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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.