Research published earlier this year showed how the ability to work remotely during the Covid pandemic significantly limited the economic impacts of the pandemic. A similar study from the Texas A&M University School of Public Health suggests a similar boost could be achieved during natural disasters.
The researchers worked with an oil and gas company that was forced to close its offices in Houston due to flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey. This made the workforce have to work remotely for a prolonged period.
Maintaining productivity
The researchers looked at employee technology data before, during, and then after the hurricane struck. The analysis revealed that while computer use typically declined during the hurricane, employee productivity over the seven-month period during which they worked remotely was comparable with pre-hurricane levels. It’s a finding the researchers believe has equal value in terms of post-Covid working.
“In the future, there will be a greater percentage of the workforce who is involved in some sort of office-style technology work activities,” they explain. “Almost all of the study’s employees were right back up to the same level of output as they were doing before Hurricane Harvey. This is a huge message right now for employers because we’re having national debates about whether or not employees should be able to work remotely or in a hybrid schedule.”
Of course, not all studies have shown that remote working has been similarly productive, not least due to the additional meetings we seem drawn into. Research from King’s College London found, for instance, examined a number of existing studies, each of which applied a unique approach to examining productivity during Covid.
For instance, some measured productivity based on accounting data, some measured it based on the hours worked and the activities people performed, while others measured productivity via self-assessment from workers.
Mixed results
The results show that those studies using the first two approaches typically found a negative relationship between working from home and productivity. Those studies using self-assessment tended to produce more mixed results.
Of course, this isn’t to suggest that remote working had no positive impact, as indeed research from Kellogg Business School identified recently.
The analysis found that GDP would likely have fallen by around twice as much during 2020 if remote working was not the option it ultimately was. What was interesting, however, is that the productivity boom that many have argued materialized in the wake of the shift to remote working was not really found in the data. The researchers explain that this claim only really held water if the only inputs were those associated with traditional workplaces, such as energy costs or office space.
In other words, it assumes that those things weren’t also a cost when we worked from home, which of course is not the case. Once those costs were factored into our home working environment, the apparent productivity boom largely disappeared. This is something that the King’s researchers readily concede.
“The investment and various measures taken by firms to deal with the productivity consequences of the pandemic have mitigated the decline in output and significantly changed the work dynamics,” they explain.
So remote working is certainly better than nothing when other routes aren’t available, especially when done en masse, but the jury remains out whether the kind of wholesale changes seen during both Covid and Hurricane Harvey should be maintained during more benign times.
