As diners increasingly turn to delivery, the future of fast food may be one with no human interaction at all.
There was a time when your local McDonald’s was the ideal spot for a 6-year-old’s birthday party. Its PlayPlaces had ball pits and slides where children could spend hours, post-Happy Meal.
McDonald’s launched PlayPlaces in the 1970s in an effort to build brand loyalty in children by emphasizing a family-friendly environment. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find one. That’s not just due to safety and health concerns (ball pits are known to be bacterial cesspits). People just aren’t hanging out at fast food joints the way they used to.
By the end of 2021, dine-in visits to fast food chains had fallen to just 14 percent of restaurant traffic, compared to 28 percent pre-pandemic, according to the market research firm NPD Group. When it comes to burgers and fries, people are increasingly scarfing them down in their homes, at their offices, in their cars — anywhere, really, but in the restaurant.
Now, McDonald’s and other fast food and fast casual giants are betting on the “digital kitchen” — sleek, compact stores that harness automation and digitalization to have diners ordering through mobile apps or digital kiosks — to get diners in and out in record time. Meanwhile, chains are “demolishing” their dining rooms, or shrinking them, in order to meet the demand of drive-thru and digital ordering, Steven Baker, an architect at Harrison French and Associates who works on fast food restaurant design and development, wrote in an article last year. For McDonald’s, Sweetgreen, and others, reducing seating means chains can open smaller stores, saving on expensive real estate, especially in urban areas.
The big transformation taking place inside restaurants also threatens to change how the industry looks at labor. In April, McDonald’s announced hundreds of layoffs in its corporate offices as part of a larger strategy to open new locations while investing more into digital, delivery, and drive-thru. And for all fast food and fast casual restaurants, whether it’s third-party delivery apps, automated kiosks, or even food delivery by drone, the glittering promise of tech is the ability to offload to machines more and more of the tasks performed by people paid an hourly wage.
Last year, 85 percent of fast food restaurant orders were to-go, according to data from NPD. Drive-thrus are busier than ever, with roughly three-quarters of orders being placed at a drive-thru. Foodservice consulting firm Technomic found that 73 percent of all orders at limited-service restaurants (places where you pay in advance and don’t typically have table service, including both fast food and fast casual restaurants) were either carryout or delivery in the first half of 2022.
McDonald’s has responded to the shift by opening a new dining room-less concept restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas, designed around digital orders and more efficient pickups. Sweetgreen has also launched a few locations without seating, including its first digital-order-only, pick-up-only location in DC in late 2022; it will open two fully automated restaurants in 2023. Chipotle, too, has been dabbling with smaller, digital kitchens offering only pick-up or drive-thru, while Panera Bread, a sandwich-serving staple with booths and tables galore in the suburbs, is opening smaller stores with less seating in urban areas, as well as to-go-only stores. Digital sales now account for half of its total system sales, according to the company, and a spokesperson told Vox in an email that the company is “redefining its dining experience to serve today’s guest in an increasingly off-premise world.”
Burger King, KFC, Wingstop, the list goes on. At IHOP’s nascent Flip’d locations, all the food is packaged to go, and there’s limited seating — the modern, urban evolution of a chain famous for being a drunken late-night refuge.
Even Starbucks — the chain that has long billed itself as an inviting hangout, engineered to always smell like freshly roasted coffee — is leaning into takeout. Though its stores reduced seating at first due to the coronavirus, some locations are making that reduction permanent. The WSJ reported that Starbucks plans to open 400 new takeout- or delivery-only stores in the next three years.
All of this is happening not because the fast food industry is struggling and trying to cut its costs, but for the exact opposite reason. “It’s having a renaissance,” says Adam Chandler, author of a book about the fast food industry called Drive-Thru Dreams.
McDonald’s is a particular standout; it reported sales growth of more than 10 percent in 2022, recording a profit of $6.1 billion, after increasing prices by about 10 percent in 2022, too. Cost no longer seems to deter customers. As one analyst remarked during the company’s Q1 2023 earnings call, fast food delivery is booming even though it’s more expensive, diluting the value proposition of a cheap meal. “Shockingly, in a lot of places, people are willing to pay double what they would pay to have a box of doughnuts and a large fries arrive to them 20 to 30 minutes later, slightly soggy,” Chandler says.
