I have an HP Printer… Actually 2. I didn’t want another HP Printer, and I especially did not want another InkJet Printer. Yet we were persuaded into a new printer we’ve used like 20 times since we bought it.
Look I work from home, I think everyone who can (and wants to) work from home should work from home most of the time. But people are definitely less productive working from home, and I think the people who say that most people are more productive are delusional.
There are more important things than just raw productivity numbers, western workers have been working far too hard and far too long for the last half century, and I think we should return to a more humane approach to working.
Also froma purely selfish capitalist perspective I don’t neccesarily think the productivity boost of being in person is worth all the costs of a bigger office, cleaning staff etc.
I work from home and I get the same amount of work done. However if you define it as, “Doing X amount of work in Y amount of time,” then yeah I’m less productive because nowadays instead of getting that work done in an 8-hour shift I take about 10–12 hours to do it.
Same work, same day, so my productivity hasn’t changed. I just take longer to do it by taking breaks, going out to long lunches with friends, and my stress level is almost non-existent!
I find that to be a very equitable trade-off: Almost no job-related stress for a slightly longer working day.
Studies that I’ve seen have seen both an increase in time to perform work and a decrease in quality of work.
You are noting that you take more time, but you work that additional time. Not everyone does that.
Increased employee happiness/retention and reduced office rent may be good reasons why to pick full remote over the increased productivity of the office, but the idea that people are more productive at home isn’t proving itself to be true.
There's also to take into consideration the fact that people experience dips of productivity throughout the day. Like, I'd never be able to start something that requires most of my brain power after 3.
For others it's early morning.
So, when I was in the office I would just kill time, go on coffee breaks or just do fucking nothing until it was time to go home, and I know for a fact that it was like that for most of my colleagues.
No one works 8 hours straight out of an 8 hours work day. Working from home just removes the torture of sticking around looking busy.
I actually complete from home the same amount of tasks I used to at the office, really, because my productivity (and that of others) wasn't constant there either.
Had a summer job as a customer service agent for a big company, and pretty much did work 8 hours non stop, the phones were ringing constantly. I had two 5 minute breaks that I could take whenever and one 20 minute break that I had to take at a set time. The break time wasn’t payed, so you ended up having to be there for 8.5 hours. It was very stressful, but it kinda helped that every customer had a new problem, so it wasn’t very repetitive.
Now I some days take longer and other days shorter, to accomplish from home what I could’ve gotten done working from the office.
nowadays instead of getting that work done in an 8-hour shift I take about 10–12 hours to do it.
“For disappearing acts, it’s hard to beat what happens to the 8 hours supposedly left after 8 hour of work and 8 hours of sleep” – Doug Larson.
An 8-hour shift quickly turns into 10-12 clock-hours when you factor in all the extraneous crap that goes along with it. I mean, just lunch and a commute easily adds 60-90 unpaid minutes per day. Add the time spent getting ready for work and settling down after work, and you’re easily up to 10 hours a day.
I think people leave out the fact that their commute should also be considered time working. If you've got an hour commute and an eight hour shift, you really have a ten hour shift.
So you are taking ten hours to do eight hours of work, because part of it means dragging your brain through meatspace to be there. Since you don't have to do that, you can take longer doing the actual job.
But people are definitely less productive working from home, and I think the people who say that most people are more productive are delusional
Except pretty much every study done on this has said the exact opposite. I am much more productive when I’m home. My team is much more productive when working from home and hard data backs it up. I literally cannot think of one thing about the office that I miss or made me more productive.
My last office job involved my desk being 7 feet from the entry door to the building. We had codes to get in so anyone not employed there had to knock and it was on me to get up and figure out who they are and decide if I could let them in. Half the time this also involved me tracking down someone else in the building to see if they were expecting said individual OR I had to have the back and forth discussion with said individual that no we don’t want your services and point to the No Soliciting sticker right on front of them on the door. This definitely took away from my productivity.
You are laughing. But with these hot summers I actually miss some of that artic wind. But more importantly I have a heavy hayfever and being in the closed office durning the summer was a relief. It all went considerably worse when I started working from home.
My ability to close a door and sit, focus, and develop in silence makes me not only more productive, but also happier. I’ve done some of the best work of my career over these past 3+ years. I used to wear headphones 50+ hours a week, now it’s only when i go for a walk every morning.
There's really nothing like sitting in a darkened room with music blasting, code pouring out of your fingers while you have an out of body experience from caffeine overdose and lack of sleep. I've spent my entire career chasing that high.
That needs to be backed up by data and not just what people think. And reliable data needs scientific study, with proper time and people for the answer to be minimally reliable. Working from home is different from the office, we can establish that - all the rest are just thoughts or delusions from both sides.
Having said that, I agree 100% with the conclusion. We don’t need more productivity to make more money for profit only. We need investment for our personal lives too.
The few people I know who are against remote working are the type of persons that don’t have any non-family social life outside workplace and are freeking out, because their coffee break chit-chats disappeared.
