For millions of workers, the prospect of working from home has gone from a nice-to-have before 2020, to a necessity, and to now a preference more than two and a half years since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

And employers are adapting. Forrester’s Spring 2022 American Opportunity Survey found that nearly six in 10 (58%) of 25,000 respondents said they are able to work from home at least one day per week, with 35% indicating they work from home on a daily basis. Only 13% of respondents said they have the opportunity to work remotely but choose not to.

To look specifically at how the work-from-home/hybrid element is impacting distribution, we asked respondents in the 2Q22 Baird-MDM Survey, “Do you plan to mandate or at least encourage your office staff to return to the physical office full-time in the next 12 months?” As detailed in a July Premium blog, 44% of approximately 500 respondents — predominantly distributors — said they had already returned all workers to the office full-time; 36% said they planned to remain in a hybrid setup; 13% said they indeed plan to mandate a full return to office; and 7% said they don’t intend to.

So, the stats tell us a large portion of the distribution sector certainly has an appetite to work from home. But that hasn’t ended the discussion of whether distributor employees SHOULD work from home.

That was the topic of conversation in a panel session at B2BOnline, an industry conference held Nov. 13-15 in Orlando that brought together approximately 375 distribution and manufacturing attendees to learn about a variety of best practices in digital transformation and eCommerce. In arguably the event’s most entertaining session, Master B2B Co-Founders Brian Beck and Andy Hoar hosted a debate between two proponents of working remotely — Brooke Logan, NAPA Auto Parts Director of Pro Digital and Boris Lokschin, Co-Founder and CEO of Spryker Systems; and two proponents of having everyone work in the same facility when possible — Eric Rehl, Head of Digital Transformation at Avnet; and Gireesh Sahukar, Vice President of Digital at Dawn Foods.

Beck and Hoar emceed the lively session that was themed as a boxing match setup, with each two-person team donning robes and taking the stage after hyped-up introductions. Beck took the side of work-in-person, and Hoar led the remote work team — having the two teams alternate between asking questions to defend their position.

Beck and Hoar prefaced the debate by sharing a couple of interesting stats from Forrester’s “Master The Messy Middle Of Hybrid” report (released Sept. 28) that polled 46 companies and 722 employees about the changing world of hybrid work.

• Asked what percentage of respondents would agree with the statement “I would prefer to continue working from home,” 41% answered in the affirmative, compared to 52% in Forrester’s 2021 report.
• The 2022 report also found that while 87% of employees report that they are productive at work, only 12% of company leaders say they have full confidence that their team is productive.
• Further, 73% of employees indicated they need a better reason to go into the office than just company expectations.

I thought both debate teams made great points for their case. Here’s a sampling of how each team responded to three rounds of questions, along with how the audience polled in response to those same questions via scanning a QR code that took them to a digital vote.

Productivity

“Are employees more productive for the company when they’re in the office, or remote?”

Rehl, Avnet: Productivity does not equal quality. And for me, this is all about the whiteboard. Collaboration is not the same as co-innovation, and the ability of a team to come together in a room and start drawing on the whiteboard and come up with creative and great ideas is quality that cannot be replicated in a virtual environment. I know they’ve got Miro and (Microsoft) Teams is headed to their whiteboard app, but there’s nothing like that compares to bringing those people together face-to-face and hammering out those great ideas on a whiteboard.

Logan, NAPA: I was just talking to somebody last week and he said ‘I live only three miles from the office, but it takes me 45 minutes longer to get ready to get there.’ You have to get all this stuff together and sit in the office and then just be disrupted by all the people that are there wanting to chat with you. So no, absolutely far more productive at home using the tools that we have for collaboration, which I think are great. You know, where you want to build relationships by having good strategic times together out in the field with our customers or other places, but absolutely more productive being able to really control your space.”

• Audience Poll: “Are employees more productive for the company when they’re in the office, or remote?”
  • In Office – 25%
  • Remote – 75%

Culture

“Is it easier to promote the company’s culture when employees are in the office, or remote?”

Sahukar, Dawn Foods: If you have a team of 40 people, it takes 1,560 conversations over five months of time to align them if you’re doing it one at a time. That can be happening in a 30- minute in-person conversation. I just had 12 of 15 days of in-personal meetings over the last three weeks, and we have advanced our cause, our mission, by leaps and bounds in those kinds of days. We couldn’t have done that in a remote setting.

Rehl: Effective culture, especially in a big company, walks around on two feet. It doesn’t float out in the ether somewhere. And you can sink your teeth into it. It’s tangible. You can feel it that happens in-person.

Logan: I disagree. I think saying that culture needs to exist within the four walls of the office is like saying you can only see God in the four walls of a church. It’s the same thing. And I disagree with you (Rehl) completely that culture needs to be on two feet because exactly what you described as this energy between people. It’s about the relationships that you build — even in a remote way — and the policies and the ways that you can work. That becomes your culture and has nothing to do with being here in-person one way or another.

Lokschin, Spryker Systems: You can’t contain culture. We have 650 people scattered across 55 different countries, and this gives much more diversity. This gives different perspectives and opinions. People sitting in an office are usually living nearby or the same neighborhoods, so it has less diversity and is a less interesting environment to work in.

Hoar, Master B2B: Culture is not a place, it’s a thing that exists beyond the four walls, like Brooke pointed out. The reality is culture is going to find its own place. Like water, it finds its own level. And people are going to work wherever they want to work.

