Are remote workers more productive? Or are they just slacking off?
Three years ago, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer famously banned employees from working remotely. Earlier this year, IBM did the same thing, forcing remote workers to start showing up at the office.
The most popular justifications for such a policy are efficiency and collaboration — especially collaboration The idea that employees from various groups should randomly encounter each other, brainstorm and collaborate is practically a Silicon Valley religion.
Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was a major proponent of the collaborative work environment idea. Now that Apple's new Apple Park headquarters is nearing completion, press accounts are emerging about how the main "spaceship" building is designed to encourage chance employee encounters.
But the strongest embodiment of this idea is to be found in Facebook's HQ, which boasts the world's largest open-office workspace — a single room spanning eight acres. Something like 2,800 employees all work in the same open area, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The irony here shouldn't be lost on anyone. IBM is one of the major companies selling the infrastructure to enable secure remote work. And Facebook's entire company is built on the idea of cloud-based social interaction. Yet both companies apparently believe that getting computers and networks out of the way is the key to better communication.
Other companies, including Canonical, Mozilla and MySQL, go to the opposite extreme, requiring all or most employees to work remotely.
The best reason for insisting on remote work can be found in the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. The author's thesis is that corporate culture in particular and the wider culture in general is encouraging us all to be constantly interrupted and distracted, spending our working hours multi-tasking. Newport calls this mode "shallow work." He points out that multitasking is a myth, and that in fact interruptions shatter concentration, degrading the quality of work. "Deep work," on the other hand is something that's increasingly rare and valuable.
The pros and cons of remote work
On the pro side, advocates boast higher morale, more focused work, less interruption, time saved on commute, reduced turnover, lower overhead, more flexible hiring — all of which adds up to higher productivity for the company.