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""There is no substitute for in-person collaboration and connection," said Take-Two Interactive Software CEO Strauss Zelnick. This is especially true for those who are in management roles in a firm, who find that actual management and mentoring is best done offline. The same goes for relationship-building, spontaneity, and creativity."

"As colleges come under unprecedented pressure to downsize, from the pandemic as well as the steep enrollment decline that was already projected for 2025, some professors predict that the shift online might reinforce "corporate university" tendencies to track professors' productivity and use the results as an excuse to lay them off."

"In September last year, researchers at New York University and Harvard Business School published their analysis of the emails and online meetings of 3.1 million remote workers in such cities as Chicago, New York, London, Tel Aviv and Brussels, in the very early phases of their countries' first lockdowns. They found that the length of the average working day had increased by 8.2%, or nearly 50 minutes, "largely due to writing emails and attending meetings beyond office hours"."

"Before Covid-19, many of us thought remote working sounded blissful. Now, employees across the world long for chats by the coffee machine and the whirr of printers"

"But now Silicon Valley seems to be under a little-noticed threat. Amid Covid-19, the deep recession, and renewed antitrust pressure from Congress and regulators, the Valley faces a very different challenge - the disruption of its very essence, the serendipitous encounter. The culprit is a rush by many of the Valley's leading companies to permanently lock in the coronavirus-led shift to remote work."

"Remote working changes not just our understanding of a working community and the company ethos, but also our very concept of physical reality. Suddenly, to misappropriate Gertrude Stein, there is no there there. But if there is no shared space, what's to stop employers following the example of many customer-care call centres, and employ much cheaper staff based in the developing world?"

"But the movement to legally protect leisure time is gaining ground. The European parliament voted overwhelmingly last month in favour of a resolution calling on the European commission to propose a law allowing those who work digitally to disconnect outside their working hours."

"Company emails that she provided to NPR show her employer believed the tracking software would improve the team's productivity and efficiency while everyone was working from home."

"Employers argue they make considerable savings on real estate when workers shift from office to home work. However, these savings result from passing costs on to workers. Unless employees are fully compensated, this could become a variant of what urban theorist Andy Merrifield calls parasitic capitalism, whereby corporate profits increasingly rely on extracting value from the public - and now personal - realm, rather than on generating new value."

"Empirical evidence for this is beginning to appear. A recent large-scale study by the National Bureau for Economic Research in the US, using data from more than 3 million workers, found that the number of meetings per person had gone up 12.9% and the number of attendees per meeting increased by 13.5% during the pandemic. The researchers also found "significant and durable" increases in length of the average workday - up 8.2%, or 48.5 minutes - along with short-term increases in email activity."

""There's sort of an emerging sense behind the scenes of executives saying, 'This is not going to be sustainable,'" said Laszlo Bock, chief executive of human-resources startup Humu and the former HR chief at Google. No CEO should be surprised that the early productivity gains companies witnessed as remote work took hold have peaked and leveled off, he adds, because workers left offices in March armed with laptops and a sense of doom."

"This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen "shared" on a mediated platform. "

"The research concludes that mentally demanding tasks are more difficult to handle at home than when physically present at a workplace. Based on the chess players' performances, excessive use of homeworking can hurt productivity, the three researchers believe."