“The convenience driver has become more and more important as the years have passed,” says Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of research at the National Restaurant Association. “Even before the pandemic, about 61 percent of fast food sales were off-premise.” After reaching a high of almost 90 percent during lockdowns, they’re now still hovering around 75 percent, according to Riehle.
If fast food restaurants become less of a place to eat and hang out and more of a pit stop — a transitory space to pick up or hand off food — it also offers chains the opportunity to dramatically cut one of the industry’s most vexing operating costs: paying human employees. “Another part of this whole thing is wrapped up in labor, and how they can maximize profits by automating a lot of this,” Chandler says.
The industry has tried to fix the current labor shortage by raising wages, but the shortage has doggedly persisted, with a recent National Restaurant Association survey showing that six in 10 restaurant operators say they’re understaffed. The fact that the shortage persists shows that the pay increases aren’t quite the appetizing draw restaurants hoped they would be for workers, who may feel burned out by the grueling, often dangerous industry. The push for automation in restaurants also comes as the industry is fighting tooth and nail to reverse a new California law establishing a governmental body to raise the minimum wage for fast food workers.
The future of fast food, as idealized by restaurants, involves robots taking orders, cooking them, and delivering them right to your car.
“You’re seeing a lot of big growth in the chains, and they’re taking this moment to recalibrate and figure out their next strategies,” Chandler says.
Restaurants’ no-dining-room experiments coincide with the beefing-up of drive-thrus, which became more popular post-pandemic and also face significant bottlenecks (see: long lines overflowing onto main roads). Taco Bell’s new concept restaurant has four drive-thru lanes where food is delivered directly to the customer’s car via a vertical lift. (There is no dining room.) The demand for drive-thru has been such a growth area for fast food that even full-service restaurants are adding them.
Consumers have a fairly short amount of patience for their fast food order to be ready. According to a 2020 Deloitte report, 75 percent of consumers say waiting up to 30 minutes for their food delivery is reasonable. For fast food, 42 percent of diners said they expected their orders in five minutes or less. Fast food chains are using a host of new tech to speed up orders and delivery times: Voice bots to improve the accuracy and efficiency of drive-thru orders; apps and in-store kiosks so customers can place their orders without ever having to interact with a human. They’re even using location data that lets employees know when a customer is nearing the store to pick up their food, and experimenting with containers and packaging to ensure that food doesn’t get soggy during delivery.
“If the pandemic did one thing, it was to teach the typical American restaurant patron how to use digital ordering,” Riehle says. “The critical importance of digital ordering cannot be overstated.”
While fast food restaurants might want to fully automate, it’ll take some convincing and acclimation. Customers are a little wary of it — according to a survey by brand strategy firm Big Red Rooster, almost a third say that they don’t want to see robots preparing their food. It’s a departure from how people viewed fast food when it first appeared on the scene in the early 20th century. In a time before a uniform health code, the mechanization and consistency of fast food was a comfort, says Chandler. The allure of White Castle — the first fast food chain in the US, having opened in 1921 — was that it “standardized the look of the restaurants” and showed people a “very clean, well-lit place to dine.”
“It’s funny, because nowadays — in the last 15 or 20 years — the idea of having a place look exactly the same when you go in is kind of dystopian,” he says.
But whatever discomfort diners may feel about a robot fry cook, automating the fast food experience to be an even faster, to-go experience is the big-dollar-sign future for the industry — running a fast food restaurant, especially if you’re just a franchisee, is a fairly small-margin business. While dining in has made a comeback since the lockdowns, it’s still not back at pre-pandemic levels. It’s unclear if it will ever fully recover — or if we’ve simply entered a new era of enjoying fast food outside of the restaurant. Just as car culture gave rise to the fast food experience we’ve known for the past half-century, the smartphone is now ushering it into its next iteration, for a more atomized world where commuters and road trippers don’t have to pause at all for their meals.
