Working from the couch, at least a few days per week, is an offer many people can’t refuse. But it’s probably costing them. According to a September 2022 working paper, economists from Harvard, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the University of Iowa found that remote workers have fewer opportunities for advancement for one key reason: They get significantly less feedback than their in-person peers.
The economists—Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais—analyzed the virtual interactions and “quit decisions” of software engineers at a Fortune 500 tech company for their study. When physical offices were open, they found, engineers who went in and sat alongside their teammates received 21% more feedback on their code than engineers working on distributed teams.
After offices shuttered during the early COVID lockdowns, the amount of feedback shrank by 15%, the researchers found, making rates of feedback almost equal, and disproving the idea that anything but in-person communication was the main divide between the groups. On the whole, they said, virtual interactions “complement, rather than substitute for” being face to face. But the study suggests that, while the work might be the same whether it’s performed remotely or not, the feedback just never will be.
As with all things in the workplace, the benefits and drawbacks are not equal for everyone. Losing physical proximity reduced the amount of feedback given to young engineers and female engineers in particular, they wrote. Young and female engineers were also more likely to quit after losing proximity to their teammates.
It doesn’t take much to start feeling the impact. Even before the pandemic, gaining just one distant teammate reduced online feedback among coworkers who sat together, they added, which suggests remote-work policies impact even those who choose to go in person.
“We find a now-versus-later tradeoff associated with remote work,” Harrington, the Iowa economist, told the New York Times, adding that the office, for many white-collar workers, is critical for career development and advancement.
“These effects are really concentrated,” Emanuel, the New York Fed researcher, told the Times. “The folks who really benefit the most from being in person are junior engineers and also are younger. Those are the groups that you might imagine have the most to learn.”
A hard choice to make
More than half of Americans—that’s 58% percent of U.S. job holders, or 92 million people—currently have the opportunity to work remotely, at least some of the time.
The vast majority of them do so. In fact, most working people—especially those juggling countless tasks, like parents, caregivers or long-haul commuters—likely rely on their at-home workdays and argue that it singularly improves their work output.
Many employers have inched toward forcing them back in the office, and this new research makes that seem more benevolent than egotistical. Bosses want the people who are set up to advance in their careers to be in the office, most likely.
Take the example of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, once a remote-work stalwart who has recently become bullish on partial office returns, at the very least. In June 2022, he said return-to-office mandates would never work, but this year, he ordered thousands of workers back to the office at least a few times a month.
Earlier this month, Benioff explained his change of heart to Fortune’s Michal Lev-Ram. “We hired a lot of people, and those folks don’t have the benefit of knowing others and having the office experience,” he said. “Bringing [workers] back into the office is becoming more important than I think anyone realized.”
And it seems to be for the exact reason this study highlighted. “We know empirically that [new Salesforce employees] do better if they’re in the office, meeting people, being onboarded, being trained,” Benioff said in an interview with the On With Kara Swisher podcast last month. “If they are at home and not going through that process, we don’t think they’re as successful.”
According to a recent Pew Research survey, pro-remote workers say a hybrid arrangement helps with work-life balance, productivity, and focus. (Parents with children under 18 agreed on those points more than workers without kids.) But on the other side of the coin, those same workers seem to know there’s a big drawback—they acknowledge the feeling that not being in the office curtailed their opportunities for mentoring and making connections. Furthermore, over half (53%) of Pew’s respondents said working from home hurt their chances for advancement. As the studies continue to come in, the remote work tradeoffs will just be better and better known.
