By Chip Cutter | Photographs by Cayce Clifford for The Wall Street Journal
Four months ago, employees at many U.S. companies went home and
did something incredible: They got their work done, seemingly
without missing a beat. Executives were amazed at how well their
workers performed remotely, even while juggling child care and the
distractions of home. Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc., among others,
quickly said they would embrace remote work long term. Some
companies even vowed to give up their physical office spaces
entirely.
Now, as the work-from-home experiment stretches on, some cracks
are starting to emerge. Projects take longer. Training is tougher.
Hiring and integrating new employees, more complicated. Some
employers say their workers appear less connected and bosses fear
that younger professionals aren't developing at the same rate as
they would in offices, sitting next to colleagues and absorbing how
they do their jobs.
Months into a pandemic that rapidly reshaped how companies
operate, an increasing number of executives now say that remote
work, while necessary for safety much of this year, is not their
preferred long-term solution once the coronavirus crisis
passes.
"There's sort of an emerging sense behind the scenes of
executives saying, 'This is not going to be sustainable,'" said
Laszlo Bock, chief executive of human-resources startup Humu and
the former HR chief at Google. No CEO should be surprised that the
early productivity gains companies witnessed as remote work took
hold have peaked and leveled off, he adds, because workers left
offices in March armed with laptops and a sense of doom.
"It was people being terrified of losing their jobs, and that
fear-driven productivity is not sustainable," Mr. Bock said.
Few companies expect remote work to go away in the near term,
though the evolving thinking among many CEOs reflects a significant
shift from the early days of the pandemic.
"You can tell people are getting fatigued," said Peter P.
Kowalczuk, president of Canon Solutions America, a division of
copier and camera giant Canon Inc., which employs about 15,000
people across the country.
Mr. Kowalczuk, who worked for months out of a bedroom in his
home, went back to Canon's U.S. headquarters in Melville, N.Y., in
early July. Now, no more than 50% of the company's employees are
coming into work at the 52-acre office campus, which features two
ponds and a walking trail, and typically includes more than 11,000
staffers in a single building.
Returning is voluntary, Mr. Kowalczuk said, and requires
answering a series of health questions on an app the company
created, called Check-In Online, before getting approval to drive
in. The company has also blocked off desks to allow for greater
distancing, stepped up cleaning and created a rotating schedule so
that staffers come in on alternating weeks.
"We're really a face-to-face business," he said. "I don't think
offices are dead."
The nature of what some companies do makes it tough, if not
impossible, to function remotely. In San Francisco, startup Chef
Robotics recently missed a key product deadline by a month,
hampered by the challenges of integrating and testing software and
hardware with its engineers scattered across the Bay Area.
Pre-pandemic, they all collaborated in one space.
Problems that took an hour to solve in the office stretched out
for a day when workers were remote, said Chief Executive Rajat
Bhageria. "That's just a logistical nightmare," he said.
Chef Robotics had little choice but to make do. Its office space
could not accommodate all eight full-time employees and allow for
distancing. For a while, Mr. Bhageria invited four people in at a
time, on a voluntary basis, to work together.
"We tried it," he says. "It's just not the same. You just cannot
get the same quality of work."
Chef Robotics moved in mid-July to a new office in the South of
Market neighborhood with double the square footage, better
ventilation and non-communal restrooms.
Teams physically building a product need to be together, Mr.
Bhageria said. "There's this thrill of being a little hacky group
of people, on a shared mission, in a startup, with little money,
eating pizza and ramen."
The Boston-based video technology firm OpenExchange, which helps
run large, online conferencing events, is going a step further to
bring employees together. Workers on the company's European team
said they could benefit from some in-person interaction during this
time of huge growth at the company. So in late July, OpenExchange
is renting a house in the English countryside, with about 15
bedrooms, so many of its employees can live and work together,
while still distancing. In some cases, family members are coming
along.
