HR needs to drop 'antiquated' perceptions of remote work: Report

Even after a full year of working from home, employers around the world are still mired in the perception that remote and flexible work is inferior to having people in the office. A recent Forrester study commissioned by LogMeIn shows that over 70 percent of HR professionals, specifically those who make decisions around remote work, believe that in-office workers are more productive and more importantly, more trustworthy than remote workers.

This is in contrast to the remote workers themselves, over 70 percent of whom assess their own productivity and ability to get work done during an 8-hour workday as being better or the same compared to when they are in the office.

Why this disconnect, though? The study's findings suggest that there has been a gap between decision makers' expectations of how much remote work will benefit the organization, and the reality of how it worked out. Asked to evaluate a list of potential benefits of remote work—ranging from improved employee satisfaction to improved retention to decreased costs—decision makers apparently responded that almost all the actual benefits were less than the expected benefits, in some cases falling short of expectations by almost 20 percent.

At the same time, most of the surveyed organizations appear to have a patchy approach to flexible work, with less than half creating a clear definition of work styles or training their managers on those styles. 55 percent did not have specific criteria around which employees might be eligible to work flexibly, 63 percent did not make their criteria publicly available, and 68 percent did not even allow managers to make decisions around the employees' work styles.

Employees, meanwhile, are apparently not forgiving of what the report describes as 'antiquated perceptions', with 83 percent indicating that the availability of flexible work will affect their likelihood of staying with an employer and 60 percent even saying that they would accept less pay if a job offered them flexibility in exchange.