Recently, several tech giants have called their employees back to the office, arguing that remote work stifles innovation. But is there truth to this claim? Are productivity and creativity truly at risk in a work-from-home world?
Back in September, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that all employees would be asked to return to the office five days a week starting in January 2025. The statement sparked a series of headlines about the growing demise of Working From Home (WFH). Similar decisions from companies such as Disney, Salesforce, and Dell reinforced the Return-to-Office (RTO) narrative.
At the same time, Google assured employees that the company’s hybrid model, with employees having to show up at a Google office at least three days per week, will stay in place. The same is true for Microsoft, which has no current plans to revise its concessions regarding employees’ workplace flexibility.
The most recent data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reflects the varied approaches to the topic in the tech sector. The numbers reveal that 22.8% of workers worked remotely at least partially as recently as August 2024, up from 19.5% in the same period last year. The share of purely hybrid workers, i.e., workers who work from home at least a few days a week, climbed from 9.2% to 11.7% during the same month.
Productivity Is the Key Indicator
Regardless of policy direction, most companies seem to have based their decision on the evaluation of the same key indicator: productivity.
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft officials confirmed that for the hybrid model to stay in place, it’s fundamental that workers maintain their productivity levels. That clearly hasn’t happened at Dell, according to company executives who claim that internal data shows that teams are more productive when onsite.
Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy tiptoed around the term “productivity” but clearly hinted at how continuing to work from home is not conducive to the level of innovation that the company expects:
“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture [when onsite]; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing is simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another.”
The sentiment, in other words, is quite fragmented, even among companies that share similar models in an industry like tech, where, on many other HR topics, even competitors usually tend to move similarly in response to global patterns.
Work from Home: Productivity Killer or New Way to Innovate?
So, who’s right? Is productivity really affected when we work from home instead of commuting to the office?
According to Carolina Milanesi, Principal Analyst at Creative Strategies, using productivity as the excuse for enforcing RTO policies is quite in fashion, even though the experience of the last few years should show that this point is quite moot.
“As a society, we have demonstrated, at least from a knowledge worker perspective, that during COVID we were able to be productive despite all the hurdles we faced. These challenges included not being prepared to work from home. Even if we were already set up for it, we had to deal with family members, kids, and pets all being home in a very stressful situation—yet we were productive”.
Not everyone agrees. Lately, the pundits in the office productivity camp point to an important study published by Nature at the end of 2023, in which Oxford and Pittsburgh researchers analyzed over 20 million studies and 4 million patents across 50 years to track scientific collaboration and innovation trends. The study seems to confirm that being physically together is fundamental for innovation to spark.
And yet, another study by Oxford’s Carl Frey, one of the co-authors of the Nature paper, had already shown a much more nuanced picture. As the study points out:
“On average, we document a robust and significant negative impact of remote collaboration on breakthrough discovery. However, beginning in the 2010s, the negative impact tapers off and even becomes positive. We provide evidence suggesting that the reversal is driven by improvements in key technologies needed for remote collaboration.”
As future-of-work consultant Gleb Tsipursky explains in his comment on these studies on Fortune, starting from around 2010 we witnessed the rise of new technologies and tools we had never used or even imagined we could use. Trello boards, Zoom, Dropbox and Google Drive, Slack, Asana, and many other such platforms have revolutionized the concept of productivity itself. The global commoditization of accessible high-speed internet connections also contributed to breaking down the barriers to efficient remote collaboration.
Remote and Flexibility Make Workers Happier
There’s another fundamental aspect of productivity that these studies and the innovation-based discourse seem to overlook: the average worker is most productive, not just as a byproduct of their work environment. Their work satisfaction and happiness also play a fundamental role. According to Carolina Milanesi:
“Plenty of data points to higher engagement when people have more flexible working hours. This flexibility allows them to cater to dropping off their kids at school, picking them up, or working at times that best fit their schedule while also fitting the work requirements.”
Return-to-office mandates that end these acquired and now fundamental benefits to employees’ work-life balance are well known to have a measurable negative impact on the workforce’s morale. The burden of keeping the crew motivated after higher-ups impose their return-to-office policies often falls on the shoulders of middle management. Phenomena such as the “hushed hybrid” arrangement, where managers quietly allow more flexibility than the company dictates, seem increasingly common albeit admittedly hard to measure or quantify.
Similarly, “coffee badging”—where employees briefly appear at the office to fulfill attendance requirements before returning home—reveals that malicious compliance might also skew the statistics.
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Soft Layoffs
Milanesi agrees that these trends are relevant. She suggests that, in many cases, forcing a return to office policy doesn’t consider the element of employee satisfaction at all. For some companies, the endgame could also be to reduce the headcount and increase profitability in a way that doesn’t look as bad as mass layoffs.
“We’ve seen different trends over the past year and a half to two years, including ‘quiet quitting’. This occurs when you might not have the ability to find another job, but you stay where you are while remaining disengaged—that’s when productivity actually suffers. People do their bare minimum to collect their paycheck, but they’re not invested in their work and, therefore, not invested in doing what’s best for the company.”
This happens, she says, often when people are forced back to a routine that no longer works for them.
“By forcing them back to the office, you’re forcing them to make a choice. To some extent, I wish I could say that companies risk losing talent, and we have seen some of that. Especially in tech, we’ve seen return-to-office mandates used to shed talent instead of having to conduct layoffs,because obviously that looks better in investors’ eyes.”
According to many analysts, these return-to-office mandates are coming too early after we’ve started to really try to collaborate in a remote setting. In other words, they might be biased by old and obsolete prejudices about how a job should be executed. In many cases, the decision to get everyone back to their desk could be seen as a way to exert control more than having to do with increased productivity.
Ultimately, Milanesi says that the current trend is nothing short of “lazy”:
“I say it’s lazy because we barely made it work during the pandemic, and now that we have the technology and the setup we created over COVID, we’re just going to walk away from it. From the very beginning of the pandemic, when we were trying to adapt to remote work, my point was that it would be such a waste if we discarded what we learned—practices that are clearly better from a personal perspective, enabling a more rounded talent pool and happier, more engaged employees”.
