Good morning!
Call it the “office coordination tax.”
The everyday friction of hybrid work—from finding an open conference room to managing schedules across time zones—costs the average mid-sized company $9 million annually, according to a new study from workplace management platform Robin.
Robin estimates that those losses can reach $14,000 per employee annually, based on workers’ estimates of time spent on workplace coordination and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics compensation benchmarks.
Put in terms of productivity: Employees are losing some 10% of their workweek to workplace logistics instead of the work itself.
But are these findings evidence that remote work purists have been right all along or ammunition for the return-to-office crowd? Ironically, it gives both sides something to celebrate. The report’s findings bring to mind recent conversations that capture both sides of this debate.
At the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in June, former CEO of HP and eBay Meg Whitman told the audience that if she were running a company today, she’d “force people back to the office.”
Whitman argued that giving employees broad discretion over where and when they work weakens communication, mentorship, and the apprenticeship-style learning that happens naturally when people share an office. “Things are changing so fast that you have to communicate early and often…and the best way to do that is to have people in the office,” Whitman said.
Job van der Voort, CEO and cofounder of global hiring platform Remote, sees the issue differently. He told me that offices aren’t necessarily more effective; they’re simply easier to run because organizations have spent decades building around them. Remote work, by contrast, demands deliberate systems for communication, collaboration, and management.
From that perspective, the Robin findings aren’t an argument for either fully in-office or fully remote work. Instead, they suggest that hybrid creates coordination problems neither model has to solve in quite the same way.
The takeaway may be that organizations are better off committing to one model than trying to straddle both. And if they insist on straddling both, they should make sure to arm their employees with the operational tools to do so.
Van der Voort is a proponent of fully remote work, arguing that it eliminates much of hybrid ambiguity by designing work around distributed teams from the start. He adds that this approach creates a more level playing field for working parents and women; more than half of the managers on Remote’s engineering team, for example, are women.
That remote-first approach also shapes how the company evaluates employees. Managers at Remote don’t track who’s online or how long people stay logged in. They evaluate employees on output alone. Van der Voort notes that this approach has a hidden advantage: It forces managers to give more specific feedback. Instead of relying on subjective signals—who stayed late or who was most visible in the office—leaders have to articulate exactly where someone is (or isn’t) meeting expectations.
Kristin Stoller Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media [email protected]
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