Remote work; how should we handle it?

Covid lockdowns enabled the great remote working experiments of 2020/21 around the world. 60% of the adult working population worked remotely at some point during the first lockdown in the UK, a total of over 8 million people or a quarter of the population working remotely, as opposed to half that figure in 2019 according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS).  As people are no longer required to work from home this figure has dropped; however the trend to work at least partly at home continues to rise. Remote work did not disappear at the end of lockdowns. By the spring of 2022 more than a third of working adults in Great Britain still spent at least part of their time working from home.

Remote work came out of the Covid era a stronger force to be reckoned with, silencing its critics in regard to whether it was possible to transfer work to remote settings, at scale and across industries. Instead of the feared loss of productivity through people ‘shirking at home’, the productivity of many people actually increased when they worked remotely. When the dangers presented by Covid subsided and people could once more return to their offices and other premises there was an abject sitting on hands and reluctance to give up the new-found flexibility. Having assumed that it would be back to business as usual after the pandemic passed, some corporate executives were perplexed; people just did not return dutifully to the office in the way that they had projected. They insisted on staying home. We are now at a place where the new reality of changed expectations and work norms are colliding into long-held and heavily invested-into beliefs about organisational culture, power-relationships and management practices.

Remote and hybrid working looks to be a large and permanent sector of how work is offered, both now and in the future. It makes sense. At a time when more and more work functions can be undertaken from any location using technology, why not capitalise on the efficiencies that this way of working brings? When people value work flexibility over pay, organisations cannot afford to ignore the clarion call of a new era in work organisation. Ignoring the expectations of a labour-force that has relative ease in moving to alterative employment elsewhere is bad for business.

So there is now a scramble to work out what to do for the best.  What ‘mix’ of remote compared to on-site working arrangements should organisations adopt? Should there be one model or should there be different variations to suit different groups of employees? How can organisational culture be maintained or established when most people are working in a hybrid or remote way? Practically, how should managers actually manage their teams in a hybrid/remote world of work?  Given the speed with which remote work has become a key part of how we work, it is not surprising that many of these questions are just starting to be asked, let alone answered.

The upheaval offers great opportunity but also holds considerable risk. The challenge is to find solutions and options that don’t just mirror the accepted truths that have been applied before, but which may no longer be fit for purpose.  We need to go back to first principles and look at how people actually think and behave as workers, but also as people with lives, priorities and expectations that may be uncomfortably out of sync with the conventional respected thinking about work. Failing to appreciate how power relationships have been completely altered, even subverted by the experience of remote work during Covid lockdowns, and hybrid work post-lockdown, will be a mistake. The change in power relationships should be viewed at a catalyst for better work and a different and more effective way of managing.

The question is not just ‘should work be remote or on-site?’ The issue is also one of examining how our behaviour is affected by working increasingly online and how to design work to take account of this. Remote work, though popular, does have its potential down sides: isolation and loneliness, communication problems and burnout for example. Working out how to manage purely remote or a hybrid model of work that includes both remote and face to face work will involve thinking about how the potentially harmful or inefficient outcomes of remote work can be mitigated. People have different personalities and ways of working and therefore will respond in different ways to new ways of working. Ignoring issues will lead to potentially very negative outcomes for individuals and organisations and cause the conundrum of a working population wanting to work flexibly but being increasingly dissatisfied by their experience of it alongside organisations feeling increasingly aware that they are not managing hybrid and remote working well.