I'd question how conclusions are being drawn here. I think the key takeaway is that output did not change.
The authors then go on to say that since hours worked increased, productivity decreased. But how do we define what an "hour worked" really means? I know that I definitely spend more time "working" during WFH in the sense that I am either being responsive to colleagues or actively working on my own work. However during that time I am also doing way more household tasks than I would be working in an office.
You may call that a loss of productivity, but I'd call it an increase in flexibility, freedom, and job satisfaction. And to reiterate, output stayed the same, so what's the problem?
I'm with you. I mix personal tasks and work tasks throughout the day. My work output is the same or better, but the stuff I'm getting done around the house - SKYROCKET! My quality of life has improved dramatically.
Honestly, I think the study sort of damns itself with this line:
> Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably.
You can easily translate this as:
> Without workers in the office, middle management was left to spend additional time on pointless meetings, inhibiting their workers from spending their time on work tasks.
If that is true, let's consider the facts:
1. Workers worked longer hours.
2. Workers spent more time in meetings than before.
3. Workers achieved roughly the same output.
Now, if we stare at these three things really hard, I think the conclusion is that additional meetings do not play the supplemental role that many managers seem to believe it does, and in fact minimizing meetings will increase productivity.
They go into this in the paper; it sounds like they have a quite granular level of detail here:
> The data also include information on hours worked, our primary input measure. This is measured in a sophisticated way, as the analytics software takes into account whether an employee actually engages in a relevant task (which counts as work time) or merely procrastinates at their desk (not counted), by monitoring which software tools the employee uses. Our key outcome measure is Productivity, output divided by hours worked. Thus, in contrast to studies of productivity during WFH based on surveys, our outcome variables are based on relatively objective analytics and monitoring data.
> Moreover, our data include (for a subset of employees) how time was allocated to various activities. That includes meetings, collaboration, and time focused on performing work without distractions. It also includes information on networking activities (contacts) with colleagues inside and outside the firm. Finally, we have data on employee characteristics such as age, experience, tenure at the company, gender, whether or not there is a child in the home, and an estimate of commute time during WFO
This sounds overall quite invasive, so at least from the description, they claim to be able to tell the difference between "an hour logged into slack doing household tasks" and "an hour working with 100% focus on a task".
That's an interesting twist. I like the positive aspect of it given I've mostly felt guilty for being able to flexibly take on more household tasks while taking breaks from work.
I do think things would trend even more positively had this not been a pandemic. Folks would have more flexibility in work location and could "pick their spots" better in the sense that they'd have more control over their environment and could tailor it to specific tasks.
It’s a shame the WFH experiment is blended with the pandemic. It’s hard to decouple the “effectiveness of WFH” from the “pervasive impact of a global pandemic on all aspects of daily life”. I think a lot of people got a negative taste for WFH for reasons that are less WFH and more pandemic.
Having three kids at home doing remote schooling is such a huge confounding factor. Anecdotally, my WFH productivity (or at least my uninterrupted work time tracked via RescueTime) seems to have improved since my older two went back to in-person school this quarter.
Yeah: I have always worked from home and nothing about my job has changed, but omg has life gotten harder even for me recently; it is also worth noting that the pandemic affects not only work life but also social life, which means that suddenly work almost automatically takes up a lot more time as there has often literally been nowhere else for me to go or people to see than "maybe my work colleagues would be willing to talk about our product... in the middle of the evening... oh, yep, they are, as they are just as bored and lonely as I am right now".
For sure. I feel like I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about work (in general, but especially remote work) if I, and my coworkers, had a normal social and family life along the way. It'd be a lot less exhausting and monotonous.
It seems like the overwhelming majority of people here are positive to WFH. I can't stand it. To me, a "remote first" workplace sounds abysmal. I like to have a physical workplace where our company can gather and focus on our goals together, in person. Picking up business related discussions, small talking, sharing music, joking around. Attempting this through video meetings or voice chats feels like a bad simulacrum. I just hope there's a place for people like me in your visions of the future distributed workplace.