Something stands to be lost with the shrinking of dining rooms and expansion of drive-thrus, says Chandler. The fast food joint often serves as a “third place,” a stand-in for the lack of other public spaces and institutions offering a neutral place to hang out. “When I was reporting [for my book], I would go to small towns in the Plains states,” he says, “and I would see the local Burger King is where a bunch of old timers meet every morning, have coffee and maybe a sandwich, and hang out.”
“To see the playgrounds going away — to see the stores’ footprints reducing in size, where you see this enormous emphasis on smaller or fewer dining rooms and more drive-thru lanes, speaks to a movement away from those third places,” Chandler says.
The milk wars are heating up.
There’s a war in the dairy aisle, and the latest shot was fired by Aubrey Plaza of White Lotus and Parks and Recreation fame, in a commercial for a fake company called Wood Milk.
Wood Milk sounds like something you might find in the Goop catalog, or on Saturday Night Live, but it doesn’t actually exist. Rather, Plaza — acting in the commercial as a co-founder of Wood Milk — is mocking plant-based milks, the non-dairy varieties made from oats, almonds, soybeans, or coconuts.
Throughout the ad, Plaza hugs trees and dumps wood shavings on her head while espousing the supposed benefits of this “artisanal,” “old-fashioned,” “eco-friendly,” and “free-range” nectar of the forest. Wood Milk, like other non-cow milks, comes in various flavors: oak, cherry, maple, and mahogany.
“If you can’t pick your favorite [flavor], that’s okay, because they all taste like wood,” Plaza says in her trademark deadpan style. The implication is that non-dairy milks taste like, well, wood.
But the main point of the ad arrives at the end, when Plaza asks the camera in the same sarcastic style, “Is Wood Milk real? Absolutely not. Only real milk is real.” Black text on the screen reads “IS YOUR MILK REAL?” and the commercial ends with the iconic “got milk?” slogan. “Obviously, Wood Milk has zero nutritional value,” viewers are warned.
Plaza was mocking plant-based milk on behalf of the Milk Processor Education Program, or MilkPEP, the quasi-governmental dairy industry organization administered by the United States Department of Agriculture that ran the “got milk?” campaigns of the 1990s and 2000s.
While Plaza’s mock TV commercial is tongue-in-cheek, the dairy industry is serious about its message: Only milk from cows is “real.”
It’s an odd claim, given that people have been drinking milk from plants for centuries. But plant-based dairy and meat products have also been subject to industry attacks charging that they’re overly processed (another odd claim, considering the dizzying complexity of modern-day meat and milk production).
But the stakes of the milk wars go beyond mere aesthetics. While the Wood Milk commercial touts the “realness” of cow’s milk, it fails to mention the very real harms of dairy production: air and water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, inhumane treatment of cows, and dangerous conditions for a low-paid and vulnerable workforce, half of whom were immigrants in 2014, according to an industry survey. Shortly after the ad went live, Plaza was condemned for propagandizing for Big Dairy, and eventually turned off the comments section on her Instagram post about it.
Here’s a fact that is 100 percent real: Shifting some of our meat and dairy production to plant-based is critical to meeting climate targets, and doing so would reduce air and water pollution and prevent animal suffering. But that shift is made all the harder when the incumbent industry has an enormous advertising budget and immense power in Washington.
The backlash against plant-based milk and meat, explained
It’s safe to say that the millions of people who regularly drink plant-based milks don’t think it tastes like wood — otherwise the industry wouldn’t have grown fast enough to account for 16 percent of fluid milk sales. The product’s ascent into coffee shops and the dairy aisle has been swift enough to cause the conventional dairy sector to counterattack — US per capita dairy milk consumption fell by over 25 percent from the mid-90s, when “got milk?” ads began to take over the airwaves, to 2018.
The war of words over the authenticity of milk has escalated to the halls of Congress and statehouses in recent years — dairy groups have lobbied for legislation that bars plant-based milk companies from calling their products plant-based “milk,” “yogurt,” or “cheese.” The dairy industry, which spent $7.2 million on federal lobbying in 2022, argues that calling plant-based milk “milk” violates the US Food and Drug Administration’s “standards of identity,” which stipulate ingredient formulations for certain products.
For example, there are strict definitions that differentiate jelly, jam, and preserves, while “milk” is defined as “the lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows.”
