The signs are becoming clearer: remote work has probably reached its peak

In September of this year, The World Bank published a study which pointed out that the risk of recession in 2023 increased as interest rates were increased by central banks. This fueled a debate about whether a slowdown in the economy would encourage telecommuting or, on the contrary, a return to the office.

LinkedIn Alert. Doubts about the future of remote work, which were many, have increased even more after the ad made this week by Jerome Powell, president of the US Federal Reserve, who confirmed the increase in the price of money by 0.75% to combat inflation. Precisely in the United States, according to a LinkedIn report published last month and quoted by Bloombergremote job offers fell from 19.8% in March to 15.9% in August.

British descent. Being data higher than that of August 2021 (13.2%), the online employment portal raises the possibility that the maximum percentage of teleworkers in the US has been reached. It is the same question that is asked in relation to data from Great Britain, where remote job openings have gone from 16% in January this year to 12% in September, culminating the fifth consecutive month of declines.

Bad context for teleworking. Other countries where telecommuting offers have decreased are India, Germany and France. Josh Graff, executive director of LinkedIn for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, recently spoke about this phenomenon in an interview for The Telegraphwhere he explained that the darker the economic forecasts, the more intensely “the balance of power tilts towards businessmen”, who tend to prefer the face-to-face model: three quarters of them try to restrict the flexibility provided by the telecommuting due to the worsening of the economic context, according to the employment portal.

Another point of view. Employers’ fear that telecommuting affects productivity, despite the fact that employees claim to be more productive working at home, has been called by Microsoft productivity paranoia, and is widespread among employers. One of them is the British billionaire Sir James Dyson, who assured that remote work destroys learning and collaboration, hampers employee development, prevents access to the right equipment, and undermines the security of intellectual property.

Along the same lines are Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, and big businessmen and bankers like Elon Musk (who recently bought Twitter) and David M. Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs.

two stones on the road. In short, it is possible to state that teleworking has two main pitfalls. One is, as noted CaixaBankeconomies in which sectors such as construction or retail have more weight than services with high added value -information, communications or finance-, thus hindering the development of remote work, this being the case of Spain .

The other is the paranoia of productivity among employers, transversal to economies with greater and lesser implementation of teleworking, which causes the return to the offices of employees who could carry out their work at home. And while it is true that the fear of a recession seems to extend this fear, there are those who see telecommuting as a way of savingso it seems clear that this issue is not settled.

Image: Unsplash/Corinne Kutz