Working from home seems to be the ultimate win-win job situation: Employees are productive and happy while communicating and collaborating with colleagues at a distance; employers save money on office space and can more easily hire talented individuals even if they live in far-off locations.
But a study co-authored by Carroll School of Management professor Michael Pratt argues that there are losers in this “distributed workers” model – the onsite office environment, and the employees who remain in it.
Collaboration, creativity, brainstorming, team building, and easy access to information are less common in a distributed workforce, according to the study. And there is a social cost: Offsite work may contribute to more isolation for all employees, even those who choose to work onsite at a centralized office.
“We’ve focused so much of our attention on the distributed worker, that we’ve not really looked closely at what’s it like for the people who are left behind,” says Pratt, the O’Connor Family Professor in the Carroll School’s Management and Organization Department, who led the study with Professor Kevin Rockman of George Mason University.
“We found the strongest predictor of why people work from home wasn’t work/family balance or all these reasons we often hear about. It was, ‘Few, if any, of my co-workers are around in the office much, so I don’t see the benefit of going there.’”
The study, titled “Contagious Offsite Work and the Lonely Office: The Unintended Consequences of Distributed Work” and published in the Academy of Management Discoveries, is among the first to examine the consequences of what happens to the onsite work environment when employees begin to migrate offsite.
The authors studied a Fortune 100 high-tech firm with a worldwide workforce of 100,000 whose employees are free to choose where they work. Looking at interviews and surveys from more than 600 of the company’s employees, Pratt and Rockman concluded that “distributed work can take on a life of its own,” thanks largely to a domino effect: More workers choose to work from home, which decreases the number of employees at the office and changes the experience for those who remain.
Ultimately, say Pratt and Rockman, “a tipping point” occurs when coming to the office isn’t desirable, spurring yet more employees to work offsite. “Our findings suggest that these types of flexible work policies may have many benefits for the offsite worker, but some serious drawbacks for those left behind.”
“The problem is for the people who aren’t telecommuting,” explains Pratt. “Their social needs aren’t being met, because the colleagues they know aren’t there, and nor are their work needs: I don’t have the casual interactions around the water cooler, and if I have a problem with something, I can’t go down the hall to see if you’re there. People in the office talked about feeling abandoned and felt pretty unhappy.”
For these employees, being at the office was akin to working regularly in a coffee shop, the study found – “surrounded by people that you might recognize but do not really know.”
This perceived loss of the social and productivity benefits of working in the office strongly influenced some employees to choose to work from home, the study found, even though their preference was to work onsite in a more collective environment.
“The net result was that the office became more impersonal, and by consequence, a lonelier place to work.”
Given the technological advancements allowing offsite workers to stay connected and productive, says Pratt, there’s a certain sense of inevitability that the offsite office is the future. But he and Rockman found that companies with the most success in managing teams of distributed workers were those that made the effort to bring employees together at least a few times a year.
Based on the results of the study, Pratt hopes companies with distributed workforces pay more attention to the office environment, and the employees who still work in it.
“Just because we can have people work offsite doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing. I get all the economic reasons for it, but I think we miss some of the closeness and camaraderie. A lot of managers I spoke with talked about wanting to create a group that would have these kinds of accidental interactions so its members could be more creative. All that becomes really difficult if there are not people around the office.”
