Posted on 07/07/2021 11:29:33 AM PDT by ShadowAce
After 15 months of tumbleweeds blowing through near-abandoned commercial and financial centres, major North American cities are poised for a gradual downtown renaissance. The traffic that once flowed into downtowns by foot, bike, train, tram, and car and then up, up, up into the embrace of commercial office towers like arterial blood to the heart has already started to return.
In parallel, a debate rages about whether white-collar workers, who have proven they can work remotely, ought to return to the office at all. Should companies expect a return to the pre-COVID default of five days per week office “presenteeism”? Will workers even accept such terms? Is there a middle ground between strictly enforced pre-COVID attendance and the cabin fever of being isolated in a bachelor apartment all day long?
Arguments based on dogmatic views about how businesses should be run or hard-to-measure variables such as “Zoom fatigue” leave out one of the most important parts of the debate: productivity. A full year and change into the pandemic we have better data on this key metric that matters equally to employees and management. Productivity is most often measured in terms of output per unit of input. How much are people actually getting done relative to their effort?
A survey last month by Blind, an app that encourages anonymous career-related posts, suggested that 64 per cent of employees at the 45 largest companies in the U.S. would pick permanent work from home over a $30,000 raise. The most cited reason: dislike, not of the office, but of the daily commute.
What have North American office workers liberated from that commute been doing with the hours they’ve saved travelling to and from the office over the past year? Mainly, they have been working longer hours. Since COVID began the average employee newly working from home, not just in Canada but in the U.S. and U.K., is spending more than two additional hours per day logged in at their laptop. But to what effect? Have rededicated commuting hours raised productivity?
A comprehensive new study from three economists associated with the University of Chicago’s Becker-Friedman Institute shows that in spite of spending two hours more per day on the job workers accomplished essentially the same at home as at the office. They did not spend their saved commuting hours on personal care, family time, or exercise; rather, they spent two full additional hours daily on emails and virtual meetings. Worse, they generally had less time in a day for focused work.
A global survey from Microsoft that tracked 30,000 users of its ubiquitous Office 365 software across 30+ countries throughout 2020, comes to similar conclusions: in essence, we have simply replaced old fashioned in-office presenteeism with a digital version, with employees expected to be online more frequently. Microsoft’s data show that remote workers spent a staggering 148 per cent more minutes per week in virtual meetings and sent 42 per cent more instant messages after hours and 200 per cent more on weekends. Jared Spataro, a Microsoft vice-president who commented on the findings, says he has seen this phenomenon on his own team, with employees attending meetings unnecessarily in an attempt to demonstrate engagement.
Working more hours for the same output means both workers and employers are net productivity losers, at least in the short term. For obvious reasons the long-term productivity implications of this new digital presenteeism are not yet known, although late-pandemic studies around increased burnout suggest they may also be unfavourable.
Individual companies and teams will need to decide how to unpack these numbers and evaluate their own potential trade-offs. For example, for single parents is lower productivity more than offset by the flexibility benefits of being able to pick up their kids from school on a schedule a regular commute might preclude? Are some roles more conducive to solo work? Do others require active collaboration more frequently in a day?
In the end, determining what is optimal, when and for whom is best left to society’s myriad micro-actors to figure out for themselves.
I WFH full time at the moment. I am careful to limit my work hours to scheduled work hours, and I get a lot more done now than when I was in the office.
My wife gets way more done at home
I don’t even need to finish reading this tripe.
The only people opposed to folks working from home are micromanaging Pointy Haired Bosses who care only about getting their a$$ kissed and know jack-all about actual productivity.
If you push electrons around on a screen, you can do it from anywhere; only a control freak on a power trip who lacks the cognitive capacity to actually run the numbers needs to see ‘their’ people physically.
I love not working from home
Same. Although I’m not always careful to limit my offers. When lockdown first started, I was working all day, because I had nothing else to do.
My wife is FT WFH and has been for several years. She keeps getting raises and promotions so by industry standards I’d say she doing a good job and being productive. I suspect that some folks need closer supervision than others to remain productive and so WFH is definitely not for everyone.
“employees attending meetings unnecessarily in an attempt to demonstrate engagement.”
This is the problem: many employees are, formally or de facto, evaluated on BS like “engagement” rather than outcomes - because their managers lack the competence to measure meaningful outcomes.
“Working from home is great — except for productivity”
I am going to have to disagree on that. I have been working from home M-F for over 8 years. Productivity on my part has gone up.
- No more those long unneeded boring meetings where people just love to hear themselves talk.
- No more pop-ins to chit-chat
- No more clock watching.
- No more birthday’s parties to celebrate
And no more commuting...
“If you push electrons around on a screen, you can do it from anywhere; only a control freak on a power trip who lacks the cognitive capacity to actually run the numbers needs to see ‘their’ people physically.”
Ditto!
There are pluses and minuses here, as with anything.
It would be nice to avoid having to commute to work in a downtown office. Then again, there are situations where you really need face to face meetings and not zoom meetings to be most productive. And not everyone’s job in an office involves simply doing work on a computer screen exclusively.
or--a manager who lacks the confidence he hired the right people. :)
I’ve worked from home the last 14 years. You must establish and keep a routine and your performance and productivity are not an issue.
I think women are more productive working from home than at their workplace.. They don’t have to worry about makeup, matching clothes, etc., and they’re not being sexually harassed or stalked by the creep in cubicle B.
Or maybe it's because many of us got into programming as a hobby in our teens, learning how to code at home reading books and magazines (at my age it was before the internet). Plus, in our careers there were often times stuff had to be fixed on weekends or at late nights and such when we were away from the office. So working from home has been normal since before we were old enough to drive.
Exactly !
I am the same. All work, no distractions, no idle chitchat.
My daughter’s entire accounting team voted to stay working at home. In fact the company, a major distributer to the food and entertainment industry has closed a large office complex. My other daughter in HR also works from home, she has domestic and european HR responsibilities.
Productivity on my part has gone up.
- No more those long unneeded boring meetings where people just love to hear themselves talk.
- No more pop-ins to chit-chat
- No more clock watching.
- No more birthday’s parties to celebrate
And no more commuting...
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Agree 100%.
Been WFH every other week since March 2020. Saves me 210 miles per week and about 6 hours per week. With new “transitory inflation”, WFH also saves me about $50.40 on the weeks at home....more than $100/month in fuel cost.
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