Remote Work Is Making Americans Less Productive, Official Data Shows (barrons.com) 202
New data (PDF) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that one-third of Americans worked from home in 2022, up from a quarter, or 25%, in 2019. The survey also found that Americans working full time from home worked 2.5 hours less a day than Americans at the office. Barron's reports: Overall, the total civilian population worked for an average of 3.23 hours a day in 2022 down from 3.26 hours a day in 2019. The U.S. is 1% lazier. That number, given by the BLS, is the total population. Don't forget, babies don't work. [...] As far as what Americans were doing with the time not spent working, TV watching stayed flat, socializing dropped, and gaming increased.
"Economics is complicated, but labor productivity is essentially the basis for economic gains," writes Barron's Al Root. "The economy is measured in dollars, but the dollar is just a unit of account. More output per worker is how living standards improve."
"In a strange way, coming back to work is like an economic stimulus package. If people go back to the office, at a 2019 rate, and work 8.2 hours a day instead of the at-home 5.7 hours a day, the economy has just added roughly 800 million weeks of work, an 8% bump."
"The findings will give management teams some momentum to bring workers back to the office," adds Root.
"In a strange way, coming back to work is like an economic stimulus package. If people go back to the office, at a 2019 rate, and work 8.2 hours a day instead of the at-home 5.7 hours a day, the economy has just added roughly 800 million weeks of work, an 8% bump."
"The findings will give management teams some momentum to bring workers back to the office," adds Root.
How They See Us (Score:5, Insightful)
...output units.
Of course, "output per worker" is constantly receiving a higher and higher multiplier from the technology the worker is using. The entire fear of AI is that the output of programs or paragraphs per worker will rise so much, fewer are *needed* - just as ever-more-massive multipliers on farm labour and factory labour from automation (a tractor is automation, ask a horse) drastically reduced the workers needed there.
And income inequality has come, more than any one direction, than all those gains from improving technologies going to the owners, not the labourers. Like nearly 99% of the productivity improvements we have seen since PCs came out, going all to the top.
And yet, there it is: we are told, every time the production units want to take a break, and smell the roses in some way (the French smell roses for about 5 weeks a year, practically mandatory), we are reminded that all prosperity and competitiveness depend entirely upon the Protestant Work Ethic, and we're letting the country down.
This is measuring the wrong things (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny thing is, I probably did work fewer hours... due to being far more productive.
All of our productivity metrics went way up when Covid started and we were fully embracing WFH. Employee satisfaction, etc. went way up too. I spent a lot less time on BS and a lot more actually doing things that help my employer.
The butt-in-seat time really did go way down, but that's never what they should have been measuring to begin with.
Re:This is measuring the wrong things (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly it. My butt being in a seat is not in itself useful.
Part of this is likely a methodology issue. If you're shooting the breeze in the breakroom because you cannot continue until someone else gets their part done, you're "working" but if you sit in your living room playing a game for exactly the same reason you're "being lazy and unproductive".
Of course, the actual official data says NOTHING about actual productivity, it only calls out hours worked. The rest is a series of assumptions being made mostly by managers that don't believe you're working hard enough unless they can see the suffering in your eyes.
Re: This is measuring the wrong things (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Absolutely... every office job I ever had, I automated to the point I had 2 or more free hours per day while still exceeding required work (even doing extra work until SOX killed that).
From 2006 to 2011, I could do my job in 20 hours a week. I had my team set up perfectly. We finished very project ahead of time and without bugs. We were *waiting* on work approvals.
And we were *denied* because even tho we were sitting around doing nothing, the process of getting things approved required too much executive
Re: This is measuring the wrong things (Score:4, Insightful)
I work far less from home but I'm far more productive. I have people telling me all the time that they're amazed at the quantity and quality of things I'm getting out the door.
But I'm also playing games, going for walks, playing with the pets, cooking lunch, etc.
I'm vastly more productive because I'm not around all the dumbfucks in the office all the time. I'm not listening to the two dudes an isle over talk about the NFL draft from 9am until 11am in the morning. I'm not having random people walk by my desk to ask me something they should know. They send me a chat or an email instead, when I have a good time to break and respond, I point them to what they need, so my workflow isn't constantly getting trashed.