I think there will always be a place for people like you, and you have nothing to worry about. I also think that working from home can be good in some situations but not others even for the same person. I can see myself getting sick of it, and the option of a good office would be nice.
The problem is that "office" in today's world generally means an open office layout designed to waste your time and distract you. If "office" meant an actual office with a door you can close so that you can do focused work, the situation would be different.
> I like to have a physical workplace where our company can gather and focus on our goals together, in person
I dont want to sound rude, but most people here seem to focus more on actual work output.
> discussions, small talking, sharing music, joking around.
This doesnt sound like work at all, only busywork; what negatively affects those around.
Most people prefer to do get shit done and go home (when you work from home, you remove the commute part) and then spend time with real friends, since people at work very often are not your real friends.
It's possible to have that remotely! It takes effort and requires intentionality, but you can make it happen.
We do daily 30 minute standups - which we intentionally run inefficiently at this point. It's a great time for watercooler talk, catching up, and generally building rapport that's hard to build at remote companies.
We also do twice weekly hang-out sessions. It takes some time to develop the habit. It's probably not for everyone but it's been incredibly positive for our team.
There will a place for folks like yourself be as long as it’s needed. Don’t take it the wrong way but once people who have preferences like yours are gone this notion of needing a office in the traditional sense, will pass. The need for working space will remain. The need for a “office” will go away. It’s a natural progression. It’s like Horses gave way to cars but peoples need for mobility remained. Our needs as humans have remained how we fulfill them changes as decades roll. Best to enjoy life and adapt. The other way is possible too....
JP morgan is forcing me to come into office, i am still waiting for my second dose.
Jamie is forcing ppl to come into work and making up stupid anecdotes about how ppl are unproductive at home. Him being "fed up" means i have to risk my life. [1]
I don't understand how he is getting away with this.
Kroger's CEO getting paid bonuses [1] to avoid giving front-line workers hazard pay while continuing to put their lives literally on the line over the past year gives me little hope that anyone will ever be held accountable for this sort of behavior.
> (They) would fully expect that by early July, all U.S.-based employees will be in the office on a consistent rotational schedule.
> Employee rotations at JPMorgan will be subject to a 50% occupancy cap until U.S. authorities revise their social-distancing guidelines, according to Tuesday’s memo. The bank advised workers that “with this time frame in mind you should start making any needed arrangements to help with your successful return.”
Why are you trying to make it seem like they told you to come in every day starting this week, whether you're vaccinated or not?
A useful natural experiment is when something changes in a way that can only (or at least almost entirely) affect your outcome by way of the cause you're interested in. In the cause and effect chain of A -> B -> C, if A affects B, but not C, then you can exploit wild things in A to learn about how B affects C. But if A affects C outside of B, you can't tell the effects apart.
COVID does not constitute a natural experiment!
It's a mantra that apparently needs repeating. The pandemic changed work from home. Work from home presumable changes productivity. The pandemic also changes productivity, so you can't tell where the pandemic-driven productivity changes are from more granularly. Learning anything that generalizes requires tremendous care.
"Sapience time measurement is sophisticated and designed to be resilient to simple manipulatio nattempts. Merely keeping the computer on for longer or watching videos instead of working does not increase Input. Rather, it would require having the relevant work software as the active window,and giving continuous user input (via mouse, keyboard)."
doesn't sound that sophisticated to me lol. in any case their claim that their output measure (completed tasks) is "rigorous and objective" is questionable to put it mildly: "The company uses a normalized measure of output to make different jobs and roles comparable.For example, for a programmer the output measure might be programming tasks completed divided by tasks assigned, times 100. For other roles, Output might be the number of reviews (e.g., of code) completed relative to the monthly target, or the number of reports delivered relative to the target.". no mention made of the relative effort required for each programming task, or the quality of reports delivered - not to mention no assessment of whether those targets accurately measure anything that's beneficial to the company.
lol, this would result in engineering teams generating progressively smaller scoped tickets to maximize tasks and reviews completed.
