The last two years have been a tug-of-war over remote work, with CEOs trying to bring workers back to the office and staff mostly preferring to stay home. The staff usually won out. But 2023 will be different: the work-from-home wars will calm this year, leaving remote work much more common than it was in 2019 but nowhere near its 2020 highs.
How managers see remote work
Apple, Twitter, and Goldman Sachs all had public disagreements between management and staff over remote work in the last two years. They’re not alone. As Stanford economist Nick Bloom and his colleagues explain in a recent HBR article that I edited, managers and workers have fundamentally different views about remote work and its effectiveness. Employees are far more likely to say they’re more productive at home, and managers are far more likely to say their employees are less productive.
That disconnect has driven the discord over work-from-home, and it’s why as recently as late last year most executives in a survey by Charter said they expected work-from-home to decline.
Charter asked executives, “Looking ahead 12 months, which of these scenarios seems most likely regarding staff locations?”
Far and away the most common answer was: “Staff will come into an office more days each week than they do now.” Only 25% saw remote work increasing.
Forecast: 2023 is the year work-from-home stabilizes
Charter and Nonrival partnered at the end of last year to ask readers for a prediction about how this same survey question would look when it was repeated later this year.
Specifically, we asked: How likely is it that “roughly the same” is the most-selected category when Charter repeats its survey in Q2 2023?
These prediction polls, which Nonrival does each week, can be better predictors than individual experts. And even when they’re wrong, they’re a reliable way to see what the current consensus is.
About two-thirds of readers thought it was likely or very likely that “about the same” would be the most popular choice. In other words, most readers think that far fewer executives will expect big changes in remote work.
This makes sense, since days worked from home in the US has been consistent for about a year now, hovering right around 30% — after shooting from 5% to more than 60% in the spring of 2020.
Work-from-home has arrived at a “new normal,” well above pre-pandemic levels. It seems like executives are the last ones to realize it — but this will be the year that they do.