Our latest Ask the Expert business advice column focuses on the debate over remote work, which continues to be a highly debated topic, nearly five years after tech companies sent their employees home at the outset of the pandemic.
Longtime Seattle tech leader Kieran Snyder has spent time crunching data about remote work at her website, Nerd Processor.
Snyder is the co-founder and former longtime CEO of Seattle-based augmented writing startup Textio. She previously spent more than nine years at Microsoft.
Do you have a good question, or are you an expert that wants to contribute to a future column? Email us at tips@geekwire.com. — Taylor Soper, GeekWire editor.
Q: I’m a leader at a tech company trying to figure out whether our team should be working remotely or in the office. Which actually works better?
KIERAN SNYDER: This year, I got interested in the data behind the remote vs. in-office religious debate. I’ve run both in-office and remote teams of hundreds of people, so I’ve had both religions at various times.
Look, the arguments for remote work are loud and all over social media. Save time on commuting. Hire talent from anywhere. Some people see remote work as such a huge benefit that they’re willing to take lower salaries if they can work from home. And seriously, I love working in my PJs too.
But I looked at some real data this year, and it wasn’t what I wanted to believe. For instance:
- Across 200 hours of recorded meetings, people are 1.5x more likely to constructively disagree with their coworkers when they’re in person than when they’re on video.
- In that same data set, a much smaller percentage of people contribute to discussion when the meeting is remote compared to in person, and the effect is particularly chilling for women.
- Across the 180 startups I met in the first half of 2024, 64% of the in-person teams are ending the year with positive growth signals, compared with just 33% of the remote teams.
This data is not conclusive, and there are lots of good reasons to prefer remote work. But team performance doesn’t seem to be one of them.
This is like religion or politics: I don’t expect even the best data will change people’s minds. But speaking only for myself, the data is enough to change mine.
Previously:
https://ift.tt/uJ3wnAC January 03, 2025 at 03:00PM GeekWire
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