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 work for one of the large international banks. Their executive management insists that everyone must return to the office. I’m going to hate it, especially the commute, cost of fuel and parking, crowds downtown, and more. Strangely, people I didn’t get along with while working in the office were much easier to get along with while working from home. I absolutely do not want to work in an office again, but probably have no choice.
Working/teaching out of the home is the future for millions of people. And it makes perfect sense, pandemic or no pandemic.
Just think of the billion# of wasted hours of commuting, and the trillions in wasted energy is cost to do so.
It’s the future. Bet the rent.
I think I could make working from home work, if I worked in the type of job where I could work from home.
How do you know when she’s always sending you out at 7am and told to not return until dark?
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.
Or bullied by the old guys.
As an engineer, the majority of my work could be done from home. So a mix of field work and home work is appropriate.
One thing you do miss by working at home is mentoring for you and others working with you. At least in my industry, you run into problems and have to ask people for ideas on how to solve it or people bring problems to you. Zoom just doesn’t work, in those cases.
You learn better in a group environment.
If your job is so repetitious that complete independence is do-able, than a guy like me will design system to put you out of work.
I read a book by Alvin Toffler called “The Third Wave”. He also wrote “Future Shock”, which warned us to stop having babies.
Well he was wrong about that but The Third Wave, read back in the late 90’s, described a world with homes that become electronic cottages. Everybody will work from home, it said.
So I began to dream. I was, at that time and am not proud of it, a Women’s Libber. I could bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan....then something about proving to my husband he’s a man. I worked a full time job, made lots of money but, but, but, I HATED THE COMMUTE TO WORK.
I would dream of living in my electronic cottage and after sleeping until I want to awake I’d stumble into the kitchen, get a coffee, gather my papers and get to work.
I commuted by car from Baltimore to DC. I caught a but after parking in the fire department parking lot. I parked near Baltimore’s Little Italy and walked 12 blocks to my job because a)it was the closest I could park and I’d get good exercise.
The commute was always awful.
Well I’m retired now and wish I had a chance to work from home. I would have loved it.
The commute was a waste of a life.
“The commute was a waste of a life.”
Agreed 100%
Before that, I worked up in Boston and my commute was 90 minutes a day - each way - in a car. I liked that as well. I listened to a lot of talk radio, music, podcasts and books on tape while I commuted.
I despise it. I hate traffic--even when I have nowhere special to be or timeframe to be there in. I don't know what it is, but I just hate driving in traffic.
It could be that I learned to drive in the country, where I grew up. Back country roads, no traffic at all, and no one getting in my way or causing me unnecessary frustration.
It is a win-win for me as I love working from home and the new office is only 4 minutes from my house if I do need to meet with a client or come into the office for other reasons.
I have no desire to go back to a cubicle farm and helicopter bosses.
Rolling out of bed and going right to work is just not my style. I need that mental separation between home and the workplace.
“Rolling out of bed and going right to work is just not my style. “
My alarm is set for 6:56, I get up, walk across the hall to my office room, take a piss, brush my teeth, login by 7:00 AM.
If I am at the office, I am still on the same number of WebEx and Skype calls, because someone is always at a different location than my city.
I just see the remote time as proving who got work done versus who absconded with other people’s work and claimed it for themselves.
The problem will be expanding expectations. It has always been thus with working, but the “convenience” of working at home will make it worse.
You’re an employer. There is a management position opening up and you have two candidates who work remotely. Both are roughly equal in abilities, but one - because he has a family - logs in at nine and off at five. The other - who has no family - seems to be available almost 24 hours a day. The second one would seem to be the natural choice, but if you are the kind of company that rewards overworking, won’t this eventually evolve into a corporate expectation of 24/7 availability?
“Going to work” helped create a clear divide between working and not working. Working from home blurs that line. It is a slippery slope.
Several years ago, I worked for a large corporation. There was a young lady in my office who popped out two little ones in just over two years time (fertile Myrtle). Making a long story short, the pointy headed boss wanted me to switch to her job (since it had to be done in office) and for her to assume my duties and work from home. Sounded like age discrimination, plus other abnormalities to me. I can only imagine what some young parents accomplish for companies while attending their rug rats during the day.
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