WORK

US Workers With Remote-Friendly Jobs Are Still Working From Home Nearly Half The Time, 5 Years After The Pandemic Began. CC BY-ND Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted office life, American workplaces are settling into a new rhythm. Employees in remote-friendly jobs now spend an average of 2.3 days each week working from home, a research team that tracks remote employment has found. And when you look at all workers – and not just those in remote-friendly positions – they’re working remotely 1.4 days a week, or 28% of the time. That’s a huge change from 2019, when remote work accounted for only 7% of the nation’s paid workdays, even if it’s down from the height of the pandemic in 2020, when 61.5% of all work was remote. And it’s a giant leap from 1965, the dawn of te...

Job supervisors with disabilities can boost productivity, new research shows. Some large companies, such as Walgreens, Wells Fargo and Proctor & Gamble, are successfully integrating people with disabilities into their labor forces. But other employers are not doing as good a job. That means they’re losing out on what the roughly 6.5% of the U.S. workforce with some form of disability might have to offer amid a tight labor market. One potential solution is to employ more managers with disabilities. I’m a supply chain scholar who joined forces with two colleagues, Sriram Narayanan and Shawnee Vickery, for a research project on this issue. We found that when teams include people with disabilities alongside co-workers without disabilities, productivity can be higher – particularly wh...

Workplace besties: How to build relationships at work while staying professional. Having meaningful connections in the workplace is essential for personal and organizational success. Most of us form these bonds naturally, as we spend a significant amount of our lifetimes at work. After leaving college, many people in their 20s move to new cities for career opportunities, where they face the task of creating a brand new social circle from scratch. The workplace becomes an ideal place for people to connect. Activities like grabbing drinks after work, playing team sports or just sharing meals serve as opportunities to form connections with co-workers. These interactions not only help combat feelings of isolation, but also add a sense of camaraderie and support to the daily work routine...

Office gossip isn’t just idle chatter. It’s a valuable – but risky – way to build relationships. Gossip flows through the offices and lunchrooms of our workplaces, seemingly filling idle time. But perhaps, through these ubiquitous and intriguing conversations, we are influencing our workplace relationships more than we realise. Is gossiping a route to friendship or a surefire way to make workplace enemies? It turns out the answer hinges on how the recipient of the gossip perceives the intentions of the gossiper. Workplace gossip – defined as informal and evaluative talk about absent colleagues – is pervasive yet often misunderstood. Traditionally frowned upon and branded as unproductive or even deviant, recent research paints a more complex picture of gossip. While some studies im...

The future of work: Why we need to think beyond the hype of the four-day week. Is reducing working hours a sign of progress? Since the 19th century, the number of hours spent at work has been steadily declining in developed countries. The four-day week emerged in the 90s as a political and economic demand for a more equal division of work. The idea was to reduce the number of hours worked so that more people can access employment. This approach, developed in 1993 by French economist Pierre Larrouturou, was tested in 1996 with the de Robien law on the organisation of working hours. In France, business leaders such as Antoine Riboud, CEO of the multinational food-products firm Danone, championed the idea as a way of boosting recruitment. However, the law was repealed in the early 2000s wit...