The dairy industry has a point, but many commonly eaten foods have names that aren’t a perfect description of their contents. There’s no butter in peanut butter, for instance, or ham in hamburgers. (The latter name comes from Hamburg, Germany, home to the particular cut of beef that eventually went into hamburgers.)
Earlier this year, the FDA temporarily settled the matter when it issued draft guidance stating that plant-based companies can indeed call their products “milk,” but that the word must be preceded by what the milk is made of (e.g. oats). The National Milk Producers Federation called that part of the decision “unacceptable,” but the group was happy that the FDA at least recommended that plant-milk companies make voluntary statements on their packaging about how the nutrition of their product compares to that of cow’s milk.
The FDA hasn’t said when it may finalize its guidance, but wherever it lands, it probably won’t stop Big Dairy from provoking dairy-free companies with “real” versus “fake” messaging. That may appeal to our preference for what we think is the real thing, but it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It’s a perfect example of the naturalistic fallacy, which asserts that whatever is “natural” is good and real, and whatever is “unnatural” is bad and artificial.
The idea that one type of milk is real and the other isn’t is absurd on its face: Humans have produced and consumed milk from plants for centuries, which makes sense when you consider that over two-thirds of people, especially those of Asian, African, and South American descent, have difficulty digesting lactose, a sugar found in the milk of mammals.
The argument that plant-based meat and dairy are bad because they are highly processed is another fallacy that has gained traction in recent years. It’s disingenuous, and not because plant-based meat and dairy aren’t processed — they undergo a number of processes before they reach consumers — but so do animal-based foods.
Let’s first look at how “real” dairy is made. Most milk comes from cows raised on large, industrialized farms in which they’re artificially inseminated and have their offspring removed from them shortly after birth. They go on to produce milk for a few years in massive barns where a couple times a day they’re hooked up to milking machines for 10 minutes at a time. The whole system hardly resembles the rolling green hills sometimes featured on milk and cheese labels (less than 20 percent of US dairy cows have access to pasture).
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The cows’ milk is chilled, and then transported by truck to a factory where it’s tested for antibiotic residues before it’s pasteurized — heated to kill harmful bacteria — and then rapidly cooled. It’s also filtered to remove sediment and separate out some of the cream, which goes into producing creamer and other fat-heavy dairy products. Next, fat content is adjusted and, finally, the milk is homogenized, which entails forcing hot milk through tiny holes to break down oil droplets so as to ensure a smooth consistency. Dairy companies may add sugar, vitamins and minerals, or preservatives and emulsifiers, depending on how the milk will be consumed.
The cows, which have been bred to produce 2.5 times more milk than cows did 50 years ago, are killed at around three or four years old once their production has waned — far short of their “natural” lifespan of around 20 years.
The whole system is a far cry from the mental image we may have of milk production, and the one the industry sometimes evokes on its packaging and advertising: a farmer gently milking cows who were raised on pasture or in a big red barn.
And while there are many ethical problems in dairy production, the highly processed nature of dairy milk isn’t one of them. In fact, it’s necessary. If you’re trying to produce enough milk to feed 330 million Americans at a low cost, you have to do it on a large scale with the aid of technology to make it more efficient and safe. (Raw, unpasteurized milk may be more “natural,” but the FDA says it can pose a “serious health risk.”) The fact that dairy production entails a complex series of processes tells us little about how good or bad it is for us — or the environment and animals, for that matter.
The same goes for plant-based milk. Take oat milk, for example. Manufacturing methods vary, but generally it begins with taking oats that have been cleaned, peeled, and heat-treated and mixing them with water and enzymes that break down the oats’ starch. Oat bran, an insoluble fiber, is separated out. Plant oils are added for texture and gums are added as preservatives and thickeners. It’s filtered to remove solids, heat-treated to improve shelf life, and finally homogenized, just like cow’s milk. Producers may also add sugar, vitamins and minerals, and other additives.
Even better than the real thing?
Despite the highly processed nature of both plant- and animal-based foods, and the benefits derived from some of that processing, consumers keep falling for the fake versus real framing.