But I'm not getting paid any more for my increased productivity, and there will be no promotion in my future. So when the work is done, I'm going to play a game and keep any eye on the work chat/email. I'm not going to keep giving and giving for no reason, no reward.
I'm already at rockstar status, so Cult of the Lamb will fill in the hours that I'm waiting for the actual slackers to get around to doing what they're supposed to be doing, so I can move on. I'm not doing their work for them.
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Did report account for newly discovered things, like 4-days work-week being very, very interesting thing? As far as I have seen, there are little doubts, it works better. Then, don't diminishing working hours come back with returns of theirs - slashed stress, depression, less of illnesses arising from the exhausting pressure. Talk quality of life - would it be worse, it going up this manner?
I suggest to consider whether it is not about common tendency in the developed world: people may be realizing, that th
Re: (Score:3)
This, exactly.
Hours worked is a bogus metric. I bet at least 1/3 of those office hours were spent BS'ing with co-workers, flirting with the hot new guy or girl, thinking about lunch, recovering from lunch, sitting in useless meetings where you actually had to be present (as opposed to just checking in with zoom), etc.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, I still eat lunch, but at my desk in my home office. In my previous job I had to go to the company cafeteria or, more often, out to lunch because the cafeteria food was mediocre. So I can do one-hand tasks like reading email while eating at my desk.
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Don't crap in your nest.
The workplace is not your nest! That's just Corporate "suck your life force" work propaganda.
The proper expression is "Do not shit where you eat".
The SFW expression is "Do not dip your pen in the company ink."
Re:This is measuring the wrong things (Score:5, Insightful)
Including getting ready for work and commuting time, my work effort was more like 10 hours per workday. After accounting for time and money wasted on unnecessary things, my productivity went way up. The economy also benefited from reduced wear and tear of my vehicles. Auto expenses could then be directed to other parts of the economy, generally improving efficiency.
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"just as ever-more-massive multipliers on farm labour and factory labour from automation (a tractor is automation, ask a horse) drastically reduced the workers needed there."
You are correct, the next question is do rendered down humans make good glue?
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we're letting the country down.
Which is the complete BS they'll keep spewing at us until they finish selling off all of the commercial office space. Then as one more giant FU to the country they'll show all of those remote workers what we in IT knew all along: That they can just as easily push a button and the web portal that makes you money gets closed off and opened in some other country where they will pay pennies on the dollar for the "labor" or outsource it to some LLM somewhere.
Hope everyone is ready to have fun paying American
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Yeah, this report says more about the people who wrote it than it does about working from home.
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Actually "slaves" is more appropriate. A slave is not somebody that has his or her productivity stolen, a slave is somebody that has their freedom reduced severely. And that is what these people try to do to workers, thinly covered with direct and less direct lies about "productivity".
Re: Nobody understands this (Score:3)
If we could be easily replaced by off shoring we would have been already.
Re: (Score:2)
If a job can be offshored, it has been offshored. Welcome to 2023, have you been in a coma for 25 years?
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others work better at home wearing a nice shirt when video conferencing.
NICE shirt? Feh. That's when I put on A shirt.
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Some jobs use people exactly as labor units, and measure them against well known, simple metrics.
"How many bricks have you laid on top of each other today?"
And that's fine.
But when hundreds of hosts in the data center need to stay up at all times with no downtime, and each minute of downtime costs the company between $10K and millions, how do you measure my work? Most of it is proactive, and a small percentage is reactive, and mostly non-measurable. you could arguably fire me, and save a few K each month, a
Difficult to measure (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Difficult to measure (Score:5, Insightful)
People who work at home are happier, take more breaks, work longer (due to no commute) and have better work-life balance.
Like every time I see BS data about people should go back to the office, it's always FUD about decaying city business centers. Remember how Amazon killed "all the malls" but didn't actually? It only killed the malls you had to commute to and surrounded by nothing. Malls that are part of the city center and surrounded by residential properties, have never suffered from amazon. Sure some of the uncompetitive (where they are competing with themselves) stores have closed, but they are always replaced within a few months. Except the Disney store... which seems to have closed and nobody wants to take that space.
There is no way we are going back to pre-pandemic work-life imbalance, and the sooner businesses stop trying to get people to work in a cramped, insecure, disgusting open-concept office, the better.
