Hybrid work

Web developers have the best chance of finding a job that allows for remote work, according to an analysis of more than six million Glassdoor job postings by software company Remote. Nearly 2 in 5 postings for web developers in the U.S. offered remote work, according to the report, which analyzed August data.

Software engineers and data scientists had the second and third largest share of remote job openings, at 36% and 31% respectively. Cybersecurity and data analytics positions also ranked in the top 10 of all professions.

Companies offered higher salaries for remote workers, on average, than for traditional workers, according to the analysis. The average salary for web developers who worked remotely was $95,000, 31% higher than the industry average of $72,492.

Salary disparities between remote jobs and the industry average reflect the bargaining power of top tech talent. Web developer, software engineering and data science positions listed as remote also had the highest salaries.

Across the board, IT professionals saw salaries rise last year, as employers struggled to recruit and retain needed talent.

In addition to upping compensation, employers were willing to consider other factors that contribute to job satisfaction, including more flexible employment arrangements that allow for remote and hybrid work.

The segment of the tech workforce that expressed a preference for remote grew to 60%, up from 53% in 2021, according to a November report by Dice, the tech workforce marketplace.

Nine in 10 respondents indicated the option to work remotely was an important job consideration, according to Dice, which surveyed 950 technologists and 350 HR professionals.

Demand for technologists remained high in the final months of 2022, despite high-profile layoffs at big tech companies like Amazon, Meta and Microsoft.

Tech-sector layoffs are different from tech-worker layoffs: 130,000 technologists got new jobs in December, according CompTIA’s analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and technology companies added 17,600 workers.

Unless demand flags, salaries are likely to remain high. Two-thirds of software developers got raises in the last year, according to a new report by CodinGame and CoderPad that surveyed 14,000 professionals in 131 countries. Developers who switched jobs reported salary bumps of 25% or more.

There’s a limit to how much employers can offer, even for the most sought-after web development, data science and cybersecurity skills. Sweetening the deal with job flexibility and other enticements is becoming the norm.

“Employers have to think about new facets of employee experience,” Seth Robinson, VP of industry research at CompTIA, said, including work/life balance, career pathways, training opportunities and remote work.

As businesses brace for next year and feel the weight of economic slowdown, some leaders increased their focus on employee productivity levels – and they are not happy with the data. 

Companies have reported lower than normal levels of productivity, many of them measuring against pre-pandemic levels. Employees and employers, though, are often split on whether that’s true. More than two-thirds of decision makers believe employees are more innovative in the office, while fewer than 3 in 5 employees believe that’s true, according to a Vanson Bourne survey commissioned by VMware.

This has caused business leaders to hunt down the root of perceived decreases in employee productivity. 

Some companies have reversed remote work policies, calling employees back to the office. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, a vocal opponent of remote work, pushed for employees to return to the office five days a week. 

Even champions of digital work styles have questioned remote work effects. On Friday, Marc Benioff, co-founder and co-CEO of Salesforce, said workers hired during the pandemic were “facing lower productivity” in an internal message to employees, first reported by CNBC. Benioff questioned whether this was a result of either a lack of training or losing out on in-office culture.

"We have a hybrid work environment that empowers leaders and teams to work together with purpose,” a Salesforce spokesperson said in an email. “They can decide when and where they come together to collaborate, innovate, and drive customer success."

Currently, Salesforce’s work location policy allows team members to decide how, when and where they work. This includes how many days they come into the office and when to stay home, according to a company announcement last year.

As analytics capabilities expand and businesses have more digital touchpoints to monitor, performance metrics can be misleading. Regardless of work location, it is critical for organizations to be transparent about the chosen productivity metrics and keep big-picture goals in mind when setting them.

Atlassian has consistently spoken out about the benefits of remote work, and employees are allowed to work from anywhere.

“In general, the executive teams focused on productivity metrics are looking to be convinced that distributed work is the future, beyond a reasonable doubt, or disprove its effectiveness altogether,” Annie Dean, head of Team Anywhere at Atlassian, said in an email. “Companies should focus their energy on metrics that help make distributed teamwork effective and efficient for their people and business, not on convincing CEOs with metrics that were never in place to begin with.”

In May 2022, more than half of hiring managers said remote work had a positive impact on their organizations, with 39% reporting no change in employee productivity during COVID-19 compared to in-office times and 37% reporting increased productivity during the pandemic, according to a Harris Poll survey commissioned by Express Employment Professionals.

