As of 2024, five in 10 full-time employees in the United States have remote-capable jobs, according to a study by Gallup. Remote work has become “a new normal for people,” said Peter Cappelli, co-author of In Praise of the Office: The Limits to Hybrid and Remote Work, during a fireside chat at From Day One’s September virtual conference. 

Cappelli, management professor and director of the Center for HR at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, spoke with Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, Seattle Times business reporter, about the changes, benefits, and disadvantages to remote work culture, and how to make the most of it. 

Changes to Telework Culture

The rise of full-time remote work skyrocketed during Covid and has shifted the culture of remote years after restrictions have been lifted. 

In 2021, Cappelli wrote, The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face, a dive into what employees and managers should be thinking about when exploring the benefits and disadvantages of remote work. 

“The story about remote work before the pandemic was not a particularly happy one but the context was quite different. That is, they were looking at situations where people were remote but their colleagues were largely in the office,” said Cappelli.

Pre-pandemic remote workers were less committed, had lower engagement, experienced a greater sense of isolation and their career progression was worse, he added. Since then, the telework culture has dramatically changed. More employees prefer working from home or on a hybrid schedule, especially as companies are starting to call for them to return to the office. 

According to the Gallup study, “Six in 10 employees with remote-capable jobs want a hybrid work arrangement. About one-third prefer fully remote work, and less than 10% prefer to work on-site.”

“The current story does not look like the pre-pandemic story at all,” said Cappelli. His newly released book explores how hybrid work can be done effectively and what can be done to fix the current work environment. 

The Pros and Cons to Remote Work

Having the option to work from home has become the new normal and many employees have built their lives around being able to work remotely. But Cappelli found that while there are some benefits to this, there are also impacts to the social networks of remote workers. Through a series of focus groups, Cappelli and his colleague found that internationally, individuals who worked from home did not interact or develop relationships with others who also worked remotely.

“There’s pretty good evidence from other research on this showing that networks of employees, networks of people, shrunk during the pandemic, and it has not really rebounded,” he said. 

Working in the office however, allows for greater opportunities to learn from each other and to develop a more efficient work flow, Cappelli says. If a problem were to be solved in the office, employees would be able to solve it quickly. Remotely, you’d have to ping the person, try and set up a Zoom meeting, schedule it and that may take even a few days, he said. 

“The things that we started to see about human interaction are basically solving problems that come from the nature of office work, and if you’re not face to face, you don’t have the ability to solve those problems,” said Cappelli.

Experienced employees within a company know their team and interact with them regularly. For them, working remotely may be more favored. But for new hires entering an entirely remote environment, they get lost, Cappelli says. New employees are also unable to find their way because they are unable to observe the company’s culture while working from home. 

Employers are also seeing that in hybrid work environments, employees are still not coming back to the office even on “anchor days.” Attendance is about 4% on these days,” according to Cappelli. Remote meetings are also becoming less productive and engaging for workers, with many attending with their cameras off or having artificial intelligence agents taking notes for them.

Management in an Era of Hybrid Work

Cappelli says that the reason why the workplace environment isn’t “delightful” is because the problem has always been with the “top of the house” managing their employees and driving its policies. “I don’t think (top leaders are) taking it very seriously,” he said. 

As company leaders cut resources, training and supervision while increasing workload, the workplace environment begins to worsen employee mental health problems. While many corporations are issuing return-to-office policies, Cappelli observes that its leaders are not doing a great job at making the transition easy for its workers. 

If companies want to return to an in-person work environment, “it’s going to require a lot of work from people at the top of the house to take this change management process seriously and so far, they haven’t really given any inclination that they’re willing to do it,” said Cappelli. 

Jennifer Yoshikoshi is a local news and education reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

(Photo by vm/iStock)