The fight over working from home goes global
REMOTE WORK has a target on its back. Banking CEOs, like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, are intent on making working from home a relic of the pandemic. Staff at America’s biggest lender and other Wall Street stalwarts like Goldman Sachs are finding that five-day weeks are back for good. Big tech companies are also cracking the whip. Google’s return-to-work mandate threatens to track attendance and factor it in performance reviews for rebellious employees. Meta and Lyft want staff back at their desks, demanding at least three days of the week in the office by the end of the summer. With bosses clamping down on the practice, the pandemic-era days of mutual agreement on the desirability of remote work seem to be over.
Fresh data from a global survey shows just how far this consensus has broken down. Across the world, plans for remote working by employers fall short of what workers want, according to WFH Research, a group that includes Stanford University and the Ifo Institute, a German think-tank, which has tracked the sentiment of full-time workers with at least a secondary education in 34 countries. Corporate bosses fear that fully remote work dents productivity, a worry reinforced by a slew of recent research. One study of data-entry workers in India found those toiling from home to be 18% less productive than their office-frequenting peers; another found that employees at a big Asian IT firm were 19% less productive at home than they had been in the office. Communication records of nearly 62,000 employees at Microsoft showed that professional networks within the company ossified and became more isolated as remote work took hold.
2023-07-10 14:32:33
Link from www.economist.com
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