The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face Paperback – 21 Sept. 2021

Peter Cappelli’s latest book has a subtitle that highlights new challenges: “Work from home, remote work, and the hard choices we all face.” At a time when we see dozens of articles explaining that COVID 19 has changed the workplace and how employees perceive work, this short book (about 85 pages) is a must-read for its thoroughness. It provides both employers and employees with a balanced perspective on the lessons we can draw —or shouldn’t draw— from the pandemic. The book is composed of five chapters: 1) The COVID-19 Experience; What we can we (or can’t learn) from it; 2) Back to the future: How remote work works; 3) How remote working alters the future of work; 4) Managing the transition: The importance of planning; 5) The opportunity: How to make sure we don’t miss it.As the pandemic seems to be winding down for some of us, we might wonder what it means to get back to normal or what a “new normal” is. Are employees happy or relieved at the idea of returning to the office? Are employers eager to welcome them back? Responses to both questions are all over the map. While it may sound sensible to pick up where we left off, we can’t. Time is irreversible. So whether we like it or not, it’s true that the image of the “office” that has symbolized work for the past 100 years has been shattered. If many employees believe that they work well or better from home, why would they be thrilled to go back, and given the costs of real estate, what’s the point of employers spending fortunes on scarcely occupied buildings? Yet, as straightforward as these questions may appear, they encapsulate dozens of thorny issues discussed throughout the book. Here is some of them:• If employees can work remotely, what prevents companies from transforming their positions into jobs for independent contractors, especially for occupations that require few interactions with others?• If employees have the ability to choose if or when they want to work from an office, what amount of corporate real estate should be maintained and how should it be allocated?• If not all employees can afford a quiet “home-office” space, could corporate policies extending remote work create or worsen social inequities or age disparities?• Should there be changes in pay policies depending on the location employees elect to reside? If remote work allows a company to “outsource” work at cheaper salaries to areas where the cost of living is lower, how large is the risk of missing out on valuable resources living in more expensive parts of the country?• How effectively and equitably did remote work address work-life balance challenges for employees?• How did remote work affect employees’ performance assessment methodologies?• How were employee belongingness and engagement measured? What made them feel included or excluded? Was their loyalty enhanced or weakened?• Can virtual workers be as involved in key strategic decisions as their counterparts working in an office?• Are virtual employees at a disadvantage for promotion? If so, how much does this matter to these workers, and if it doesn’t, what does it say about the company?• Are employers going to use software to monitor their employees’ industriousness or slacking?• Do workers who previously worked in the office perform better than or differently from workers who were remote from the get-go?• Are companies equipped to manage multi-pronged hybrid work models that would benefit both employees and the organization?• Are companies ready to provide decent equipment to employees to help them work remotely comfortably and securely? How effective are they at selecting software capable of managing remote team work, for example?• Did all departments fare the same way during the mandatory remote-work period? What exactly was worse than or different from what happened before COVID?• Are there right ratios between remote and not-remote workers to consider to maintain some sort of company culture?As employers weigh some of the reasons why extending (or not) the size of their remote workforce may make sense, they are dealing with data skewed by the comparison effect that, therefore, may not be reliably used to define new practices and policies moving forward. Some of the advantages of remote working indicated by employees may only be so only relative to the characteristics of a situation they experienced before the pandemic. A medicine makes you feel healthier than when you didn’t take it, but health is not being sick in the first place. For example, if employees say that virtual meetings are better because they’re shorter than in-person ones, does this mean that virtual meetings are better absolutely speaking? No. Employees primarily say that in-person meetings were a waste of time—and were so because they were sloppily managed. If they say that they felt less stressed working remotely, they may indirectly acknowledge that they were tired of dealing with micromanagers breathing down their necks, spending hours in a smelly cubicle, and interacting with obnoxious colleagues! In reality, what a preference for remote work reveals in such cases is not an intrinsic advantage to working remotely. The valuable message for companies here is not that remote work is better, but that COVID revealed unaddressed issues that existed before the pandemic—and should be taken care of.The pandemic created an exceptional situation. As a result, the data it provides shouldn’t be abstracted from its context to serve as the sole reference point to design new policies. This data should be weighed against a vast body of research papers on remote work (previously called telecommuting or flextime) before the pandemic. For instance, if you see that the company’s performance was not affected by the pandemic, how do you know if this positive outcome is not solely due to the fact that during that time-frame, workers only had to maintain an existing momentum—which would wear out if prolonged? If the company’s turnover happened to be lower, could it be solely because employees were just happy to receive a salary in an insecure time? Then, many might check if the grass is greener somewhere else when things get back to some type of normality, which will increase the percentage of what is deemed to be a customary turnover for the company, and you may have to struggle to find new hires.It’s not easy to extrapolate how work arrangements observed during the pandemic will fare for the longer term, but as unique as it is, this time period can’t be discarded as an unfortunate historical parenthesis. As well emphasized by Cappelli, companies will have to make the case for “going back” because any return to normal might be perceived as a reinstatement of a status quo with baggage. In addition, even workers eager to return to the office may have, consciously or not, experienced a level of flexibility that they might realize they have to relinquish only when they don’t have it anymore. So no matter how convinced companies are that remote work is the future, that work at the office is the rule or that hybrid solutions are a must, the pandemic is an opportunity for companies to review their organizational structures. It triggered new work arrangements, new implicit or explicit behaviors and expectations that can’t be brushed aside, and Peter Cappelli exhorts us to learn from it. It’s a perfect occasion 1) to make the most of the huge amount of data and research on remote work before the pandemic and avoid commonly observed pitfalls, 2) to examine your existing company’s data more closely than ever, 3) to design and initiate new and better surveys, and 4) to stop dodging many of the questions that upper management regularly avoids about the effectiveness of its leadership and what it takes to make sure that employees belong. VPs of People have a great deal of work ahead of them—but it’s also the opportunity for them to show if their organization sees “human capital” as an asset or only as a disposable resource.

Peter Cappelli brings a lot of scientific evidence to inform the new policies that HR professionals and management need to design for the new era of working in the midst of requests for hybrid models and the great resignation post pandemic. A great read about lessons learnt from remote work and the pros and cons of the different models of work employers are currently exploring.

This a very thoughtful and timely summary of past and recent research on work options for white collar employees and their employers. There are many takeaways, including the unique opportunity for change that the Pandemic is offering society.

I admire Peter Capelli, but this book was a real disappointment. Superficial, simplistic AND irrelevant conclusions. A waste of time.