Pluses and Minuses to Work-from-Home: 2020

As the business world gets used to work from home (WFH) during these unusual coronavirus times, UC San Diego MBA graduate Elie Sherman summarizes the pluses and minuses for organizations in building WFH culture.

3 main advantages to working remotely:

Working parents get to spend more time with their kids Sure, this may not be directly related to business continuity, but demanding work schedules and the prevalence of families with two working parents has taken its toll on family life. As both parents juggle working schedules, longer hours, and family responsibilities, many families have found themselves pushed to the brink. Adding time back for family life allows workers to improve their overall well-being and thus contribute more effectively to remote culture. Who hasn’t gotten a better sense of their manager’s humanity seeing them raise a toddler up on their knee during a meeting? Such images create a sense of normalcy in strange times that can help lift moods and improve productivity.

Read more from Elie Sherman:

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Less workplace stress and distractions While many of us are extroverts who thrive on the social aspect of working in shared spaces, others prefer the quiet of a back office, a private nook, or a shaded bay window. Some people get their best work done by themselves, with their headphones on, and their favorite songs spinning softly in the background. The social elements of office life can easily become distractions for those who enjoy it, for those who head off every twenty minutes to the coffee lounge or scan the halls for a conversation. Working at home offers employees a quiet, comfortable space in which to be productive, free of the social pressures and distractions of office life.

All that commute time can be put to productive use How long did you normally spend in traffic during the workweek? Three-and-a-half hours, cumulatively? Perhaps, as many as 14? Think about all that time for a second, and ask yourself how much more effectively it could be put to productive use, rather than spending it in the car, listening passively to the latest Seth Rogan podcast while vacillating over whether to squeeze into the space between a Tesla Model S and Chevy Sonic, wondering whether that move will save you a total of 19 seconds on the way to the office. Instead, you get to enjoy yourself a little longer in the morning with a slow cup of coffee, adding that extra half hour you save to getting that memo out, completing your data visualization for the big presentation that day, or fact-checking your colleague’s report.

3 main disadvantages to working remotely:

Teamwork takes a hit Teams work better when people can come together physically. Collaboration suffers when everybody works isolated and by themselves. Some people tend to hide. Others defer work, and are at greater liberty to do so when teams don’t regularly meet. Those who take on more responsibility by default may find that without regular in-person meetings, even more work falls on their shoulders. Additionally, without a central location to meet or the chances of seeing your colleagues in the halls, certain projects will suffer the whims of individual schedules and preferences, as well as collective inertia. The group creative process is also a wonderful thing that cannot easily be replicated in the rigid confines of Zoom-screen windows.

Losing a sense of community One of the joys of life is finding a company whose work culture is easily relatable to you. It can be very fulfilling to show up to work in the morning, ready to join supportive colleagues who are just as excited as you are to tackle the missions of the day, the week, the quarter, or the year. A sense of community grows out of the desire to contribute to a group’s purpose. While perhaps a vestige of this feeling is available as everybody works from home, there lacks the power of coming together in a physical space and the sense of community that develops around seeing one another in person, not to mention interacting with leaders whose work centers around enhancing the organization’s mission and direction. Articles have highlighted Americans' growing demand for rural property amid the pandemic, but what's at stake for the company if people are seeking to move themselves or their families out on their own?

A lack of accountability Perhaps you’ve started to notice that loose ends don’t always meet once remote-work deliverables are due. Perhaps some of your colleagues show up to meetings with their cameras off, and they remain off, only piping up when their names are called, or not at all. Perhaps the same people are contributing over and over again at Zoom meetings while others remain mysteriously silent and appear totally engaged with something else on another screen. Or managers who need to "step out for a call" every thirty minutes. These factors represent a lack of accountability for managers, project leaders, and colleagues alike. Organizational outputs inevitably suffer as a result.

Where do we go from here?

Eventually, our country is going to finish disseminating the coronavirus vaccines, antibody treatments will become available (and, for a while, chic), and the worst symptoms of COVID-19 will be tamed with medical regimens.

Companies may be tempted during this time to explore various avenues in such trying times for cutting costs and increasing profitability, such as canceling real estate leases, reducing expenses around office supplies, and trimming facilities staff. However, companies will have to be critical in their assessments of the true, long-term costs of such measures.

Perhaps, work community is sacrificed without a central location to meet. Accountability suffers when individuals hide in plain sight in the digital realm. Teamwork takes a hit when people cannot regularly come together. Organizations by definition are collectives of people with shared objectives, aligned incentives, and unifying mission statements.

Remote work may be a band-aid amid the current circumstances, but for most companies, it is neither panacea nor strategically sound for the long-term. Someday soon, most workers are going to have to come back together again.