Remote Work Productivity Wanes As the Pandemic Wears On

After a year of working from home, employees are starting to feel the burden of online meetings and remote communication. Remote work schedules are starting to impact productivity, signaling the first signs that employees won’t work like this forever. However, the pandemic has changed the workplace permanently, and employees also aren’t likely to go back to “normal” either.

“We are starting to see a curve of diminishing returns. That initial productivity boost from having the extra couple of hours at home and not in the car is fading. We’re hitting a plateau, if not starting to recede,” Mark Coxon, technology sales director at Tangram, tells GlobeSt.com.

Enthusiasm has waned since the beginning of the pandemic, when companies and employees alike were bullish on permanent remote work. “In the first few weeks of the pandemic, most people adapted fairly well in transitioning to digital tools. We were even kind of excited to have some of our free time back, avoid our daily commute, get a reprieve from having to be in the office every day,” says Coxon, adding that everything from happy hours to conferences and trade shows have moved into the virtual sphere.

However, embracing virtual communication has highlighted a need for balance between in-person and online meeting styles. “We are now at the point of being biologically and psychologically maxed out,” says Coxon. “With Zoom fatigue, it’s become very difficult to be prepared to engage nonstop, all day long without the traditional social cues we receive when we’re in person.”

Another issues is the frequency of meetings, which for many employees has increased exponentially. “Because people assume we’re sitting at our desks, we end up in three, four or five hours of back-to-back meetings just switching Zoom rooms,” says Coxon. “Rather than switching gears, we are grinding into second every time we come into a new meeting.”

Despite the toll that online meetings have on productivity, Coxon also acknowledges that meetings in general need to adapt and change. As the economy and work environment gradually reopen, we should be anticipating and defining a new, optimal approach to meetings that blends the best of both worlds,” he says, adding that this has been a long time coming. “We’ve needed an impetus to redefine meetings. In a pre-information-age world, a physical meeting was needed to share information, because that information couldn’t be delivered digitally. Plus, we didn’t have the assets to distribute the information with the context that we needed.”

He recommends shedding the format of an office meeting, including the design of the meeting room itself. “What we need to embrace is the idea of outcome-based design,” he explains. “The fundamental question becomes, is there a reason to meet in person? Could we just meet virtually? Do we need to meet at all? Thoughtfully addressing these kinds of questions can help build a hierarchy of decision-making.”