By SUSAN JONES
If you had any doubt about how important the issue of hybrid vs. in-office work is in the United States and internationally, you need look no further than the interest Mark Ma’s research on the subject has gotten.
Ma, an associate professor of business administration for Pitt Business, and Yuye Ding, a Ph.D. student in Katz Graduate School of Business, looked at Standard and Poor’s 500 firms — the largest companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges — that had implemented return to work mandates, forcing employees to be in the office five days a week.
The results showed that while many of the companies said they were bringing employees back to the office to improve the bottom line, there were no significant changes in financial performance or firm values after the mandates were implemented. But there was a sharp decrease in employees’ job satisfaction.
“Before the pandemic, you wake up in the morning and you automatically assumed that you should go into the office to work,” Ma said. “Now you know that there’s another option. You can work as efficiently as in the office. People know that this is viable and that the environment has a lot of benefits.”
At Pitt, hybrid work seems here to stay. Human Resources said that of the approximately 8,000 staff working at the University, 5,277 have flexible work agreements as of January 2024. About 13 percent of Pitt staff work fully remote and 52 percent work hybrid schedules.
Ma's research was posted in January, and since then the paper has been downloaded more than 17,000 times from the Social Science Research Network website and has been featured in news articles around the world — from the Washington Post, NPR, Forbes and Business Insider to the BBC, the Australian Financial Times and many more.
As a professor, Ma said he always hopes his research gets attention and has an impact in making society better, “but I didn’t expect that it would get so much attention all around the world,” he said. “That means this is something that people all around the world care about.”
The research found that about 30 percent of the Standard & Poor’s 500 companies had imposed a return to office mandate by the end of November 2023. Ma said before the end of 2023, several presidents and CEOs were pushing for workers to return to the office, but he thinks that trend has reversed.
“Not only because of our research,” he said. “There are many studies about this and also (companies) have their own internal data.”
He cited the case of the job search company Glassdoor, which has gone fully remote after realizing that remote jobs posted on their site got 50 percent more applicants and ones with better qualifications.
The companies that have forced employees back to the office and not improved the bottom line now face a dilemma. Many of the CEOs of these larger companies have been very public about their “return to office” announcements, often scapegoating remote employees for a company’s bad performance.
“In almost every firm that imposed a mandate, there is a crisis that leads to conflicts between managers and employees,” Ma said. “But now I feel it’s too late for these managers to back off because if they backtrack, they’re admitting they made a huge mistake previously, and that would be the end of their career at the firm.”
Even before the pandemic increased the prevalence of remote or hybrid work, Yahoo’s CEO encountered this problem. In 2013, Marissa Meyer ordered all employees to be in the office every day. In the end, Yahoo lost 30 percent of its employees and Meyer had to step down. The new CEO backtracked on the policy.
“I don’t think we are going back (to fully in-office work),” Ma said. The biggest resistance to remote work has come from the commercial real estate companies, but he said recent news stories show even they “are also realizing that they are losing the fight, because they are actively seeking government help to convert their offices to apartments.”
Ma said he has gotten some pushback from company leaders, particularly about how to adequately train new employees right out of college when they are working remotely. He suggested to one person who was angry about remote work that he could tell new, younger employees to come back for training and give incentives to more experienced workers to be in the office as their mentors.
He likes to point out to business owners that they can save money by minimizing office space, and it also benefits the company because employees experience less burnout and are more productive when their commuting time is minimized.
“Also we have recently found that many firms ignored the environmental implications,” Ma said. “When you have thousands or millions of people get on the road five days a week, during rush hour that creates a lot of carbon emissions. If you give more flexibility that’s also good for the environment.”
And what about those online meetings?
Meanwhile, David Lebel, associate professor of business administration, has been looking at another aspect of remote or hybrid work — understanding the differences in communication between virtual and in-person meetings.
You may have received a survey from Lebel last fall asking a variety of questions about an in-person meeting or virtual meeting you had attended recently. Around 350 people took the initial survey. Then another 750 at Pitt participated in a follow-up survey.
While separate research has shown there is Zoom fatigue and a tendency toward passive disengagement during virtual meetings, Lebel’s research found that there is a benefit to virtual meetings for certain people.
“We found that virtual meetings have a benefit in terms of do people feel it’s safe to speak up,” he said, “and then we find it especially for those people who are worried about negative outcomes at work.”
He said the main variable is “psychological safety,” which is “perceptions of, do you think it’s safe to speak up? Do you think you could speak up without criticism or negative reactions? Do you think you’ll be listened to?”
Lebel said they hope “this launches more research on the types of people that are responding to meetings differently.”
Some of the practical implications, Lebel said, might be that some people contribute more to the conversation during online meetings vs. in-person, and also that it might be easier to “cold call” on people who haven’t spoken up during a virtual meeting.
“At the end of meetings, saying ‘We haven’t heard from you yet. Do you want to say something?’ … Anecdotally I found that works very much online,” Lebel said. “There are times where this person is completely checked out, and as soon as I ask that … it’s clear they had something — a question or something — and they say it right away. In person, I think I still get the shrugs.”
Some of the responses also were colored by what the subject of the meeting was and how long it lasted.
“It made me feel a little bit better that the way people were responding wasn’t that this type of meeting is good for all these things. It’s still a meeting,” he said.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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