Flexibility sounds good but what I have seen over the last year is that all boundaries in terms of when and where work begins and ends are being eroded. This started accidentally but it is now being actively exploited on an unprecedented scale.
At will employment is the problem. You should be able to switch off at a certain time and ignore work comms. But I think in US you’d be scared of being fired. In other countries like UK this has never been a concern, and WFH doesn’t change that.
This might be a blessing in disguise. Hopefully it will force us to really examine our work culture, and begin to challenge this notion that 40+ hours a week of our lives should be devoted to work (unless of course, you're working that many hours voluntarily on something you love).
a) I feel sympathy for the young, single-types who benefit most from working in a busy environment. The WFH change is wonderful for the older types a bit fed up with long-commutes and open plan offices. I hope the hybrid approach allows us to treat the office like an old-school marketday where once or twice a week, everyone is there and the goal is to be as social as possible. The softer skills of work arent easily passed on via a Zoom call
b) The world has had to quickly adapt to WFH, and I suspect much of the dislike some people have experienced with WFH is due to things that arent fit for this purpose. Many of my colleagues live in small London flats with both parents trying to hold simultaneous zoom-calls and with schools being shutdown, having to manage their children while also doing their jobs. As WFH (hopefully) sticks, these problems iron themselves out
On your b. topic, that's what my company has been pretty clear about: we aren't working from home, we are at home, during a global crisis, trying to work.
It's not the experience I had before, around 2010-2011, working completely remote/from home for 2 years with processes and companies adapted to that. Being able to take 2 hours during an afternoon to meet people for a coffee somewhere, or go to the gym.
We are just trying to work from home now, not really living through a proper experience of that with all its benefits.
For (a) can we do barbecues and cookouts and happy hours instead? We can bring whiteboards if needed but I really don't want to spend even 2 hours a week commuting again.
I really much appreciate this aspect of the pandemic. The "home office revolution" has long been possible, but still would not have happened for a long time without COVID.
People with friends and family can't gauge how bad of a toll this has taken on lonely single guys like me. For most of them WFH been a Godsend. I really wish this ends or at least there remains enough places which require working from the office.
It might really be a liberating moment for people (and economies, but let's care about people first). I don't know the future but I've seen way too much absurd friction in too many workplaces not to believe this can be a good step.
Meanwhile, here in Belgium, some companies force employees to come to the office despite government plea to allow remote work. Subjectively, there's been much less traffic on the streets in the beginning of the pandemic. Now, it seems like far too many people are still commuting every day.
You are completely right, some employers just can't cope with the tiny bit of control they lose when their employers work from home. A friend of mine (who is also in IT) still has to do an hour and a half drive 3 times a week just so that a client can 'see' that he is working. There is no reason for him to go work there, other than inspection. We're in IT, all we need is a decent computer and a network connection.
It won't be for everyone but there has still been a huge revolution. Many businesses didn't even have laptops for employees before. Having the technical infrastructure makes it much easier to allow 1-2 days per week from home.
I've also seen WFH advertised much more in job ads. That in turn probably means that more candidates ask for partial WFH as part of their decision to join the company. In the end, that will drive change even if some managers object it.
I like the mention of being able to work from your local branch. It may help keep more branches open if they're doubling up as workspaces for the "office" staff
A mix of both home-office and going to the actual office is probably the way to go for most companies. Sometimes being in the office just isn't necessary and colleague interaction can be done by phone or chat/video apps.
However, going into full time home-office mode isn't great either since you would miss out on the random meetings/talks when you run into each other in the office.
i read a lot of studies about how productivity increases when working from home.
so i decided to superficially calculate this after a year of working from home for all of my very diverse clientele (fortune 500, small agencies, etc). i felt that a lot less work was being done, but i didn’t know how much. or why.
since i’m a coder at heart i looked at tickets/features and commits. something easy to measure.
what i found is a big productivity drop. in some cases there was 40% less work done from home than from the office. and this happened gradually over the course of a year.
and since i know people working for big corps in HK i’ve asked them to do the same. their company’s productivity increased slightly (5%<). they were never forced to work from home.
this is by no means a scientific study, but i was surprised at the huge drops i was seeing, and even more surprised at the continuous drop off across the time line.
did anyone else notice this, or are just my clients outliners?
what will wfh do to the productivity difference between asian countries and western ones? will this apparent productivity loss be offset somehow?
