Peter Cappelli

The COVID pandemic continues to shape the face of the global workforce in 2024. This book, written in the middle of the pandemic in 2021, sought to bring prior research about remote work to the forefront of business leaders. Written by a Wharton School professor, it briefly summarizes earlier studies and speculates on the pandemic’s future business outcomes. Given that it was written in the middle of a global crisis, this work is tightly coupled to its situation in time and place. Nonetheless, the exploration of academic work on remote work since the 1990s continues to be welcome in ongoing management discussions.

In a broad brush, Peter Cappelli presents a skeptical case about the long-term promise of remote work. Although he welcomes an inability to micromanage employees, he laments the loss of company culture, though without supporting data. While remote works frees up hiring to national and international forums, he worries that employees will become independent contractors. He’s not persuaded that some industries have become more productive in the pandemic.

I’ll divulge my biases: I work in IT at an academic medical center. These industries have been doing remote work for a long time. Further, I grew up watching my researcher/father work from home for decades. I studied throughout graduate school at home. Even before the pandemic, I worked 2-3 hours per day at home. Remote work was not new to me when COVID hit.

A strong case can be made that my industries of IT and biomedical research have become more productive and happier since 2020. Our local surveys certainly say such. Of course, I function in high-trust environments with a great deal of responsibility. Management can measure productive results by lines of code, downloads, publications, and funded grants. Cappelli’s skepticism seems out of place for my workplace, but it helps to understand the challenges other workplaces face.

I have two specific criticisms. First, the cited studies start in the 1990s when telework started. However, today’s technology via almost ubiquitous high-speed Internet is an entirely different animal than in the 1990s. Virtual, video, multi-site meetings are only now possible, and now the norm. Cappelli did not acknowledge the impossibility to use these technologies widely in the 1990s.

Second, he attempts to generalize across industries, and I just don’t think this is possible. Primarily, the nature of the work should drive decisions about remote work, and then maximizing benefits to employers and employees should come second. Work varies greatly from industry to industry. We should organize our hybrid approaches to advance our particular work – and ultimately, our place in the economy – most.

In 2024, it’s already clear that this book was just an opening salvo on remote work. Published far before even the end of the pandemic, it seems timed towards organizations trying to figure a way out. Detailed studies and business outcomes will eventually tell the tale much better, and subsequent books continue to plead their cases and add their nuances. This book’s central value lies in branching early research in the 1990s about remote work to pandemic-era developments. We all continue to figure out how to push our own work forward.… (meer)