Opinion: The traditional office workplace is dead, and you’ll be surprised to learn why

Opinion: The traditional office workplace is dead, and you’ll be surprised to learn why

We now have definitive proof that the traditional Monday-through-Friday, 9-to-5 is over for remote-capable employees. It’s based on a meta-analysis paper on productivity in hybrid, remote and in-office settings, published by researchers from Stanford University, the University of Chicago and the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

People will credit (or blame) the pandemic for this, but there’s actually a much simpler reason: The traditional model is either less productive or more expensive than the alternatives, or both.

Hybrid work models, which combine remote and in-office activities, offer a balanced approach that has been shown to enhance both productivity and job satisfaction. This model allows for flexibility, enabling employees to work remotely while capitalizing on the benefits of face-to-face interactions for certain types of work that benefit from direct engagement, such as brainstorming sessions and complex project discussions.

Research has consistently found that hybrid workers exhibit an increase in productivity of 5 percent to 13 percent over in-office workers. They also report greater job satisfaction.

One randomized control trial found that productivity in hybrid settings is improved by approximately 4 percent. Self-assessments by hybrid workers corroborate these findings, with 3 percent to 5 percent increases in productivity. The international findings are similar, with positive reports from around the world.

The picture for fully remote work is more complex.

Traditional, office-centric approaches to remote work introduce significant hurdles that can undermine efficiency. In such cases, communication difficulties and a lack of immediate feedback can slow down project progress, reduce collaboration, and diminish the quality of outputs.

Another major concern in fully remote work environments is the propensity of employees to become disengaged from their work tasks, if supervisors aren’t using best practices and lack training in managing remote teams. The distractions of a home environment can lead to procrastination and a phenomenon colloquially known as “shirking from home.” This issue is particularly acute for workers who lack intrinsic motivation or whose tasks are boring.

For example, consider a study by economists from MIT and UCLA observed two groups made up of 235 data-entry workers — one working from home, the other in the office — in Chennai, India. They hired these workers for 8 weeks and compared the productivity of both groups. Their finding? Low-skilled contract workers hired for a two-month gig working from home proved 18 percent less productive, based on net typing speed, than those working from the office.

In contrast, an earlier study by scholars at Stanford looked at 250 call center employees of a sizable multinational corporation, split into two groups: those working remotely and those commuting to an office. Their prevailing assumption was that employees at home might indulge in leisure — sleeping or binge-watching television — instead of performing their duties. Contrary to these expectations, the researchers uncovered a startling 13 percent surge in productivity among remote workers. The difference might stem from the fact that the latter study focused on permanent staff invested in their careers at the multinational company, compared to the short-term contract workers evaluated in the former study.

The evidence does show that fully remote work undermines collaboration and learning, unless you adopt best practices for remote work management. One study looked at software engineers at a Fortune 500 company with a main campus split across two buildings. Engineers stationed in the same building as their entire team benefitted from receiving 22 percent more online feedback compared to those with teammates in different buildings. The researchers concluded that the lack of such feedback indicates that working remotely undermines collaboration and learning.

Still, there’s no question that fully remote work offers much better cost savings. Remote employees require no office space and can be hired at lower wages. Specifically, consider FlexJobs’ 2024 Work-From-Anywhere survey of  over 4,000 U.S. professionals. The findings revealed a significant willingness among workers to trade financial gain for geographic flexibility: in order to secure the ability to work from anywhere, 26 percent of respondents would accept a 5 percent reduction in salary, and another 24 percent indicated they would agree to a pay decrease ranging from 10% to 15%. This data underscores a shift in priorities, where location independence increasingly outweighs traditional compensation structures in the professional landscape.

So overall, even with a more complicated picture of productivity, organizations may very well be getting a higher return on investment from remote workers. In other words, the reduction in productivity per employee compared to hybrid or in-office work would in most cases be overcome by the reduced cost of each employee, even if the negative impact on collaboration and learning has to be considered and addressed.

In any case, the debate is clearly between a flexible hybrid model or a fully remote model. The traditional office-centric model is already toast. That’s without even considering how blanket return-to-office mandates, especially for full-time in-office work, harm productivity by decreasing employee engagement.

Hybrid work definitely offers higher productivity than office-centric work. Productivity in remote work is more nuanced and context-dependent, with negative implications for learning and collaboration. But organizations that adopt best practices may be able to overcome those problems. Besides, fully remote offers major cost savings that many companies may want to take advantage of.

The upshot: There has never been less reason to work a traditional, five-day in-office 9-to-5 job.

Gleb Tsipursky is CEO of the hybrid work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts and authored the best-seller “Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams.“

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.