An employee gets into his car or truck right after arriving to perform to a shuttered Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) headquarters on March ten, 2023 in Santa Clara, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Pictures News | Getty Pictures

The SVB report noted workers may possibly struggle with perform-life balance when remote, which could lead to “lowered productivity and/or substantial disruptions in our organization operations.” It also flagged on the web connectivity challenges and cybersecurity threats as other remote-connected dangers.

But some workplace authorities say blaming functionality challenges on remote perform as an underlying trigger for SVB’s current failure is “a practical excuse that ignores deeper organizational challenges and fails to address the root causes of the issue,” says Dan Schawbel, managing companion of the HR analysis firm Workplace Intelligence.

“Remote perform itself is not the trigger of functionality challenges,” he tells CNBC Make It. Rather, “what probably contributed to SVB’s collapse was a lack of helpful leadership, communication and management practices.”

Authorities say a drop in employee functionality has far more to do with leadership than operating remotely. Functioning from house may possibly adjust the technologies of acquiring perform performed, but “a higher-trust leader can carry out on a park bench with a can and strings and build a terrific expertise for workers,” says Michael Bush, CEO of Fantastic Spot to Perform, the worldwide analysis and analytics firm that evaluates corporate culture.

The majority of SVB’s eight,500 workers perform remotely across the U.S., which includes prime-level executives, FT reports — in contrast to economic giants like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan that have championed returning to the workplace all through the pandemic. The Federal Deposit Insurance coverage Corp, which took more than SVB, told workers to continue operating remotely, except for necessary workers and branch workers, per Reuters.

There is small information to help that remote perform hampered productivity through the pandemic, as organization functionality skyrocketed all through 2020, 2021 and most of 2022 primarily based on Fantastic Spot to Perform information from 30,000 worldwide corporations, ten million leaders and virtually 40 million workers.

But an increasingly volatile economy with increasing inflation, interest prices, earnings pressures and worker’s fears of job insecurity has an outsized effect on engagement and functionality, Bush says.

“Providers did pretty properly by way of Covid and started to stumble more than the previous seven to eight months as economic pressures elevated, but remote had absolutely nothing to do with it,” Bush says, adding that other economic institutions like Bank of America and American Express continue to be lucrative when embracing remote perform.

SVB may possibly have also struggled with onboarding new workers through a pandemic hiring spree.

Bush recognizes remote perform tends to make it far more tough to onboard early-profession and new workers but adds that corporations have often struggled with onboarding, even prior to Covid. He says it could take yet another 4 to 5 years for organizations to figure out how to onboard new workers properly in a virtual atmosphere, regardless of whether that suggests incorporating some in-individual education early on or investing in metaverse technologies to boost the transition.

Bush says it will not be surprising to see far more leaders point to remote perform as dangers to productivity, but that it oversimplifies how companies must believe about the future of their hybrid and remote perform policies.

SVB’s collapse may possibly be the initial to take place in the new era of remote perform, but it really is worth noting that several other significant firms failed even with the majority of their workers operating from an workplace.

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