Re:Difficult to measure (Score:5, Insightful)
> Remember how Amazon killed "all the malls" but didn't actually?
Whole lotta big box stores have cratered. Maybe not Amazon specifically, but online shopping in general, has put a big hurt on traditional commerce - especially casual shopping. And yes, even those "part of the city center and surrounded by residential properties" have seen a downturn in traffic.
That said, working from home is indeed the new paradigm and, unlike commerce, there is no apparent downside from a jobs point of view. If the same person can do the same job regardless of where they are, then it's nearly a net zero effect. If there's concern about city business districts imploding, then turn those empty offices into apartments and solve both the local demand AND housing problems.
=Smidge=
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>Whole lotta big box stores have cratered. Maybe not Amazon specifically, but online shopping in general, has put a big hurt on traditional commerce
Once I noticed my local bricks & mortar shop was selling the same Chinese stuff I could get from Aliexpress for MUCH less, I only bought from my local bricks & mortar shop when I couldn't wait. I got even more firm in that policy when I started noticing stores didn't actually carry what they said they did... but they'd happily order it for you (from
Re:Difficult to measure (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, the big box brick and mortar stores had previously killed almost all the small, local mom and pop stores. So it's hard for me to get too worked up about Amazon in turn killing off the big box stores. It's true their demise means some lost local salaries, but those people are in turn probably driving for Amazon now - so it might just be a wash. And most of the "big box" money was already leaving the area.
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No amazon killed a lot more malls than that. My city went from 12 malls to 3. And the one that made it is almost all luxury goods.
Thing is... amazon is reliable. I would love to support retail stores but I drove over 30 miles and visited three different stores trying to get a BBQ pit part for $25. No luck. Not even in stock.
Ordered it on amazon for $22. It was there 2 days later. No personal driving, gasoline, or pollution.
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are also the sort where productivity is difficult to measure
Not difficult to measure.. Difficult to standardize short-term effective statistics for, because it's impossible to have good standardized work units between workers, or between days of work. For example: If you are a developer... the exact number of bugs or commits you had per day isn't an amount of work. However, you can still create a gross metric easily that will show a binary productive or not over a longer timeframe -- it just
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
It is not difficult to measure, it is just expensive to measure.
1. Invent a project with series of modifications after the initial release.
2. randomize devs to several teams
3. Make half of teams work in the office, half at home
4. Give every team the same project
5. Wait for results.
You have to have several teams, to filter out individual differences. You also have to have big projects with changes, so you can measure how fast later changes are (how good the code maintainability is).
Re: (Score:3)
My guess is that it's a wash. Any of the large scale evaluations that were done by companies like HP or IBM back in the 70's that I've looked at have found that productivity remains relatively stable. Anything showing a massive gain has more to do with the
thats not how efficiency works (Score:5, Insightful)
they were getting their jobs done in less hours before.
sounds like efficiency to me.
Re: thats not how efficiency works (Score:2)
Your right. There is an easy 2 to 4 hours of totally unproductive, non work hours every single day for in office workers. If I go into the office I easily lose a day's worth of work that I would have done at home.
Barron's is a Dow Jones jerk-off mag. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever wonder why economy feels like it's run by blind monkeys? This is why.
Monkey's playing with the economy levers are trained to get an erection reading twaddle from people who can't even sort it in their skulls that as long as the work output stays the same productivity INCREASES as time it takes to produce that work output DECREASES.
I.e. Do faster good.
Incidentally, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report linked in the summary doesn't mention productivity even ONCE.
Monkey masturbators decided to make it about productivity, while either not understanding how that thing works OR lying blind.
Or both.
Re:Barron's is a Dow Jones jerk-off mag. (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, productivity is damn near impossible to really quantify in a generic way.
Take coding, how do you measure productivity? Lines of code? Well, vomiting code without thought is generally less productive than thinking it through and writing less code. What about number of commits? Same deal, a developer using git as an 'undo' buffer committing constantly isn't more productive than someone carefully making sure their commit is correct. Number of 'tasks' or 'stories' chewed through? Again those vary greatly. Someone has a half dozen stories revolving around tweaking the details of a web page, whereas another has a story that is "Create a Web UI". One might thing "ok, but weight them by their sizing", except sizing is both inaccurate and so highly subjective.
