The end of remote work
Summary
Several large companies are herding their employees back to the office. It may seem that the remote work era is coming to a close. But the data tells a more nuanced story.
When I speak of asynchronous collaboration, I often get the following pushback.
“Async is all about remote work, but we’re all in the office.”
“Oh, but we’re hybrid.”
“We value the energy of spontaneous conversations at coffee machines and in hallways.”
Analytics India Mag even went to the point of saying that “AI is killing remote work”. They quoted a tech founder who said,
“With AI handling much of the execution work—writing code, generating content, creating designs—the main bottlenecks are now cognitive: getting stuck on problems, running low on energy, or struggling to generate fresh ideas.”
Meanwhile, Amazon and AWS’s war against remote work felt like the big news of 2024 as far as work arrangements go. Indeed, as we wrap up the year, it feels like remote work is dying off. But I wonder if we must step away from the news cycle and examine the truth.
What the data tells us
It doesn’t matter if you’re a remote work advocate or naysayer. If you’re on either extreme of the spectrum, your news feed will often have blurbs about how a large company is bringing people back to the office. Such news bytes make us feel like everyone’s getting back to the office. But as I’ve explained earlier on this site, the news focuses on a quarter of the industry - i.e. the WITCH and TAMMANA - and ignores everyone else.
To build a clearer picture of the state of remote work, let’s first examine the data.
1. People’s preferences haven’t changed
Over the last few years, workers have been quite unequivocal about their work preferences.
A staggering 98% of Buffer’s survey respondents say they want to work remotely for at least some of the time.
Over ⅔ of respondents to Owl Labs’ survey believe that working from home should be a legal right.
Approximately ⅓ of respondents to Owl Labs’ survey say they’ll expect a pay rise if they have to return to the office full time.
You should take these figures with a pinch of salt because there’s some selection bias at play, and you never know how these responses may change as the economy shifts and the job market changes.
All that said, it’s fair to assume what I’ve said for a few years now.
“Most people want to work remotely most of the time.”
2. Remote work continues to grow
Contrary to the headline-grabbing news, the prevalence of remote work continues to grow.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports an increased prevalence of remote work compared to 2023.
Office occupancy in the US is either going down or staying flat, contrary to what the news about the big firms will tell you.
Remote work is only growing. 79% of tech firms adopt a fully flexible model, i.e. employers give their workers a choice of whether to come to the office.
Small companies, i.e. those with 100 employees or less, are more likely to be fully remote than larger companies, i.e. those with 1000+ employees. The difference in likelihood is stark - 42% for small companies than 4% with large companies.
Full-time in-office arrangements are shrinking. Compared to 8% in 2023, in 2024, only 3% of tech employers expect employees to spend five days in the office weekly.
Tech companies by work arrangements
Research from Flex Index, 2024
Again, take these numbers with a pinch of salt. Yes, the soundbites from Andy Jassy, Elon Musk and Sam Altman notwithstanding, remote work is still growing. But the office is far from dead.
3. Offices have a renewed purpose
In 2023, 37% of tech firms had no physical office. In 2024, that percentage is down to 23%. As I’ve noted before, remote work isn’t always for everyone. Offices may also help bootstrap new teams faster than an all-remote setup. Employers, particularly those that care about inclusion, need offices if only to cater to a fraction of their workforce at any given time.
4. RTO mandates don’t always work as planned
While the C-suite grabs headlines when they sing hosannas about a return to the office, orchestrating an RTO isn’t easy. In 2023, we heard stories about coffee badging - where employees came into the office as often as the management wanted them to - but only for a coffee or a short meeting before heading back home for the rest of the day. Talk about productivity theatre!
2024 seems to be the year of “hushed hybrid”. Managers are the ultimate enforcers of an RTO mandate. However, many managers don’t want to spoil team morale or risk losing people by being strict about RTOs. So, they work out implicit arrangements with their team members, where individuals can avoid the office or come to the office for fewer days than the mandate. I know a few people who are beneficiaries of such a hushed-hybrid setup.