As Vox’s Kelsey Piper has written, this new generation of plant-based alternatives — especially alternatives to meat — were often praised by food writers as sustainable game-changers when they were produced in smaller batches and cooked up by trendy chefs. But as they landed on fast-food menus and were, by necessity, mass-produced, they were marked as “ultra-processed” foods of which consumers should steer clear.
To be fair, the plant-based industry can fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy as well, decrying GMOs and touting plant-based burgers that are “simple and clean” with “no synthetic ingredients, no artificial anything.” But the problem with processed foods isn’t that they’re processed, or how much they’re processed. It’s that sometimes the processing involves adding in a lot of addictive ingredients your doctor probably wants you to eat in moderation, like salt, sugar, and fat, which, of course, make those foods really difficult to eat in moderation.
The food writer Tamar Haspel of the Washington Post summed it up this way: “Processing is a tool, and, like any tool, it can be used for good or for evil. If I have a hammer, I can use it to fix my neighbor’s roof. Or I can kill his dog. Likewise food processing.”
NOVA, a classification system that sorts foods into four categories of processing — unprocessed/minimally processed, processed culinary ingredients, processed, and ultra-processed — puts plant-based alternative products in the latter category, along with Twinkies and soft drinks. Mark Messina, the director of nutrition science and research at the Soy Nutrition Institute Global, told Food Navigator that while food processing can impact nutrition, such categorization is “simplistic and does not adequately evaluate the nutritional attributes of meat and dairy alternatives based on soy.”
Instead of asking whether, or how much, a food is processed, we’d be better off simply looking at a food’s nutritional content. When it comes to plant-based milk, there’s a high degree of variability — soy milk is similar in fat, protein, and calcium to 2 percent cow’s milk, though other plant-based milks tend to have little protein. (It’s worth noting, though, that Americans already consume far more protein than the USDA recommends). Plant-based meat tends to have a similar amount of protein when compared to animal meat. As a plus, plant-based meats contain no cholesterol and typically less saturated fat, and are higher in fiber. But on the downside, they’re usually higher in sodium.
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Ultimately, I wonder how much this mud-slinging and ingredient interrogation really matters. Americans love to say they hate processed foods, but our behavior in the grocery store and at the drive-thru belies that notion. “Ultra-processed food” accounted for 57 percent of our caloric intake in recent years (up from 53.5 percent in the early 2000s). Food corporations have created a culinary landscape in which added sugar, salt, and fat reign supreme; many plant-based meat and dairy companies are merely trying to fit into a world that Big Dairy and Big Meat have helped create. And given that every animal product replaced with a plant-based alternative reduces the toll of animal suffering and environmental degradation, that seems like a reasonable trade.
There’s room to criticize plant-based food producers for taking the route they have, but it’s a bit rich when it comes from the dairy industry, which partnered with Domino’s to create a pizza with 40 percent more cheese and with Taco Bell to create the creamer-based Mountain Dew Baja Blast Colada Freeze.
It’s unclear how many of the punches against plant-based food have landed. After years of record growth, plant-based meat and dairy sales have slowed, though it’s likely due to factors like cost, taste, and habit, rather than what celebrities are paid to think. But Big Dairy’s attempt to discredit plant-based milk could all be in vain, anyway; researchers say it has played only a small role in the decline of cow’s milk, which started decades before cow-free milk began to make a splash. The dairy industry’s real enemy, based on consumer trends, is bottled water, which indeed is minimally processed. And while it has no nutritional value, it also doesn’t include added sugar, fat, or salt.
Wood Water, anyone?
That’s poor ground to stand on when trying to revoke remote work.
Like pretty much every other company that could, HubSpot let its employees work from home when the pandemic hit. The difference was that, early on, the enterprise software company made a strong commitment to let workers continue working remotely if they wanted. And that’s what the majority of HubSpot workers did. Meanwhile, about a third are hybrid, and less than 10 percent are back to the office full time.
Now, HubSpot is trying to figure out the pros and cons of different working situations to make the most of each going forward. And, like many companies, it’s looking at a deceptively difficult metric to measure: productivity.
In looking at things like sales reps reaching their quotas and developers cranking out code, HubSpot found that productivity didn’t seem to vary by employee location. The only real difference they saw was that at-home workers felt more connected to HubSpot’s mission and customers than in-office employees, a counterintuitive finding that likely speaks to how satisfied they felt about their work situation.