Re:thats not how efficiency works (Score:5, Insightful)
they were getting their jobs done in less hours before.
sounds like efficiency to me.
Increased efficiency is not the problem.
The problem is that in this case, the benefits of the increased efficiency are going to the employees, not the employers. This is not allowed.
Re: (Score:3)
We can't have that now, can we ?!?
huh (Score:4, Interesting)
"More output per worker is how living standards improve."
That doesn't sound right. Do employees no longer count for living standard measures? Are only C-levels and up considered human in America now?
Re: huh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
the beatings will continue until morale improves [reddit.com]
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Unfortunately the output goes up for all companies at the same time, and the businesses are therefore just expected and competitively pressured to produce a higher amount of return per employee for their investors ---
If a company decided to take a policy of pay employees more with the increase in output, and therefore not increase its profit per employee as much to keep up with advances competing corporations in the same industry were making, Then the competition for management of companies/capital woul
Re:huh (Score:4, Informative)
We adapted the 40 hour week in the 1970s. Since then, productivity per hour has increased by 200 to 1000 percent. Due to better processes, better logistics and not least because we automated and sped up a lot of work with the use of computers.
I can't really see the increased living standards, though. In the 1970s, a single income from one parent was enough to pay for a house, a car and a vacation a year. Today, two incomes from two parents are hardly enough to pay rent and utilities.
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Don't worry, the handful of oligarchs that control pretty much everything these days are working on significantly reducing your expenses. You'll have a lot less in bills to pay once you don't have a car, air conditioning, eat fresh food, or live in more than the bare minimum of physical space.
You'll own nothing and be happy.
Re: huh (Score:4, Interesting)
Progress!
Multiple studies show the exact opposite (Score:3)
Even the summary makes this stupid. This is another B.S. article put out by the owners of commercial real estate. Katie Porter wants to pass a law making WFH a right. She's going to be a Senator in California. Don't you wish your Senator pushed for things you wanted?
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Yes productivity is up. But this measures work hours.
Of course we need to measure something that actually dropped if we want to push a narrative.
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He is correct, multiple studies showed WFH improved productivity. This study just counts hours, not actual productivity.
It's yet more silly management BS, and you are a moron who just tries to nahsay everything rsilvergun says.
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Found the useless middle-manager who fears for his "empire", and people realizing that the emperor has no clothes.
Cats out of the bag (Score:5, Insightful)
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People realizing they prefer time to money has a lot of factors that augment each other. First, the obvious one you just mentioned: People realized during the lockdown that their main concern isn't money but time. But it doesn't end there. We are right in the middle of a generation shift among workers.
The "boomer" generation is leaving the workforce. Boomers were, by and large, concerned with "building a nestegg". They bought houses in their youth, they got mortgages they paid off, they prepped a retirement
False. (Score:5, Funny)
I'm super productive. On slashdot.
Kidding aside, I am productive at my job too. In case my boss is reading this. I'll have the TPS reports done ASAP.
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Wilson! I was wondering why those reports weren't on my desk yet!
Say goodbye to your bonus this year!
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Oh c'mon, like there has ever been a bonus.
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yeeeaaaa... about that....
I'm going to need you to work from home on Saturday.
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Sorry, didn't read that email 'til Monday.
If you want people to work on weekends, you might want to pay them to read their emails on weekends.
What are they really measuring? (Score:5, Interesting)
They are measuring how much time people do work. That is not the same as how productive they are. Do the numbers show that all the WFH has decreased productivity by 25%? (2/8 hours they say people aren't working). Somehow I really doubt that. Businesses wouldn't have survived.
This is another hit piece against WFH, that's all.
John Wooden's comment many years ago...... (Score:5, Insightful)
....I think applies to this story: "Never mistake activity for achievement.” . The only thing this metric is measuring is the amount of time that people are in the office vs. how much time they think people are working at home. I.E. they are assuming that ALL that activity in the office is 100% nose to the grindstone work. It never is. If I'm 100% efficient at home and only 60% efficient at work, then from the metric of actually accomplishing things, it's better to be at home.
