The massive shift to work-at-home caused by policies related to the Covid-19 pandemic have inadvertently provided a remote-work statistical base we will be analyzing for years, especially regarding the productivity impact of massive work-from-home changes.
Most past studies of work-at-home productivity arguably involved smaller sets of workers in functions that arguably are best suited to remote work (sales, coding, marketing, accounting, legal work and so forth).
What the global pandemic stay-at-home orders have done is push the bulk of enterprise workforces to either work at home or not work. The early data from the change is not encouraging for productivity impact, suggesting that the tools we have are not so much the problem as human ability to adjust to remote work environments and use the tools fully.
If it is the case that only a third of jobs can be done remotely, forcing everyone to do so will not be universally productive. say professors Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, who conducted a recent study on the subject.
The study suggests 34 percent of U.S. jobs can plausibly be performed at home. Assuming all occupations involve the same hours of work, these jobs account for 44 percent of all wages. The converse is that 66 percent of jobs cannot plausibly be shifted to “at home” mode.
As you might guess, some jobs and some areas are more amenable to remote work. The top five U.S. metro areas feature many jobs in government or technology that could be done from home. On the other hand, some areas involve manufacturing, agriculture, raw materials extraction of other major industries that are not amenable to remote work.
“More than 40 percent of jobs in San Francisco, San Jose, and Washington, DC could be performed at home, whereas this is the case for fewer than 30 percent of jobs in Fort Myers, Grand Rapids, or Las Vegas,” they say.
Professional, scientific and technical services, management jobs, education, finance, insurance and information jobs are easiest to shift to remote work. Transportation, warehouse operations, construction, retail, agriculture, food services and lodging are among the hardest to shift to remote work.
The new conventional wisdom is that more remote work is coming, as a permanent change after all the stay-at-home rules put into place to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. But there is some debate about whether remote work is less productive or not. And if remote work turns out to be less productive or more productive than face-to-face work, there will be consequences for its extension and use.
Looking only at the impact of the massive stay-at-home orders to counter the Covid-19 pandemic, there is at least some evidence that productivity has suffered, in some countries, because of remote work from home.
Aternity, for example, has aggregated from millions of employee devices from over 500 Global 2000 companies, reveals that the United States has become less productive due to remote work because of the pandemic. The metric is hours of work, captured because Aternity hosts a cloud-based analytics application that captures work-related application usage.
At the end of March, 77 percent of work has been moved to be performed remotely in North America, the largest amount of any continent. The North America trends were bifurcated. U.S. enterprise worker productivity actually dropped 7.2 percent, Aternity reports, though Canadian productivity increased about 23 percent.
“Overall productivity (as measured by hours of work computing time) in Europe declined by 8.2 percent,” according to Aternity.
Another study of worker attitudes suggests that about half of workers 18 to 24 believe their productivity is lower when working from home, according to a study by National Research Group. Half also believe they are distracted at home. That does not necessarily mean productivity is lower, but the workers feel their productivity is lower.
Some believe remote work, in some cases, is wildly less productive. A study by Scikey MindMatch that estimates only 0.2 percent of the Indian IT workforce actually is capable of working from home at high levels of productivity.
That finding might run counter to what many observers would expect for remote work productivity, but Scikey describes itself as a firm supporting firm efforts to attract personnel that drive “high-performing teams.”
Since talent, skills, intelligence and ability to perform work at a high level remotely are bell-shaped curves (a normal distribution), people who might be described as “high performing” would be expected to be a minority of all workers.
The Scikey study seems to be operating out at three standard deviations, which would represent 0.3 percent of people.
Reports about the study indicate that 99.8 percent of the workforce in the information technology sector is incapable of working from home, at least with very-high productivity arguably matching what happens at the workplace, the study claims.
The reason so many are “incapable” of working from home is that they lack at least one quality deemed essential for success, including resistance to learning and exploring (95 percent), lack in practical communication skills (65 percent) and lack in planning and execution (71 percent).
Some 17 percent of the employees are instruction-driven and therefore they need clear and direct instructions to work their best. about 12.7 percent of the employees are very much dependent on their social interactions, and working from home comes as a real challenge for them. Work is not difficult for them, but social interactions are necessary for them to function, Scikey suggests.
What the study likely indicates is simply that the human characteristics Mind Match associates with the highest-performing individuals in a remote work setting are three standards deviations from the mean.
You can make your own assessment of whether that is a functionally valid test of worker suitability for remote work.
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