The Biggest Benefits to In-Person Working

It's an interesting time for several companies about whether to have a remote workforce or an in-person corporate environment. In this video clip from "The Virtual Opportunities Show" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on April 12, Fool.com contributors Jose Najarro and Travis Hoium discuss some of the positive advantages to working in an office setting.

Jose Najarro: I agree. It's pretty crazy. One thing I would like to see is what age group that management portion is and see if there's any difference between maybe an older management group and the younger management group.

I think this ties well with an article I saw today that said about 70% of interns view remote work negatively. This is something when I used to be back in the workforce, I saw that a lot of the interns, one of the biggest complaints was that they didn't have the ability to talk with the other engineers in the facility where sometimes say if you want to find out if this spec matched well, you can walk to the person's desk and two seconds in, in and out.

But now it's like, I got to send an email, I got to wait for them to respond. I feel like interns are feeling more of a pest than a trouble, emailing others of the thing. I thought that was pretty interesting that 70% of interns view remote work negatively and this was from an analyst by career site Glassdoor.

I also want to see how this might move in the future, usually when you find some negativity in something, eventually these interns maybe in the next 10, 15 years might be managers. I wonder if they might be in that standing, "Hey when I was starting the workforce, this working from home was not the greatest thing." I wonder how that might shift. Might have some changes in the future.

Travis Hoium: It's really going to be interesting to see how this plays out as companies who were not built to be work from home first have to adapt to workers wanting to work from home. I think of a lot of companies that are starting up now or have built even in the last five years that are digital-first, maybe they had small remote locations all over the place. Look at us, we're all over the world. We have never been working in the same place. The Motley Fool in general is built for this structure.

I know people who work here locally at Target (TGT 1.03%) and Best Buy (BBY 0.20%), General Mills (GIS 1.93%). If you're in a corporate environment in those businesses, they're not built to be digital-first. I worked at 3M (MMM 0.86%) for a long time. They would design buildings so that you would be able to run into somebody to another engineer, a designer, and have a conversation about this project that you're working on. There was intentional space for that to happen.

I know that companies like Netflix (NFLX -9.09%) have talked about similar things, it's those small conversations. My wife is onboarding, you're relatively new at a new job and she doesn't have those small conversations, hey, what was going on in this meeting? What's this little piece of nuance that I might have missed? You don't even realize you have it when you're in person. If you're not built for that kind of communication and structure as a company, then I think makes it a lot harder to go more digital.

Then you get the weird dynamic of if you have a corporate headquarters and you go, well, there's 30% of us that are there every day, and [laughs] there's this chunk of other people that are at home every day. How in the world do you handle that? This will be a really interesting thing to see play out. I would not be shocked if what Rachel brought to us is going to be the future is companies going back to work and things like everyday Zooms (ZM -0.82%), all day Zooms being a thing of the past.