A serial founder and former public company CEO, Dan Richards is an award-winning member of the marketing faculty at the Rotman School of Management, where he also oversees the credit course associated with MBA student internships.
Today, many employees view being asked to go into the office for even one or two days a week as an unreasonable request. In their view, the past two years have proved they can be just as productive from home while enjoying flexibility and saving on time, cost and commuting hassle.
A recent report, prepared by the Future Skills Centre, Environics Institute for Survey Research, and the Ted Rogers School of Management’s Diversity Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University, shows almost four in five Canadians say they like working from home more than the office.
Even if some employees acknowledge there are benefits to working from the office, many take the view that all of those advantages accrue to their employer, while they bear all the costs. In informal conversations I have with recent graduates in their 20s and 30s, this is an especially common view.
However, new evidence suggests working from the office can yield important benefits for younger employees, as it can help them develop communication skills, build relationships with coworkers and accelerate their overall learning.
At the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, internships are a requirement for full MBA students to graduate. As the faculty member with oversight for the course associated with internships, recently I asked 200 students who completed summer internships for feedback on the impact of working from the office versus working from home.
These MBA students reported the impact on eight dimensions. Of those, work from home scored significantly better in one area, two were a wash and work from office performed better in five cases.
Areas where work from home performs better
Managing stress
Work from home was the consensus pick, as the ability to take breaks reduced the pressure on students.
Areas where work from office performs better
Maintaining your motivation
One legacy from the pandemic is the growing struggles among many employees to stay motivated at work. For more than half of students who responded, working from the office had a positive impact here.
How much you learned
Constant learning on the job is paramount for anyone with ambitions to progress in their career – and that’s especially important for those in the early stages of their jobs. For more than half the respondents, working from the office enhanced learning.
Developing communication skills
Communicating effectively is another trait that is essential for career success. Compared to working from home, 60 per cent of students said that being in the office helped them improve their communication skills.
Relationships with coworkers; Networking with other departments
In most organizations, relationships are critical in getting things done – and for younger employees, they can also be key to advancement. Here again work from the office was the clear winner.
Evenly split
Ability to contribute on the job
The ability to contribute on the job varied widely. Forty per cent of the time work from office scored better, while 30 per cent of the time work from home was more effective and another 30 per cent of the time they were largely the same. There is no definitive answer on what works best in terms of contributing on the job, with that varying with the role and the employee.
Developing technical skills
In some roles, hard skills such as financial modelling or upgrading software skills are essential. Four out of ten times where students worked made no difference in developing these skills, with work from home and from the office evenly split in the balance of cases.
There are limitations in extrapolating from these findings. First, these students were only on the job for 13 weeks. Second, they were weighted to roles in consulting and the financial industry. Finally, their focus on learning and getting a full-time offer was different from the goals of most full-time employees. That said, there are clear indications of the benefits of working from offices that are warning signs for younger employees who believe there are no costs or trade-offs in choosing to work exclusively from home.
Setting new norms
Being asked to come into the office, even for a couple of days a week, has become an increasing source of contention between many employers and employees. A recent report on U.S. job postings from LinkedIn suggest more people want to work from home compared to the number of work-from-home jobs available. In October, only 14 per cent of U.S. postings were for entirely remote jobs, down from a historic high of 20 per cent last February. Meanwhile, more than 50 per cent of applications were for those entirely remote postings.
A strong case can be made that more flexibility is needed by both employers and employees. Most employees must be prepared to rethink the view that working from home all the time has no downsides. There may be cases where that’s true, but those will be the exceptions. For most employees, there appear to be real costs to failing to be in the office on a regular basis.
At the same time, employers need to revisit their expectations on how often employees will be in the office. Some level of flexibility will continue to be important. When students were asked how many days a week they would have liked to be in the office this past summer, the most common response was three days a week – and only 6 per cent said every day.
Whether you’re an employer or employee, consider whether bringing more flexibility to work in the office practices should be among your resolutions for 2023. That flexibility could make a big difference in more productive workplaces and more successful careers.