In-person collaboration has been linked to high performance and job satisfaction, but these benefits don’t increase with more days spent in the office.
An oft-cited reason for in-person work mandates is that they help drive connection among a team. As more employers push for four and five days in the office, rhetoric has focused on the importance of collaboration and a sense of belonging that some leaders believe can only be fostered in a shared physical environment.
Yet some data shows the number of days people attend the office doesn’t directly correlate to that sense of connection. In fact, there’s only a 1% difference in the number of employees who say they feel connected to their organisation working four or five days a week as compared to those working two or three days on site. That slim leading edge went to the latter group, at 60%, according to a global survey of 1,115 employees by London-based workplace insights firm Leesman, seen by the BBC.
“There just doesn’t seem to be huge gains from the number of days people are in the office,” says Allison English, deputy CEO of Leesman. “It’s about the quality, not quantity, of time that matters. In fact, we see that the greater the number of in-person days, the less the worker is generally satisfied with work-life balance, impacting engagement and their connection to the organisation.”
That was my experience early on, but since committing to full remote first, I find even the “in person” tasks like onboarding, and brainstorming, easier to do remotely.
You just need a good remote culture of frequent and open sync/async communication, with protected do-not-disturb/focus time.
For me, the occasional office visit is basically for socialization only. Meeting up with coworkers, have lunch, hang out for a bit in the office, then back home to work.
Yeah, that’s how I treated it when I was doing hybrid instead of fully remote, but now I don’t even have an office to go into even if I wanted.
I will still meet old co-workers cum friends for lunches, though. Can’t do without that!
I work with some non-technical people that just need in person communication because that is how the rest of their job works. They are the knowledge experts about the things we are creating web systems to support.
If I worked only with technical people I would expect remote to work for everything.