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 am already seeing CNN propaganda that companies need to get rid of the 4o hour work week altogether. Won’t it be fun when they eliminate hours to 31 1/2 hours per week to avoid Obamacare mandates?
Working from home is a dream come true for me. After 23 years in the office with constant co-worker interruptions, way too long meetings, and nearby cube-dwellers talking too loud on the phone COVID-19 meant working from home for 15 months.
My productivity went through the roof. I started finishing my assigned work each sprint with 2-3 days left. Since COVID-19 slammed our revenue by more than 40% the R&D budget was shrunk - so I spend my extra time working on new product features that were put on hold.
In April 2021 I was one of less than 20% in our company to get a bonus and then in June got the biggest raise of my career. This was due to the first perfect Performance Review I ever earned. In addition I have been told that next April I will be promoted to the highest level on our company’s engineering track.
How did I do it? I decided to give back to the company half of the 15 hours per week I used to spend commuting to the office. Combine that with much shorter meetings due to all being on Teams plus no co-worker interruptions (my family has been great at abiding by my work hours), no neighbors yelling on the phone, and 15 minute lunches since the kitchen was 10 steps away.
Added bonuses of working from home: 400 miles less automobile expenses; cheaper and healthier lunches at home; my wife was able to get a better job since I am now able to drive the kids to and from school and summer camps; and no more paying state income taxes to the RINO overlord in the next state (I work in a no-state-income-tax state).
WFH might not be for everyone, but for those that can do it well, the benefits are incredible. My company has allowed about 5% of the workers to go fully WFH, and about 35% to go partial (2-3 days per week). All others are required to return to the office. (So far in 2 1/2 months only 2 workers have left that I know of over being forced back into the office - none on the engineering side - both pencil pushing middle managers.)
You kind of missed my point. Easy jobs can be automated and should be. Ones that aren’t, won’t be. No insults intended.
“If your job is so repetitious that complete independence is do-able”
Who said anything about “complete independence”?
One of my first bosses often said, “The work expands to fit the time available for it.”
He was comparing the differing amounts of time logged into employee’s time sheets for a given type of project, when we were slow vs. when we were busy.
“I absolutely do not want to work in an office again, but probably have no choice.”
You may have one choice. A few year ago I fired an employer, one reason being their dick attitude about working from home.
WFH is nice, I’ve done it quite a bit but also never completely left the office or the area of the office so I was able to be there when necessary.
I’m a contrarian to this subject compared to the many who live it because they are receivers of benefit from it. What I see is more like Loaf From Home based on the number of couples and families out and about at all times of the day somehow justifying to themselves their absence from regular work hours. I have also managed people who are on their own and are supposed to be WFH, they start to justify a lot of things that just aren’t so like their productivity and attention to work.
In LFH relationships are killed, nuance is lost, convenience of sharing ideas and asking questions is gone, mentoring is absent and so is stimulation of the creative process by associations and none of this can be replaced by LFH.
All of this comes from someone who worked world wide and managed several virtual teams that were successful in delivering complex projects. One of the things I found essential was to plan for face-to-face opportunities even if it was a partially necessary meeting that included a meal and social gathering. I am an engineer not known for being a social butterfly but I think I can see what is necessary for people to be human and get the best effort from them.
LFH has its place but not always. I’m sorry for some to say that it is time to really go back to work.
However, I do have a co-worker who has issues working even when in the office. Being remote has, for him, turned into LFH, as you mentioned. It really is dependent on one's ethics and motivation.
Ditto
It’s been a long time since I worked in an office building, but I remember it being endless made-up meetings to justify everyone’s productivity (or lack thereof) while at the same time getting absolutely nothing done.
And that’s not to mention the between-meeting time where co-workers pop their heads into your office to drone on about the party they were at or the girl they got drunk enough to sleep with them the night before.
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