hi everybody i'm Catenya McHenry thank you for joining us today on our big ideas show where we
take a deeper look at faculty research happening here at the macomb school of business at the
University of Texas at Austin joining me today is Andrew Brodsky he is assistant professor of
management and today we are talking about remote working how that's going to look bringing people
back to the office his research focuses in that area and he's been featured recently in several
national publications regarding his research and his work so that's what we're talking about
today welcome Andrew it's great to see you great it's good to see you virtually yes once again
we're still here virtually yes yes we are yeah so you were recently featured in the Harvard
business review talking about the implications of remote working so i'd love to know what your
opinions have been of the last year and a half um in remote the remote working setting and what
that says about just the workforce and how we're able to still operate and function in that way
sure sure so you know when people were asking me six months ago if i thought companies were
going to stay virtual you know my response then is you know i think employees will want to stay
virtual but i think companies are going to try and you know try and bring people back um and
unless there's a tight labor market then you know employees are not going to have a choice of matter
uh someone interestingly we kind of ended up in this situation where we have a tight labor market
um so you see a lot of companies who are kind of trying to bring their employees back but employees
were saying no we've actually grown to like this virtual work and the flexibility that allows us
um and as a result we've seen some kind of companies reversing their policies
on that stuff um so yeah it's been interesting to watch everything unfold over the last um six
months here in terms of changes as like the gum static comes back to normal and seems to be moving
towards a new neuron yeah this is something you've been looking at and studying for a long time since
i mean obviously before covet so when you first started looking at it how do you think just the
industry of work and the work force the labor force how has it changed to better to be better
accommodating and i think it's something you've written about where you've said that companies
will have to think about implementing some kind of remote working policy even before covet so
how have you noticed the changes since you started looking at this yeah i mean remote work has been
particularly great especially for people who are often underrepresented organizations or have other
issues due to you know their single parent taking care of children or maybe they do have a spouse
but kind of a child care still falls on them um for other reasons they might not be as easily able
to commute to work maybe they don't have a car um so you know remark remote work trend has kind of
um unintentionally increased inclusivity a whole lot um and you know it's beyond that it's kind of
had a lot of nice other benefits coming up commute time all that stuff um and i think organizations
have gotten better at kind of using remote workers you know the big challenge that's coming up
now is organizations seem to be you know giving people the option do you want to work from home
or do you want to work from the office and the risk is that you know remote workers
you know they don't have as much face time with bosses you know managers don't see them working
they don't kind of get that you know schmoozing and social networking in the office as much
so there's a risk that if organizations don't handle this process well that virtual workers
will kind of become second-class citizens and live out on resources and promotion and all those kind
of things so you know this is a key thing to focus on as organizations are bringing people back is
to make sure that all these benefits gained by virtual work aren't kind of lost by um giving
you know too many extra advantages those who just come back to the person
yeah when you say extra advantages can you talk about that specifically what what does
that mean and does it vary depending on the organization and the size of the organization
sure sure happy too so there's research on stuff called the input bias or facetime it
basically shows that you know in a lot of jobs figuring out what exactly is performance is kind
of a little bit ambiguous so you can think about you know for certain jobs it's very clear right
you got sales goals you meet your sales goals or not but for someone whose job is more kind
of a little bit unclear what the exact goals is you know for um people kind of in marketing
positions for instance or publicity positions it's hard for managers to evaluate how people perform
so historically and not necessarily intentionally managers often evaluate people based on how hard
they see them working uh due to kind of lack of other good criteria and the problem with that
is you can't physically see employees working you know you don't get to see that extra hard work so
you know if you've got half your employees and you can physically see them working you know the idea
is that you will kind of many managers will think those people are harder working than those at home
who may be getting their work done but managers aren't able to observe the process as easily
sure they're both they might get worse performance evaluations they might pass up for promotions um
and then the other thing is you know the water cooler top right
like a lot of stuff in organizations happens kind of through these informal interactions
and unfortunately for virtual workers they're kind of have less success than those workers
through the office which potentially creates this risk of kind of two tiers of workers