5. Remoteness impacts inclusion
Last but not least, let’s shine a light on a topic that the industry seems to have stopped caring about - inclusion. There’s no doubt that women are underrepresented in tech. In more senior roles, the lack of representation is even more stark - only 17% of tech firms have women CEOs.
While systemic issues and biases contribute to such poor representation, women also suffer the motherhood penalty during their careers. Two recent studies by Pablo Zarate and Ho, Jalota and Karandikar highlight the importance of remote work when including women in the workforce.
A flexible work arrangement triples the chances of job acceptance amongst mothers from 15% to 48%.
Work-from-home arrangements double the chances of job acceptance for mothers.
Remote working arrangements reduce the income penalties for mothers by 21% and the weekly work hour penalties by 9%.
I expect that when talent is scarce, employers will revisit their DEI messaging and use remote work to attract women to their workforce. Much like top talent dictates everyone else's employment terms, a reprised DEI focus will be a tide that lifts all boats.
Someone is always remote
Let’s set aside the data for a bit. You’ll agree with FlexIndex that work arrangements fall into seven categories.
Fully remote
Employee’s choice of where to work
Minimum office days each week
Specific office days each week
Minimum and specific office days each week
Percentage of time in the office each week
Always in office
The seven categories of work arrangements according to Flex Index
Regardless of your category, someone is always remote in relation to you. Even if you’re in category 7, i.e. always in the office, you’ll most likely have colleagues in another office, a client in another company, or a stakeholder or collaborator in another geography.
This insight only elevates the importance of effective distributed work and, by association, asynchronous collaboration. Revenue, profitability and performative productivity seem to be the primary concerns today. However, the benefits of going async-first –– deep work, inclusion, knowledge sharing, work-life balance, decision velocity, and resilience –– are evergreen.
But what about AI?
This entire discussion brings me back a full circle to the point about AI being the end of remote work. The quote from the beginning of the article may have you believe that productivity is all about spitting out more code and that a technologist’s job is now just about high-energy hand waving and coming up with dime-a-dozen ideas. Get back to the office and head to that water cooler! Errm, nope.
The 2024 DORA report explains the nuances of AI tooling and its potential pitfalls. The standout observation for me was that an increase in AI adoption could decrease delivery throughput and stability. Here’s what the report says,
“Since AI allows respondents to produce a much greater amount of code in the same amount of time, it is possible, even likely, that changelists are growing in size. DORA has consistently shown that larger changes are slower and more prone to creating instability.”
And guess what? The DORA report also differentiates between meaningful work and toilsome work. For technologists, meaningful work is about bringing software to life. Meanwhile, the toilsome work includes meetings, administrative work, and busy work that are often unavoidable in our corporations. As it turns out, AI is reducing the time knowledge workers spend on valuable work while doing nothing to reduce the toil.
I understand the allure of generating lots of code using AI and then asking technologists to come to the office for meetings that promise to generate even more ideas for AI to execute. But ideas have always been cheap. Execution is costly, and as the DORA report shows, it may even be more expensive with AI.
Laura Tacho, CTO of DX, had a great take on these observations of the DORA report.
“I’ve never met a developer who wanted to spend less time coding. We get time back because our meaningful work gets completed faster—not because we can get the robots to do the unsavoury parts of our jobs.”
AI helps us with valuable work but does little to reduce toilsome work (2024 DORA report)
One can never tell if AI will end anything, but the DORA report carries a hidden warning. AI tools aren’t yet at the point where they improve software delivery. It is a fraught proposition to assume that they are now a shortcut to herd people back into the office.
I have no idea how the tide will turn for remote work. I’m neither bullish nor sceptical at this point. However, I encourage you to look beyond the headlines and examine the data and anecdotes from professionals in the field.
Here’s what I’ll say, though. Nothing has changed since the start of the year, except a few large companies making RTO announcements. The job market remains challenging for employees, and many cynical employers are using this opportunity to squeeze their workers. In India, this leads to ridiculous statements about 70 and 140-hour work weeks.
I remain optimistic about the coming year, though, and I hope smaller employers don’t unquestioningly ape the big boys. The fundamentals of effective distributed collaboration haven’t changed overnight, AI or not. With that being the case, the case for asynchronous collaboration remains strong.