COVID Altered the Frame of Reference About Remote Work

Source: thedarknut/Pixabay

The COVID pandemic and responses to it by key decision-makers instigated a lot of disruptions to people’s day-to-day lives, both in the office and at home. One major transition that occurred was an immediate shift to remote work, a shift many organizations made on the fly (and the subject of my first post on this site).

One of the points I raised back in 2020 was that many systems “tend to snap back into place like a rubber band.” This is evidenced by the fact that even though companies shifted to remote work for the past two years, a recent survey conducted by Microsoft (2022) indicated that around half of those companies plan to require full-time onsite work beginning in the next year. Such a plan would conflict with current employee expectations about work. A recent McKinsey & Company (2022) survey report indicated that employees prefer to work remotely at least part of the time, and, when given the option to work remotely, 87% of employees take it. To potentially make matters more difficult for companies planning to return to fully onsite work, a recent ADP survey found that more than 60% of those working remotely said they would seriously consider quitting if required to return to the office full time.

Why, though, did we see such a shift in employee expectations as it concerns remote work? After all, Hoffower (2022) argued that employees and remote work advocates have been clamoring for a transition to greater reliance on remote work for the past 15-20 years. Yet, now we’re seeing reports of sizable percentages of employees indicating they are willing to quit their jobs if required to work onsite and more employees reporting the desire to work remotely most or all the time. Though many potential explanations for this change in mindset could be offered, one likely culprit is that a radical shift in some employees’ frame of reference occurred over the past two years.

The Pre-Pandemic Remote Work Frame of Reference

As I wrote in 2021, a frame of reference is “the context within which we interpret the world, evaluate various decision options, and reach conclusions.” That frame of reference is influenced by both the available options and the attitudes, beliefs, and prior experiences of the decision maker.

Prior to the pandemic, many organizations lacked the technology and/or the work processes/structures necessary to allow employees to work remotely. In such situations, a permanent, ongoing remote work option was largely impossible or, at a minimum, highly infeasible.

But even in organizations where remote work was feasible before the pandemic, it was often used as an ad hoc way of working. Even though the technology itself may have been available to support the integration of remote work into formal business processes, many organizations (and especially managers) were reluctant to embrace it as more than a workaround (Newport, 2020^[1]), leading to a bias toward onsite work that persisted amidst the pandemic^[2]. Given that less than 6% of employees worked remotely in 2018 (Flynn, 2022), most employees had little experience with anything approaching formalized remote work.

The Pandemic Altered the Remote Work Frame of Reference

But all that changed in spring 2020. The abrupt switch to remote work that occurred likely precipitated a radical shift in many employees’ frame of reference about it. Employees (and their organizations) varied in how well they adapted to the transition toward remote work. This was especially the case early on, as often multiple members of a household transitioned to a fully remote work and/or school environment^[3]. Even with those obstacles, eventually many employees adjusted when and how they worked and improved their productivity (Singer-Velush et al., 2020).

Thus, a workplace scenario for which few employees had a well-established frame of reference prior to the pandemic became much more commonplace, with just slightly more than 40% of employees working remotely at the height of the pandemic. This means that many employees had plenty of opportunity to test out a fully remote work environment. Some employees likely decided that a remote work environment, at least part of the time, was extremely helpful in improving their work-life interface, potentially explaining some of the results reported by McKinsey & Company and ADP. For other workers, the experience with remote work likely reinforced the benefits of being onsite, and they may eschew any requirement for long-term remote work.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that in April 2022, only about 7.7% of employees were working remotely “because of the pandemic.” It is difficult to know whether the overall percentage of remote workers has decreased to near pre-pandemic levels (which was 5.7% before the COVID pandemic) or whether the 7.7% figure is misleading due to companies having formalized remote work options, thus decreasing the percentage of employees working remotely because of the pandemic^[4].

It will, however, be interesting to see if the data being reported about the percentage of people willing to quit their jobs if they do not have access to remote work options will result in (1) higher levels of voluntary turnover, (2) the formalization of some remote work across a greater percentage of organizations, or (3) a return to a mostly pre-pandemic status quo.