They still base their view on the idea that people are spineless and sooner or later start slacking off.
The ones I see who are against WFH the hardest have pretty awful family lives and don’t want to admit it to themselves. They need the break from the shitty family they can’t face or deal with more than is absolutely necessary.
Or men that do have a happy life at home, but don’t want to be home w/o the wife because children are women’s work (I worked with a guy pre COVID that didn’t take WFH days because he might have to watch kids on his own)
As a work from homer who gets twice as much done in half the time, I'm eyeballing your own delusion xD
And this isn't a self assessment, it comes from my boss, who is fighting tooth and nail to keep us from having to go back into the office with numbers and spreadsheets proving it.
These decisions are top down and have very little to do with what's actually happening on the front line.
But people are definitely less productive working from home
How so? I personally think it's a somewhat personal matter, but people who are less productive are home seem to be people who can't focus in general. I am far more productive working from home, mostly because I don't get distracted by others. I have colleagues who spend hours bantering only to then stay in the company until later to compensate for the banter - I'd rather get my work done so I can end my day on time and go home do the fun stuff. But I do have colleagues who say they get distracted easily when working at home and they'd rather work at the office.
Overall though, my company used to be very against working from home, but after the period of mandatory work from home, management admitted overall productivity had increased. They still insist people should come to the office every now and then to maintain the "friendly" environment the company is supposed to have, though, which is fair I guess.
My team was more productive at home, no open space telephoning, discussing, interruptions etc etc etc. no hours on a car or public transport, etc etc and it seems it’s the norm (or about the same productivity).
and I think the people who say that most people are more productive are delusional
I care more about the actual data that otherwise makes your position the more delusional one. For instance, I-
There are more important things than just raw productivity numbers
Ah of course you had to throw that in there to address the numerous studies that say people are more productive working from home. I think you need to check your facts before posting about this topic again.
Edit: As u/Semi-Hemi-Demigod pointed out, one of the authors of this paper has his own connections to pro-business/anti-worker groups, which may have biased the conclusions of this review.
I’m definitely no specialist on this topic, but to me it seems questionable to generalize the conclusions of that review to all remote workers. From section 3.a, where they analyze the productivity of fully remote workers:
[…] Emmanuel and Harrington (2023) use data from a Fortune 500 firm which had both in-person and remote call centers pre-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.
Extending the results of one call-center to all other companies would be very shortsighted, and the fact that this shift to remote work happened quickly during the COVID pandemic is very likely to affect the results. Still, it could be evidence that for this type of industry specifically fully-remote work may have a negative effect. Nonetheless, the authors of the paper offer a more nuanced analysis, finding that remote work actually increased the productivity of workers who were already in the company:
[…] We find that working remotely increased call-center workers’ productivity. When previously on-site workers took up opportunities to go remote in 2018, their hourly calls rose by 7.5%. Similarly, when COVID-19 closed on-site call centers, a difference-in-difference suggests that the productivity of workers who switched to remote work rose by 7.6% relative to their already remote peers.
What their results suggest instead is that people who are overall less productive are more likely to seek remote work:
Despite these positive productivity effects, remote workers were 12pp less likely to be promoted. If better workers are more concerned about being overlooked in remote jobs, remote workers will be adversely selected. Consistent with this theory, we find evidence that remote work attracted latently less productive workers. When all workers were remote due to COVID-19, those who were hired into remote jobs were 18% less productive than those who were hired into on-site jobs.
Going back to the main review, the next study they cite didn’t actually find a decrease in productivity, only finding that workers spent more hours working to do the same job:
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.
Similar to the first study they found that the workers who prefer to work from home are less productive when doing so, which partially explained the lower productivity:
[…] We find negative selection effects for office-based work: workers who prefer home-based work are 12% faster and more accurate at baseline. We also find a negative selection on treatment: workers who prefer home work are much less productive at home than at the office (27% less compared to 13% less for workers who prefer the office).
Still, because this study focused specifically on one data-entry company and only included 234 workers in their final sample, we should be careful with generalizing their findings.
Ultimately even if we take the conclusions of the review at face value, the authors themselves point out that mixing remote and in-person work doesn’t seem to lower productivity, and remote work can still be an attractive option for companies because it reduces on-site costs:
[…] Fully remote work is associated with about 10% lower productivity than fully in-person work. Challenges with communicating remotely, barriers to mentoring, building culture and issues with self-motivation appear to be factors. But fully remote work can generate even larger cost reductions from space savings and global hiring, making it a popular option for firms. Hybrid working appears to have no impact on productivity but is also popular with firms because it improves employee recruitment and retention. Looking ahead we predict working from home will continue to grow because of the expansion in research and development into new technologies to improve remote working. Hence, the pandemic generated both a one-off jump and a longer-run growth acceleration in working from home.
There are a lot of other studies on remote working with conflicting results, with some finding an increase in worker productivity while others suggest the opposite, and as the section dedicated to COVID-19 on the Wiki states the effects of remote work can vary depending on the earnings and position of the worker.
