No need for the \s. That is literally how they did this "study". I'd be interested to see who it was that paid for this bullshit, wouldn't be surprised to see the money trail leading back to commercial real estate.
The article boasts the headline front and center % productivity loss, as though this was some years long extensive study. The section of the report discussing these results is less than two paragraphs long. I've seen high school students put together a more detailed a well researched study.
What bothers me the most is that people will readily reference this article and spread this bullshit everywhere, with basically no one having read the study or put any critical thinking into this at all.
I dig through the paper and the study literally looked at two sectors and job types. So let’s just extrapolate that too all workers right 🙄
“Remote working appears to lower average productivity by around 10% to 20%. Emmanuel and Harrington (2023) use data from a Fortune 500 firm which had both in-person and remote call centers pre-pandemic. The firm shifted all workers to fully remote in April 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the always remote call-centers as the control group they find an 8% reduction in call volumes among employees who shifted from fully in-person to fully remote work. Gibbs, Mengel and Siemroth (2022) examine IT professionals in a large Indian technology company who shifted to fully remote work at the onset of the pandemic. Measured performance among these workers remained constant while remote but they worked longer hours, implying a drop in employee productivity of 8% to 19%. Atkin, Schoar, and Shinde (2023) run a randomized control trial of data-entry workers in India, randomizing between working fully in the office and fully at home. They find home-workers are 18% less productive.”
Yea that’s still not indicating how they measure productivity. It actually does highlight an increase in efficiency though; if there’s an 8% decrease in call volumes, that is a correlation to end users not needing to call in multiple times.
I swear, when I’m called into the office I get fuck all nothing done. Like once in a while there’s a reason for me to be on site, and I do that thing and nothing else all day.
Distractions, interruptions, noise, general discomfort. Seems every time I actually start making progress on something, a person stops by my desk and that basically erases whatever I did. So it always ends with “I’ll do it tomorrow when I’m at home”.
I must be in like some weird alternate reality because my boss recognises that the office is a distraction, and doesn’t go there often himself. We go there very seldomly, primarily to catch up with colleagues, but not to work on our tasks.
I get maybe 15-20% of my normal work done at the office.
Granted this might increase over time if I came in regularly but it’d never touch how productive I am at home. This rhetoric about losing productivity working from home is dangerous and bullshit.
And you know, working from home I’m comfortable doing things otherwise I wouldn’t agree to doing - particularly coming online late hours.
They’re doing maintenance at 7pm, that’s no big deal, I’ll adjust my hours around and make it work. Not like I’m driving or just staying late, okay I’m not doing a 12 hour day at the office. And realistically 4pm-7pm would basically just be waiting. Guess I would if I really had to, but I wouldn’t be too happy about it. Heck just last week I checked to see if something applied correctly at 12am. No big deal, just log in and make sure.
And I fully recognize this could be exploited, become the norm. I’m careful to set boundaries, but I guess working from home has loosened my boundaries of what is and isn’t okay. Used to be I wouldn’t even answer my work phone after 5pm, but now it’s not so bad. Little annoying sometimes, but I’m okay with it.
That’s me too. Sure it’s useful once a week to sit down with my team but the rest of our work is solo or on an ad hoc debugging call where sharing screens actually makes things easier.
Even worse my office doesn’t even have enough desks for everyone, and even fewer of them are properly setup with a monitor from this decade. Each of I ur 3 mandatory office days is a complete crapshoot on whether you’ll actually get a proper workstation or will you be stuck at a table with your laptop all day.
They’re write offs where fuck all gets done. Some of my colleagues who are in meetings all day seem to be okay with the office but if you actually need to do work there’s little point in being there.
I recognise that I’m probably a minority here, but I have a much harder time staying focused at home. At my office I share a room with a couple others, on a floor with a couple dozen more. Pretty much everything I do (outside 1-3 meetings a week) is individual work.
For me, something about physically “going to work” helps me “switch on” much more. Taking breaks with other people, rather than alone, also helps me structure the breaks, and it’s not uncommon that we get good ideas or resolve something that’s been bugging someone during a break. Lastly, I really appreciate the option of “just dropping by” when I want to ask someone about something, and the fact that they can do the same to me. In my experience it’s never gotten to the point that it happens more than maybe once or twice a day, so it’s not really that disturbing either.
Same for me. I found having my workspace be outside my home is better for both my productivity and mood. But I will fight for whatever method of work people find works for them individually.
The trick for me is having a dedicated home office. I wake up, shower, dress in work clothes, and “go to the office”.
Only things in there are my work desk, and some excercise equipment.
The company is currently hybrid, with a couple days required in office every week. From everything I’ve heard, productivity is up, and there is no talk from management that we’re changing things.
Try adding some plants too. Having the occasional distraction of watering or picking dead leaves available is useful, without being excessively distracting.
Also, I guess people like oxygen and decorations, it whatever.
That is great and you should have that option. Some of us work best from home and want that option. The idea that we all work the same is the problem, flexible is the solution. The ability to allow people to work in whatever way they think is best and trust them to get stuff done would solve this issue. Except it isn’t about that it is about office real estate and management thinking the only way people are working is if they are watched.
I absolutely agree that flexibility is the way to go. I also have to admit that a large part of what makes me function better in the office is that my coworkers are there as well. As such, I think a compromise that everyone can be as happy as possible with is the best thing.
Remember: Some people would prefer to work from home everyday, and function best when the do. People like me would prefer that as many as possible people are in the office as often as possible, and function best when that is the case. The optimum (both regarding satisfaction and productivity) is clearly somewhere in-between.
That means flexibility is very important, but “full flexibility”, i.e. everyone always working from where they would prefer, is probably not the global optimum.
I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think you’re saying, essentially “I work better in the office with others, so others should be here to make me work better” and I would submit that a better solution is for you to find a company that hires like minded folks so you can all work together in an office.
I can see why you would say that, but my point is that in any reasonably large group of people there’s going to be diversity regarding how often people prefer to be at the office (if ever). It’s also well documented that things like training and meetings are much less efficient if people are remote. Together, I think this means that the solution to having as efficient and satisfied employees as possible is to do some coordinating, such that everyone has their needs met.
I don’t think it’s realistic to have some companies consisting only of people that prefer to work from home every day, and others where everyone wants to be in the office every day. Flexibility and coordination is key.
Dude, same. I’ve never been more productive than working from home specifically because people have to engage with me via teams or email instead of barging into the office and disrupting my work flow.
Shit… Did I commit that router config before Becky needed my help fixing her user error? Oh no, I did but I forgot to change the DNS on the DHCP pool so now I can’t hit the domain for remote authentication because they’re still using public DNS.
Fuck! I’ll just do it tomorrow when I have my coffee in hand and my cat buzzing happily, with lo Fi beats to overhaul WAN circuits to blaring.
Im the same way, i just catchup with the coworkers and we spend most of the day chatting about various things and then a long lunch and at least two hours of meetings is basically my days in the office...at home no distractions, get shit done in the morning, make lunch, deal with any issues in the afternoon...can at least take a shit without smelling other peoples shit...
I love Xolos. I feel like they strike the perfect balance of cute and intimidating for walking alone at night. They sometimes win the World’s Ugliest Dog contest but, like this year, are often beat by the Chinese crested dog
When I was living in peru, there was a peruvian version of the hairless dog that lived with me. I loved that nutjob. So crazy and funny, but a true sweetheart.
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