Does a Raise or Remote Work Sound Better?

Telecommuting is emerging as a coveted perk. Workers and their companies see the benefits, but how will they feel in 2021?

By Rachel Feintzeig of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"“The euphoria is kind of peaking,” says Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

Part of the appeal might stem from the fact that we’ve only been doing this for a few months, when the weather’s warm. Even if you remove the Covid-related factors from the equation—the chaos of taking conference calls with children underfoot, the stress of trying to focus as the world careens into crisis—there’s reason to believe working from home has some downsides. An experiment that Dr. Bloom did with workers in China in 2009 and 2010 found that intense loneliness tended to set in by the ninth month.

“This is like one year into a relationship,” he says. “It’s the early honeymoon where none of the fights have started.”

He declares remote work a 2019 perk, a 2020 necessity and a “2022 attribute which some people are going to like and others are going to loathe.”"

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