After the pandemic, I became completely convinced that home office work would grow by leaps and bounds across the world. But this trend was not confirmed.
Such was my surprise when I came across data published by VOCÊ RH magazine that showed that only 7.7% of vacancies advertised in Brazil had the possibility of working from home.
In 2022 this index was 12.6%, which represents a drop of 40%. Then I ask myself: what led to this? Since a survey carried out by Infojobs showed that 85.3% of professionals would change jobs for more days working from home.
This same survey also showed that 64.4% of people who returned to work in person said that their quality of life had worsened. Intrigued by this question, I decided to research more on the subject.
Why has home office work fallen?
As you all know, I am an advocate of working from home and I was intrigued by the data presented above. If the absolute majority of employees prefer to work remotely, why do companies insist on face-to-face work?
To answer this question, I looked for empirical research and came across an MIT study that compared the performance of workers at an Indian company in both regimes: in-person and remote.
This research concluded that home office workers were 18% less productive than those who were working from home.
Not satisfied, I continued researching and came across another experiment in 2022 that reached a similar conclusion. It was carried out by researchers at the University of Chicago and analyzed workers in the IT sector.
In this last study, the drop in productivity was 19%. Then the question came back to me: why are employees less productive under this regime? I always imagined the complete opposite.
Hypotheses are not yet conclusive
With the data in hand, I analyzed what makes workers less productive when working from home, and I haven’t found a plausible conclusion yet.
Among the hypotheses raised by the studies, the most sensible is hampered communication. In other words, you have a small problem to solve, being in person you already answer your question right there, in the home office you need to wait for someone to respond to your message.
Another possibility is the lack of creativity caused by non-interaction, as many ideas arise during lunches or informal conversations.
Finally, to really believe the data, I read a literature review done by Stanford and WFH Research that concluded that fully remote work has a drop of between 10% and 20% in productivity.
Therefore, leaving assumptions aside, the conclusion is that in-person work is more productive, and therefore benefits organizations.
But what about the quality of life?
The 3 surveys came very close to the result that productivity drops when working from home, and possibly, managers must have read these studies too, and that is why there was a drop in hiring in this format.
However, here we are only considering productivity, not quality of life. Employees may be more focused working in person, but will they be happier? From what the Infojobs research shows, no.
So I ask: only productivity matters?
Based on these reflections, it is concluded that the hybrid regime can be the solution since it is the union of the useful and the pleasant. Spending 3 days a week at the company, and 2 at home, can give employees satisfaction and at the same time minimize the drop in productivity.
There is still a need for more studies on the topic. But I see that companies should not only consider productivity, but also the health and mental well-being of their team. And for this reason, I continue to defend each person’s free choice.
