Home office researcher: "People can work productively from home"

Contents

Mark Ma is Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh's Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. Together with doctoral student Yuye Ding, he has been studying the economic and sociological effects of the home office trend for several years - and the current counter-movement, which has particularly affected large corporations and often annoys employees. In Ma's opinion, forcing employees to go back to the office mainly leads to frustration and does not necessarily help productivity in the face of strong digitalization. At the same time, Ma also believes that working on site makes sense if it is voluntary and even celebrated because the whole team agrees to it.

"Instead of forcing everyone to work in the office, high-performing employees who perform well at home should be given the opportunity to work at home," says Ma. This would benefit both the employee and the company eventually by retaining high performers who can easily find another job. Regular face-to-face team building activities can help maintain company culture, which can be essential for problem-solving and brainstorming new ideas.

In an interview with heise online, Mark Ma talks about his latest findings – and how companies and employees should best deal with the issue of working from home without causing conflict.

heise online: It seems that the trend of letting employees work from home has reversed - at least in larger companies, there is an increasing obligation to come back to the office at least some days. Is this also your impression from your research?

Mark Ma: Yes, some companies had made returning to the office mandatory after the pandemic. But the peak of such a trend seems to have already passed. According to surveys of managers in 2024, most CEOs no longer consider returning to the office a total priority.

During the pandemic, companies have learned that it is perfectly possible to achieve good results while their employees work from home. Has some of this trust been lost? And if so, why?

Experience during the pandemic has shown that people can be very productive when working from home. But some managers don't seem to trust their employees when they work from home.

That's why they are pushing to return to the office. The problem with this, however, is that such orders openly signal to employees that the manager does not trust them. And this lack of trust then damages the general morale of the employees. Trust plays an important role in this situation.

When employees work from home, rental costs for offices can be saved and space can be reduced. Nevertheless, large corporations in particular seem to be recalling their employees. So it doesn't seem to be a question of cost. So, as you have already indicated, is it a question of power and control?

Yes, power and control play an important role in these decisions. We have also found that an astonishing number of companies have made such decisions after their share prices have fallen.

This is because the managers had to make a statement to their investors when the companies did not perform well. A simple answer is that people just aren't working hard enough in the home office. Therefore, they would call everyone back to the office.

Nevertheless, the trend towards working from home seems to remain strong. In major cities such as San Francisco or New York, many office spaces are empty, and in German cities too. The market for office real estate is depressed. What do managers believe they can achieve when their employees are with them?

Managers like to claim that working from the office can help the company develop a better culture and improve collaboration and cohesion. But many workers who are called back to the office have told me that they spend most of their time in the office working individually on their laptops rather than collaborating with other employees.