You're ignoring the variables that conflate. Plenty of people I know are burnt out, tired, and not as productive as they are at their peak. This isn't "WFH". This is WFH and quarantine and not being able to travel or take travelling vacations and worrying about your health and the health of everyone you care about and schooling at home and a pandemic and......you get the point. No data claiming a productivity drop during this pandemic can be isolated to WFH with any reliability.
I'm burnt out. My productivity has been garbage this month. The cause isn't WFH or even work in general - the cause is that it's been an utterly miserable year for the world and it's wearing me down. I'm tired of isolation and I'm tired of constant reminders in the world around me that I'm surrounded by idiots without empathy who would rather protest their right to put others in danger than take basic precautions to protect those around them, and I'm ABSOLUTELY tired of the fact that these people haven't learned or changed in an entire year.
I have been working from home for about 10 years. I have been a top performer in most companies I worked with, promotions, etc.
My productivity is down this year a lot. And I mean a lot. This is not because of WFH but do to the situation we live in. I think I wrote like 50 lines of code this month. I just can't stand it anymore, being locked inside the house with a computer on. I was WFH pre-pandemic but travelled, surfed, played social sports, went to cafes, beach. I was productive but my life was balanced and nice. Lets not even talk about the home schooling period where I had to be a teacher and full time worker (like many parents).
Now? I hate my life. I just wake up with the desire for it to be night and go to bed and have the day behind me.
I actually think during this pandemic I would be more productive in an office, due to having some kind of normal, getting out of the house, see other people and talk with others. My gf just started a new job this week that required her to go to the office. You can't imagine how much I envy her right now. I wouldn't mind a 50 minute commute or whatnot, just for a sense of going back to normal.
So yeah, I think you are doing a very unscientific 'study' based on the current situation the world if going through.
What you failed to account for is that we are all working from home during a global health crisis.
I never felt burnt out before, but I do now. I haven't worked much more than if I was in the office, but conflating not having an office space for the usual water cooler discussions that helped shape architectures, having to schedule any kind of small conversation, be ready in your seat, etc. Having to be on during the expected office hours but from home, with no contrasts in life apart from the occasional walk, biking outside.
The drop is not necessarily due to working from home, more due to: working at home, during a crisis, while trying to build up completely new processes for working remotely, adjusting team spirit for that, adjusting means of communication to not be overwhelming (how many of us haven't already experienced Zoom/videocalls fatigue and started to give up on them? I know I have).
We are all mostly just at home, trying to work, I would hate to see this kind of data being misused to state that working from home is less productive. Working during a pandemic while loved ones are dying or in danger is less productive.
You're close to the right idea, but "easy to measure" is exactly the problem here. Tickets close is not a meaningful measure of productivity. It's better than commits, though. I've been pushing commits far less frequently since working from home, but it isn't because I'm actually pushing less code. It's because I no longer need to push to a central Git server in order to share with myself between a company-issued laptop I use when I am contributing from home and my office desktop when I'm in the office. I only have code in one place, and I only need to commit and push when I'm confident it's actually working, not as an adhoc sharing mechanism between devices that can't share storage.
Ultimately, the only metric that matters is company value and that has gone through the roof for virtually every company out there in spite of the pandemic. Unfortunately, that seems largely due to central bank action, not because their products have gotten any better, so that confounds any attempt to reduce the causes of value changes to anything you can easily measure at the individual employee level.
But currently I'm burned out. Living a groundhog day esque life. Getting up, sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours for work, sitting in front of a TV or a computer for 4-6 hours for "fun", go to sleep, repeat.
I'm trying to spend a few hour outside a day, but I have already seen every street in the 5 miles radius of my home at least twice.
I haven't been on a real vacation in the previous one and a half years. Taking PTO for sitting home is not relaxing.
Definitely down. Not sure if because the amount of distractions at home, kid, pet, things to tidy up... or if because people are taking this more like exceptional times, so it is OK to slack.
Something I haven't seen brought up much, probably because most of the people commenting on these posts aren't disabled, is the positive impact on disabled people. I have spine problems that effectively prevent me from being able to commute. I was able to get around that in the past by taking trains I could stand/sit on, but that required me to both live and work within walking distance of a train station, which in the US is not very many places. Then I was able to get around it when my wife started working at the same site because I could just carpool with her and be reclined the whole time.
