A Paradigm Shift in Work Culture: Are We Ready for the Consequences of Remote Work?

This year I'll be writing a quarterly piece for The Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology on the employee experience of remote workers?- which has been identified as TREND 1 in the top 10 work trends of the year.

Last year I wrote a series of pieces looking at the engagement of remote and hybrid workers - so this year I want to expand the lens to make sure we see the rapid expansion of remote/hybrid/digital working from several important angles:

• The risks and challenges inherent in designing the employee experience of remote working.
• How people are starting to experiment with their new found flexibility, and the impact on how the employee experience is designed.
• Developing a more "digital" experience for those working remotely, while ensuring they feel connected and part of a community.
• How a more hybrid and remote employee experience might actually improve career agility and development, while reducing bias and democratising access to meaningful work.

I hope you find this series useful and I'd love to hear your thoughts and reactions:

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Recent research suggests that remote work is stabilizing at about 25% of overall days worked – at least in the United States. While this is down significantly over the last year, it is still 5 times higher than pre-pandemic levels. Technology, finance and professional services employees are the most likely to be working remote, and those who are at home (2-3 days a week) say that it’s “worth” somewhere between 6-11% of their pay. That’s a lot.

While the value of remote work to employees has been widely discussed, leaders who are responsible for the performance of organizations have been much more mixed in their responses. One of the reasons for this is that it is taking a long time to see the real outcome and impact of such widespread adoption of remote work. Leaders often “feel ” things are less productive or effective but have had very little real evidence of that being the case.

Some commentators are now starting to identify and discuss genuine risks and challenges that need to be addressed in the employee experience if remote work is going to be sustainable. For example, there is some evidence that people are less ambitious and driven than before the pandemic; they see work as a less important component of their life (or at least less central to it). In a recent survey of 3000 workers, close to 40% said that work had become less important to them in the past three years. More than a third said that their career ambitions had declined. This has implications for workforce productivity, which has been declining as well as for talent processes like leadership and succession pipelines.

If remote work is so good for engagement and happiness then why would people feel this way? The reasons behind this are complicated but are likely to be connected to badly managed remote work, leading to burnout and disengagement . On a personal level, people may also feel less social and peer pressure to exhibit drive and ambition as they are seeing colleagues in person less often and working at home in their pyjamas – softening their desire to get ahead and compete with others. In many ways the experience of remote work is simply less motivating, even if it is more satisfying. We can integrate our life and work more easily, but perhaps we feel a reduced sense of belonging, connection and purpose. This is a risk that needs to be managed carefully and thoughtfully with better work and experience design.

Perhaps even more seriously, some employees attribute part of the blame for the poor risk management at Silicon Valley Bank to an increase in remote work. The financial press have been asking questions about the risk management practices at the bank and whether the lack of in person interactions made it difficult to ensure that everyone was being listened to and all the potential risks well understood. While it is difficult to explicitly know, research on risk culture tells us that psychological safety and leadership behaviours are critical – and that employees will often look for social proof to figure out what behaviours are appropriate in uncertain situations. If employees are remote – how can they observe these behaviours?

The point I want to make here is that “re-thinking the employee experience” is not just about adding fancy technology to keep people productive, or dreaming up fun virtual rituals to enable people to have shared cultural experiences (both useful by the way). ?It also means thinking carefully about the risks that remote work introduces into organizations and designing a meaningful employee experience that helps to mitigate those challenges.?