um which is really not ideal for organizations because you know you're often going to see those
virtual workers as the kinds of people who you want to make sure you have in the organization
who for one reason another might not be able to be there in person and you don't want them to
kind of get penalized for that factor sure so it's i mean it sounds like they're i mean they're two
different ways to look at this depending on um the kind of work of the organization etc so i'd love
for you to expand a little bit on the benefits of having a remote working policy and also the
benefits of having the in-person interactions because i think in certain organizations it's very
important to have those interactions um because a lot is lost in the virtual setting you know
when when you're when you have to communicate with people and and you work in teams you have
to have sometimes you know you have to that recognition of gestures and body language and
all that stuff is so important as many times lost in a virtual setting so can you talk about both
sure sure so you know first i'll talk about uh what's lost let me talk about the good things so
far mostly um you know at least as far as gestures go newer research shows that people are actually
able to adapt to email pretty well particularly for um people who you're familiar with
so for instance um you know if you get an email from a stranger you're often like there's often
a lot of this interpretation you have to read through the lines but you know if you were to
get your an email from like your spouse or your best friend like there's no misinterpretation
you know exactly what's between the lines um but that said there are definitely downsides um
you know we in our own research we've seen that communication with those outside of people's
specific teams have decreased meaningfully um since people started working virtually so you
know the idea is you know cross-team communication is going down because you know there's a lot less
possibility for these informal interactions or you know building these crosstalk processes that
have been more often in person and the problem with that is that a lot of innovation occurs
when you have um people communicate with those in the organization who they don't normally right so
if you're working with your team all the time you know you've got all the same shared information
so there's not a lot of room to innovate but all of a sudden when you have someone from say
like you know a marketing team talk to someone in a finance team and they bring some ideas back from
finance they can kind of use that new knowledge to innovate on their existing competencies
um and we're concerned based on some of the data we see that some of that is going to be lost
um so you know these informal interactions that often have in the office or these kind
of ones that come from more and more of the team are definitely potentially problematic
as well as um for new employees not being able to get socialized into the organization as easily
um you know a lot of these informal ways of learning about the culture and learning you
know what's acceptable versus not a lot of these unspoken roles are really much more
easily figured out you know in person when you can formally interact with people um and when people
are being onboarded virtually potentially some of that is being missed as well yeah yeah it's been
interesting even on our team we have onboarded three four three new people in the last year
and we've all been talking about how weird it's going to be to actually meet them in person and
to actually see them you know face to face that'll be it's it'll be really weird but i felt for them
because i'm never on board virtually as and we've had a couple of people who've moved um out of from
out of state and just from a different city have moved here so i i can't imagine how difficult
that transition has been for them but like you said it we're totally adaptable creatures so
what do you think the last year just being in covet has proved about productivity and i think
particularly in an organization like ours at ut i mean like 50 000 plus people students faculty
and staff had to and i hate to use the word pivot because it's been so overused but had to adapt to
a new way of doing the job so what do you think it's proved not just with our organization but
many others across the globe yeah you know there's an interesting debate going on where they're like
some ceos saying you know productivity's worse at home they're other ones saying it's actually
better at home um you know i i fell in the viewpoint that at least based on the data
that i've been seeing that productivity has been improving somewhat um i mean
people are you know people commute they immediately gain back two hours of their day
you know if can be an hour each way but even beyond that it seems that giving people
kind of more flexibility and control over their work on coverage seems to have had a little bit of
a benefit at least that said you know this is not universally true for some people virtual workers
work for better than others you know so although the average might be slightly improved you know
it is not necessarily true for some all people and you have the same in the office right some people
happen to be more productive or less productive in office um so you know this idea of flexibility and
what works best for each employee you know will be the kind of key area for the future to think about
to be able to maximize performance across you know different connective employees whether it's
their family situation you know personality characteristics or abilities um that'll be
key going forward yeah dude has there been any um evidence or research that um that speaks to