But nothing truly freed me like the ability to work from bed. The possibility of a bad flareup or injury always haunted me because in the past it has meant possibly months of missed time while I go on disability or even having to change jobs. Now it means nothing. I mean, something because I'll be in more pain and miserable, but I can at least keep working.
i do hope that you are still taking a break when the pain flares up but i can totally see the difference to being out of commission for a week just because it's to painful to get in a car, when you could otherwise work, as long as you can sit comfortably and lie down for breaks, or whatever it is you need to do to get relief.
not to mention the difficulty of finding work that will accommodate your needs, since, even if it's required by law to not discriminate, some companies still find an excuse to not hire, or are making it difficult to get your workplace adjusted to your requirements.
Is there a risk of wide adoption of home working becoming discriminatory against people with low incomes?
I am lucky enough to have a 4 bedroom house that I share with just my fiancée. This means that I have space to have a nice office, that is separate from whatever else is going on in the house. This is not a luxury that everybody has. In most cases it will be because they can't afford it, but in some cases it will be because they prefer to or need to live in a big city where it is affordable to very few.
If you're in that situation working from home is going to be a less pleasant, less attractive option. If a large portion of workplaces become remote-first are you going to be at a disadvantage if you prefer an office?
We're not there yet - there aren't many remote first companies, and most companies offer the option but I worry that what for a lot of us is a blessing will become a curse to some.
that's a very good point. i could not get any work done if i didn't have a separate room. it's a small one (4-5sqm) but that's enough.
however that's the thing. most apartments i looked at in one particular city didn't have any small rooms. in order to get four bedrooms (one to be converted to an office) i could not find anything smaller than 150sqm. a friend of a relative has a 100sqm apartment with 5 rooms. two of them are mere closets with a window, but that's the perfect size for a home office.
another issue is tax relief. if you don't have your office in a separate room, you can't write off the full cost for that office as a work expense (which would be subtracted from your income, so you pay less income taxes). if your office is a desk in the living room, then you only get to write off half of the cost for that desk (or less) just because the room is also used for other purposes, and your kids, god forbid might use your desk for other activities when you are not working.
Absolutely. You learn so much more during the first years than just technical content. It's all about behavior at work, socializing, office politics etc. Sadly, anyone deciding if people should work remotely has already done that and is most likely in a position where they have a family and enough space at home for a nice office. Few people in upper management work out of a studio apartment in their first job.
I bet they'll walk back this advice when employees start moving outside the UK and start living across the world, and suddenly Nationwide has the laws and bureaucracies of hundreds of countries to deal with...
"Hi HR, you need to pay be the 8 years maternity pay you owe me because I live in Svalbard and the local laws require all employers pay that".
That would be an issue, but thankfully isn't necessarily the case.
you're usually bound by the locality where the contract is signed, so you dont suddenly gain rights just by moving abroad until the employer actually creates a new contract. for that to happen, the employer would have to create a legal entity in that legal region.
do note however, that some nations dont allow you to work while on their soil, unless you specifically get a visa permitting it.
Just like taxation regimes have scrambled to keep up with the fact that you can order something from abroad and have ambiguity of where the sales tax will be applied - this is the next big thing about to happen:
High skilled, (comparatively) rich, healthy knowledge workers will leave the place they reside, move somewhere like Dubai (no tax, few free public services - doesn't matter they're not going to need them) to work for a company based - on paper, somewhere similarly - meanwhile the sick, aging and destitute back in the old country depend on tax-funded public services that have lost their tax base.
I don't know what the solution is - but it's something I think needs to be considered. Conversely, people might want to move the other way (say to the nordics), but, I'd wager it being heavily skewed in the first direction.
I don't think they're saying work anywhere in the world. They're saying work anywhere within the UK, including HQ, local high street branches, at home, or a mixture of the above.
The other advantage of the UK being small and everyone working in country is you can therefore still meet up easily say every couple of weeks, or for smaller groups to work together for a short time.
I guess in the US people can fly for this too. Does anyone do "work anywhere but must be in the same state"?
No, Europe tends to have the same tax rates and rules per country. But in a way you can compare the EU and US here, moving countries within the EU also has tax consequences. But due to language barriers, that happens less often than people moving states in the US. And the UK isn't part of the EU anyway.
I doubt it's anywhere as in 'you can work from the beach in Thailand'. Going abroad means complying with the local tax regime and if spent enough time outside the UK, no taxes need to be paid there.
[+] [-] scandox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xvector|5 years ago|reply
Almost everyone I know works normal hours or less even during WFH.
To be perfectly clear, this is true regardless of WFH. Your work will never set boundaries for you as they benefit from you working harder and longer.
