Remote Working

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GUEST OBSERVATION
But that revolution has long been thwarted by resistance – crucially from management concerned about productivity and performance.
It was <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/what-telecommuting-looked-like-in-1973/418473/?sf43013774=1">the case in 1974</a>, according to Jack Nilles, who led <a href="https://www.propertyobserver.com.au/https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/540203">the first major study</a> to evaluate the benefits of “telecommuting” (by a team from the University of Southern California). It was still the case in 2019, according to researchers from San Jose State University, whose studies showed <a href="https://transweb.sjsu.edu/sites/default/files/1860-Prager-Flexible-Workplaces-South-Bay_0.pdf">managerial and executive resistance</a> were the major perceived obstacles to the expansion of flexible working practices.
Our own research with Australian public service managers in 2018 found extensive managerial resistance to employees working from home.
Wondering how the enforced experience of working from home might change such attitudes, we surveyed 6,000 Australian public servants (including 1,400 managers) in June and July, and found the seeds for a revolution.
Only 8.4% of managers rated their teams less productive when working from home, while 57% thought productivity the same, and 34.6% believed it higher.
These findings, along with others, suggest working from home, at least for part of the week, may become the norm.
Negative perceptions
It is difficult to estimate precisely how many people had the option of working from home prior to the pandemic. Australian Bureau of Statistics data <a href="https://www.propertyobserver.com.au/https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/6333.0">published in September 2019 </a> indicated about a third of all employed people regularly worked from home. But it is likely this number also includes workers catching up on work after hours.
In the public sector, about one-third of executives worked away from the office, but <a href="https://www.apsc.gov.au/sites/default/files/apsc_state_of_the_service_report_2018-19.pdf">less than 15%</a> of non-executive employees did.
Our 2018 research, involving focus groups with nearly 300 managers across four state public services, found extensive managerial resistance to allowing work from home despite supportive policies permitting it.
Public sector managers shared with private sector managers concerns about performance and productivity, and the difficulty of remotely managing workers. They often framed their resistance around concerns about technology or work health and safety.
But on top of this, public service managers were sensitive about agreeing to any working arrangements that might feed community stereotypes about public servants having it easy.
Key findings
The COVID-19 pandemic rendered those objections irrelevant. By the end of May, <a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6764395/the-numbers-that-reveal-%20%20%20the-scale-of-the-public-services-response-to-covid-19/">57%</a> of Australian Public Service employees were reportedly working from home.
To compile our findings we worked with the Community and Public Sector Union, which distributed the survey on our behalf. The 6,000 respondents included about 20% non-union members and 22% managers, across a broad range of occupations and agencies.
As noted, three times as many managers thought team productivity and performance had increased as those who perceived a decrease, with the majority neutral.
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354017/original/file-20200821-14-awgoce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354017/original/file-20200821-14-awgoce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt="Manager perceptions of team performance working from home, by gender."></a> Manager perceptions of team performance working from home, by gender. The authors, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a>
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Female managers were slightly more likely to perceive greater productivity (36.7% compared to 31.1% of male managers), as were managers of teams larger than ten employees.
One manager noted “people are either productive or not, and it doesn’t matter where they work from”. Others said it had changed their management style for the better, forcing them to realise they did not need to micromanage to get results.
Nearly two-thirds said they intended to be more supportive of working from home in the future (though 2% said they planned to be less supportive). Male managers were the most swayed, with 68% saying they would be more supportive, compared with 63.6% of female managers.
One manager noted:
I had always accepted the department line that working from home is a privilege and not a real workplace. Also that working from home makes you unavailable and disconnects you from the workplace. Discovered that I couldn’t have been more wrong.“
Generally, our results show employees were mostly positive about working from home, with more than four out of five saying it gave them more time with their family, two-thirds saying they got more work done, and three in five enjoying having more autonomy over their work.
The downsides
There can be downsides to working from home, however. As one respondent put it: "I hate my house, it’s cold, and the kids are annoying, the dog stinks.”
The <a href="https://theconversation.com/its-not-just-the-isolation-working-from-home-has-surprising-downsides-107140">key issues identified by research</a> are social isolation, lack of feedback and loss of separation of work from home life.
<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354027/original/file-20200821-18-16za4ti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt="Tired women using laptoop at night.">A quarter of workers reported working longer hours. Shutterstock
On the isolation and feedback front, our results were generally positive. Managers indicated communication technology enabled teams to stay in touch in multiple ways, from instant messaging to video conferencing. While just over 10% stuck to their usual meeting routine, the majority (about 60%) had increased their use of virtual meetings. This included scheduling social activities such as virtual coffee and drinks.