For leaders supporting remote team members, it’s important to set them up for success by setting norms and practices, according to Anita Williams Woolley, professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.

Woolley suggested these tactics:

• Eliminate communication gaps
• Add tools like task trackers, messaging platforms and whiteboards
• Keep detailed notes and action items for any in-person conversation without remote colleagues
• Create concrete, detailed and outcome-focused goals and objectives
• Implement a fair and transparent process for determining if employees are meeting performance goals

“Companies have had varying degrees of success in how productive their WFH employees have been, in large part due to how managers have handled the process,” Woolley said in an email. “An organization's 'work from home' policy is not real if it exists alongside a highly subjective and opaque evaluation system where employees feel like they need to have face time with their boss to get promoted.”

Measuring employee performance

Productivity is not necessarily a well-defined and cross-enterprise term. Productivity can look different depending on the team or the company. 

For IT service desk staff, end-user customer experience might be one way to measure productivity, while a sales team might use the number of sales completed.

However, best practices around performance measures don’t change for a hybrid or remote team, according to Jane Kouptsova, senior research analyst of People and Leadership at Info-Tech Research Group. Both groups should have outcome-focused metrics that align with broader enterprise goals.

“If managers are turning to micromanagement, this is a symptom of low trust in employees and low comfort with — or absence of — accurate outcome-focused measures,” Kouptsova said in an email. 

For business leaders struggling to improve productivity levels, an honest root cause analysis is needed, Kouptsova said.

There are many ways that managers influence employee behavior. Providing praise when earned and one-on-one meetings between a team lead and employee could be much more valuable than monitoring data points. 

Productivity paranoia can have consequences, though, if taken too far. Earlier this year, the National Labor Relations Board issued a memo criticizing electronic surveillance practices. Using ethical productivity data gathering practices is essential for businesses to avoid legal troubles or decreased employee morale.

“Performance management is critical to remote/hybrid team effectiveness, but many organizations are doing it wrong by trying to employ invasive monitoring methods,” Kouptsova said. “Micromanagement is not the answer in the new normal, just as it wasn’t before.” 

 

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In remote environments, file collaboration can be impacted by inconsistent Internet connections, and workers employ DIY workarounds like emailing files among team members. This isn’t sustainable, as versions of documents are not controlled, security policies are not applied, and large files are dependent on a users’ home bandwidth limitations.

Egnyte lets users create shared folders that can correspond to a project, department or client, enabling employees, clients, contractors and vendors to securely collaborate from anywhere. 

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Setting up, configuring, and managing access for a VPN is a huge drain on resources, and it takes significant time. It also only works when users have a solid connection to the network. Also, consider that VPNs are rarely designed to support the majority of a company’s employees working remotely. Users require instant access to their data on their mobile devices for accessing, storing and collaborating, and VPN is cracking under the pressure. 

Egnyte simplifies the issue of connecting securely to company files for employees working from home — all the files that a user needs, even those that reside in widely-used third-party apps — are securely accessible from Egnyte’s cloud service. Employees can create, share, and access files directly through Egnyte; no need to add the layer of connecting through a VPN and dealing with inconsistent performance issues. 

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Employees adapting to disruptive situations have to create their own working environment and won’t likely be tied to a traditional desktop way of working. In these situations, workers rely more on mobile devices to perform tasks and stay connected. To be productive, they also need to be able to access and collaborate with their files and other content on any device. 

The Egnyte mobile app mimics the functionality of the desktop experience by providing the same level of access and capabilities to files that they would get in the office. This gives workers the ability to execute file-dependent business tasks on any type of mobile device at the same speed and reliability they get in a desktop experience. 

The stark reality is disruptions to your business will occur. The difference between weathering those disruptions and floundering during uncertainty is a solid roadmap for continuity to ensure productivity is not curbed. A big part of that roadmap is ensuring that your business-critical content is available from any location your teams have to work. 

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Six in 10 IT leaders are concerned end users are not adopting new tech quickly enough, endangering the return on investment for digital projects, according to an annual digital adoption report by WalkMe released Wednesday.

On average, organizations waste more than one-third of transformation investments on projects that fail to meet goals, which surveyed nearly 1,500 senior business leaders across the globe.

Companies invest in new technologies to solve a problem – optimize operations, reduce time or minimize costs. But when end users do not adopt a piece of technology, this results in wasted resources and frustration among staff and stakeholders, according to the report.