Update Text For Button -- started 5/10, completed 5/11
Update Color Of Button -- started 5/11, completed 5/12
Update Margins Of Button -- started 5/12, completed 5/13
Update Border Radius Of Button -- started 5/13
They used tracking software on employee's computers. That alone was enough for me to close the link without reading further. My company uses Microsoft's inane version of this, and the only real thing it measures is the amount of money going into Microsoft's account.
"the analytics software takes into account whether an employee actually engages in a relevant task (which counts as work time) or merely procrastinates at their desk (not counted), by
monitoring which software tools the employee uses"
That's genuinely awful. I wonder to what extent employees are aware of the analytics, and how many people just set up macros look busy.
One of the measures/trackers is the various spreadsheets that get opened. This certainly hurts the employees that have automated those aspects of their jobs. One of my initial roles had me inherit 15 different spreadsheet reports and over time I pushed all the report logic upstream so that I never had to open them. This made me much more productive whereas the tracking would show me as contributing very little.
It never seemed surprising to me to think that the disaster that has been high school and college from home might also be a problem for working from home. After all, one major difference between working from home and learning from home is that working relies on human interaction much more heavily than studying.
But no one seems to even bother disputing that college-from-home is an inefficient way to learn compared to in-person. It is practically a universally accepted fact. Meanwhile, the entire internet seems to rush to find flaws, no matter how minute, in any study that casts the faintest negative light on working-from-home.
i learned my entire curriculum from youtube 2014-2018 so i dispute that remote college is inefficient. however i would not dispute that universities would have any motivation to make the remote learning process work well for fear of future consequences.
> The jobs involve significant cognitive work, developing new software
or hardware applications or solutions, collaborating with teams of professionals, working with clients,
and engaging in innovation and continuous improvement.
> The company provided rich data for a large sample of more than 10,000 employees,
for 17 months before and during WFH, from its personnel records and workforce analytics systems.
It has a highly-developed process for setting goals and tracking progress towards them, culminating
in a primary output measure for each employee.
I am skeptical. Why? I've never seen a half-decent way of quantifying output in all my time on the job at 7 companies. Sure, this company complies enough numbers so that clients and upper management feel the performance is quantified, but that's not the same thing. At a minimum this productivity metric needs to be interrogated more closely.
A lot of comments here saying that this is a flawed study because we don't know how the pandemic may have impacted a statistical decline in productivity. I must ask, why is this not a concern when someone anecdotally or statistically shows an increase in productivity from Covid WFH? The response is instead something like "we've known it all along! WFH is better!".
Honestly, I think if that's the general consensus, then who gives a shit about productivity?
Employees, especially in America already have almost no bargaining power, literally no statute mandated vacation, terrible worker protections like "exempt (from overtime pay) employees" which I'm sure almost everyone on this board falls under. So literally the more hours they make you work, the less per hour you earn. How that one got passed congress without a revolt I'm not sure I'll ever understand.
But I digress....if employees like WFH a lot better then they should have it.
For me personally, the reason is that I fully expect the pandemic to negatively impact productivity in ways completely unrelated to WFH (children in home instead of school, stress, lack of preparedness to proper WFH, etc.). In contrast, I find it difficult to think of pandemic-related but not WFH-related aspects that I expect to improve productivity. I'd be happy to be convinced otherwise.
Probably just intuition, wfh was more productive despite a global pandemic. Intuitively covid is a disruption that would decrease in productivity like other distractions
Honestly, IMO most of economics "research" is just a random assortment of bullshit viewed through a lens of confirmation bias. Results don't match your priors? Make adjustments to your model assumptions until it does. Disagree with a result? Point out at all the ways in which those assumptions are imperfect. Results match your priors? LGTM.
It might be because a global pandemic is assumed to depress people's spirits, which isn't what we'd expect to increase productivity. So we rely on our intuition for directionality?
