With the start of the pandemic now three years behind us, the landscape of the workplace continues to change as businesses and employees reevaluate what’s important and rethink how we do things.
We asked local workers and business experts to weigh in on the pros and cons of remote and hybrid work. There’s no question about it: Everyone has an opinion, because life has changed since 2020.
Embracing Flexibility
“I never thought I was someone who could work remotely,” says electrical engineer Ben Watson of Springfield.
Watson previously worked in an office and now works a hybrid schedule, meaning he spends some days in the office but works remotely otherwise. Instead of a daily commute, he can prep dinner when he works from home, or take time out to attend his daughter’s big game and then work in the evening.
“You can get distracted working at home, but you’re not always efficient working in an office either, where you can be interrupted by impromptu visits from co-workers and other distractions,” Watson says.
“The flexibility my employer gives me makes me feel more loyalty to the company,” he adds.
That flexibility adds up to a lifestyle change that means extra time and less frustration in workers’ lives as they spend fewer hours stuck in rush-hour traffic on Interstates 95, 495, and 66.
The latest INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard came out in January and looked at how things changed from 2021 to 2022. INRIX studies congestion in the world’s most congested cities. In 2022, DC ranked eighth in the nation when it comes to congestion, up from 13th the year before. Drivers lost an average of 83 hours to traffic delays in 2022, compared with 44 hours in 2021. But those numbers are still down 33 percent from before the pandemic.
As more office workers worked from home during the pandemic, Metrorail saw ridership decline dramatically, especially as its largest chunk of riders — federal workers — teleworked. Ridership, which had been at 626,000 trips per day in 2019, fell to 227,000 trips per day between January and November 2022, according to the latest data available.
Monique Ruiz of Fairfax, who works as a director of marketing, is among those who used to take Metro to work. One thing she initially missed about the commute was that she stopped getting the exercise that walking between the Metro station and her office provided. Instead, she established exercise routines at home.
“It definitely takes some adjusting when you first start working remotely, but the pros far outweigh the cons,” Ruiz says. She says she and her husband, who also works remotely, appreciate the flexibility they have now. “We were able to get puppies, which we never would have done if we were both away at the office all day.”
High Demand for Remote Work
Like Ruiz and Watson, many NoVA employees have found that they prefer remote work — and it’s resulted in many businesses adapting for the long term, rather than just during the pandemic.
The second annual Northern Virginia Workforce Index, a regional survey and analysis done by the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce and Northern Virginia Community College, found the “demand for remote work is even more pronounced in Northern Virginia.”
The report, released in January, took a closer look at the workforce since the start of the pandemic. The ability to telework or work remotely topped the list of employee benefits that Northern Virginia businesses changed in response to COVID-19 restrictions and worker shortages. Fifty-four percent of the 237 businesses surveyed said they changed their options for telework and remote work.
Most of the businesses either increased their share of the workforce eligible for remote work (70 percent) or increased the number of hours of telework allowed every week (67 percent). Northern Virginia employers say they have offered more support and paid more attention to remote office arrangements since early 2020.
The second most likely benefit to change was flexibility. Forty percent more employers offered more flexible scheduling.
With a tight labor market and businesses less optimistic about the near-term outlook of the economy, remote work options are still “front of mind,” the analysis finds.
Earlier data bears out the region’s desire for remote options when it comes to the workplace. Arlington ranked No. 2 in cities with populations over 65,000 where people worked from home in 2021 (48.8 percent), according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2021 American Community Survey, which also ranked Alexandria No. 11 (40.9 percent). In metro areas with populations over 1 million, DC ranked third in remote work (33.1 percent), while Fairfax County (37.2 percent) and Montgomery County in Maryland (37.1 percent) came in fourth and fifth, respectively. The Census Bureau released the data in September 2022.
While most of us think the term “remote” means working from home during any part of the workweek, it may also include people who work for a business based here while they’re living in another part of the country.
Businesses in the Northern Virginia Workforce Index say they changed their policies about where work occurred. Forty-one percent of businesses increased the geographic area where workers could live. Sixteen percent increased that geographic area by a little, while 25 percent increased it by a lot.
Economic Challenges
NoVA businesses that allow workers to live outside of the region can pose a challenge for the local economy.