[+] [-] adamhp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Anktionaer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aseerdbnarng|5 years ago|reply
a) I feel sympathy for the young, single-types who benefit most from working in a busy environment. The WFH change is wonderful for the older types a bit fed up with long-commutes and open plan offices. I hope the hybrid approach allows us to treat the office like an old-school marketday where once or twice a week, everyone is there and the goal is to be as social as possible. The softer skills of work arent easily passed on via a Zoom call
b) The world has had to quickly adapt to WFH, and I suspect much of the dislike some people have experienced with WFH is due to things that arent fit for this purpose. Many of my colleagues live in small London flats with both parents trying to hold simultaneous zoom-calls and with schools being shutdown, having to manage their children while also doing their jobs. As WFH (hopefully) sticks, these problems iron themselves out
[+] [-] piva00|5 years ago|reply
It's not the experience I had before, around 2010-2011, working completely remote/from home for 2 years with processes and companies adapted to that. Being able to take 2 hours during an afternoon to meet people for a coffee somewhere, or go to the gym.
We are just trying to work from home now, not really living through a proper experience of that with all its benefits.
[+] [-] adamhp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hendrikto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sn_master|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xvector|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] f6v|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reeeeee|5 years ago|reply
All while WFH is obligated by the government.
[+] [-] dx034|5 years ago|reply
I've also seen WFH advertised much more in job ads. That in turn probably means that more candidates ask for partial WFH as part of their decision to join the company. In the end, that will drive change even if some managers object it.
[+] [-] Jonnax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kzzzznot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattuk89|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cletus|5 years ago|reply
A more accurate description is probably “vacation days determined by whether your manager likes you”.
[+] [-] xvector|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vm646m80v4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexf95|5 years ago|reply
However, going into full time home-office mode isn't great either since you would miss out on the random meetings/talks when you run into each other in the office.
[+] [-] midasuni|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmlx|5 years ago|reply
so i decided to superficially calculate this after a year of working from home for all of my very diverse clientele (fortune 500, small agencies, etc). i felt that a lot less work was being done, but i didn’t know how much. or why.
since i’m a coder at heart i looked at tickets/features and commits. something easy to measure.
what i found is a big productivity drop. in some cases there was 40% less work done from home than from the office. and this happened gradually over the course of a year.
and since i know people working for big corps in HK i’ve asked them to do the same. their company’s productivity increased slightly (5%<). they were never forced to work from home.
this is by no means a scientific study, but i was surprised at the huge drops i was seeing, and even more surprised at the continuous drop off across the time line.
did anyone else notice this, or are just my clients outliners?
what will wfh do to the productivity difference between asian countries and western ones? will this apparent productivity loss be offset somehow?
[+] [-] Arainach|5 years ago|reply
I'm burnt out. My productivity has been garbage this month. The cause isn't WFH or even work in general - the cause is that it's been an utterly miserable year for the world and it's wearing me down. I'm tired of isolation and I'm tired of constant reminders in the world around me that I'm surrounded by idiots without empathy who would rather protest their right to put others in danger than take basic precautions to protect those around them, and I'm ABSOLUTELY tired of the fact that these people haven't learned or changed in an entire year.
[+] [-] odshoifsdhfs|5 years ago|reply
My productivity is down this year a lot. And I mean a lot. This is not because of WFH but do to the situation we live in. I think I wrote like 50 lines of code this month. I just can't stand it anymore, being locked inside the house with a computer on. I was WFH pre-pandemic but travelled, surfed, played social sports, went to cafes, beach. I was productive but my life was balanced and nice. Lets not even talk about the home schooling period where I had to be a teacher and full time worker (like many parents).
Now? I hate my life. I just wake up with the desire for it to be night and go to bed and have the day behind me.
I actually think during this pandemic I would be more productive in an office, due to having some kind of normal, getting out of the house, see other people and talk with others. My gf just started a new job this week that required her to go to the office. You can't imagine how much I envy her right now. I wouldn't mind a 50 minute commute or whatnot, just for a sense of going back to normal.
So yeah, I think you are doing a very unscientific 'study' based on the current situation the world if going through.
[+] [-] piva00|5 years ago|reply
I never felt burnt out before, but I do now. I haven't worked much more than if I was in the office, but conflating not having an office space for the usual water cooler discussions that helped shape architectures, having to schedule any kind of small conversation, be ready in your seat, etc. Having to be on during the expected office hours but from home, with no contrasts in life apart from the occasional walk, biking outside.
