Telecommuting, Innovation and the Great Resignation

Employees want to work from home. However, their bosses are eager to return to the office. Knowledge managers believe that remoteness makes their work better, while managers worry that the agreement could worsen the quality of work. But as a scapegoat for telecommuting, companies may be hiding the real scourge of creativity right now: too much work.

According to a study by Slack’s Future Forum Pulse, they are almost three times more likely to say they want to return to the office full-time than non-executives. The report found that while nearly 80% of knowledge workers want flexibility in the place where they work – citing benefits ranging from work-life balance to lower anxiety at work and a better feeling for affiliation – their employers believe that the agreement will lead to various diseases that reduce the cooperation, creativity and culture of the company. These concerns are linked to another recent report from Northeastern University, which found that more than half of C-suite executives were concerned about their workforce’s ability to be creative and innovative in a predominantly remote work environment.

As the worst effects of the omicron variant begin to diminish, companies will once again make noise about returning people who have worked from home to their computers for the past two years back to the office. However, thanks to the incredibly tight labor market, these employees have more leverage than usual to get what they want. The way this will develop will determine the way we work for years to come.

One problem is that some employers’ concerns about telecommuting may be unfounded.

“The prevailing consensus seems to be, at least if you ask managers, ‘Oh, if you’re all away, it must be bad,’ and therefore you need to get people back in the office,” said Christoph Riddle, an associate professor at Northeastern University who studies teamwork. and processes of nearly a decade. “We can directly compare the performance of teams working remotely with teams working face to face, and we generally find no difference in the performance of the team.”

What is certain, and that is the cause of much of this concern, is that our work networks are shrinking. Monitored data from both Microsoft and the employee engagement platform Time is Ltd. found that workers interacted with fewer people at work outside their direct teams. Although not a silver bullet for innovation, this type of departmental conversation can help break down silos and encourage new solutions. But remote work is not the main reason for preventing these interactions: The problem is that there is not enough time for them to happen. In other words, we talk to fewer people not because we work from home, but because we work too much.

“A more direct reason for people to use time and hours during the day is workload, not distance,” Denise Rousseau, a professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon University, told Recode.

“I think there is a tendency for people to attribute one problem to another just because they meet together, saying, ‘We work from home, so we don’t innovate,’ Rousseau said. “Our to-do lists are high and our staff is shrinking. That’s another really good reason not to innovate. “

Because people have left their jobs or left their workforce, in what is called the Great Resignation or the Great Displacement, those who have left had to take on the absence. Two-thirds of workers said their workload had increased “significantly” since they started working remotely (read: since the pandemic). More than half of those who stayed at work said they took more responsibility when their colleagues left, with 30 percent struggling to get the job done, according to a survey last summer by the Human Resources Management Society (SHRM). People spend more hours, send and read more emails and have less time to focus, according to Time is Ltd.

“Even before the Great Resignation, if someone leaves a department, key tasks will often be shared among others on the department until a replacement is found,” SHRM Knowledge Adviser John Duni told Recode. “The challenge [now] there is a higher percentage of people leaving, so there is more work to be allocated and it just takes more time to hire people. “

This shortage can be seen in our communication with wider networks of people at work.

“There’s no time for chats, no time for this interaction, which would happen naturally,” Duni said.

As if increased work-related work is not enough, pandemic-related obstacles such as lack of childcare and smaller social support systems are forcing many people to have more work than paid work.

“They have more work to do and have an additional role to play as public health experts,” said Dana Sumpter, an associate professor of organizational theory and management at Pepperdine University, referring to the many new hats the pandemic has forced people to wear. The situation is particularly difficult among women, who are more likely to take on an extremely large share of childcare and work at home. “They made sacrifices to allow work relationships to break down or even end because they have limited time, energy and attention.”

People everywhere have been burned by the pandemic and are doing their best to cope. As Brandy Aven, a professor of organizational theory, strategy and entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon, said: “When we are under threat and everyone is still filled with fear, people will withdraw and become very tribal and get lost. That’s what we see. ”

The answers are indexed on a scale from -60 (very bad) to +60 (very positive). Source: Future Forum Pulse study

What seems to provide workers with some comfort, according to a Slack study, is exactly what executives worry about: remote work. While there is certainly room for improvement in telecommuting in terms of maintaining collaboration, creativity and innovation, the more pressing issue is alleviating our workload.

This means either hiring more people or reducing the amount of work for existing employees. It will be necessary to separate mission-critical from good ones in order to allow people to talk to those outside of those with whom you absolutely need to talk.

Once we have a little more time and space, we can focus on how to foster collaboration, creativity and innovation in a remote environment. If managers want to improve the quality of work, they may want to consider the amount of work they expect. If they want to make remote work better, there are better places to start from the office.