NEW YORK–Credit unions that plan to allow employees to make their own choices about working from home or working in the office should be aware of two potential problems, according to one researcher.
In this, the third in a four-part series, CUToday.info provides a synopsis of interviews conducted by the New York Times examining how companies and academics should move forward with plans as more offices are opened even as many employees prefer to remain at home. The big question: how to strike a balance.
According to Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, in monthly surveys about remote work his research team has conducted since May of 2020, 30% percent of U.S. employees never want to return to working in the office, while 25% never want to spend another day working from home.
“Given such different views, it seems natural to let the workers choose,” said Bloom. “One manager told me, ‘I treat my team like adults. They get to decide when and where they work as long as they get their jobs done.’
But according to Bloom, that approach raises two concerns.
‘Mixed Mode’
“One is that it’s likely to result in ‘mixed mode,’ the widely disliked situation when some people are at home and others are at the office, all appearing in one Zoom box in the conference room,” he explained. “The second, less obvious concern is the risk to diversity. It turns out that who wants to work from home after the pandemic is not random. In our research we found that among college graduates with young children, women want to work from home full time almost 50% more often than men do.
Bloom said that is “problematic” given evidence that working from home while your colleagues are in the office can hurt your chance of promotion.
“In a study I ran in China at a large multinational company, we randomly assigned volunteers to work remotely or remain in the office,” Bloom related. “Remote employees had a 50% lower rate of promotion after 21 months than their colleagues in the office.
‘Diversity Crisis’
“Adding this up, you can see how the let-them-choose approach could lead to a diversity crisis: Single young men who generally opt to go into the office five days a week could rocket up the firm while employees with young children, particularly women, prefer to work from home and are held back,” he continued. “Remote work can be a huge benefit for firms and employees, but should be centrally organized so everyone within the same team is in the office on the same days. This is how working from home will work out.”