It's important to have people in a room and see body language
and read signals that don't come through a screen, says Mark Loehr,
the CEO, noting the event is optional. "They're going to do their
work there -- modestly, individually, sometimes in group rooms --
but try to meet together for breakfast, lunch and meals," he says.
"And maybe out on the lawn, just to know each other."
One benefit of working together in person, many executives said,
is the potential for spontaneous interactions. Mary Bilbrey, global
chief human resources officer at real-estate giant Jones Lang
LaSalle Inc., returned to her Chicago office in early June, as the
company reopened its spaces. She noticed that she was soon having
conversations with peers that wouldn't have happened in a remote
set up -- a discussion sparked by a passing question in the hall,
for instance. "They weren't going to think about scheduling a 30
minute call to do it," she said.
More companies now envision a hybrid future, with more time
spent working remote, yet with opportunities to regularly convene
teams. CompuCom Systems Inc., the IT service provider owned by
Office Depot, may institute "core hours" for its employees, similar
to office hours that professors hold on college campuses. The idea
under consideration is that teams would agree to come together for
a limited time on certain days of the week to bounce ideas off each
other, collaborate and strategize, says CompuCom president Mick
Slattery. Online education provider Coursera expects half of its
650 employees to work "blended" hours once the pandemic passes,
with staffers spending three days a week in the office and the rest
remote, says Chief Executive Jeff Maggioncalda.
Any broader shift away from physical offices, if it happens, is
unlikely to be immediate. The majority of U.S. office leases are
eight years or longer, according to an analysis by credit-rating
agency Moody's Investors Service. In an early July report, analysts
noted that they did not expect an exodus from offices, despite
popular claims that offices were now dead.
The toll of extended work-from-home arrangements is likely to
affect career development, particularly for younger workers,
several executives said. At Stifel Financial Corp., which employs
more than 8,000 people around the world, junior employees learn how
to underwrite deals or develop pitch books by sitting beside more
experienced colleagues and watching them work, said Chief Executive
Ronald J. Kruszewski. That's hard to do remotely.
"I am concerned that we would somehow believe that we can
basically take kids from college, put them in front of Zoom, and
think that three years from now, they'll be every bit as productive
as they would have had they had the personal interaction," said Mr.
Kruszewski.
In March, Stifel transformed from eight group trading desks to
more than 180 separate trading locations. Dozens of staffers fanned
out to smaller office locations in Connecticut and New Jersey, and
some people set up work-from-home stations using secure cloud
technologies.
Mr. Kruszewski says the company didn't miss a beat, but when the
pandemic has passed, or there are viable treatment options,
employees will be recalled from their alternative locations.
"Our traders need to be together," he says. "We're missing
things, and that will become more evident over time."
And then there's the challenge of training employees who began
work after the pandemic began and have had to work remotely from
the start. At Discover Financial Services, thousands of new
call-center workers and other employees have come on board since
March, said Andy Eichfeld, chief human resources and administrative
officer.
Most of those new employees have never worked in a Discover
office. Customer-service agents who once got six weeks of
in-classroom training now must learn the information remotely. They
don't have the same casual day-to-day opportunities to ask more
experienced workers for help or advice that they would if they were
working in the same office, even as the company has tried to
connect people virtually. New employees in marketing and analytics
roles haven't been able to quickly pick up company jargon and
shorthand in meetings, leaving some of them lost.
"If you were physically on site, you might have someone
physically whispering, 'Hey, that means this.' We don't have that
here. So, it's taking longer for the new employee to understand
what's happening," he said.
In a recent company survey, less than a third of Discover
employees said they want to work from home permanently, though many
said they would like the flexibility to do it sometimes, which the
company plans to offer. Without the interactions that define office
life, Mr. Eichfeld worries that Discover's culture will gradually
fray, which is why he's eager to get workers back together once it
is safe.
"It was easier to go remote fast than most people would have
ever imagined," he said. "That doesn't mean it's great."
Write to Chip Cutter at chip.cutter@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 24, 2020 11:24 ET (15:24 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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