I stumbled across this post from 2017 — The way we work doesn’t work, anymore— and it’s interesting to look back to how things were changing before the pandemic pushed us to 100% out of the Hive.
Since 2013, the percentage of employees ‘working remotely in some capacity’ has grown from 39% to 43%, and those working offsite spend more time offsite, too.
And what about the engagement of remote workers?
In 2012, Gallup found that employees who worked remotely experienced higher engagement than those who never worked remotely, but only up to a point. Those who worked remotely less than 20% of the time had higher levels of engagement, but if the time went up the results regressed to the mean.
In 2017, times have changed:
all employees who spend at least some (but not all) of their time working remotely have higher engagement than those who don’t ever work remotely.
And those that work remotely 60%-80% of the time say they are more likely to strongly agree that working remotely makes them more productive.
I think the step up from 24% to 31% for workers 80% to 100% out of the Hive, well, that was a big step.
What do you recall about the changes in that period, 2013-2016?
The way we work has sadly been broken for a long time. I think around '16 and '17 we were getting closer to 10-20% remote. Obviously only about 47% of jobs even CAN be remote. The geopolitics of '16, when Trump beat a legacy brand, did embolden some male managers to think they could just go apes*** on their preferred rules, and I think that backslid remote. There's some Wharton stuff from early 2017 about how a lot of male managers just become more rude, hierarchy-obsessed, etc. after DT won. That's a small chunk of it. I think COVID showed that companies could be productive (at least fiscally) with a large majority of people in "their jammies," but managers are desperately missing the element of control, and the warm body management approach where they can emerge from their office and say "You there, do this task for me!" That's where the rubber is meeting the road currently.
Remote was on the Rise, Prepandemic
The way we work has sadly been broken for a long time. I think around '16 and '17 we were getting closer to 10-20% remote. Obviously only about 47% of jobs even CAN be remote. The geopolitics of '16, when Trump beat a legacy brand, did embolden some male managers to think they could just go apes*** on their preferred rules, and I think that backslid remote. There's some Wharton stuff from early 2017 about how a lot of male managers just become more rude, hierarchy-obsessed, etc. after DT won. That's a small chunk of it. I think COVID showed that companies could be productive (at least fiscally) with a large majority of people in "their jammies," but managers are desperately missing the element of control, and the warm body management approach where they can emerge from their office and say "You there, do this task for me!" That's where the rubber is meeting the road currently.