The Future of the Office by Peter Cappelli

Author:Peter Cappelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wharton School Press

Worries About Burnout

I don’t want to suggest that employers have no interest in doing things that will benefit only their employees, but all employers have nagging voices in their investor community, sometimes on their boards, wanting to know how decisions are going to help them and their profitability. At a minimum, they want to know what it might cost if there are no net benefits for the operation. Aside from real-estate savings, what will employers get out of employees working from home?

One idea is that employees who are not commuting have more time that could be spent working, as some of the evidence presented in this and earlier chapters suggests. I suspect employees are thinking that work-from-home will mean the same amount of work done from home and not more work, although the latter has been the case.

Evidence from Gallup surveys in the United States shows that employee perceptions that they are “burned out” have been rising since 2016 and continued to be high in 2020, with the surprising statistic that remote workers reported a higher degree of burnout than those working on-site. The good news for advocates of occasional work-from-home is that before the pandemic, the ability to work from home was associated with reduced perceptions of burnout.73 If working from home was a way to get away from work pressures, this was impossible to do when there was no choice but to work from home. It is arguably not good news for those wanting to be permanently remote.

There is more systematic evidence on what employees working from home during the pandemic thought about it from countries other than the United States. The results vary: In France, for example, the sense of well-being actually improved during the pandemic in part, researchers believe, because of the comparison effect. Respondents could see what was happening to people elsewhere who lost jobs and felt good about where they were. In Germany, respondents who were working from home appeared to feel less satisfied with their work and family life. And in the UK, respondents mainly felt the same as those in Germany, but relationships with family got marginally better, especially with younger children.74 All this suggests that the social context of work and family before the pandemic, which varies across countries, affects our assessments a lot. For example, if I had good child care before the pandemic, having to work at home with day care closed was hard because I am trying to work with my kids there. If I had irregular and unsatisfactory day care, being home with my kids might seem like an opportunity to have them safe and cared for. It is very difficult to extrapolate how remote work would have felt without the pandemic context, but that is what we need to assess in order to make the right decisions.

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