On the question of work-life balance, our results were more mixed.
Three-quarters reported they continued to work their usual work hours. But one in four reported working longer hours. Mostly this was due to increased workload, though almost 15% said they had been working more voluntarily because they were absorbed by their work. Many managers noted this increased motivation and mood.
Given the focus of the public service, this result is not necessarily one we can presume would apply across the entire workforce. That said, longer working hours do seem a feature of working from home during this pandemic. Based on data from more than 3 million in 16 cities, researchers found the average workday for those under lockdown <a href="https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-shorter-meetings-but-longer-days-how-covid-19-has-changed-the-way-we-work-143894">is about 48 minutes longer</a>.
These findings on longer hours potentially offset some of the positive perceptions of productivity improvements. The emergency conditions in which both managers and workers have been prepared to go the extra mile cannot become the baseline for expectations permanently.
Despite these caveats, and the need to point out that organisations still have much to do to embed flexibility in their cultures, our results add to the evidence that the great working-from-home experiment of 2020 has broken the back of decades of inherited managerial resistance. The revolution may have started.<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/144850/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;">
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/linda-colley-22201">Linda Colley</a>, Associate Professor HRM/IR, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/cquniversity-australia-2140">CQUniversity Australia</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/sue-williamson-104295">Sue Williamson</a>, Senior Lecturer, Human Resource Management, UNSW Canberra, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/unsw-1414">UNSW</a>
This article is republished from <a href="https://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/with-management-resistance-overcome-working-from-home-may-be-here-to-stay-144850">original article</a>.
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j.ballantyne1990-6AQqhLzZaK

With management resistance overcome, working from home may be here to stay

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One of the many things COVID-19 has had a dramatic impact on is the way many of us work.
Those fortunate enough to be able to work from home have been able to adapt to this new reality – and it certainly has been “new”.
Perhaps the biggest question for both employers and employees is whether working from home has led to a decrease in productivity.
The fact major companies such as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/technology/facebook-remote-work-coronavirus" target="_blank">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/05/13/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-tells-employees-they-can-work-from-home-forever-before-you-celebrate-theres-a-catch/#765a70652e91" target="_blank">Twitter</a> have said they will allow many employees to work from home permanently suggests work in some sectors can be done more efficiently outside a formal workplace.
At a minimum, time saved from commuting and greater flexibility to multitask other elements of one’s life are positives from working from home. Lack of social interaction and the inevitable distractions in most home environments are negatives.
The degree and extent of increased productivity from working at home remains to be seen. It will depend on the way in which working in a team has evolved in a remote environment using online tools like Slack and Zoom.
The big question is how the nature of collaboration has changed under COVID.
<h2>Studying 3 million people</h2>
Thanks to <a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w27612" target="_blank">a fascinating analysis</a> by researchers from the Harvard Business School and New York University, we are beginning to get the first systematic evidence on how the nature of work has changed for those working from home during COVID-19.
The authors gathered aggregated meeting and email meta-data for 3,143,270 people working for 21,478 companies in 16 cities in Europe, the United States and Israel where government-mandated lockdowns were imposed in March.
As the authors put it:
<blockquote>
These lockdowns established a clear break point after which we could infer that people were working from home. The earliest lockdown in our data occurred on March 8, 2020, in Milan, Italy, and the latest lockdown occurred on March 25, 2020, in Washington, DC.
</blockquote>
To explore changes in worker behaviour, their analysis compares meeting and email data during the lockdown periods (typically a month long) with data for the eight weeks prior and the eight weeks after lockdowns ended.
The data they used came from “an information technology services provider that licenses digital communications solutions to organisations around the world”.
This meta-data indicates the actual behaviour of employees in real organisations. So it’s more robust than, say, a survey asking people what they did. Survey respondents might not remember accurately, or might not tell the truth, and those that respond may not be a representative sample.
In short, the meta-data enables the authors to draw detailed and interesting conclusions that survey data would allow.
It’s the detail of a paper like this that is, in a sense, the whole point. But the bottom line is this. Lockdowns have reduced the amount of time most workers spend in meetings, but increased their working hours.
<h2>Time in meetings</h2>
Their results show the number of meetings attended by workers increased, on average, by 12.9% during lockdown – with the average number of attendees per meeting increasing by 13.5%.
Impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on meetings
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351458/original/file-20200806-22-173asvd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351458/original/file-20200806-22-173asvd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt="Impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on meetings."></a>
<a class="source" href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w27612" target="_blank">NBER Working Paper No. 27612, July 2020</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" target="_blank">CC BY-NC-ND</a>
But the average length of meetings fell by 20.1%, with the net effect being that people spent 11.5% less time in meetings.
