Technology & Innovation

Remote work is here to stay

May 27, 2020

Global

May 27, 2020

Global
Matt Clancy

Researcher, educator, and writer

Matt Clancy is a researcher, educator, and writer on the economics of innovation at Iowa State University.

The evidence is stacking up: as ease of remote working has increased, the economic benefit of people and firms being in close proximity to one another has declined. While intensified by covid-19, these longer-term trends predate the current crisis. Remote work’s time has come, says innovation economist Matt Clancy.

On May 12th Twitter announced its employees would be working from home indefinitely. How many other firms will follow suit after being forced to experiment with remote working due to covid-19? Recent research from across several social science disciplines suggests that remote work is likely to remain more common after covid-19 recedes than it was before. In my recent paper, The Case for Remote Work, I focus on four main reasons.

First, the technology for remote work has improved. For many jobs working remotely is just as productive, if not more so, than working in the office. Remote workers were found to be more productive than their co-located peers in experimental and quasi-experimental studies lasting between months and years in settings as varied as a Chinese travel-booking company, a UK life sciences company and the US Patent and Trademark office

That said, remote work is not universally superior. A 2019 study of thousands of Portuguese firms between 2011 and 2016 found the productivity impact of remote work was negative on average, but with significant variation across firms. High-performing businesses are more likely to see the benefits, such as large companies, those employing skilled labour or firms conducting research and development projects (see chart).

 

 

The second reason is the increasing ease with which workers are matched to geographically distant firms. Direct comparisons of the same employees working remotely or in the office actually undersell the advantages of remote work. This is because remote work changes the kind of employees firms can get. The ability to hire remote workers gives firms access to a larger labour market and companies offering remote work can attract better workers.

The third reason to be optimistic about remote work is that it can be a cost-saving amenity that workers value. Living near productive firms is expensive, with the rising cost of living in US urban centres approximately one quarter of the urban wage premium according to one study. Work-from-anywhere programmes at the US Patent and Trademark Office enabled workers to relocate from costly urban areas (and also saved the agency money on office space).

But it’s not only about the cost of living. People value locations for all sorts of reasons and will pay a large implicit premium to live near friends and family. For example, studies from Denmark have investigated the trade-offs people make between salary and the proximity of work to home. These studies imply people will accept significantly lower wages to live near friends and family: for blue-collar workers choosing between two potential jobs, one 20 miles away and the other twice as far, individuals would prefer the job closer to their hometown unless the more distant job paid at least US$11,000 more (compared to an average salary of us$32,000). Meanwhile, declining geographic mobility in the US may indicate that the value people place on living location is rising.

Fourth and finally, it has become less and less important to reside near other workers to benefit from their knowledge. These “knowledge spillovers” are one reason why innovation and economic activity tends to cluster in cities: until recently, physical proximity made it much easier to learn from other people. The easy interchange of ideas is one reason why cities with bigger populations have more patents per resident. 

But this correlation has been weakening since its peak in the 1960s and a host of other metrics suggest the same thing: physical proximity to other knowledge workers doesn’t offer the advantage it used to. For example, inventors living in big cities used to produce more innovative, cutting-edge patents than their small-town or rural counterparts, but this is much less true today. Similarly, the benefit academic economists derive from being physically around their colleagues used to be substantial but this effect weakened in the 1980s and appears to have disappeared by the 1990s. Lastly, consider a 2017 survey of over 500 Norwegian firms that aimed to measure the importance of serendipity and innovation in cities: it found no relationship between the probability of forming an important partnership from a casual or chance encounter and residing in a bigger city.

The reason this is happening is simple: better communication and transportation technology make it easier to access knowledge from a distance. Studies looking at planes, trains and automobiles have consistently found that with better infrastructure links, remote collaboration rises. 

Moreover, as we move more of our lives online, social connections are also less geographically constrained. It is estimated that 41% of American adults play video games with other people online, averaging nearly five hours per week, and studies have shown gamers exhibit forms of social capital not dissimilar to the kind formed offline. Social networks allow us to more easily maintain connections made offline in geographically dispersed places. Online social networks seem to have made it easier for young people to form more social connections than in the past and to maintain these relationships at a distance.

Taken together with the remote working experiment that covid-19 is forcing us all to run, modern economies may be nearing a tipping point. Once remote productivity is good enough, and once the advantages of physical proximity to colleagues and peers decline enough, the advantages of a larger labour market and the ability to attract workers at lower cost may be decisive. Remote work’s time may finally be here.

 

Matt Clancy is a researcher, educator, and writer on the economics of innovation at Iowa State University.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited (EIU) or any other member of The Economist Group. The Economist Group (including the EIU) cannot accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this article or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out in the article.

Enjoy in-depth insights and expert analysis - subscribe to our Perspectives newsletter, delivered every week