The perils of working from home

Between 2000 and 2005, I teleworked a lot, as I had one foot in Park City, Utah, and the other one in Vail, Colorado. With the main office so far away from home, I ended up working fifty per cent of my time from my home office and found that it was alright, as I was a true workaholic and a highly motivated individual. 

Neither my craving for skiing, family disruptions or any social media addiction got in the way of my work. What I was missing though, was the daily interaction with my office colleagues and also the isolation and the nagging feeling that I wasn’t fully included in the business process as well as I could miss on bunch of decisions that could have some impact on my career. “Out of sight, out of mind”, you get the rift!

Yesterday, I read a Bloomberg article stating that most of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s employees working from home as a result of Covid-19 saw their productivity slip. Along with lower output, the large bank worried that remote work was no substitute for organic interaction and created a risk for a form of creative burn-out. 

As a result, the institution is likely to ask more workers to return to their offices over the coming weeks. JPMorgan’s findings indicate that employees don’t perform as well at the kitchen table as they do in their office, suggesting that remote work for extended periods of time may not be all what it was cracked up to be. 

Still studies before the pandemic asserted that remote workers were just as efficient as those in offices, but that begs the question of their performance in the long term. 

If someone asked me today if I believe in working from home as a magic prescription for everyone, I’d answer: “Not really, it might work for ten percent of the labor force, some need to be constantly prodded, and it’s unsustainable for the rest...”