I say this as someone who is actually more efficient at work, but my old boss was hugely more efficient at working from home, so I understand that many people would be the same as him.
Also, can we highlight the fact that Barron's is a not a neutral observer on this subject? They are quite a "pro executive business suite" organization so I'm assuming from the get go that any story out there will be spun into something that tells you just how horrible the working class is and how tough those upper level management types have it.
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A former co-worker of mine was in a Skype meeting (with people probably 100 yards away naturally), sharing her screen for whatever reason. These people needed something done - a sample tested or whatever. Co-works says she is far too busy to do this sample today. Insists it cannot be done!
Meeting ends, she forgets to stop sharing her screen and they all see her open up Amazon and start shopping. These economists would say she was "productive" for 8 hours. Hell, since she also did some shopping so that's lik
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Actually, I'm more productive at home. Allow me to explain why.
At work, I get to work around 9. Now, I live close to my work place, but back when I didn't, that arrival was marred by being drained from a lengthy drive and the first thing I did was to get a coffee and stare at my screen for about 30 minutes, pretending to read mail while I try to clear up the fog in my head.
Around 11 I get hungry. I start checking the homepages of various restaurants around the office to see what they have to offer for today
Nothing to do with productivity (Score:5, Informative)
This also seems to have no correlation as implied by the title to a reduction in productivity due to working at home. Hours worked are on average a tiny bit down, but we have all seen the news, the youngest workers are working less and the baby boomers are retiring. So clearly the rest of us are almost picking up the slack -- which is the opposite of what is implied by the misleading click bait title.
Of note it looks like "Men 45 to 54" is the only demographic that averages 40+ hours a week averaged over the entire year.
Retarded. Economy in shambles, and... (Score:2)
Because you were finally allowed to work from home we'll use the fact we allowed it during an economically bad time to "prove" it caused the bad productivity. Problem solved.
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What they fail to explain is why I should give a fuck about productivity when it obviously is of no benefit to me if it increases.
Hours worked does not equate to productivity (Score:2)
Never has been the case, even in manufacturing. There was a person helping factories adopt a "30/40" model. Same pay, benefits, but only work 30 hours a shift. You keep three shifts, shut the machines down for the six hours saved and you will have the same or better output. It worked, so of course, it got squashed.
Working better always beats working more.
American's deserve a 1% vacation (Score:2)
Every single one. Good for us for taking a well deserved rest from being consumers.
Re: (Score:2)
You're In Like Flint (Score:2)
You are not a pleasure unit.
Remote is better (Score:3, Interesting)
work 8.2 hours a day? (Score:3)
uh, those people are being paid for 7.5 hours plus 0.5 break, but we want them working 8.2 hours a day do we? How about 8.2 inches of footware up your rectum, BoL 'crat?
Yeeeah...no. (Score:3)
I'm not sure if I'm surprised or not that the Bureau of Labor Statistics makes baseless claims from useless survey data. None of this survey is relevant.
"Hours worked" is not a measure of productivity (Score:4, Insightful)
Back when I was working 8 hours per day in an office, about 4 of those were productive (if I was lucky). The rest were spent daydreaming, socializing, in useless meetings, or whatever. And this is true of many more office workers than will admit it.
Re:"Hours worked" is not a measure of productivity (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm still pretty sure that a lot of the increased productivity we noticed during the first WFH months came from people who were finally able to continue doing some work while the narcissist who loved to hear himself talk and thus calls in a bunch of pointless meetings droned on for hours.
Wow the self confirmation circle jerk is strong. (Score:2)
I had to use a government call center to apply for an application and it was obvious I was a secondary priority to whoever I was connected with. The child in the background was a dead giveaway, but so was the ridiculous wait time with silence every time she was busy enteri
Re: (Score:2)
As if government workers needed WFH to be unproductive.
This has less to do with WFH than with a lack of consequences. WFH is no vacation, it means that you work from outside the office, but you're still expected to perform. If you don't, you'll be kicked out.
It's just harder for crappy managers to notice it. If you can't find your slackers due to WFH, fire you managers and replace them with some that can do their job.
Bet this gives Elon a boner (Score:2)
keep your organic output units close, as many hours as possible
time on clock != working time (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
It doesn't even mean someone is watching you. My manager has no idea what I do. I could literally play some sort of game (at times, my work does look like some sort of text adventure...) and he wouldn't notice.
