Why the Remote-Work Debate Stays So Heated

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The physical space in which a person works, or hopes to work, intersects with their most personal choices. Today we’re checking in on the remote-work debate and why it remains so heated.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Better Together?

In the summer of 2021, I started going back to the office. It was not the allure of watercooler chatter or the promise of juiced-up productivity that pulled me in. At the time, I just really wanted to sit in the AC. It was June; it was hot. Access to a desk in a freezing-cold Midtown tower—a far cry from my living room, which tended to get steamy on 90-degree Brooklyn days—seemed like a major perk. I was living with roommates, was vaccinated, and had no child-care duties. Each morning, I strapped on my mask and packed my backpack with canisters of coffee and sandwiches to sustain me through the day. I often felt better when I got home: When you’re going into an office, I found, it’s harder to have a day where nothing happens.

My desire to return to a routine that involved leaving my home was inspired, in part, by my now-colleague Ellen Cushing’s 2021 Atlantic article about what the monotony of the pandemic was doing to our brain. “Sometimes I imagine myself as a Sim, a diamond-shaped cursor hovering above my head as I go about my day. Tasks appear, and I do them. Mealtimes come, and I eat. Needs arise, and I meet them,” she writes in one memorable passage. In another, she quotes an expert saying that “environmental enrichment”—seeing new people, observing new things on a commute—is good for our brain’s plasticity. After reading the article in March 2021, I became fixated on the idea that observing random humans on my commute would keep my mind sharp.

Then the fall came around, and so did more of my colleagues. It was great to see them. It was also great, sometimes, to return to the relative solitude of my home and take walks in Prospect Park at midday. I was lucky to have that flexibility. Now that I work for The Atlantic, I go into the office almost every day. I have enjoyed meeting new people and, again, sitting in the industrial-grade AC.

I’ve given you this narration of my personal experience because, for all the talk of productivity and metrics and company culture, the topic of returning to the office is intensely personal. My needs and desires, for a variety of reasons relating to my age, finances, circumstances, health situation, and lifestyle, might be very different from those of workers who fall elsewhere on any of those axes. Some working parents have said they might value flexibility at school-pickup time. Some workers of color have raised the benefit of being free from in-office microaggressions. Recent college graduates may want to go into the office to make friends. And of course, not all workers are able to work remotely. The physical space in which one works, or hopes to work, intersects with one’s most personal choices. It collides with and reveals what people value most.

Nick Bloom, a Stanford economics professor who studies remote work, told me that “research and evidence are slowly catching up” to the work-from-home debate. In five years, he predicted, the topic will be less controversial. Bloom and two colleagues, Jose Maria Barrero and Steven J. Davis, published a working paper earlier this month that collects some of the existing work-from-home research, pulling both from their own work and from other papers. One interesting finding is that although fully remote work has been correlated with a drop in productivity, hybrid work (which occurs widely in white-collar fields such as tech and business services) was not linked to any productivity loss—and could actually help with recruitment and retention.

Workers gained freedom over their working conditions in the past few years. Now many bosses are trying to wrest that power back. And workers and managers don’t always see eye to eye about the stakes of returning to work. Bloom and his colleagues asked managers and employees about how working from home affected productivity. Workers, on the whole, said they were 7.4 percent more productive on average while working from home; bosses said that they thought their employees were 3.5 percent less productive. Managers tend to most appreciate what they can see in front of them, Bloom told me over email: “It’s like those restaurants where the kitchen is open and on display—it feels more like you are having a fantastic culinary experience, but it’s really just a mirage.”

Companies’ rationales for calling people back to work can seem mushy, beyond that it simply seems like being together would be better (or, in some cases, that employers want to fulfill expensive real-estate obligations). One argument for working in person is the idea that younger workers can learn from, and be mentored by, more experienced colleagues in the workplace. Bloom told me that senior managers over the age of 50 provide about 50 percent of the mentoring minutes when working from home as they do while in the office. “A lot of mentoring is casual, relaxed conversations and, yes, it’s spontaneous—taking somebody aside and giving some quick advice,” he said. A Pew Research Center survey from March found that 36 percent of teleworkers said remote work hurt their opportunities to be mentored. Positive remote mentoring can happen (I found a formal mentorship program conducted mostly over Zoom very useful). Bloom said that although in theory—and with the right software—these types of relationships can blossom, “practically this does not happen as much online.”

Bloom’s point (and my reaction to it) reinforces how personal experience can color perspectives on this issue: In my case, I both relish time away from home and believe in the potential of remote mentor relationships. But how those dimensions of work fit into our lives can vary widely. Change any inputs—personal commute time, age, nature of work, child-care responsibilities, goals—and the resulting approach may be unrecognizable.

Related:

Today’s News

Evening Read

Do Yourself a Favor and Go Find a ‘Third Place’

By Allie Conti

On a Sunday last year, I was walking through a suburban neighborhood in Pennsylvania, heading home from an early-afternoon meditation class. One of the nondescript stucco houses had a curious sticker on its mailbox reading mac’s club. I checked Google Maps to see if I was standing next to a cleverly disguised business—what might pretentiously be referred to in a city as a speakeasy—but nothing popped up, so I peeked inside the house. That’s where I spotted a pool table and a middle-aged guy sitting at the end of a long, mahogany bar, drinking a Bloody Mary by himself. Apparently I’d stumbled upon a social club meant for residents of the neighborhood. Though at first the bartender was incredulous that I’d just walked in, he soon rewarded my sense of adventure with a Guinness on the house. The Eagles weren’t playing in the NFL that day, and he was grateful for the additional company. We talked about the upcoming deer season, and upon learning that I was a new hunter, the two guys showed me a rifle that was kept in another room. …

Besides giving me the feeling that I’d flexed a muscle that had atrophied, the interaction was special to me because I’d found a classic “third place” in the suburbs, where I least expected it. The term, which was coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the 1980s, essentially refers to a physical location other than work or home where there’s little to no financial barrier to entry and where conversation is the primary activity.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

---

Culture Break

Read. Mozart in Motion, by the British poet Patrick Mackie, explores the secret to Mozart’s lasting appeal.

Watch. Beneath the hijinks and lewdness, the show Dave (streaming on Hulu) constructs an unlikely model for male friendship.

Play our daily crossword.

---

P.S.

I like to bake, and find doing so relaxing. But in the summer, when my apartment is hot, I turn to treats that don’t require baking. (In case it hasn’t become clear: I do not enjoy the sensation of being overheated.) One very easy and fun one I have returned to is these chocolate-peanut-butter cups, courtesy of Samantha Seneviratne. I don’t have a double boiler or a microwave, so I boil water in a saucepan and melt chocolate chips in a metal bowl on top of it. And I like cashew butter, so I use that instead of peanut butter. The effort-to-reward ratio is high: These take just a few minutes of active work and render delightful little treats.

— Lora

---

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.