Remote, on-site or hybrid: WFH needn’t wait for crisis

Sebastian Fixson

More than six years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, over 1 in 5 of the US workers who can work remotely do so either full time or at least one day per week.

Even though a new normal has set in, no single approach has worked for all employees. And the debate over the benefits and drawbacks of remote work continues.

In early 2020, the research and development units of four global companies were conducting similar technical and scientific work. They all had access to the same communication technologies when COVID-19 upended everyone’s routine.

What unfolded over the next three years in terms of how they arranged how and where employees would work as waves of COVID-19 came and went – remote, on-site or hybrid – differed in terms of the time it took them to arrive at stable work arrangements and the degree to which workers agreed with them.

Other research into how likely an employer is to allow remote and hybrid work arrangements after the pandemic has focused on executives’ traits, such as their age and personalities. But we’ve found that these choices regarding where employees work can have more to do with an employer’s organisational culture: the set of assumptions, beliefs and norms that shape how people who work together make decisions and interact with each other.

For most scientists and technicians, fully remote work lasted between a few weeks and a few months. For the four companies we studied, it took 3-15 months to establish new stable work arrangements, sometimes with multiple workplace policy changes along the way.

Second, managers and employees understood, agreed with and accepted new work arrangements to very different degrees.

By early 2023, middle managers and workers at two of the four employers broadly accepted their companies’ work-from-home policies.

We found that organisational culture determined how quickly an employer succeeded at establishing a new balance between remote, on-site and hybrid work after the earliest phase of the pandemic had passed.

Two of the employers established procedures and enforced clear lines of authority and rules regarding when employees could work from home. A research director at one of these highly hierarchical companies described the pandemic as “just another risk that needed to be managed” using existing protocols. These employers stabilised work arrangements quickly, and employees understood “the rules.”

The other two emphasised teamwork and participation, welcoming employee input in decisions. One of the two companies with collaborative cultures held workshops about the use of remote work, which included employees at every level – ensuring that all employees would understand what was being done and why.

The hierarchical companies moved faster but struggled more with managerial issues over workplace policies when many of their employees felt their concerns were not heard. In contrast, the collaborative companies took longer to decide on their workplace policies but encountered less pushback from their employees.