>Key negatives are reduced productivity due to lack of supervision, difficulty of face-to-face meetings with clients, difficulty of training younger staff.[hard to measure]
Just throwing this experience of mine out there, when faced with actual dollar figures and hard to measure, vague outcomes, companies that I've worked for have nearly always acted on the dollar figures.
Depending on how your company works, the short term positives could be nothing compared to the problems that will arise when everybody becomes an anonymous cog in an invisible machine.
When it comes to their core business companies have a decent belief in what it looks like.
Playing a little bit the devil's advocate here:
Risk aversion and general tendency to apply gradual changes.
Would you bet your company to run an experiment almost no one else is trying? Perhaps letting your workers work from home works perhaps you'll miss all deadlines and generate all kinds of drama.
An external factors kicked in and everyone was in the same experiment. Things were messy but not completely unmanageable. Some were even surprised things kept working as well as they did.
Now, the big question is: will this take a toll on people? Will companies that choose to continue with this work style be put in disadvantage as other companies switch back to on-prem?
Because it seemed impossible, until now.
That would make the ones doing the firing redundant too. You want as many employees as possible as cheap as possible.
I've worked remote most of my career, and in my experience, the politics and work theaterisms are still there, just different.
For example, someone's perceived level of "effort" often becomes a function of how responsive they are. Do they respond to Slack messages at random hours, when team members in different time zones/aggressive managers ping them? Do they frequently communicate with the team via video calls and Slack discussions? Just like in normal office politics, their actual productivity or work quality is assessed less than their appearance of engagement.
That's just an example, but my experience in general has been that remote doesn't change anything about the cultural of management at a company. Whatever metrics mattered in person, there will be remote equivalents to replace them.
The positive here is that good leadership is still good leadership, remote or not. The negative, obviously, is that remote isn't the balm for poor leadership that many hope it will be.
Yes. Key positives for a company are reduced cost of office space and ability to draw upon a wider, cheaper pool of potential workers and increased employee satisfaction (for some, not everyone prefers working from home). Key negatives are reduced productivity due to lack of supervision, difficulty of face-to-face meetings with clients, difficulty of training younger staff.
Its a tradeoff and I think different businesses will fall into different buckets and there will also always be some inertia to change. I do think that the 'new normal' is neither 5 days 9-5 in the office OR complete remote work but something more like a couple of days in the office and a couple at home every week for most staff. But this wil probably be a plurality of the workforce only, with substantial numbers completely remote or close to, and substantial numbers also still in 5 days a week.