How the Paper of Employers Wants To Make You Think Workers Want Bosses

This is just a ridiculous article:

Since the start of the pandemic, sweeping workplace changes have arrived far faster than the research examining their effects. More than 50 million Americans, largely in white-collar jobs, began working from home at least part of the time. Many of them, especially working parents, became fiercely attached to the flexibility. In recent months, as large employers — including Amazon, Disney and Starbucks — have tried to call workers back to the office, thousands of employees have objected, pointing to a track record of productivity at home.

But remote workers may be paying a hidden professional penalty for that flexibility, according to a working paper from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the University of Iowa and Harvard. The research is among the first major studies to demonstrate the professional downside of remote work.

The economists — Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington and Amanda Pallais — studied engineers at a large technology company. They found that remote work enhanced the productivity of senior engineers, but it also reduced the amount of feedback that junior engineers received (in the form of comments on their code), and some of the junior engineers were more likely to quit the firm. The effects of remote work, in terms of declining feedback, were especially pronounced for female engineers.

“We find a now-versus-later trade-off associated with remote work,” said Ms. Harrington, an economist at the University of Iowa. “Particularly for junior engineers who are new to this particular firm, and younger engineers, they receive less feedback from their senior colleagues when they’re remote.”

The study’s findings are preliminary and relatively narrow, directly measuring just one form of interaction among one set of workers at one technology firm. But the authors said their findings suggested something broader: that the office, at least for a certain type of white-collar knowledge worker, played an important role in early-career development. And the mentorship and training people get in person had so far proved hard to replicate on Slack and Zoom.

What’s the downside to this again?

I suppose there are workers who are super anxious and want to be patted on the head by their employers. In fact, as a faculty member, I can tell you that the one of the most perplexing things is how we, at least those of us who are tenured and tenure-track, have more control over our daily work lives than almost any other profession and all half of faculty want is to please the bosses and get that nice pat on the head from the dean. So people are weird. But not having daily control over workers is not exactly something most workers are really wanting here. One of the nice things about working from home is more daily autonomy from the boss. Not that everyone is ever going to agree on their preferred mode of work, but let’s not pretend that there is a great crisis in the workplace right now over this kind of thing.