“We need to understand that when employees work remotely [outside the region], they are spending their incomes outside Northern Virginia, so it does affect our local economy,” says Terry Clower, professor of public policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and director of the university’s Center for Regional Analysis.
“We have to consider the cost of doing business. Remote working takes their money out of Northern Virginia,” Clower adds.
Another challenge that businesses surveyed for the Northern Virginia Workforce Index encountered was the difficulty of recruiting employees for some positions that cannot be done remotely, such as construction and food service.
Empty Office Space
If businesses have fewer workers in offices, that can affect the tax base as companies reconsider whether to keep their existing office space or to downsize. In Arlington, for example, the value of commercial property, which makes up 45 percent of the county’s tax base, was flat in 2022, with values increasing just 2.6 percent, according to County Manager Mark Schwartz.
“Companies are pulling back on their space — not breaking leases, but not renewing them and downsizing instead,” Clower says. He says that in 1995, a single worker needed an average of 300 square feet of space, and now it’s down to 100 square feet.
If businesses reduce or eliminate their office spaces, that reduces tax revenues and in turn reduces how much money local governments have to spend on services residents count on.
As much of the federal workforce continues to telework, often on a hybrid schedule, Clower says that raises a question about office real estate in DC and Northern Virginia: “What will the federal government need for office space in the next 10 years?”
The federal government owns or leases about one-third of all downtown DC office space, says James Bailey, a professor of leadership development at the George Washington University School of Business. He estimates the city is still missing nearly 200,000 daytime office workers. Bailey is among those who are calling for workers to return to their offices, along with DC Mayor Muriel Bowser.
“Continuing to work remotely after the pandemic is a terrible idea,” says Bailey. “People need to have separation between their work and their home life, to leave work at work, and individuals who work from home can’t do that.”
Bailey says working from home can also have an impact on the bottom line.
“I’m concerned about the quality of product we’re producing while working at home. There are too many distractions,” he says.
‘It Can be Lonely’
Company culture suffers, too, Bailey says.
“There are what are called the ‘soft elements’ that make a company successful. One is company culture. If you have two similar companies, the one with a thriving company culture will always be more successful, and you can’t build company culture with people working remotely,” Bailey says.
“Working alone is isolating and leads to loneliness,” he adds. “Working one or maybe two days per week from home may be OK, but not five days.”
The isolation that Bailey points out is a drawback echoed by others who have studied workplace trends and by employees, including Fairfax resident Angela Chiu, a procurement contracting officer for a federal civilian agency. Before the pandemic, she worked partially remotely. Now, she is 100 percent remote, as are 90 to 95 percent of her co-workers.
“It can be lonely at times,” Chiu says. “People don’t always answer when you reach out to them, where before you could just walk down the hall to get their input.”
She feels for new employees, who might have a harder time connecting because they haven’t worked in an office with their co-workers before.
“People are not as efficient working from home. They need in-office collaboration,” says Clower. Still, he does not foresee a complete return to in-office work. “We can’t go back to requiring everyone to be in the office every day.”
What’s Next?
Businesses that haven’t developed hybrid work policies yet may want to consider doing so to keep and engage workers, experts say.
Some employers have instituted methods for bringing remote workers together regularly, even if it’s virtually. For example, Ruiz’s employer has virtual clubs for people to join and discuss mutual interests, including the gardening club she belongs to. Clubs “meet” and discuss their latest projects, share problems they’re having, and offer possible solutions.
Dana W., a data management professional from Chantilly who asked not to use her full name, had a hybrid schedule before the pandemic and now goes into the office about once a month. Her company uses a “Question of the Week” to get co-workers together and share non-work topics, much as they would in an office breakroom. “It could be something like, ‘What new dish have you had lately?’ … Everyone has to turn their camera on so it’s more like being face-to-face,” she says.
Regardless of all the pros and cons, it’s clear that remote work is here to stay — whether it’s full time or part time.
“We can’t go back to the way things were, working totally in the office,” Clower says. “Even before the pandemic, we were moving toward hybrid schedules, allowing people to work from home one or two days a week. Hybrid work is how we do things now.”
This story originally ran in our March issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to Northern Virginia Magazine.