It's called trust. If you cannot trust your worker, fire him. Quite seriously. Fire him. I cannot employ a person I can't trust to do his job.
this talks about time in office not productivity (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They know that quite well, it just was the only metric they could come up with that doesn't show that RTO is a bad idea.
Headline is backwards (Score:2)
RFK had some wise words on this subject (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
His speech
https://www.jfklibrary.org/lea... [jfklibrary.org]
is well worth reading.
It cannot be overstated how our productivity and work ethic has boosted the 0.1% for the last 40 years, and will continue to do so.
I don't expect anything to change. The propaganda machine, which Root is a part of, is relentless, well funded and won't let up for a second.
If only the proles were as devoted to stopping that machine.
It's not a lie, until you look more closely (Score:3)
Cites "Works at home worked fewer hours than those in the office".
That's true
What isn't discussed is my average work day prior to work from home was frequently 12 to 14 hours. Working from home it was more like 10 hours. I had fewer distractions while programming and SRE'ing at home. At one previous employer, I had a tier II manger (just below C level) yack me up while I was constructing a salt command that would potentially affect over 5,000 servers, instead of only the couple dozen I wanted. Of course I stopped while the distraction was active, then got written up because that same boss said I wasn't doing anything while he was talking, giving the exact date, time, and link to CC video.
Now you know why I made them a former employer. Well, that, and the expected 6 work days per week. As long as you weren't on call.
Useless numbers (Score:2)
Even if true, that's 2.5 hours of pure presenteeism, who does that benefit? What's the economic win? Some families can't balance both parents at work, forcing office occupation will just mean some people have to stop working. That seems to be the worst option.
"worked" (Score:2)
For sufficiently broad definitions of the word "work".
By my experience regarding office work, a lot of people (not everyone, but the majority) spend somewhere between a quarter and a third of the day smoking, drinking coffee, chatting with colleagues (not about work) or otherwise spending time more than working.
And that's ok. You can't stay focussed for hours straight without something to refresh your mind.
But in the office, that time is counted as work hours. In my home office, when I take an extended lunc
This is all about business real estate and taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
So let me get this straight - US economy is fine with ditching local workers for workers in other nations with cheaper labor forces, despite the loss in productivity due to language gaps, time zone differences, and cultural differences. BUT when Americans work away from the office it's OMG PRODUCTIVITY!!!!
Horse crap. These back to work full time arguments are cherry picking data and I have suspicions the real motivator behind it are organizations who desperately want corporate real estate to be the cash grab it has been in the past, and the taxes that go along with it. With a side dose of taxes from people commuting/lunching/buying stuff during the workday.
A better indicator of company health is corporate profits - and those certainly are not suffering due to working from home the last few years. In reality 5.7 hours working form home just means people are getting their work done in that time and cutting out the lunch breaks, bathroom breaks, chatting with Karen for 30 minutes per day as she walks by, surfing the internet from one's work device for another 30 minutes per day.
No productivity in pdf (Score:2)
Mixin' it up (Score:3)
"The findings will give management teams some momentum to bring workers back to the office,"
You are getting it all wrong, the correct sentence would be:
"The management teams gave some momentum to get the findings to bring workers back to the office"
It was only a matter of time till "studies" would be ordered that shows whatever management want them to show. Remote working is a threat to some layers of management, and specially some styles of management, and that will generate some pushback. Don't expect this to be the last one.
That a bullshit metric (Score:4, Insightful)
Hours worked is not usable as a metric for productivity, except in repetitive factory work and even there it has its limits.
The whole "study" seems to be a systematic lie. I guess those that cannot adapt are trying for a last stand here.
Consider the source (Score:3)
I don't think Baron's is named for a group of working people -- more like those who want to be on top managing workers.
Can't help but think of robber barons taking advantage over the masses. And how robber barons populating wall street led to the great depression...
So Americans Behave Just Like Children ? (Score:3)
Here in France, before remote work, we already were among the most productive workers (yes, I hear you, always on holidays, or strike. No, not just French are always on strike, and about holidays, that's not how it works, we are productive, even with this amount of holidays, or may be _because_ of this amount of holidays, think about it).
