The fight over working from home goes global

REMOTE WORKCEOsWFH IT has a target on its back. Banking , like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, are intent on making working from home a relic of the pandemic. For staff at America’s biggest lender and other Wall Street stalwarts like Goldman Sachs, five-day weeks are back for good. Big tech firms are also cracking the whip. Google’s return-to-work mandate threatens to track attendance and factor it in performance reviews. Meta and Lyft want staff back at their desks, demanding at least three days of the week in the office by the end of the summer. With bosses clamping down on the practice, the pandemic-era days of mutual agreement on the desirability of remote work seem to be over.Fresh data from a global survey shows how far this consensus has broken down. Across the world, employers’ plans for remote work fall short of what employees want, according to Research, a group that includes Stanford University and Ifo Institute, a German think-tank, which tracks the sentiment of full-time workers with at least a secondary education in 34 countries. Bosses fear that fully remote work dents productivity, a concern reinforced by recent research. A study of data-entry workers in India found those toiling from home to be 18% less productive than office-frequenting peers; another found that employees at a big Asian firm were 19% less productive at home than they had been in the office. Communication records of nearly 62,000 employees at Microsoft showed that professional networks within the company ossified and became more isolated as remote work took hold.