Bias against remote workers could become a new obstacle to making workplaces more diverse and inclusive.
Bias may create obstacles to diverse and inclusive workplaces.
When offices finally reopen, some companies plan to use them in a very different way than they did before the pandemic, giving workers the choice to come in just a few days a week, or not at all.
Some employees are eager to return to the office full time as soon as they can, but others can’t imagine ever going back to the way things were. Offering people more flexibility over where they work can help attract and retain talent, companies say.
Around 10,000 employees at Google recently applied to work remotely or transfer to a different location, and the company approved 85% of the requests. Zillow says more women have applied for its jobs since it announced a year ago that most of its 5,900 employees could work from home permanently. Software company Slack, which also offered permanent remote positions last year, said that among recent hires the number of minority workers was 50% higher for those who planned to work mostly from home than for those who prefer the office.
But even as the hybrid workplace reduces some long-standing barriers, it could introduce another type of inequality. Bias against remote workers could become a new obstacle to making workplaces more diverse and inclusive, say management experts and executives themselves.
“The employees who are working in person may get more visibility with leadership,” said Sonja Gittens Ottley, the head of diversity and inclusion at the software company Asana, which has more than 1,000 employees who will be allowed to spend two days a week working remotely when offices reopen. “They might have more opportunities for mentorship and sponsorship.”
Though most evidence that remote workers are at a disadvantage is anecdotal, at least one study, led by researchers at Stanford University, suggests they are less likely to be promoted than their in-office peers. In the experiment, researchers randomly assigned workers at a large travel agency in Shanghai to work remotely or in the office for nine months. Though the remote workers were 13% more productive, putting in more hours and making more calls per minute, they were promoted about half as often as their in-office peers.
“They can get forgotten,” said Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford and one of the study’s authors.
The result is troubling partly because the desire to work remotely isn’t evenly distributed, Bloom said. He and his research team conducted monthly surveys about remote work since May last year. As of March this year, among college-educated parents of young children, women have said they want to work from home full time around 50% more often than men do.
At Zillow, “We’re going to do everything we can to actively move away from the way we used to work,” said Meghan Reibstein, the company’s vice president for organizational operations. Before the pandemic, fewer than 2% of the company’s employees worked remotely. Now about two-thirds plan to continue working remotely indefinitely.
Another change that companies such as Zillow and Salesforce are making to level the playing field for remote workers is in how they conduct meetings. Instead of having in-office employees gather in a conference room while remote employees dial in, if one person is not in the physical room, everyone will dial in separately on their laptop, regardless of whether they’re in the office.
“Space is equal on the screen, and everybody’s name is there,” Reibstein said.
To foster the spontaneity of office interactions, job aggregator Indeed is exploring technology that includes installing screens in its office kitchens that would allow remote workers to engage in casual water cooler conversations with their co-workers (perhaps in sight of an actual water cooler). Office small talk has been shown to foster a greater sense of belonging.
Changes like these may help reduce some of the bias against remote workers, but only up to a point.
Take meetings in which everyone dials in from a laptop: “After the meeting ends, the three people at the office close their laptops, step out of the cubicles, go grab a coffee, go chat in the corridor, basically carry the meeting on,” said Bloom. “And so you just naturally have an in group and an out group.”