But a growing number of companies are still calling workers back to the office in the name of productivity.
After promising that it would remain “fully flexible” last year, for example, the struggling ride-hailing company Lyft recently said it would start requiring employees to show up in person. The company’s new CEO reasoned that things move faster face to face. But it’s not clear if that strategy actually works.
“Part of the reason you’re seeing so many people lobby for return to office is there’s this notion of, ‘That’s how I did it growing up,’” HubSpot chief people officer Katie Burke told Vox. “I certainly did that. I had a Palm Pilot growing up. I wore suits to work. I don’t think that everyone needs to do the things that I did in order to succeed in modern work.”
The emphasis on productivity can seem disingenuous, given that many companies raked in record profits as their workforces toiled in their living rooms. And even when companies try to measure productivity, they’re not necessarily measuring the right thing. In other words, your boss might be obsessed with productivity without really knowing what it means.
Some 71 percent of business leaders say they’re under immense pressure to squeeze more productivity out of their workers, according to a new Slack survey of 18,000 knowledge workers, including managers. But most are measuring what workers put in, rather than what they put out. In turn, workers say they’re spending a third of their time “performing” work — that is, making an effort to look like they’re working rather than actually working. That includes focusing on supposed productivity signals, like speaking up in work threads regularly and responding to emails more quickly than necessary, even after hours.
Meanwhile, worker engagement, which is a measure of how well people understand their jobs and feel connected to them, has gone down since the early pandemic, according to a long-running Gallup study. And because worker engagement is highly correlated with productivity, that’s likely gone down, too. Workers are also reporting high rates of burnout, all of which is bad for productivity.
So not only does nobody know how to measure productivity, we’re also not even sure it’s the most important way to predict success.
It’s been three years since the start of the pandemic, which wrought unparalleled destruction but also enabled a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make work better. For the tens of millions of people who were able to work remotely, the situation allowed them to skip long commutes and expensive lunches and get more time with their families and a work environment on their own terms. With these changes came conversations about work-life balance and job satisfaction that their bosses, desperate to hold on to talent amid the Great Resignation, seemed to genuinely consider.
Companies stand to gain a lot from giving workers more flexibility, too. It can encourage a better, more creative, and more highly functioning workforce. Remote work, specifically, enables employers to hire from a broader candidate pool and one that might be more diverse than the location of the office, which contributes to better business outcomes. It also makes many employees happy, and happy workers are more productive.
Now we stand at a crossroad for employees and employers. The pandemic is no longer considered a public health emergency. Economic uncertainty and a loosening hiring market have given management ammunition — if not good reason — to pull back on the kinds of flexibility they offered during the pandemic, including remote work.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. The chance to make work better both for employees and employers still stands. It starts with measuring the right thing.
The problem with “productivity”
What productivity means can vary by job, industry, and even person. Does it mean making more widgets or better widgets? And what makes a good widget?
There are many parts of people’s jobs, especially knowledge workers’ jobs, that aren’t straightforward. Knowledge workers aren’t necessarily making widgets themselves. They might be coming up with new ways of selling those widgets, or improving those widgets, or writing about those widgets, or coaching others on how to spot new widgets.
When researchers try to measure the relative productivity of remote work versus non-remote work, there are even more elements to consider. Those might include how often people are working from home, and whether there might be an extenuating circumstance, like different types of management styles or, say, a pandemic.
It’s particularly challenging to measure productivity among knowledge workers.
“The research on this really does seem to be a complete mess, not in the sense that it’s bad research but in the sense that you can find research that points at positive effects, be it productivity or happiness or job satisfaction, or you can find research finding the opposite,” said Christoph Riedl, an associate professor of information systems at Northeastern University’s business school.
The studies around remote work and productivity tend to look for more countable outcomes in jobs that are more straightforward, like the number of calls per hour in a call center. Even there, the data is mixed.
