Many companies have announced plans to transition their workforce to a fully, or at least hybrid, remote structure, hoping to raise employee engagement and attract new recruits. However, these working-from-home perks might not be a panacea for deeper, more structural reforms.
Empirical research has long highlighted corporate culture–specifically managers–as the most important determinant of employee engagement and turnover. So, does culture still matter–or has the pandemic shifted underlying employee-employer dynamics?
Working with Professor Jason Schloetzer at Georgetown, we just released the first comprehensive analysis linking remote work with job satisfaction and turnover, drawing on unique data from PayScale.com. We found that hybrid work is associated with higher levels of job satisfaction but has no effect on turnover. However, fully remote work is not linked with an increase in job satisfaction, but with higher levels of intent to leave the organization.
Measures of corporate culture matter significantly more. Suppose, for instance, that an organization could help its employees feel appreciated for the work they do. That matters 10 to 20 times as much as the ability to work remotely on some days. Although other measures of corporate culture vary in their gravity, all matter substantially more than hybrid work availability.
However, there is no doubt now that remote work is here to stay and will provide an added degree of flexibility over the location where employees perform their work. While the percentage of workers who perform their work exclusively from home has declined from 54% to 25% between April 2020 and September 2021, the share of workers who perform at least some work from home has grown from 15% to 20%, according to the latest data from Gallup.
The availability of remote work will not be "a game-changer” for organizations’ ability to raise employee engagement, but it is a complementary tool in their arsenal. Each organization will have to decide how much remote work to allow–and whether different sets of employees should have different options when choosing how and when to do their work. Our research suggests that tasks requiring lower degrees of coordination are much easier to perform remotely and the employees who do so exhibit greater degrees of job satisfaction.
Unlike traditional statistical analyses, ours is the first to control for employees’ perception of their organization’s corporate culture, ranging from managerial quality to the degree of development and training opportunities.