Should be studied more, but wouldn't you be surprised to know that the pandemic itself (stress, isolation, deferred medical care, etc.) caused an increase?
It could well be that CoVid19 led to a 50% productivity loss (processes had to be completely reengineered or stood up from scratch without setting foot in the office).
Then, if the actual measured loss is 20% then perhaps it actually went up by 30% (the difference).
One cannot really conclude much from this study due to a lack of control, and I hope this is discussed honestly in the paper.
One thing I could observe is that working from home required a lot of people that are not used to it to learn to communicate professionally in writing, which they weren't used to. With the option of clarifying via a quick personal chat on the corridor taken due to an "all remote" forced work mode, poor communicators really do need a lot of overhead in terms of extra Teams/Zoom/Slack... meetings to get their message across.
Another observation was there was suddenly a lot of extra work. Initially I expected to have more time due to less business. In reality, CoVid19 also presented new opportunities, so extra projects were launched that would not have been required without the pandemic. Another variable that can't really be controlled.
Working from home as a planned/rolled out thing for a percentage of people is vastly different from a pandemic improptu shutdown. I was actually surprised how quickly the whole business world adjusted. I've been arguing for years in favour of working from home but was told it can't be done, or people won't do enough work.
If there's something I've realised about the hn gestalt, it's that any anecdote in favour of wfh is taken as true by default, while any critique of wfh is assumed to be bunk unless absolutely faultness.
I'd be curious to hear about the effects of pets, especially since so many people added them at some point during the pandemic so you could get some interesting before and after stats.
That’s part of the point. Sometimes you’ll be surprised. If you test lots of hypotheses getting results that surprise you along with lots that don’t increases your confidence that the surprising results are probably real. If you don’t test obvious things you’ll never be surprised by disconfirmation.
What raises my eyebrows here is that the output is 100.00% in both periods, for both the 1st and 3rd quartile. This seems extremely artificial. Basically, when 1 task is assigned, 1.0000 tasks will be completed. I’ve only skimmed but didn’t see any discussion of how the tasks are assigned - is there any variation on that end?
I don't see they have considered , daycares being closed, kids at home, remote schooling, no where to go, mental agony , loneliness, overworked, many new to remote work culture, non-remote friendly processes etc. Analyzing WFH when a pandemic is ongoing is not helping anyone and it is doing no good.
I think it is, frankly, irrelevant. Companies need to understand that their employees are adults, and should be able to pick whichever way of working is comfortable for them. If that decreases productivity, they should get less in compensation.
I doubt it will change, though, unless employees start to organize in unions and demand to be treated in less patronizing way.
I see the point of employees’ well being is always missing from these conversations as the main topic.
Across companies I’m seeing it’s getting increasingly difficult for people who liked a simple 9-5 or 10-6 in the pre-pandemic days. On most days they could just switch-off from work in the early evening by leaving the work place.
That boundary is now constantly stretching. Someone has a kid so they want a different time, someone has daily house chores so they’d rather take that 3-5pm off and then extend to 5-8pm and they’d expect others to adjust around it.
It’s especially bad in my country, India. This place already had a chronic national work-life balance issue and it’s limitless in many ways now. US companies anyway treat this place as offshore software worker colony no matter how you’d want to dress this in words. I recently switched from an Indian startup (quite bad work-life balance) to a US firm and I could never imagine it would have changed for the worse. Anyway I’ve resigned and I’m interviewing only for very large MNCs where I know multiple people personally who can vouch for this part of work culture.
Now of course you can be strict about your time and slowly become “that uncooperative person” in the team. Or you can just bleat about how that’s just company failing to streamline things.
Problem is majority seems fine with not having a work boundary in their lives that used be a hard stop early in the evening and then everybody else is automatically expected be okay with this.
There is no fix of this other than very clearly separating work and home.
> Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company
I suspect companies that already had strong WFH and remote friendly practices in place probably had very different outcomes. Western companies probably also have very different communication styles that would lead to different outcomes as well.