But remote work is work, and for many people, it means being more productive : no commuting time, you can start working earlier even when getting out of bed later, no need for fancy dressing (where needed or where people care more about how you look than your work), you can start working in your pyjamas, working late without the boss knowing, etc.
This is how stupid it has become for my wife : she has to go to the office two days per week. There, she has to find a free desk, because they switched to flexoffice (nice one), then, she has meetings, often, but since some other colleagues couldn't come (or didn't wanted to, or
TL;DR in her case, going to the office is a pain in the ass, and as inefficient as her bosses are stupid.
Two remarks (Score:5, Insightful)
First, hours worked has zero to do with productivity. Hours worked has lowered throughout the past 100 years, from 60 to 40 today, and productivity is arguably MUCH higher than it was 100 years ago. So, sorry, not buying your bullshit story. You just looked long and hard until you found a metric that actually did not improve with WFH so you can somehow try to justify forcing people to RTO because otherwise your investment in office real estate goes down the tubes.
I don't give a fuck about your investments. And no, I also don't care how you are supposed to explain this to your shareholders. Sucks to be you.
Second, even if it lowered productivity, I would not give a fuck. I don't benefit from increased productivity at all. We went from the 48 hour week to the 40 hour week in 1975 in my country. Ever since, productivity per hour worked went up. We're now looking at two to ten times the productivity that we had in the 1970s. The average worker saw jack shit of that increased productivity rewarded. Why the fuck should I give a damn about your productivity if you don't share the rewards with me?
You don't care about me. I don't care about you. You, my dear employer, are the necessary evil I have to endure to get money. If you go bankrupt, fine. If you die, fine. I find another one. Why should I treat you with any more care or respect than I get from you?
That's management BS (Score:3)
First, I question their metrics for assessing when one is working or just sitting there, be it at the office or at home: even if employers were being watched every single second that's well-nigh impossible to assess for many jobs, especially those that require some thinking, which can be done anywhere. Conversely, sitting while furiously typing at the keyboard may, or may not, amount to working.
Second, as anybody who has worked at the office, and then at home, effective work hours at home are MUCH longer: almost any time of the day can be - and is - devoted to working. When you are forced to go to the office, it is far easier to disconnect when you leave the office.
This is just management BS: you have lots and lots of managers who jobs lose all relevance and meaning when people work from home, thus revealing what is pretty obvious: most managers are nothing but dead weight.
Something is not right... (Score:3)
I have seen things in the news about some companies wanting to pull things back, maybe this article is part of those efforts?
Look busy vs work (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
lolz, I've worked in two places that outsourced major chunk of work to India. Lack of what one culture calls "common sense" half a world a way causes disasters. You want things screwed up and ending up costing 2 or 3 times as much, by all means do that.
Re: (Score:2)
I refuse to participate in a race to the bottom.
Re: (Score:3)
If a job could be outsourced to India at 1/3 the cost, it would have been done ages ago, long, long before Covid. You think any C-Level needs a WFH experience to have the bright idea to outsource jobs?
Re: (Score:2)
Nope. Culture is important. Even when it is politically incorrect to state that these days. Incidentally, competent people stopped being much cheaper in India about a decade ago or so.
Re: (Score:3)
Hilarious.
A local WFH is way way different than an offshoring scenario.
In the local WFH, you almost certainly personally vetted the candidate, in person even. In the offshoring scenario, you delegated to a 'recruiting' team to handle the details. More often than not, the local recruiting team is more about grifting the foreign company rather than legitimately trying to look after the interests of the payer.
The offshoring team is, usually, between 8-12 hours off from your work schedule. Which makes for neg
Re:Slackers (Score:4, Informative)
Cool, thanks for your irrelevant experience.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe report them to your superior rather than to us? They're obviously not working and something should be done about it.
If a company allows its employees to treat WFH as if it is a day off, that's the company's fault, not WFHs.
Re: (Score:2)
In this economy, I don't even work hard enough for that. Fire me, I dare you.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I work fewer hours a day. And I get away with it. Because I'm good at what I do.
Get better at what you do instead of ranting about your betters and you might one day also be in a position where your boss can't just use you like a doormat.