A widely cited pre-pandemic study by Stanford economics professor Nick Bloom and others found remote call center workers at a Chinese travel agency spent more time working and conducted more calls per minute than their in-office counterparts. These people also went into the office one day per week and received performance pay. A more recent study by Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel of call center workers at a Fortune 500 retailer found that those who worked from home answered 12 percent fewer calls than those who worked in an office. But their pay wasn’t tied to performance.
In a different study, Harrington and others found that software engineers located in different buildings on the same campus before the pandemic wrote more computer programs than those who were sitting close to colleagues. However, the engineers who worked in different buildings commented less on others’ code. In other words, they were more productive but that potentially meant that less experienced coders got less mentorship and may end up being less productive in the future.
“It is relatively context-specific in the sense that it may really matter what the management practices of the firm are and what the incentive scheme is,” Harrington, who is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Iowa, told Vox.
One would think that a given company would have a better idea of its own productivity, but that isn’t necessarily the case. The Slack survey found that 60 percent of executives were tracking activity metrics — things like emails sent or hours worked — as the main way to measure productivity. The problem is that doing so incentivizes things like sending more emails or staying at your desk longer, not making better widgets.
“We see employers focus so much on measuring inputs instead of outputs,” Slack’s SVP of research and analytics, Christina Janzer, explained. Looking more at what employees achieve than how they’re achieving it, she added, requires a shift in mindset.
“We have this opportunity to think so much more holistically about what really unlocks productivity,” she said. “I think there’s an opportunity for us to step back and rethink productivity because many people are focused on the wrong things.”
According to Slack, more than 80 percent of employees in the Slack survey said that feeling happy and engaged with their organization would improve their productivity.
HubSpot is closer to the goal than most. When measuring the rate at which salespeople were meeting their quotas, the company found no difference between at-home and in-office employees. They also found that software engineers spent the same amount of time on revising code, regardless of location. Importantly, HubSpot’s leaders are also asking employees how they feel about working there, which helps them address issues as they arise.
When HubSpot workers in the office complained about not seeing enough colleagues there to get that in-office experience, the company responded by reducing the office footprint so that those who did come in were physically closer. The company also designated a day each week — as well as a few marquee events each year — when there are more planned activities and in-person events to facilitate connection and in-person collaboration for those who want it.
Importantly, the software company is doing so not to cajole people back into the office, but to try to make those who do find the office beneficial happier when they’re there.
What companies need is better management
The current focus on productivity might say more about managers and the pressure they’re under from their bosses than it does about workers, Northeastern’s Riedl said.
“If you are the one who allows remote work, you need to justify why you’re doing that,” he said. “If everyone’s going to work from the office and you demand everyone works from the office, there’s just less justification needed.”
In other words, it’s easier to revert to the status quo.
But in doing so we’re missing chances to make remote work better for the majority of knowledge workers who currently work from home some (46 percent) or all (20 percent) of the time, according to the latest data from WFH Research. We are also ignoring other important aspects of work that actually make people happy and more productive.
We know that employee engagement is down for all types of workers, but that it’s lowest for people who have to show up in person. Gallup estimated that low employee engagement cost the global economy $7.8 trillion in lost productivity last year.
For those who work in jobs where they could be remote but are being told to go to the office, their lack of autonomy is likely contributing to their lowered engagement, said Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist of workplace management and well-being and a co-author of Culture Shock, a book coming out this month about the changing workplace. The decline in engagement among remote and hybrid workers has to do with unclear expectations.
All those issues could be solved by better management, Harter said.
That includes assessing individuals on more than just how much email they’re sending, being clear about goals, and generally communicating openly and frequently with your employees.
“I think organizations could reach their highest levels of productivity ever if they have managers who are upskilled to have the right kinds of ongoing conversations with people so that they’re in touch with them on a regular basis,” Harter said.
That’s not easy. Figuring out how to make people feel connected remotely is hard; so is adapting new ways of onboarding or mentoring employees. Managing people working in multiple environments is obviously more of a challenge than just looking over their shoulders in the same office. But it’s not impossible, and solving these issues could make work — and productivity — better for employers and employees, regardless of where they work.
“When we had increases in remote work during the pandemic, there were a lot of people asking, ‘How do we know people are productive?’” Harter said. “And my question back was, ‘How did you know they were productive before the pandemic?’”