Working From Home: Trade Offs and the Employee Experience

The biggest cost of working from home might be the conversations you never have.

Barclays want to move everyone from a minimum of two days in the office to four. Their employees aren’t thrilled.

We all know what you gain from working from home. Time. No commute expenses. Greater freedom to blend work and life. But what do you lose?

A lot of it comes down to human connection.

For some things, there isn't a substitute for being in the same room as someone else. I know this from my own research work. I get just a little less from each remote interview or focus group. It's harder to pick up on body language. It's more probable I haven't got 100% of everyone's attention. That’s in one interaction. Multiply it across hundreds of interactions and it becomes significant.

And it's not necessarily that you stop speaking to people. It's who you speak to. One large study looked at the working patterns of more than 61,000 Microsoft employees. When people moved to remote working, their networks became more siloed and static. The proportion of collaboration time spent with people from other groups fell by around 25%.

If you have fewer points of connection, you're more likely to spend your time with the people you already know and, often, people who are more like you. That's fewer perspectives, fewer chance conversations. Fewer opportunities for ideas to be created, challenged and fleshed out. There are parallels with how social media affects society: increasing our ability to communicate, while not necessarily increasing the variety of people we communicate with.

Having fewer points of connection also has an impact on learning. That matters at any career stage, but particularly early on, when you need to learn almost everything. It's harder to overhear, to look over someone's shoulder, to ask a quick question because you happen to be there. To be organically included in something. Remotely, that all has to happen by design, rather than being prompted by your simple presence.

As much as we'd like to think otherwise, opportunities aren't distributed purely on merit. Every connection you have - or don't have - with a decision-maker adds another penny to the scale. It affects promotions. But it's also the projects. The secondments. The introductions. Being asked your opinion. Or simply being the extra person who gets invited to the big meeting.

Working from home is wrong. Has costs as well as a benefits, they’re just often harder to put into numbers.