Ofcourse my productivity dived.. I have to spend 3h per day on meetings to align with ppl on various thing because ppl force me to have f2f meetings over zoom. Things that could have been an email.
On top of that are kids and wife who drive me crazy and constantly interrupt when you have to focus.
This is not a correct way to measure WFH, during normal WFH situation my kids would be in school and my wife at work..
And coworkers wouldnt be so desperate for interactions with others.
I've had a similar experience. Many more meetings now than when I was in the office. Middle managers not knowing what to do with themselves, so calling useless Zoom meetings.
However, I've been super productive when I've been able to get some quiet time outside of meetings.
[+] [-] dml2135|4 years ago|reply
The authors then go on to say that since hours worked increased, productivity decreased. But how do we define what an "hour worked" really means? I know that I definitely spend more time "working" during WFH in the sense that I am either being responsive to colleagues or actively working on my own work. However during that time I am also doing way more household tasks than I would be working in an office.
You may call that a loss of productivity, but I'd call it an increase in flexibility, freedom, and job satisfaction. And to reiterate, output stayed the same, so what's the problem?
[+] [-] taylodl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] discardable_dan|4 years ago|reply
> Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably.
You can easily translate this as:
> Without workers in the office, middle management was left to spend additional time on pointless meetings, inhibiting their workers from spending their time on work tasks.
If that is true, let's consider the facts:
1. Workers worked longer hours. 2. Workers spent more time in meetings than before. 3. Workers achieved roughly the same output.
Now, if we stare at these three things really hard, I think the conclusion is that additional meetings do not play the supplemental role that many managers seem to believe it does, and in fact minimizing meetings will increase productivity.
[+] [-] theptip|4 years ago|reply
> The data also include information on hours worked, our primary input measure. This is measured in a sophisticated way, as the analytics software takes into account whether an employee actually engages in a relevant task (which counts as work time) or merely procrastinates at their desk (not counted), by monitoring which software tools the employee uses. Our key outcome measure is Productivity, output divided by hours worked. Thus, in contrast to studies of productivity during WFH based on surveys, our outcome variables are based on relatively objective analytics and monitoring data.
> Moreover, our data include (for a subset of employees) how time was allocated to various activities. That includes meetings, collaboration, and time focused on performing work without distractions. It also includes information on networking activities (contacts) with colleagues inside and outside the firm. Finally, we have data on employee characteristics such as age, experience, tenure at the company, gender, whether or not there is a child in the home, and an estimate of commute time during WFO
This sounds overall quite invasive, so at least from the description, they claim to be able to tell the difference between "an hour logged into slack doing household tasks" and "an hour working with 100% focus on a task".
[+] [-] jrcii2|4 years ago|reply
I do think things would trend even more positively had this not been a pandemic. Folks would have more flexibility in work location and could "pick their spots" better in the sense that they'd have more control over their environment and could tailor it to specific tasks.
[+] [-] hvocode|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rustybelt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saurik|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway3699|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptmcc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mekkkkkk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsj_hn|4 years ago|reply
The problem is that "office" in today's world generally means an open office layout designed to waste your time and distract you. If "office" meant an actual office with a door you can close so that you can do focused work, the situation would be different.
[+] [-] rvba|4 years ago|reply
I dont want to sound rude, but most people here seem to focus more on actual work output.
> discussions, small talking, sharing music, joking around.
This doesnt sound like work at all, only busywork; what negatively affects those around.
Most people prefer to do get shit done and go home (when you work from home, you remove the commute part) and then spend time with real friends, since people at work very often are not your real friends.
[+] [-] SkyPuncher|4 years ago|reply
We do daily 30 minute standups - which we intentionally run inefficiently at this point. It's a great time for watercooler talk, catching up, and generally building rapport that's hard to build at remote companies.
We also do twice weekly hang-out sessions. It takes some time to develop the habit. It's probably not for everyone but it's been incredibly positive for our team.
