Working from Home Results in Less Engaged Employees. Really?
Since 2020, most knowledge workers in organisations worldwide had to start switching to “remote work”, often called “working from home (WFH)” – for escaping the virus. Students at all levels had to do the same. Of course, the beginning of working from home was a bit bumpy, since not all of these students or workers were equipped with the hardware and software to do so. And, people in some regions recognised that their internet connectivity can not cope with practically everyone going online at the same time.
Much was written about the impact of this 100 nanometres large virus on the human population, especially the way the work gets done. An interesting article by Andrew Brodsky and Mike Tolliver at the Harvard Business Review sheds light on one important question: does working from home result in reduction of employee engagement? The authors use the proxy ‘meeting characteristics’ to measure engagement.
Findings On Remote Working Arrangements
What is the Impact of Working from Home?
The above mentioned HBR article is based on such observations from 10 large MNCs over six weeks from May to June in 2020, 2021 and 2022. On the one hand, assuming that these 10 MNCs can really represent most other organisations, is a daring supposition. On the other hand, this study still offers some general take-aways that may or may not apply at your organisation.
- The number of remote meetings went up from an average of about 5 to more than 8 per employee.
- The duration of remote meetings dropped by 25% from 2020 to 2022.
- The number of participants per meeting went down by 50% over the same timeframe. This number was affected by the count of one-on-one meetings that went up more than threefold.
- Employees who left one of the participating organisations did show low participation, i.e., engagement.
For more details, please refer to the article.
Commenting These Findings
Trusting These Working from Home Findings
The danger of any conclusion out of such dataset is always the perspective on averages. Above-mentioned trends are based on means. Means are lies. Nothing is said about the variation, which is usually a better source of information for solid conclusions. Questions the authors could have probably answered are, for example:
- What kind of organisation or, better yet, organisational unit follows the mentioned trends and which kind behaves differently? Why?
- One of the conclusions mentioned is that people who leave show less participation in meetings, i.e., less engagement. Are people less seen in meetings because they are on the way out already? Or, do people leave because they do not feel engaged? Correlation does not prove cause or effect.
- The data could have been matched and correlated with employee engagement data which should be available in at least some of the MNCs. This could have shown whether there is a relationship between the proxies, the remote meeting indicators and engagement metrics.
Conclusions on Working From Home
