2023 was a year full of surveys on remote work, with a mountain of mixed data

The only thing taller than Mount Everest might just be the mountain of surveys and data being collected on remote work.

In honor of the end of a year that saw the rate of remote work drop as employers called workers back to the office, let’s take a look at some of the data that has emerged.

Productivity concerns. More data on remote workers’ productivity emerged this year, and so far, the results have been mixed. For example, a July paper from the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research found that fully remote workers may be about 10% less productive than in-office workers.

However, many employees believe they’re more productive working remotely, Eagle Hill Consulting found in May.

“It all comes down to how workers are managed. If you set up fully remote with good management and incentives, and people are meeting in person, it can work. What doesn’t seem to work is sending people home with no face time at all,” Nick Bloom, economist and remote work academic at Stanford, told the New York Times.

What workers want. The Eagle Hill survey also found that 42% of workers believed their job satisfaction would decrease if they were required to be in the office full-time. This is in line with research that has found many workers would rather find a new job than return to the office.

And while 64% of employers expect that workers will be back in the office full-time by 2026, according to KPMG, that’s not what job-seekers want. Remote roles receive three times more applications than non-remote roles, a summer ZipRecruiter survey found.

Other findings. We forgot to pack our ice ax for this journey, so we won’t make it to the top of Virtual Everest, but there are some additional interesting findings we think are worth highlighting, including:

• Remote workers save an average of 55 minutes per day by not commuting, the National Bureau of Economic Research found in January.
• The carbon footprint of remote workers is 54% less than that of those who work in an office, research from Cornell University and Microsoft suggested in September.
• Workers believe remote work has allowed them to have a better work-life balance, according to an August survey from Deloitte.
• Over one-half (58%) of workers think RTO will negatively impact their mental health, according to KornFerry, but remote workers are more likely to have anxiety and depression, the Integrated Benefits Institute found.

The only consensus appears to be that there’s not yet a consensus on what’s best for companies and their workers.

As for us, we’ve already started training for next year’s climb of Virtual Everest.