Future of telecommuting sullied by its unsuccessful past

Remote work a strategic move, expert says, and comes down to trust

Three months after the coronavirus pandemic shut down offices, corporate America has concluded that working from home is working out. Many employees will be tethered to Zoom and Slack for the rest of their careers, their commute accomplished in seconds.

Richard Laermer has some advice for all the companies rushing pell-mell into this remote future: Don’t be an idiot.

A few years ago, Laermer let the employees of RLM Public Relations work from home Fridays. This small step toward telecommuting proved a disaster, he said. He often couldn’t find people when he needed them. Projects languished. “Every weekend became a three-day holiday,” he said.

“I found that people work so much better when they’re all in the same physical space.”

IBM came to a similar decision. In 2009, 40 per cent of its 386,000 employees in173 countries worked remotely. But in 2017, with revenue slumping, management called thousands of them back to the office.

Even as Facebook, Shopify, Zillow, Twitter and many other companies are developing plans to let employees work remotely forever, the experiences of Laermer and IBM are a reminder that the history of telecommuting has been strewn with failure.

The companies now barrelling forward run the risk of the same fate.

“Working from home is a strategic move, not just a tactical one that saves money,” said Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics. “A lot of it comes down to trust. Do you trust your people?”

Companies large and small have been trying for decades to make working from home work. As long ago as 1985, the mainstream media was using phrases like “the growing telecommuting movement.” Peter Drucker, the management guru, declared in 1989 that “commuting to office work is obsolete.”

Telecommuting was a technology-driven innovation that seemed to offer benefits to both employees and executives. The former could eliminate everlengthening commutes and work the hours that suited them best. Management would save on high-priced real estate and could hire applicants who lived far from the office, deepening the talent pool.

And yet many of the ventures were eventually downsized or abandoned. Apart from IBM, companies that publicly pulled back on telecommuting over the past decade include Aetna, Best Buy, Bank of America, Yahoo, AT&T and Reddit.

Remote employees often felt marginalized, which made them less loyal. Creativity, innovation and serendipity seemed to suffer.

One very public setback for remote work was at Best Buy. The original program, which drew national attention, began in 2004. It aimed to judge employees by what they accomplished, not the hours a project took or the location where it was done.

Best Buy killed the program in 2013, saying it gave the employees too much freedom.

Remote workers might be free of commuting costs, but they are traditionally more vulnerable. Jeffrey Gundlach, who runs Los Angeles investment firm DoubleLine Capital, said in his monthly webcast that he had started seeing his newly remote staff in a new light.

“I kind of learned who was really doing the work and who was not really doing as much work as it looked like on paper that they might have been doing,” he said. With “some of the supervisory, middle-management people,” he added, “I’m starting to wonder if I really need them.”