As some of the previous studies point out the drop in productivity is in part due to less productive workers self-selecting into remote positions, and due to remote training at the start of the job being less adequate. Hence what seems like the most reasonable solution to me is in-person training for the first few weeks, then a mix of in-person and remote work for employees who want it - and even if there is some drop in productivity, I ultimately agree with you that the improved life-work balance and worker satisfaction that remote work gives to some people is worth the cost.
It’s funny how these kinds of articles always read exactly the same. I honestly want to know what offices they are using for these supposed metrics because it seems like people are doing everything they can to just endure and waste time while in actual offices.
Clearly they’re analyzing offices with fat commercial real estate bills going unpaid month after month. Think anyone at Forbes magazine is invested in that stuff?
I love the fact that brother basically does no marketing as far as I know. They just end up shining like a diamond because they make a generally good product and everyone else around them makes absolute trash.
I only bought a brother printer because of recommendations from reddit. It’s so much better than my old hp inkjet that randomly started asking me to sign in in order to print or scan.
Why tf would I need to sign in to my HP account online in order to print in my own fucking home.
A printing kiosk or photo shop. They will be so much better quality. If you buy an inkjet and only use it once or twice a month the heads get clogged and you waste loads of ink cleaning it.
What the other guy said. Unless you genuinely need high-quality color photos on a daily or weekly basis, you do not need an inkjet printer. Go to a print shop, get it done right and it’ll be much less headache – but the vast majority of the time I’ve needed something printed, it has been swathes of black text on white paper. And a plain B&W laser printer does that perfectly, with no bullshit. I just recommend Brother because they’re a decent company.
They are but the pricing is ok, £2 a month for 50 pages. The higher end pricing seems to be around 3p per page which is what they price their toners at. They even allow you to rollover a decent amount of print credit. Now, if they had these printers in shops around the country and I could use the credit for those instead of just in my own home, I think it would be a really cool service. The local corner shop charges £2 to print a single sheet of A4 and then 50p per page after that.
Yes, I have a b&w brother laser/scanner than is 6 to 7 years old and it goes on without any issues (except networking BS at times, but that is likely my problem)
Yep, totally. In the vile shit that printer business is, Brother seems to be the only brand to not be straight-up anti consumer. I have a Brother all-in-one machine at work, it works out of the box on all devices, scans with whatever app, doesn’t push some bullshit custom nagware every time you print and, best of all, ACCEPTS NONAME TONERS without saying a single word of complain. It doesn’t refuse to print, doesn’t even mention that you may get worse quality prints (yeah right). It just prints and we don’t have to think about it and I really appreciate it.
I shit you not I have a brother laser printer that I don’t even know how old it is. My dad pulled out of our basement and cleaned it up and got it running so I could use it in college back in 2009. Skip ahead to 2016 and I’m using it for the table cards at our wedding. It’s 2023 and I still use it from time to time. I’ve only changed the toner once and cleaned it a handful of times, but that sums up the entirety of the maintenance while I’ve had it. I have to plug it into my computer via USB which isn’t so bad. But they don’t have a driver available for OSX anymore so it’s now a PC only printer. I’ll keep using it until it stops working or isn’t compatible with any computer anymore.
Regarding the driver, I had the same problem with running my 2005 HP LaserJet 1020 on OSX, but got it running with a built-in driver for a printer in the same build group (LJ 1022, maybe?) so keep that in mind if you haven’t already tried it. I know your printer is Brother and not HP, but there may be a native Brother driver already in the OSX build you can use.
You may lose some advanced driver functionality doing this but most printing doesn’t require it anyway. If it works you’ll be able to print just fine. You can also search your model number and see what Mac printer driver hacks others have come up with, since this was not an uncommon thing with Macs back when I had to do it a few years ago.
But yeah, on the sad day my old HP LJ non-networked non-enshittified printer carks it, I’ll be getting a Brother. No way I give HP my business now.
What about Epson? Specifically I’m considering one of the ecotank ones because I need to print stuff for board games like info sheets and so on that need rich colours and designs. Might even look into A3+ printers.
Are those useful? The per-page cost looks crazy low for an inkjet.
No joke. I had HP and I knew Brother was painfree experience and when I was buying said HP, I completely forgot about them. Few years forward my old HP avoided destruction by sheer luck and my brother’s will to try and tame it. These days I have Brother laser printer and it takes whatever you throw at it without complaints. It’s so obedient am having issues accepting such behavior.
I’ve moved to Brother from HP. Disappointed by the support for Linux. While the driver exists, a lot of them aren’t packaged. HP does a better job at that.
But never EVER buy a brother inkjet, its the same as all the other brands. You cannot insert bootleg ink anymore. My printer didnt accept any ink apart from the oem.
How else will they justify spending money on these huge office buildings (monuments to capitalists) to their investors if you aren’t there pretending to be busy?
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...
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.
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