In recent months, the remote work honeymoon has been slowly coming to an end, with a wide range of businesses insisting that employees return to work or be fired. The moves have been met with near-universal backlash, with tech giants like Google and Apple struggling to get their teams on board with the move for a variety of valid reasons. Now, controversial CEO Elon Musk has joined the fray. He’s baselessly criticizing remote work, stating it “tricked people into thinking that you don’t actually need to work hard.” Unfortunately, that’s just not true. The statistics back that up too. A survey by ConnectSolutions showed that 77% of remote employees showed an increase in productivity. Moreover, 30% of them were doing more work in less time and 24% were doing more work in the same period of time. And if you think your employees will just take the hit, you’re sorely mistaken. One survey showed that 64% of employees would consider finding a new job if required to return to the office full time. Another survey found that 51% of employees would outright quit if asked to give up their new hybrid working model. Suffice it to say, giving workers a bit of flexibility is becoming one of the most valuable perks any business can offer to retain talent. Even more so, other studies have shown that employees that work from home are more optimistic (89%) than their on-premises coworkers (77%) and have more job satisfaction (90%) compared to those that commute to the office (82%). All this to say that Elon Musk, while an admittedly impressive entrepreneur, seems to be wrong when it comes to remote work.