[+] [-] ashtonkem|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quietthrow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dominotw|4 years ago|reply
Jamie is forcing ppl to come into work and making up stupid anecdotes about how ppl are unproductive at home. Him being "fed up" means i have to risk my life. [1]
I don't understand how he is getting away with this.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/jamie-dimon-fed-up-with-zoom...
[+] [-] whoisburbansky|4 years ago|reply
https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/kroger-blasted-for-endi....
[+] [-] macd|4 years ago|reply
> Employee rotations at JPMorgan will be subject to a 50% occupancy cap until U.S. authorities revise their social-distancing guidelines, according to Tuesday’s memo. The bank advised workers that “with this time frame in mind you should start making any needed arrangements to help with your successful return.”
Why are you trying to make it seem like they told you to come in every day starting this week, whether you're vaccinated or not?
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/jpmorgan-...
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago|reply
A useful natural experiment is when something changes in a way that can only (or at least almost entirely) affect your outcome by way of the cause you're interested in. In the cause and effect chain of A -> B -> C, if A affects B, but not C, then you can exploit wild things in A to learn about how B affects C. But if A affects C outside of B, you can't tell the effects apart.
COVID does not constitute a natural experiment!
It's a mantra that apparently needs repeating. The pandemic changed work from home. Work from home presumable changes productivity. The pandemic also changes productivity, so you can't tell where the pandemic-driven productivity changes are from more granularly. Learning anything that generalizes requires tremendous care.
[+] [-] ultrastable|4 years ago|reply
doesn't sound that sophisticated to me lol. in any case their claim that their output measure (completed tasks) is "rigorous and objective" is questionable to put it mildly: "The company uses a normalized measure of output to make different jobs and roles comparable.For example, for a programmer the output measure might be programming tasks completed divided by tasks assigned, times 100. For other roles, Output might be the number of reviews (e.g., of code) completed relative to the monthly target, or the number of reports delivered relative to the target.". no mention made of the relative effort required for each programming task, or the quality of reports delivered - not to mention no assessment of whether those targets accurately measure anything that's beneficial to the company.
[+] [-] josephorjoe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stakkur|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themanmaran|4 years ago|reply
That's genuinely awful. I wonder to what extent employees are aware of the analytics, and how many people just set up macros look busy.
[+] [-] Guest42|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigmattystyles|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] missedthecue|4 years ago|reply
But no one seems to even bother disputing that college-from-home is an inefficient way to learn compared to in-person. It is practically a universally accepted fact. Meanwhile, the entire internet seems to rush to find flaws, no matter how minute, in any study that casts the faintest negative light on working-from-home.
[+] [-] denimnerd42|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdeck|4 years ago|reply
> The company provided rich data for a large sample of more than 10,000 employees, for 17 months before and during WFH, from its personnel records and workforce analytics systems. It has a highly-developed process for setting goals and tracking progress towards them, culminating in a primary output measure for each employee.
I am skeptical. Why? I've never seen a half-decent way of quantifying output in all my time on the job at 7 companies. Sure, this company complies enough numbers so that clients and upper management feel the performance is quantified, but that's not the same thing. At a minimum this productivity metric needs to be interrogated more closely.
[+] [-] xhrpost|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NaturalPhallacy|4 years ago|reply
Honestly, I think if that's the general consensus, then who gives a shit about productivity?
Employees, especially in America already have almost no bargaining power, literally no statute mandated vacation, terrible worker protections like "exempt (from overtime pay) employees" which I'm sure almost everyone on this board falls under. So literally the more hours they make you work, the less per hour you earn. How that one got passed congress without a revolt I'm not sure I'll ever understand.
But I digress....if employees like WFH a lot better then they should have it.
[+] [-] andersource|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tayo42|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tqi|4 years ago|reply
Honestly, IMO most of economics "research" is just a random assortment of bullshit viewed through a lens of confirmation bias. Results don't match your priors? Make adjustments to your model assumptions until it does. Disagree with a result? Point out at all the ways in which those assumptions are imperfect. Results match your priors? LGTM.
