Professionals Can’t Virtually Recreate The Office

In late September, Google’s CEO said that the future of work involves a ‘hybrid model. On Blind, an anonymous professional network, with 3.6M verified users, we ran a survey from 10/01- 10/08 and had 2,700 responses. The survey asked the following questions:

Have you met colleagues offline (in person) in the last 6 months?
Does your company encourage informal digital communication? (ex. happy hours, coffee chats)
Have you been able to virtually recreate the encounters that happen every day in office settings?

Key Learnings:

28% of professionals have met their colleagues offline (in person) in the last 6 months

Only 15% of Facebook professionals have met their colleagues in person in the last 6 months

71% of surveyed professionals state that their company encourages informal digital communication

86% of surveyed Google professionals state that their company encourages informal digital communication

Only 6% of professionals say they have been able to virtually recreate the encounters that happen every day in office settings

You can see the report highlighting the overall responses here.

A user at Google posted, “Why does everyone want permanent WFH? Does this mean we can’t go to the office if we wanted to anymore? Will offices be almost completely empty for those that do want to return? I’m a new grad, so going to the office is one of things I’m looking forward to the most, but if nobody is there, that’ll be wack too. For people my age, it’s definitely not a good idea to be hermitting at home 24/7 with no social interaction“.

The platform also ran a survey on the topic of Hybrid work between 9/25- 9/28 and had 3,202 responses. The survey asked the following questions:

In your opinion, the future of work will be:
Does not being able to get together in person with your team negatively affect your work?
1. Why or why not?

Key Learnings:

Only 9% of professionals believe the future of work will be “As it was before (9-5, Mon- Fri)”

80% of professionals believe the future of work will be “Somewhere in the middle — a remote/in-person hybrid”

45% of surveyed professionals state that not being able to get together in person with their team negatively affects their work

63% of Google professionals say that not being able to get together in person with their team negatively affects their work

56% of Uber professionals say that not being able to get together in person with their team negatively affects their work

As to why or why not?

A professional at Apple has an opposing opinion, stating “Everything we need to do can be done via webex.”

A professional at SourcePanel shares, “I’m social. I want to hang out with my coworkers.”

You can see the report highlighting the overall responses here.

A user at Facebook posted “Sundar gets it – Hybrid WFH. I don’t know a single person on my team who wants to work from home full time, and yet the majority of my team would like to work from home some of the time. Facebook (and other tech companies) only seem open to an all or nothing approach currently, but it looks like Google might move forward with the model most employees actually want.”

“I see the future as definitely being more flexible,” Pichai said during a video interview for Time 100. Pichai was part of this year’s list of the most influential people in the world.

“We firmly believe that in-person, being together, having that sense of community, is super important for whenever you have to solve hard problems, you have to create something new,” he said. “So we don’t see that changing, so we don’t think the future is just 100% remote or something.”

What do you think the future of work is? Join the conversation!