Employees Working In Office Spend 25% More Time On Career Development, Says Study

People who work in the office spend 25% more time in career-development activities as compared to their remote counterparts, according to the data released by a team of economists. The group has analysed working virtually since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Office workers devoted about 40 more minutes a week to mentorship, almost 25 more in formal training, and around 15 additional minutes each week doing professional development and learning exercises, as per the WFH Research, a group including Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom.

Based on surveys of more than 2,400 American adults, the figures lend quantitative support to CEOs, including Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase and Co.) and James Gorman (Morgan Stanley). They have said younger workers must be on-site to learn and mature alongside more experienced colleagues. Wall Street banks have been in the cutting-edge of corporate campaigns to make workers return to offices. However, those efforts have conflicted with workers' demands for flexibility, leading to a hybrid work culture.

About half of the employees working remotely have a hybrid arrangement. On the other hand, just over a third are on-site, and 20% are completely working from home, as shown by data from WFH Research. The new figures acknowledge the shift to hybrid schedules since workers require "a few days each week to mentor and be mentored," as pet Jose Maria Barrero, a member of the research group from ITAM

While bosses support the value of in-person mentoring and professional development, they haven't had much to support their arguments beyond references to the power of "watercooler moments" when workers instinctively connect to share ideas and advice. Now they have the data about WFH and two new research papers. The Power of Proximity, one of them, argues that working in the same building has a larger effect on workers' training. According to the paper, the impact is more significant on younger workers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Natalia Emanuel, University of Iowa's Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais from Harvard University.

The researchers wrote that older workers not returning to the office might depress younger workers' skill accumulation. They studied over 1,000 software engineers between August 2019 and December 2020. "This may be particularly important as young workers learn the most on the job, benefit the most from proximity, and are much more likely to quit when proximity is lost," they wrote.

The second research paper, from Zoe Cullen of Harvard Business School and University of California Berkley's Richard Perez-Truglia, discovered that employees are promoted at a higher rate when they have more face-to-face interactions with their managers. Further, the scholars also wrote that employees' interactions with their managers could benefit their careers.

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