Poor adoption often results in wasted investments and affects talent retention. A little over 60% of leaders found poor digital experiences contribute to employees turning in their resignations, according to the report.

In the tech industry, employee attrition is a huge problem resulting in obstacles to growth and failure to reach data aspirations. In the broader landscape, the Great Resignation is still ongoing, with employers raising wages and providing additional benefits to attract workers. 

IT teams can help with retention by addressing the struggle of adopting new tech in the workplace. 

The best way to do this is to include end users in the process before any new technology is integrated into their day-to-day routine, according to Brian Jackson, research director at Info-Tech Research Group. 

“Communicate with them about what change is coming and why the change is being made,” Jackson said in an email. “If IT [teams] can demonstrate how the new technology will help make users’ jobs a bit easier or drive better performance, then getting buy-in shouldn’t be too hard.”

While technology investments can improve business performance and operations, that’s not always the case. If there is substantial pushback from end users, tech leaders should reevaluate the adoption of a new tool, Jackson said.

“Too often, technology projects are not aligned with an organization’s overall strategy, and that is a major reason that they end up failing,” Jackson said. “If a user is pushing back and saying that the new tool isn’t helping them deliver good results, listen to them and consider that the technology may indeed be the problem, not the people.

Meetings have evolved since the start of pandemic, challenging conventional wisdom about engagement levels of remote workers, according to new research published Tuesday in the Harvard Business Review.

Despite a gradual return to office, employees participated in 60% more remote meetings in 2022 as compared to 2020, according to research conducted by Andrew Brodsky, assistant professor of management at McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, and Mike Tolliver, director of product management at workspace collaboration analytics company Vyopta.

The researchers used webcam metadata from Zoom, Microsoft Teams and WebEx to compare the frequency, size and duration of remote meetings at 10 technology, healthcare, energy and financial services companies during six-week periods from April through mid-May in 2020, 2021 and 2022.

Meetings got smaller, with the average number of participants dropping by half — to 10 this year, down from 20 in 2020 — owing in part to a significant rise in one-on-one conversations, research showed.

Two-thirds of those one-on-ones were unscheduled, as compared to just 17% directly after the pandemic.

The increase in frequency, particularly in smaller meetings, coupled with the large number of spontaneous chats, indicates a high level of employee engagement, according to Brodsky and Tolliver. It also suggests that remote meetings have evolved to resemble in-person meetings more closely.

The engagement effect 

Better engagement is good news for employers, who worry that remote work is eroding innovation. Two-thirds of more than 5,000 IT and HR professionals said employees were more innovative in the office, according to a survey commissioned by VMware.

Engagement, as measured by meetings with coworkers, is a reasonable proxy for collaboration, which can be indicative of other characteristics, such as productivity and innovation.

“It would be hard to argue that someone who is disengaged is highly productive,” Tolliver said in an interview with CIO Dive. 

“The most innovative teams I’ve been part of are highly collaborative teams,” said Tolliver. “Innovation doesn’t really come out of a dark silo where people are cordoned off.”

In technology, where skilled programmers and engineers are hard to come by and there is strong worker preference for remote and hybrid models, the research confirms what many already suspected. 

Not only do technologists seek out jobs with remote flexibility, many are willing to change employers if it’s not an option, according to a Dice survey of 950 IT professionals published in November.

“Technologists know they're in demand and they know that they can work in a remote environment very effectively,” Art Zeile, CEO of DHI Group, Dice parent company, told CIO Dive. “They've proven that over the last several years.”

The remote learning curve

Learning to use the full suite of remote technologies doesn’t happen overnight. Developing rules of etiquette for group and one-on-one video conferences takes time as well.

Employers, IT support staff and the companies that supply remote work technologies evolved along with the broader workforce in the three years since COVID-19 began to spread.

In research not yet published, Brodsky and Tolliver found that several metrics related to “meeting hygiene” had improved substantially. These include reductions in participants showing up late for meetings, the number of rejoins per meeting, and the number of meetings that failed due to technical difficulties.

“When someone joins a meeting late, it can show unfamiliarity with the technology, or it could be a problem with the technology itself,” Tolliver said.

There are steps companies can take to promote engagement through improvements in remote meetings. Encouraging synchronous work schedules for workers on and off premises, and reducing some of the strain around meetings are two strategies suggested by Brodsky and Tolliver.