[+] [-] edmundsauto|4 years ago|reply
Should be studied more, but wouldn't you be surprised to know that the pandemic itself (stress, isolation, deferred medical care, etc.) caused an increase?
[+] [-] jll29|4 years ago|reply
Then, if the actual measured loss is 20% then perhaps it actually went up by 30% (the difference).
One cannot really conclude much from this study due to a lack of control, and I hope this is discussed honestly in the paper.
One thing I could observe is that working from home required a lot of people that are not used to it to learn to communicate professionally in writing, which they weren't used to. With the option of clarifying via a quick personal chat on the corridor taken due to an "all remote" forced work mode, poor communicators really do need a lot of overhead in terms of extra Teams/Zoom/Slack... meetings to get their message across.
Another observation was there was suddenly a lot of extra work. Initially I expected to have more time due to less business. In reality, CoVid19 also presented new opportunities, so extra projects were launched that would not have been required without the pandemic. Another variable that can't really be controlled.
Working from home as a planned/rolled out thing for a percentage of people is vastly different from a pandemic improptu shutdown. I was actually surprised how quickly the whole business world adjusted. I've been arguing for years in favour of working from home but was told it can't be done, or people won't do enough work.
[+] [-] esyir|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkk3|4 years ago|reply
Surprising No One.
[+] [-] jrcii2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barry-cotter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rammy1234|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js8|4 years ago|reply
I doubt it will change, though, unless employees start to organize in unions and demand to be treated in less patronizing way.
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|4 years ago|reply
Across companies I’m seeing it’s getting increasingly difficult for people who liked a simple 9-5 or 10-6 in the pre-pandemic days. On most days they could just switch-off from work in the early evening by leaving the work place.
That boundary is now constantly stretching. Someone has a kid so they want a different time, someone has daily house chores so they’d rather take that 3-5pm off and then extend to 5-8pm and they’d expect others to adjust around it.
It’s especially bad in my country, India. This place already had a chronic national work-life balance issue and it’s limitless in many ways now. US companies anyway treat this place as offshore software worker colony no matter how you’d want to dress this in words. I recently switched from an Indian startup (quite bad work-life balance) to a US firm and I could never imagine it would have changed for the worse. Anyway I’ve resigned and I’m interviewing only for very large MNCs where I know multiple people personally who can vouch for this part of work culture.
Now of course you can be strict about your time and slowly become “that uncooperative person” in the team. Or you can just bleat about how that’s just company failing to streamline things.
Problem is majority seems fine with not having a work boundary in their lives that used be a hard stop early in the evening and then everybody else is automatically expected be okay with this.
There is no fix of this other than very clearly separating work and home.
[+] [-] Karrot_Kream|4 years ago|reply
> Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company
I suspect companies that already had strong WFH and remote friendly practices in place probably had very different outcomes. Western companies probably also have very different communication styles that would lead to different outcomes as well.
[+] [-] pojzon|4 years ago|reply
On top of that are kids and wife who drive me crazy and constantly interrupt when you have to focus.
This is not a correct way to measure WFH, during normal WFH situation my kids would be in school and my wife at work..
And coworkers wouldnt be so desperate for interactions with others.
[+] [-] ok_coo|4 years ago|reply
However, I've been super productive when I've been able to get some quiet time outside of meetings.
[+] [-] Havoc|4 years ago|reply
I joined during covid and obviously working at home I was used to everything being truly 1:1 just between us. (I'm blessed with a great boss)
The few back at office days rattled me a bit in terms of "who is listening/judging" in open plan.
I've spent years in open plan so that aspect isn't new...but somehow the covid contrast rattled me
[+] [-] Huiokko|4 years ago|reply
I book 1:1 with my manager and it was always in a meeting room.
Is it common for you to have 1:1 in your cubicle?
[+] [-] 0xCAP|4 years ago|reply