if people are working more because their offices are at home and their offices are like
right outside of their bedrooms and they can just you know go to their desk or whatever the space
they they uh they designate in their house to to work do you think people have been working more
because of that yes the data that i've seen both from our own collection as well as others it does
seem like the workday has extended um you know and we've also seen that people feel more time
pressure when they are working at home that they just don't have enough time to get everything done
yeah um and you know this is due to two factors one is you know reduce boundaries
so for instance you know the company i'm working with um we're working with their call center
employees it used to be you know you're in the office you take your calls you know you'd
be on the call queue you know five o'clock whatever time your day was done you'd go home
now you've got this issue where theoretically you can take calls at any point of the day
and you have to like if you're call backs to customers you may feel the need to do that
later at night um so the idea is that you know these barriers for you know ways that we engage
with work have been lowered very heavily and also there's less clear you know end of the day
for many jobs there's a clear you know what i'm done i'm going home you know maybe you'd have a
couple emails a night but now you know when you're not leaving the office at a set time
there's kind of this incentive to you know work more and more so you look good for your manager
because you know they don't see you sitting there in the opposite five so they know till five so
they don't know you're working so people feel they need to show that in their work
output which seems to be increasing um the amount of time people are working unfortunately
yeah what other negative aspects we've talked about the positives we're talking about negative
one right now what other negative aspects have you noticed about remote working yeah i mean
you're seeing a lot of people who are talking about student fatigue right this idea that
you know you're on webcam all the time and you're looking at your own face all the time
it's exhausting um some of my research actually suggests that there's a lot of benefit to still
meeting with people but turning webcams off um and you're also seeing people feeling a bit
more isolated and you know that's not just due to work being virtual but everything's being virtual
um but if people are it's interesting we've seen kind of a shift in preferences where people are
trying to replace their work interactions you know other things you know there's some
arguments uh being made that's you know part of why people are buying more land and bigger houses
you know so they can have more activities as opposed to you know where they got
some of that stimulation from interacting with people in real life previously
do you think that remote working has improved the work-life balance because i think you've talked
about that and and been have written about that as well so i mean i think that that's something
that people are demanding more of and i think it's one of the things that we've been forced to really
think about and evaluate in and during covet um because we're with our families all the time
so how how has the work-life balance do you think improved you know i think it's been an
interesting double-edged sword so people now have a lot more control over their time when
they're working virtually but because of the decreased barriers has been more interruptions
so you know it's important for organizations to think about you know how can we with virtual
workers rebuild some of those barriers in ways that allow them to kind of have that separation
because we're seeing in our own research that i've done with um some doctoral students here
um is that like this decrease in barriers creates anxiety
and these things can hurt work performance in the end so it's not just in the interest of
workers themselves to be able to kind of rebuild some of these barriers um but organizations as
well to you know ensure that employees can be you know mentally at their top state and perform best
so as we end today what are some things you think companies need to be thinking about
as we slowly continue to reopen between now and over the next six months or so
yeah i mean for me i think one there's a few big things one don't lose sight of all the
gains we had during virtual work you know tons of time with save due to decreasing commutes
um a lot of people who might not have been able to go to the offices easily now have kind of more
central roles in their workplaces um there's more inclusion there um you know i think there's two
big kind of things to be careful of though going forward one when you start having hybrid office
places where some people are in person and some are working virtually how to make sure that one
group isn't necessarily prioritized of the other and then the second is thinking about support for
virtual workers you know this idea that when you work from home and there's no longer an
office theoretically you could be on for all hours of the day so you know figuring out structures to
put in place so that you know work for virtual workers doesn't lead into their entire lives
and they can be productive during certain parts of the day but they're allowed to be off um awesome
well thank you so much Andrew we have been talking with assistant professor of management Andrew
brodsky here at the macomb school of business we will have links to uh some of his work in the
description of this video thank you so much again for joining us today on our big idea show we will
see you next time and be sure to check out some of our other videos as well thank you very much