Companies can alleviate some of the stress and fatigue associated with too much screen time by making video an option rather than a requirement during remote meetings, Tolliver said.

Finally, the research methodology used by Brodsky and Tolliver could help companies identify areas within their organization in which engagement is flagging, based on decreased meeting frequency. When the number of meetings begins to decline, it might be time to put videoconferencing software aside for a day or two and schedule an in-person team building session. 

The majority of tech professionals — 60% — ranked fully remote as their most-desired workplace setting in a Dice report released Tuesday. That's up from 53% last year.

More than half of technologists said they’re likely to change employers in the next year, according to Dice, which surveyed 950 technologists in July and 350 HR professionals in September.

Tech workers aren’t merely seeking to increase compensation, Art Zeile, president and CEO of Dice’s parent company DHI Group, said in an interview with CIO Dive. “The reason so many people are looking is they are affirming their belief in remote work.”

Apple made headlines in August, merely by trying to coax workers back to the office three days per week, an effort that yielded public pushback by employees.

Other companies are doing the same, according to the report. Nearly 7 in 10 employers are focused on future plans for a hybrid work environment and are offering employees back-to-office incentives.

While 9 in 10 Dice respondents indicate that remote work is preferable to being in the office full-time, the numbers don’t add up.

In an environment where IT talent is in high demand, fully remote and hybrid options are top of the list for technologists. Getting workers — including technologists — back to the office on at least a part-time basis is a priority for many companies.

That, Zeile said, is one reason why so many tech workers anticipate changing employers.

“The technology community knows that they're in high demand,” said Zeile. “First they went after salary, then hybrid and remote work and now they're saying they want the whole package.”

That package has broadened to include factors beyond compensation, according to the report. 

Tech salaries rose precipitously for web developers, database administrators, software developers and other in-demand positions this year, with the average breaking six figures for the first time, according to Dice.

More than two-thirds of employers surveyed said they have added flexible work arrangements to accommodate employee needs and in response to C-suite direction and industry trends.

“We know by looking at our statistics throughout the entire year that roughly 35% of the jobs on the Dice website are remote-qualified,” Zeile added.

With that ask answered by a growing number of employers, more tech workers are weighing workplace culture and company image when choosing a job.

Nearly 9 in 10 respondents said employer brand is an important consideration and 8 in 10 indicated they would not apply for a higher-paying job at a company with a bad reputation.

Candidates monitor company reviews on sites like Glassdoor and employee sentiment on social media, according to the report.

“Technologists know they're in demand, they know that they can work in a remote environment very effectively and they’ve realized they can pick and choose and go and work for a company that they respect,” said Zeile.

That not only complicates matters for companies committed to ongoing modernization — it poses an existential threat to IT departments and CIOs who depend on retaining and recruiting talent and aren’t willing to pivot.

“It really comes down to who's the better salesman and who has a better value proposition across all these dimensions,” Zeile said. “It’s compensation that is market appropriate, remote or hybrid work, plus ‘why my company makes a difference.; That's a really important message to get across to CIOs — they have to be very much an HR salesman to get the talent they need to succeed.”

“Damaging habits” brought over from office life are hurting productivity and costing employees work time, according to a July 19 report from GitLab and Qatalog, a work management software company.

More than half of knowledge workers surveyed said they feel pressure to be seen as “visibly online,” spending an additional 67 minutes a day sending or replying to emails and messages, joining team calls or updating project tools in order to show themselves as “present.”

That pressure likely comes from the top, the report said; 63% of workers surveyed said they believe management prefers “a traditional culture with employees in the office” and 54% said their colleagues are stuck in old habits.

The pandemic has forced employers to reconsider how they measure productivity. Some employers have made strides in this area; a Robert Half survey published earlier this month showed that 66% of workers surveyed said they felt their boss cared more about how they are contributing rather than when and where they work.

Employers that don’t pay attention to this issue could risk higher turnover. Various studies have shown that employees are willing to quit over a lack of flexibility; one survey from GoodFirms published at the end of 2021 found that 70% of HR managers pointed to flexibility concerns as a reason for resignations — the most cited cause in the survey.

But adjusting to a distributed work style isn’t always easy for teams. Notification fatigue is a real problem for knowledge workers in a distributed environment, Asana’s 2022 Anatomy of Work Report suggested. About two-thirds of U.S. workers surveyed said they check their email outside of work hours and 62% said they feel pressured to respond right away — something that could be solved through more efficient meetings and clearer communication around responsibilities, respondents said.

