Why do some employees thrive when working entirely from home while others yearn to go into the office daily?
In 2022, businesses have increasingly taken a stance requiring remote employees to return to physical offices. Famously, CEO Elon Musk ordered all Tesla employees to “spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week,” on the premise that they can’t be productive in a remote or hybrid setting.
Musk further commented that remote workers are “phoning it in” and that Tesla employees unwilling to return to the office “should pretend to work somewhere else.” However, gut-driven blanket statements like these make assumptions about all workers without giving special consideration to the unique preferences and motivations of the employees themselves.
Remote work, by the numbers
In April 2022, SWZD surveyed over 600 knowledge workers in sales, marketing, and data science to understand more about them and their work from home (WFH) status.
WFH status among survey respondents:
- 11% completely remote
- 25% hybrid but mostly from home
- 46% hybrid but mostly in office
- 18% completely in office
These findings might not be surprising for a survey fielded two years into an ongoing pandemic. However, we surfaced some interesting trends that suggest that the location in which employees currently work has a lot to do with how they prefer to learn.
Before diving into our insights based on where work gets done, let’s establish a baseline.
Worker learning styles
We asked our 600+ working professionals the following question: “Which of the following best describes your preferred learning style(s)?” Respondents were able to select multiple styles that apply to them:
- 52% Visual (e.g., seeing graphs and charts, images, or video)
- 46% Logical (e.g., thinking and reasoning using logic, developing systems)
- 44% Physical (e.g., learning via hands-on / tactile / kinesthetic actions)
- 42% Social (e.g., learning and working in groups)
- 41% Auditory (e.g., listening to recorded speech, music, and rhyme)
- 39% Linguistic / Verbal (e.g., reading text and speaking out loud)
- 4% Solitary (e.g., prefer to learn alone)
How employee learning styles correlate to WFH status:
Now, let’s compare some of our most interesting insights in learning style preferences, based on where survey respondents work.
- First, which may seem like a given: Completely onsite workers are twice as likely (46%) to be social learners who prefer to collaborate with others than fully remote workers (20%). It’s natural that those who want to be around coworkers would choose to work in an office environment where they can frequently meet face-to-face with their peers.
- The widest and most surprising preference gap: 70% of fully remote workers are visual learners (compared to only 38% of completely onsite workers), preferring to absorb information through images and video, often with the aid of graphs and charts (e.g., communicating information through visual mediums like PowerPoint and Excel).
- Sometimes you just want to talk it out: 47% of completely onsite workers are verbal learners (compared to only 25% of fully remote workers), preferring to learn by reading text and speaking out loud. The verbal component of this learning style might be key: conversations and presentations through a Zoom call often lack the nuance and in-person interaction that a face-to-face dialog provides.
Interestingly, there are associations between these three learning styles and where our respondents work. When we added hybrid workers (who are either mostly remote or sometimes remote) we uncovered relatively predictable patterns for each of these learning styles.
In other words, the more often our survey respondents work from home, the more visual they tend to be. Conversely, the more often respondents go into the office, the more linguistic / verbal and social they tend to be.
Which came first? The work style, or the preference?
Over the past two years, it’s possible that as many employees adapted to working from home, their learning style shifted to become more visual as they relied more on digital imagery in lieu of in-person interactions.
Perhaps a more compelling argument for the association between learning style and work-from-home status is tied to favorable employment conditions for workers. Thanks to a large number of job openings and opportunities to work remotely, many workers have been able to seek change jobs relatively easily.
For example, SWZD’s 2022 State of IT report found that one-quarter of IT professionals plan to look for or change jobs in 2022. Among those job seekers, the vast majority (85%) said they would apply for jobs that offer remote work options.
Due to increased job mobility, workers have been able to take jobs that fit their preferences, with the ability to self-select roles with flexible workplace options that suit them. Our data suggests that employees’ work location preferences are related to their natural tendency to favor particular learning styles.
What it all means
To address Elon Musk’s one-size-fits-all assertion that all remote workers are “phoning it in” ignores the fact that many employees likely naturally perform better in a fully remote environment because it better suits their natural learning styles and their preferred modes of interaction. Other workers who may only need occasional in-office interaction to feel fully energized might benefit from a hybrid arrangement that allows them to come in only when they need to. Based on our research, the requirement that all workers must be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week to be productive seems misguided at best, and could have negative impacts on worker happiness, productivity, and retention in the long run.
The correlations between how employees prefer to learn and interact and where they prefer to work might benefit many roles in any organization. For employees, identifying and understanding what their unique learning style(s) are might create opportunities for autonomous growth. With this information driving their decisions, job seekers can find an environment suited for their personal work-style, and land a role that keeps them happy and productive long-term.
For managers and HR decision-makers, identifying and understanding the learning styles of current employees might help retain talent, increase productivity, and develop a roadmap for future talent. In addition, organizations can leverage this information to create a workplace that caters to their employees’ unique learning styles, or vice-versa, find the candidates whose learning styles are compatible with their work culture.
For marketers looking to connect with potential buyers, understanding how prospects best absorb new information can be highly valuable when developing messaging. For example, content creators might emphasize visual mediums when selling products that cater to a work-from-home audience, while focusing on verbal communication when addressing workers in a physical office setting.