Most companies say that home office does not affect productivity, says FGV

Since the pandemic imposed isolation and took millions of Brazilians to the home office, there has been no lack of praise for the system. Its advocates especially highlight the increase in team productivity.

Greater efficiency would come from the association of factors such as saving time, since it is not necessary to travel long distances between the office and home, greater comfort and less stress, as it does not require clothes and formal protocols, and even the possibility of having more food healthy cooking at home.

Not so for most, points out a survey carried out by the FGV Ibre (Brazilian Institute of Economics of the Getulio Vargas Foundation) with 4,000 companies, from September 1st to 27th, through an electronic questionnaire. The margin of error is two percentage points.

On the overall average across all sectors, 59% of companies reported no change in productivity. The others are divided practically equally between those that verified an increase and a decrease.

The average percentage of performance improvement in companies that had an increase was around 20%. It is practically the same percentage of loss in those that had reduced productivity. That is, zero balance.

“This issue of productivity remaining from zero to zero was surprising. But then you can see that many activities cannot adapt, and the data reflects this a little too,” says Rodolpho Tobler, survey coordinator at FGV Ibre.

Companies in the manufacturing and service industries were consulted, which were the sectors that most adapted to the home office. And also retail and construction, which had more difficulty due to the nature of these operations, according to the survey data.

The FGV Ibre survey shows that in services provided to families, such as bars, restaurants and hotels, 34% adopted some type of remote work. Of these, about a third had a drop in productivity. For these companies, the loss was, on average, 40.8%.

According to Tobler, the perception of lost productivity is affected by the profile of these services, in which only part of the work can be kept away. “How is a restaurant going to make a home office?”, he says.

“Often he [o estabelecimento] I just couldn’t work. So it’s a result related to the type of activity, to not even being able to open.”

In general, companies that have adapted well to teleworking come from sectors in which the home office already appeared, although less frequently, in the case of companies that provide services in the area of ​​information technology.

In the survey, they appear as those who most used the home office (91.8%), according to Paulo Peruchetti, researcher in the area of ​​Applied Economics at FGV Ibre. About a third of these workers are still fully or partially in this regime.

This is also the only segment in which most companies (54%) verified an increase in productivity. On average, this gain was 24.8% in companies that saw some increase.

These companies are also among those in which employees should not return to 100% in-person.

“Some segments saw a window of opportunity and were able to take advantage of it. Others saw a window of survival to maintain themselves”, says Tobler.

At Peers consultancy, the experience of the home office was positive, says Pedro Ribeiro, founding partner of the company, but it also pointed to new challenges, such as the need for balance between work fronts.

With the health crisis lasting longer than expected, the company needed to calibrate the new work model, according to Ribeiro. At first, the remote system was good for the job. Consultants who used to live on the road —in a week, Ribeiro says that he used to visit three different cities to meet with clients— were able to have time for personal life, as displacements were suspended.

“People started to have more time at home and with their families, and this resulted in a gain in productivity at work”, says Ribeiro.

On the other hand, there were those who took on grueling routines and found it difficult to separate work from personal life. “We saw signs of burnout in some people and we had to start a workload assessment.”

For 2022, the company plans to open a new office in Belo Horizonte and create meeting spaces in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba or Porto Alegre, and Salvador or Recife.

“Before the pandemic, we had a 100% team in São Paulo. Now we have around 15% of employees in other cities and even in Europe. This will only be possible to maintain as a hybrid model”, says Ribeiro. “The home office works very well, we know that, but the office is a differential for those who understand that the company’s culture is also a strategic issue.”

FGV researcher Ibre Paulo Peruchetti reinforces this perception. “The hybrid will be a little bit of the way forward, especially in the administrative area.” According to the survey, 22% of employees are still working at home or in a hybrid system, a percentage that rises to 42.5% precisely in positions in the administrative areas.

It takes an average of 3.1 working days away from the office for administrative staff and 1.1 for workers in the operational area of ​​these companies. Entrepreneurs expect that, once the pandemic has passed, this average will drop to 1.7 and 0.7 days, respectively, while still maintaining a hybrid work system for office activities.

Tobler, coordinator of the Ibre survey, says that, in general, the survey data are in line with work done in other countries on the subject. He also says that the hybrid system, differentiated by sector and type of function, is the trend at the moment, but that this could change according to the experience of each company in the post-pandemic period.

“The home office seems to be here to stay, but not in the same pattern that we saw throughout the pandemic. Today, the perception of entrepreneurs is that the trend is towards a more hybrid path”, he says.

The discovery of the omicron variant of the coronavirus raised new doubts about the return to the offices, but companies heard by sheet they said that, for now, the hybrid work models, with part of the team working in person on some days of the week, are maintained.