The drop is not necessarily due to working from home, more due to: working at home, during a crisis, while trying to build up completely new processes for working remotely, adjusting team spirit for that, adjusting means of communication to not be overwhelming (how many of us haven't already experienced Zoom/videocalls fatigue and started to give up on them? I know I have).
We are all mostly just at home, trying to work, I would hate to see this kind of data being misused to state that working from home is less productive. Working during a pandemic while loved ones are dying or in danger is less productive.
[+] [-] nonameiguess|5 years ago|reply
Ultimately, the only metric that matters is company value and that has gone through the roof for virtually every company out there in spite of the pandemic. Unfortunately, that seems largely due to central bank action, not because their products have gotten any better, so that confounds any attempt to reduce the causes of value changes to anything you can easily measure at the individual employee level.
[+] [-] ProZsolt|5 years ago|reply
But currently I'm burned out. Living a groundhog day esque life. Getting up, sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours for work, sitting in front of a TV or a computer for 4-6 hours for "fun", go to sleep, repeat.
I'm trying to spend a few hour outside a day, but I have already seen every street in the 5 miles radius of my home at least twice.
I haven't been on a real vacation in the previous one and a half years. Taking PTO for sitting home is not relaxing.
[+] [-] guilhas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnedeotes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonameiguess|5 years ago|reply
But nothing truly freed me like the ability to work from bed. The possibility of a bad flareup or injury always haunted me because in the past it has meant possibly months of missed time while I go on disability or even having to change jobs. Now it means nothing. I mean, something because I'll be in more pain and miserable, but I can at least keep working.
[+] [-] em-bee|5 years ago|reply
not to mention the difficulty of finding work that will accommodate your needs, since, even if it's required by law to not discriminate, some companies still find an excuse to not hire, or are making it difficult to get your workplace adjusted to your requirements.
[+] [-] rkangel|5 years ago|reply
I am lucky enough to have a 4 bedroom house that I share with just my fiancée. This means that I have space to have a nice office, that is separate from whatever else is going on in the house. This is not a luxury that everybody has. In most cases it will be because they can't afford it, but in some cases it will be because they prefer to or need to live in a big city where it is affordable to very few.
If you're in that situation working from home is going to be a less pleasant, less attractive option. If a large portion of workplaces become remote-first are you going to be at a disadvantage if you prefer an office?
We're not there yet - there aren't many remote first companies, and most companies offer the option but I worry that what for a lot of us is a blessing will become a curse to some.
[+] [-] em-bee|5 years ago|reply
however that's the thing. most apartments i looked at in one particular city didn't have any small rooms. in order to get four bedrooms (one to be converted to an office) i could not find anything smaller than 150sqm. a friend of a relative has a 100sqm apartment with 5 rooms. two of them are mere closets with a window, but that's the perfect size for a home office.
another issue is tax relief. if you don't have your office in a separate room, you can't write off the full cost for that office as a work expense (which would be subtracted from your income, so you pay less income taxes). if your office is a desk in the living room, then you only get to write off half of the cost for that desk (or less) just because the room is also used for other purposes, and your kids, god forbid might use your desk for other activities when you are not working.
[+] [-] curiousgal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dx034|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] londons_explore|5 years ago|reply
"Hi HR, you need to pay be the 8 years maternity pay you owe me because I live in Svalbard and the local laws require all employers pay that".
[+] [-] 411111111111111|5 years ago|reply
you're usually bound by the locality where the contract is signed, so you dont suddenly gain rights just by moving abroad until the employer actually creates a new contract. for that to happen, the employer would have to create a legal entity in that legal region.
do note however, that some nations dont allow you to work while on their soil, unless you specifically get a visa permitting it.
[+] [-] sn_master|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alibarber|5 years ago|reply
High skilled, (comparatively) rich, healthy knowledge workers will leave the place they reside, move somewhere like Dubai (no tax, few free public services - doesn't matter they're not going to need them) to work for a company based - on paper, somewhere similarly - meanwhile the sick, aging and destitute back in the old country depend on tax-funded public services that have lost their tax base.
I don't know what the solution is - but it's something I think needs to be considered. Conversely, people might want to move the other way (say to the nordics), but, I'd wager it being heavily skewed in the first direction.
[+] [-] dkarp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billynomates111|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frabcus|5 years ago|reply
I guess in the US people can fly for this too. Does anyone do "work anywhere but must be in the same state"?
[+] [-] dx034|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cosmodisk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benlumen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alephnan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gswdh|5 years ago|reply
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