Industrialist Elon Musk has criticized work-from-home arrangements, claiming it was unfair to employees who cannot access such options while at the same time being less productive compared to working from an office.
“The people who make your food that gets delivered, they can’t work from home. The people who come fix your house, they can’t work from home. But you can? Does that seem morally right? That’s messed up.”
Musk is a “big believer” in in-office productivity. He agreed with the host’s assessment that work-from-home impacts people’s ability to learn.
Musk also made it clear that those who wish to work at his companies like SpaceX, Tesla, or Twitter will have to be at the workplace regularly.
The Productivity Debate
Whether work-from-home boosts or reduces productivity is a hotly debated topic, with some research showing that it raises productivity.A two-year study of more than 800,000 employees working at Fortune 500 firms found that most people reported stable and even increased productivity after starting working from home.
The research, done by the Great Place To Work Institute, compared employee productivity from March to August 2020—the first six months of stay-at-home orders—with productivity from March to August 2019.
Worker Shortages, Pay Cuts
The prevalence of remote working could lead to worker shortages in some sectors. According to a report by the National Foundation for Educational Research, teacher shortages in England worsened after the COVID-19 pandemic partly due to the fact that the profession offered relatively limited opportunities to work from home.The number of teacher vacancies posted by schools was found to be 93 percent higher in the academic year up to February 2023 when compared to the same period in the year before the COVID-19 pandemic.
For some people, work-from-home arrangements are so attractive that they are willing to take a pay cut for it. An August 2022 study by a team of international economists and other experts found that American workers were willing to take a pay cut of 5.7 percent in exchange for remote work options.