graham, and Yueran Ma. The effect of remote work on employee productivity, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Top 10 skills employers are looking for in 2022, For Support : support@businessdaynigeria.zendesk.com. Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts, and Zhichun Jenny Ying. Get real time updates directly on you device, subscribe now.
More generally, the producer has to attract workers . Companies need to be perceptive and proactive: Be aware of how team collaboration is changing. Among European executives, a whopping 88 percent reportedly disagree with the idea that remote work is as or more productive than working at the office. Working policies may be shaped by employees preferences. Always, he said on a June episode of the Freakonomics podcast. Research Choudhury conducted with Harvard PhD student Cirrus Foroughiand Northeastern Universitys Barbara Larsonanalyzes a 2012 transition from a work-from-home to a work-from-anywhere model among patent examiners with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. That could be good for reducing the earnings gap between men and womenbut only to a point. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Call it forced collaboration.. When there is no perceived need for interaction outside of ones own team, cross-functional interaction diminishes. This might bias survey respondents toward giving more positive answers to questions about their productivity, says Gibbs. Forty percent of workers reported they were more productive at home during the pandemic than they had been when in the office, and only 15 percent said the opposite was true. and if workers really want to commute less, and they can save time on their end, and employers can figure out some way to accommodate that, theyre going to have more success with workers at a given wage cost.. There are too many variables to make this decision easily. This website uses cookies to ensure the best user experience. They devoted the rest to other activities, including household chores, childcare, leisure activities such as watching movies and TV, outdoor exercise, and even second jobs. The study also confirmed that remote work causes formal and even informal silos to form. We want to demonstrate our commitment to your privacy. The researchers exploited a natural experiment and estimate that there was a 4.4 percent increase in work output when the examiners transitioned from a work-from-home regime to the work-from-anywhere regime. The widespread implementation of remote-working technology, a defining feature of the pandemic, is another important factor for productivity. The world helped them stay motivated, she says, adding that looking at such an atypical year may not tell us as much about the future as performing the same experiment in a typical year would. But much like rare power outages in Manhattan have made it possible for New Yorkers to suddenly see the nighttime stars, the dramatic work-from-home shift that occurred during the pandemic made it possible to recognize the impact traveling to and from an office had on productivity. In an analysis of the data collected through March 2021, they find that nearly six out of 10 workers reported being more productive working from home than they expected to be, compared with 14 percent who said they got less done. The shift to remote work affects a significant slice of the US workforce. However, well before Zoom, which came on the scene in 2011, or even Skype, which launched in 2003, the researchers acknowledged some of the potential benefits of remote work, allowing that dependence on physical proximity imposes substantial costs as well, and may undercut successful collaboration. For one, they noted, email, answering machines, and computer bulletin boards could help eliminate the inconvenience of organizing in-person meetings with multiple people at the same time.
Three-quarters or more of the productivity gains that we find are coming from a reduction in commuting time, Davis says. Supported by findings in the Microsoft study, this leads to a breakdown of critical bridging ties. The researchers argue that the work-from-home trend is here to stay, and they calculate that these working arrangements will increase overall worker productivity in the US by 5 percent as compared with the pre-pandemic economy. For one, Gibbs, Mengel, and Siemroth acknowledge that their study doesnt necessarily reflect the remote-work model as it might look in postpandemic times, when employees are relieved of the weight of a massive global crisis. But data indicate that preferences and productivity are shaped by factors beyond a persons line of work. An experiment that allowed for random selection would likely be more telling. Companies that offer more flexibility in work arrangements may have the best chance of attracting top talent at the best price. Gibbs concurs, noting that companies using a hybrid model will have to find ways to make sure employees who should interact will be on campus simultaneously. As the pandemic has demonstrated, many workers can be both productive and get dinner started between meetings. Remote work arrangements create opportunities for flexibility, less commuting costs, fewer office-related distractions, and increased autonomy for employees. In a remote or hybrid workplace, employees often gravitate to settings or situations where they feel most comfortable. R&D groups may need to make sure that researchers are on campus at the same time, to spur unplanned interactions that sometimes lead to new ideas and innovations.. With widespread lockdowns abruptly forcing businesses to halt nonessential, in-person activity, the COVID-19 pandemic drove a mass social experiment in working from home, according to Jose Maria Barreroof the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Stanfords Nicholas Bloom, and Chicago Booths Steven J. Davis.
Companies that offer more flexibility in work arrangements may have the best chance of attracting top talent at the best price.