WTF is happening with WFH? (Roundup #20)

2 new studies quantifying remote work's impact on commuting + mentorship

People love working from home. Remote workers benefit from avoiding questioning their existence while in traffic really long commutes. They can sleep in longer and take more naps. They can use the reclaimed time from remote work for other things, like leisure, childcare, and household duties. 

Without a doubt, not everyone can work from home. Frontline workers, despite being critical to society, have little choice in the matter. But 98% of people would like to work remotely at least some of the time.

For the last two years, remote work (as a percentage of total days worked in the US) hasn’t dropped under 25%. 

So while it's dropped off from its pandemic peak, remote work is still more than 4 times more common than it was before the pandemic. Remote work is not going away anytime soon.

Source: Nick Bloom, Stanford

Today, we’ll cover two recent studies quantifying the impact of remote work. Spoiler alert: it’s not all rainbows and sunshine.

WFH Reduces Traffic, Shifts Commuting Patterns

Remote work is great because people don’t need to waste hours of their day commuting. But could the WFH trend also benefit workers who need to commute?

According to Stanford economist Nick Bloom, who analyzed GPS data of commuters in the top 10 US cities, the answer is yes. 

Bloom found that, post-pandemic, commuters have been facing less traffic during rush hour. Specifically, these committed commuters are traveling 10% faster to their destinations, on average. And that’s just on average. 

It’s obviously a huge boon for commuters to deal with less traffic, but Bloom found something else interesting in the data. Workers who do commute seem to be shifting towards ever longer commutes. 

In fact, after the pandemic, there has been a particular surge in “super-commuters”: commuters who travel over 75 miles each way to work. These are people doing long hauls; on average, each leg of these super-commutes takes over 2 hours.

Source: Nick Bloom, Stanford

A few things might be encouraging higher levels of super-commuting: faster post-pandemic commute speeds, the normalization of going to the office a few days per week (i.e. hybrid work), and cheaper housing prices further out of the city. It isn’t clear how much weight we should put on each cause.

But one thing is clear. Remote work is drastically shifting the living and commuting preferences of today’s workers.

And while it might be great for reducing road traffic and increasing alternatives for families, it doesn’t seem great for cities. Remote work may be exacerbating urban sprawl.

Remote Junior Engineers May Get Less Mentorship, Fewer Pay Raises

Another interesting paper finds that remote work may be a mixed bag for engineering teams. 

The research looked at a Fortune 500 company with some teams that were effectively remote even before the pandemic, because they were spread out across different campuses.

Senior engineers on remote teams in this context didn’t get tapped on the shoulder as much by junior engineers to provide feedback and mentorship. As a result, these senior engineers could spend more time writing code than their counterparts on co-located, in-person teams.

Senior engineers who work on teams that work in the same office provide even more mentorship to team members than senior engineers who work across multiple buildings. The time spent giving feedback ultimately reduces productivity, as senior engineers can’t write as much code. (Source: NBER)

But this productivity boost comes at a cost. Specifically, the reduction in feedback and mentorship negatively impacted junior engineers on remote teams. With less experience and training, these remote junior engineers were ultimately less likely to get a pay increase, relative to their counterparts on co-located teams.

This seems to support Mark Zuckerberg’s argument for Meta employees (especially junior ones) to return to office.

There’s more complexity in the paper than we can address in this update. But fortunately there’s a great new podcast by The Atlantic that discusses this research paper with the author. You can find the paper here.

The Future of Remote

More research on work commutes is crucial. 

In terms of its effect on commuting, it could be helpful to understand how commute frequency and mode of transport has shifted over the last few years. There is already fascinating research on the climate impact of remote workers, but further research could estimate the actual realized climate impact of remote work so far.

Fully remote workers emit less than half of the CO2 of fully in-office workers. (Source: PNAS)

Regarding feedback and mentorship, we’re curious if there are alternative ways to train and develop junior employees in a remote environment. Can apps like Slack help save the day, or are these tools more of a distraction to workers? Should companies invest in bringing employees back to campus to foster a culture of mentorship?

We haven’t even touched on the impact of remote work on social connection. During what Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called an “epidemic of loneliness,” how can we ensure remote workers are building close relationships while they’re out of office?

Many questions about remote work remain. But from these two papers, it’s already clear that the impact of remote work is more complex than we all expected.

Other Links from the Last Month

🏖️ Daniel Pink suggests rehauling national holidays in the US to create more 3 day weekends, foster national unity and culture, and removing holidays that have outlived their usefulness. (Washington Post)

🤱 The number of Americans working part time has hit a record high this year, thanks particularly to working mothers. (Bloomberg)

📊 The US added 272,000 jobs in May in a surprisingly strong showing of the labor market despite higher interest rates. However, it’s not all good news – unemployment also rose to 4%, the highest it's been in 2 years. (New York Times)

🏭 Why the United Auto Workers failed to unionize an Alabama Mercedes production plant, despite a supermajority of workers saying they wanted a union a month before the election. And, what role can the NLRB play in making things right for workers? (Power At Work)

👨‍💼 47% of executives believed that CEOs should be replaced by AI, according to a survey conducted by MOOC platform EdX. While AI managers could make dispassionate business decisions, many AIs ‘hallucinate’ outputs. Also, how many employees want an all-knowing boss scrutinizing their every move? (New York Times)

✊ The Atlantic released an interesting conversation with former SEIU president Mary Kay Henry on the future of labor. Henry discusses “collectivizing power” across unions, representing workers outside their ranks, and sectoral bargaining as trends to watch. (The Atlantic)

💸 1 in 3 Americans has tip fatigue. A guide on when and how to tip. (Washington Post)

⚡ Tesla laid off 10% of its employees in an effort to reduce costs in the face of faltering growth. The EV slowdown is affecting manufacturers worldwide. (Bloomberg)

🤖 The American Civil Liberties Union sued Aon Consulting, a large consulting firm, for selling AI-powered hiring tools that discriminate against candidates on disability and race. The consulting company apparently had marketed these services as “bias-free.” (Bloomberg)

🧑‍💻 An increasing number of people are freelancing full-time, according to a new economic report by Fiverr. 71% of self-employed creative, technical, and professional workers are doing so full time, compared to 61% last year. (Fiverr)

🪧 Casey Newton compares large tech companies on their stance towards employee activism, especially regarding the conflict between Israel and Palestine. (Platformer, paywalled)

🚧 New Jersey has overhauled its unemployment insurance application portal, making the first major update in almost a decade. The portal is now mobile friendly, available in English and Spanish, and has streamlined identity verification. (NextGov)