Employee engagement has hit an 11-year low, and remote workers are partly to blame, according to Gallup data. Reports also suggest that communication, collaboration, and innovation are more difficult in a remote work environment. So it’s essential to weigh these costs against the benefits of remote work when considering how to structure your team. What is your team’s solution?

How to Make Remote Work Successful

With the creative culture-building, intentional communication, and remote-friendly collaboration, you can build a stronger remote work environment.

By SARAH LYNCH, Staff Reporter

If you’re still struggling to hack hybrid and remote work, you’re not alone.

Since millions of workers started working from home during the pandemic, companies have encountered noteworthy challenges, despite the apparent advantages of increased flexibility. A handful of studies show productivity declines in some work-from-home cases. Remote workers can feel more disconnected from work, and their ability to innovate and learn on the job can also suffer, according to other reports.

“I think remote work is harder than in person work,” says Rob Sadow, co-founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based hybrid work platform Scoop. “We’ve been operating where work is located in a place for all of history… Hybrid work and remote work are relatively new.”

But with more employers embracing remote work from the get-go and offering work location flexibility, leaders will need to confront the possible drawbacks of this approach. And the results are “sensitive to how well managed it is,” says Stanford economist and work-from-home expert Nick Bloom.