Employers may naturally be worried about productivity when employees work out of managers’ sight. And while certain forms of employee surveillance are legal, too much could damage retention, according to a report published by the European Commission’s Joint Research Council. That means HR may need to focus on shaping manager training to accommodate the cultural shift that remote work requires.

The tech workforce is shifting away from familiar hubs and toward cities that haven’t traditionally been viewed as innovation hotbeds.

Houston, Detroit, and Orlando, Florida, are three cities with the fastest growing tech workforces this year, according to a Tuesday report by Dice, a technology career marketplace.

The report, which drew on analysis of more that 7 million job postings in the U.S. from January through October, found the number of postings increased 25% as compared to the same period last year, despite a slowing economy.

New York, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco and Austin, Texas ranked highest for job posting volume. San Diego, Minneapolis, and Charlotte, N.C., made it into the top 25.

Driving the migration from traditional tech corridors are several factors, including demand for remote work the expansion of the tech workforce in banking, manufacturing, retail and other sectors.

New hives of innovation have begun to emerge in a number of smaller cities, marking a shift away from Silicon Valley toward areas with a lower cost of living and a higher quality of life, according to an October Skillsoft report, competitive salaries.

“The notion that you have to work in Silicon Valley in order to make it in the tech industry, just like you had to work in New York City if you were going to make it in the finance industry, has broken down,” Art Zeile, president and CEO of Dice parent company DHI Group, told CIO Dive.

New jobs in new places

Most businesses today — not just in Silicon Valley — are technology businesses. They need technologists. It’s a dynamic that’s driven persistent demand for talent, consistent growth in jobs and the emergence of new hubs for technology.

November marked the 24th consecutive month in which the economy added tech jobs, according to CompTIA’s analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

While the tech sector added more than 200,000 new technologists through November, tech occupations across industry sectors grew by 137,000 in November alone, fueled in part by hiring in finance, insurance and manufacturing.

CompTIA’s analysis echoed Dice’s findings, with “under the radar” cities such as Topeka, Kansas; Virginia Beach, Virginia; and Worcester, Mass. showing noticeable uptick in tech employment opportunities.

Those opportunities are coming from companies like M&T bank, which is working to put Buffalo on the map as a tech hub through its own modernization efforts. The company employs more than 2,000 technologists, according to CIO Mike Wisler, and has been adding roughly 100 computer science graduates to its team each year.

Global insurance giant MetLife undertook a similar effort in Cary, North Carolina, opening a technology campus in 2015. The company committed in August to adding 400 technologists to an existing workforce of more than 2,600 by the end of the year.

A spike in demand by defense contractors and aerospace companies has kept the tech talent market tight in a number of cities, including Denver and San Diego, Zeile said.

“When we look at companies that are hiring right now, some of the names that pop to the top are Boeing, Leidos and Raytheon,” said Zeile.

After the Biden administration requested a 4% increase in defense spending and Congress bumped it up to 8%, defense contractors started looking for new hires, Zeile said.

Zeile estimated that there are more than 150 aerospace and defense companies with divisions in Denver, including Lockheed and Boeing.

San Diego is home to several military bases.

“It’s not a place that you find folks developing brand new iOS or Android applications,” Zeile said of San Diego, “but you’ll find a ton of technologists working there in defense and aerospace.”

Remote from where?

As companies struggle to overcome IT skills gaps, technologists are demanding the flexibility to work remotely. Tracking where those technologists reside is complicated.

A majority of 950 tech workers surveyed for a Dice report published in November stated their preference for remote, and more than half said they’re likely to change employers in the next year.

Roughly one third of the job postings analyzed by Dice are remote, Zeile said.

Companies willing to hire remote technologists open up a larger talent pool while also helping to support the emergence of hubs in secondary cities.

Without pinpointing the location of each remote worker, it can be hard to determine the size of the tech workforce in a particular city.

Dice's analysis defaults to a company’s headquarters for location when a job is listed as fully remote. As a result, the data may understate the extent of the tech workforce migration.

“Some of these job postings numbers in coastal cities are probably overstated,” Zeile said. “A lot of these jobs are moving to other interesting locations where people have a better cost of living, to non-traditional places for technology that are culturally amenable to the tech community — cool places, cheaper places to live, or a combination of the two.”