As layoffs mount, working from home is getting riskier than ever

Employers and employees have spent the past few years engaged in an arm-wrestling match of sorts over the return to offices. For a while, the odds were in workers’ favor. A white-hot labor market gave workers a lot of leverage, including the ability to dictate their own work-from-home schedule. The tides, however, are shifting. Employers are clawing back power, and some companies are using that power to compel workers back to their desks — or face some consequences.

If your company is doing layoffs, whether you work from home is probably not going to be the sole factor in deciding whether you get cut. But many large companies that have recently let people go have made it known that employees who, in the eyes of the higher-ups, exist mostly as faceless beings on a computer screen have a greater chance of getting a pink slip. The risk is a frustrating, if foreseeable, one for workers: out of sight, out of mind, out the door. 

Executives at the online furniture retailer Wayfair told its staff in January that remote workers were likelier to be hit in its latest round of job cuts. IBM similarly warned its US managers they needed to start reporting to the office at least three days a week or leave. This month, Snap said its layoffs were meant to, in part, “promote in-person collaboration,” and Reuters reported the tech company’s cuts seemed to affect remote workers more than officegoers. Dell is telling workers it looks forward to seeing them around more, too. 

This isn’t a brand-new development — big names, from Google to Amazon to Goldman Sachs, have been ratcheting up the return-to-office pressure for months. But we're in a moment where headlines about high-profile layoffs are basically a daily occurrence. Add in long-term trends, like the decline in loyalty between employers and employees, and it's no wonder remote workers feel anxious about cuts.

“It’s not too surprising,” Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the Wharton School who has never been a big fan of remote work, said. “We might say it’s not fair, and they could both be true. There are lots of things that aren’t fair that nevertheless are predictable.”

There isn’t an extensive amount of research on whether working from home hugely increases the risk of layoffs, but it’s “quite possible” that’s the case, Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist and expert on remote work, said. It makes sense, given the research that is out there — and human nature. “Proximity bias is alive and well,” Bloom said. He pointed to a pair of experiments he ran on remote work and promotions. They found that working from home two days a week had no impact on promotion rates, but working from home four days a week halved them.

Emily Dickens, the head of public affairs at the Society for Human Resource Management, told me her research found that 42% of supervisors forgot about employees working remotely when assigning tasks, and nearly three-quarters said they preferred their direct reports to be in the office. “That is something remote workers should be thinking about as they’re engaging with supervisors,” she said. Remote workers aren’t doomed to the unemployment line, but they may want to try a little extra to get noticed. “Knowing is half the battle that you probably have to do some more work proactively to make sure that you remain top of mind,” she said.

It’s fair to note that these risks probably won’t dramatically shift the nature of the US job market. The remote-work phenomenon mainly applies to white-collar workers, and even a small proportion of that group remains fully remote. Stanford’s work-from-home survey found that 12% of full-time employees were fully remote by fall 2023, while 58% were full time on-site and 30% were hybrid. Office occupancy rates have been ticking up. “A large chunk of companies have found a decent rhythm,” Prithwiraj Choudhury, a Harvard Business School professor who specializes in the future of work, said.

But even if the macroeconomic implications of remote workers’ precarity are muted, debate around working from home can be a heated one, with factions dug in on both sides. The state of work is still in flux as the country gets to whatever a “new normal” is in the wake of the pandemic. Employers and employees are working out what the reasonable expectations are, what’s going to revert to how it was, and what is forever changed. Making matters worse is that the data on productivity and working from home is a choose-your-own-adventure situation, and a lot depends on how workplaces approach the issue. Working from home can make life much better for many workers; for some, it makes it worse. Employers that insist workers come back to the office may lose valuable talent if that talent can go elsewhere, meaning the risk here is two-sided.

Through the lens of layoffs, questions of what the most correct, impartial system is for figuring out whom to let go aren’t always central to the discussion. It would be great if layoff decisions were only ever based on quantitative metrics, but they often aren’t. It would be wonderful if everything at work were fair and equitable and everyone got the same perks; this is not reality. 

“Workers at all levels over the course of history had lots of ideas about how their jobs could be made easier and more productive and more pleasant. And many of those ideas are valid, but many of them are unrealistic,” Joseph Fuller, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, said. Many workers have a point that they can work from home fine. That doesn’t mean that their boss will or even should go for it, or that it won’t play a role when staffing decisions are made down the line. 

There’s no surefire way to make sure that if and when the time for layoffs comes, you won’t be on the chopping block. (But if you have discovered a way, let me know.) Staff cuts often seem like they’re done with little rhyme or reason, but it may not be a bad idea to put in a little face time now and then with the decision-makers — maybe they’ll at least feel a little pang of guilt as they cross your name off the staff list.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

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