In the midst of the pandemic, over 50 million Americans were working from home. That trend has since shifted since Covid died down, but many in the job market miss the days of yore. The benefits of remote work have been broadcasted far and wide. Less supervision, more sleep, less costly (ie no gas or public transportation), more time with family, and hey, let’s talk about the real reason work from home is beloved, the ability to goof of and not do your work while not getting caught.
But the NY Times reports economists at Harvard, University of Iowa and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York issued an illuminating study. The labrats were engineers at a sizable tech company. It noted most engineers felt that they didn’t get the feedback necessary to do their job the best they could, and since the remote era, employees were quitting the company at a much higher rate. In fact, they were receiving 21% less feedback on average versus pre pandemic.
This sounds an alarm as upward mobility becomes increasingly elusive in a tech reliant world. Sure, you can rely on technology to do most of what is necessary to do to complete your job. But you can’t get in person feedback, you can’t develop relationships and you can’t become a known quantity in your office. Because no one ever sees you.
And thus, these researchers coined a new term, almost a call to action. “The Power of Proximity.” No matter how hard the tech world tries to push back, human to human interaction might just be irreplaceable.
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