• Audience poll: “Is it easier to promote the company’s culture when employees are in the office, or remote?”
  • In Office – 63%
  • Remote – 37%

Recruiting

“Which attracts more top talent…companies that focus on having employees primarily work in the office, or remotely?”

Beck: A lot of you here are in management, coaching and getting people activated in their roles and things like that. At the end of the day, I believe it’s easier to do in-person is otherwise much, harder to communicate. I mean, in my company, Enceiba, when we onboard employees, we do that in-person. We’re not doing that on Zoom.

Lockschin: If I think about our onboarding sessions, we sometimes have people joining from six or seven different times zones or from five or six different countries making sure that this new employee gets not only the functional graso but also get the cultural grasp.

Logan: It’s all about intentionality. You can be intentional with onboarding and bringing people into your culture in a remote and safe way. It should be like that in the office, but maybe we were never that great about that. I think there are also many times we’ve all had bad onboarding experiences. I think in remote way we actually need to become much more intentional about it, very deliberate, and make sure that we’re sharing with people in that way, and then it’s a culture they’re excited to be a part of.

Rehl: So, you say need to we need to be more intentional. Having those people in the office makes that process much more supportive, much faster, and they’re not on their own. This conversation about returning to the office isn’t talking about just one location. We (Avnet) are global company with an extremely diverse workforce. I’m in the office and I work with people from all over the world. So diversity is not an issue here. And I say you can have just as much diversity in a return to work setting and a global company as you can by working remote.

Sahukar: If you’re hiring new college grads, how do you teach them your company processes? How do you enable them? How do you teach how to become a professional in the workplace? Those are things that are near impossible to write documents for, to write policies on. When they have questions, a new hire can turn to the the person sitting next to them in the office.

• Audience Poll: “Which attracts more top talent…companies that focus on having employees primarily work in the office, or remotely?”
  • In Office – 7%
  • Remotely – 93%

Closing Argument

Each debate team was then allowed to give their closing argument, in which both teams seemed to agree that a hybrid work environment is the best solution.

Rehl: The key word here is flexibility. That’s what top talent wants. They want flexibility. They want to be able to come into the office when they need to or when they’re expected to. And when there’s opportunities for more from home, they can do that, too. So that hybrid model is the key to what top talent wants. But there’s one other important point here is what a top talent also wants — and should want — is to rise within your organization, rise to make an increasingly meaningful contribution to your organization. And what that requires is being heard. And I think, more often than not, being heard means being seen face to face on a consistent basis.

Logan: We’ve talked a little bit about diversity and attracting diverse talent. And we’ve talked a lot about geographic diversity, but we haven’t talked about it other kinds of diversity. I have two kids. I don’t want to have to go into the office every day, and I think you might be missing out on top talent because of that. It’s one of the first things that people ask us when they’re going to start the interview process, ‘Am I able to work remotely?’ They don’t want to move. They don’t want to relocate their families. They don’t want to have to come into the office. They want to be able to go and pick up their kids. I agree flexibility is key, but I think you’d have the most flexibility when you have the freedom to work remotely.

The Final Word

As evidenced above, there are pros and cons to each side of this argument. There is undoubtedly a camaraderie that comes with physically being in the same office as your coworkers that just can’t be replicated remotely. But at the same time, time spent preparing for work and commuting to/from the office is time that really adds up over the course of the week and can be better spent doing almost anything else. While digital collaboration tools have been immeasurably valuable these past few years, it’s also great to be able to ask a co-worker something in-person rather than wait and hope they saw your email or Teams message in a timely fashion.

There’s also the element of remote work opening up the labor pool for distributors to potentially hire nationally and internationally instead of just within a 20-mile radius of an office. But when Hoar brought up that point, Sahukar rebutted that it isn’t as simple, as employers then have to factor in cost-of-living differences, international labor laws, foreign exchange issues and any other jurisdiction matters that need to be set up before a company can pursue a remote superstar employee. To that, Lokschin rebutted that there are service providers who specialize in handling those out-of-state and international roadblocks that may exist in the hiring process.

It’s also important to address the elephant in the room for distributors in this debate: the warehouse. Unless a distributor has the financial resources to employ a team of robots so that a warehouse is fully automated, employees are required to be there every day to physically move product around. The debate didn’t get into that aspect, as it was focused purely on positions traditionally office-oriented. Still, I’m sure distributors have weighed whether allowing office workers to work remotely may cause friction from warehouse staff who don’t get that perk. At the same time, perhaps warehouse staff are more understanding off the dilemma given the nature of their job.

Obviously, there is so much nuance here. I don’t think either fully in-office or fully remote is overwhelmingly the ‘right’ choice, as every distributor and employee is different. What works for one may not work for another. That’s why I’m fully on team hybrid — in distribution and all industries — when it’s possible for employers to offer. Given the demand for flexibility from today’s worker, offering current and potential employees the ability to work remotely if they’d like is a crucial perk in making jobs more appealing. If someone wants to work in the office, find a way to let them. If they want to work remotely, find a way to let them.

And here are the results of a LinkedIn poll Master B2B ran leading up to the session, asking, “Is 2023 the year employees will return to the office in B2B eCommerce roles?”

• Yes, we’ll be back in the office – 18%
• No, remote is here to stay – 82%