In European cities such as Brussels, Oslo and Zurich, meeting length declined sharply and continued to fall in the month after the beginning of the lockdown. In the US cities of Chicago, New York and Washington DC, length of meetings declined less.
Email and working hours
There was, also, a significant and seemingly durable increase in working hours, based on the number of hours between the first and last email sent or meeting attended by an individual in a day.
On average, the length of the average workday increased by 48.5 minutes.
Impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on email
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351460/original/file-20200806-14-1x9tdkp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351460/original/file-20200806-14-1x9tdkp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt="Impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on email."></a>
<a class="source" href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w27612" target="_blank">NBER Working Paper No. 27612, July 2020</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" target="_blank">CC BY-NC-ND</a>
Longer workdays were common across the 16 cities during lockdowns. When restrictions were lifted, average hours returned closer to pre-lockdown levels in all but three cities – San Jose, Rome and New York City.
<h2>The evolving nature of work</h2>
It is perhaps too early to draw strong conclusions about these changing patterns of communication. But there are some intriguing possibilities.
Larger meetings may be needed to get “everyone on the same page” and create what economists call “common knowledge”. This may be both easier to do in phone or video conferences, and also more important in the absence of face-to-face communication.
Consistent with this, electronic communications extending beyond normal work hours seems like an inevitable consequence, albeit a negative one for work-life balance, particularly for people with caring responsibilities.
The nature of work was evolving before COVID-19, and it will continue to do so as many parts of the world continue with various forms of physical distancing.
Documenting the nature of that evolution, as well as the implications for productivity, workplace culture, and time outside of work will continue to be informed by remarkable data of the kind the authors analysed.<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143894/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;">
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/richard-holden-118107" target="_blank">Richard Holden</a>, Professor of Economics, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/unsw-1414" target="_blank">UNSW</a>
This article is republished from <a href="https://theconversation.com" target="_blank">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-shorter-meetings-but-longer-days-how-covid-19-has-changed-the-way-we-work-143894" target="_blank">original article</a>.
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Shorter meetings but longer days – how COVID-19 has changed the way we work

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As government restrictions are eased and Australian businesses prepare to reopen, employers, in accordance with the government’s ‘return to work’ roadmap, are beginning to ask their employees to return to the workplace. The question remains: what will the post-pandemic workplace look like and how will businesses and their respective employees adapt to a post-COVID office model?   
In light of this, global design and workplace strategy firm, <a href="https://www.unispace.com/projects" target="_blank">Unispace</a>, with a varied suite of clients including ANZ Bank, Optus, Coca Cola, EY and Deloitte, has recently surveyed 237 companies among their clientele to gather data and insights on the global impact of remote working and what the workplace future holds for these high-profile companies.  
The survey results shed light on what workplaces of the future will look like and emerging cultural and behavioural trends to be taken into consideration for future office design.  
As told by Unispace’s suite of clients:  
1.       The overall office footprint will shrink  
2.       Staff will work from home at least two to three days per week  
3.       Companies will send staff back in waves  
4.       Video conferencing will replace most audio conferencing, phone calls, and F2F external meetings 
5.       Employees will use more collaboration spaces within the office than before, and focus work will predominately be conducted at home  
<img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dz9xllyip/image/fetch/c_scale,w_580,q_auto:good/https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/po.images/2020/6/12/9_Unispace.jpg" alt="" width="448" height="308">
Productivity 
Interestingly, 45 per cent of respondents have found themselves more productive while working remotely while 36 per cent have found it more difficult to maintain productivity as a result of ineffective setups and caregiving requirements. On top of this, 37 per cent have witnessed a decrease in productivity due to the increased need to communicate more regularly with colleagues. 
Internal/external changes  
The primary challenges from both an internal (63 per cent) and external (55 per cent) standpoint has been around connecting with peers and clients. Participants in the survey have seen challenges arising when talking to external parties with 42.7 per cent of respondents indicating some frustration with a mismatch of software and being unfamiliar with their client’s tools, which may have been better solved in a face-to-face office environment.   
Returning to the workplace  
Although respondents feel the office will go back to normal within three to six months (27 per cent), they also believe the overall office footprint will shrink (36 per cent) and staff will work from home at least 2-3 days per week (68 per cent).  
Remote working arrangements  
In line with higher in-office rates, 25 per cent of respondents in APAC have indicated that they don’t have a suitable home internet arrangement. While 70 per cent of organisations were prepared to work remotely, 30 per cent already had some teams working from home and were more equipped with this change to remote working. 
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