Remote Work Doesn't Seem To Affect Productivity, Fed Study Finds (frbsf.org) 105
An anonymous reader quotes a report released Tuesday (Jan. 16th) by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: The U.S. labor market experienced a massive increase in remote and hybrid work during the COVID-19 pandemic. At its peak, more than 60% of paid workdays were done remotely -- compared with only 5% before the pandemic. As of December 2023, about 30% of paid workdays are still done remotely (Barrero, Bloom, and Davis 2021). Some reports have suggested that teleworking might either boost or harm overall productivity in the economy. And certainly, overall productivity statistics have been volatile. In 2020, U.S. productivity growth surged. This led to optimistic views in the media about the gains from forced digital innovation and the productivity benefits of remote work. However, the surge ended, and productivity growth has retreated to roughly its pre-pandemic trend. Fernald and Li (2022) find from aggregate data that this pattern was largely explained by a predictable cyclical effect from the economy's downturn and recovery. In aggregate data, it thus appears difficult to see a large cumulative effect -- either positive or negative -- from the pandemic so far. But it is possible that aggregate data obscure the effects of teleworking. For example, factors beyond telework could have affected the overall pace of productivity growth. Surveys of businesses have found mixed effects from the pandemic, with many businesses reporting substantial productivity disruptions.
In this Economic Letter, we ask whether we can detect the effects of remote work in the productivity performance of different industries. There are large differences across sectors in how easy it is to work off-site. Thus, if remote work boosts productivity in a substantial way, then it should improve productivity performance, especially in those industries where teleworking is easy to arrange and widely adopted, such as professional services, compared with those where tasks need to be performed in person, such as restaurants. After controlling for pre-pandemic trends in industry productivity growth rates, we find little statistical relationship between telework and pandemic productivity performance. We conclude that the shift to remote work, on its own, is unlikely to be a major factor explaining differences across sectors in productivity performance. By extension, despite the important social and cultural effects of increased telework, the shift is unlikely to be a major factor explaining changes in aggregate productivity. [...]
The shift to remote and hybrid work has reshaped society in important ways, and these effects are likely to continue to evolve. For example, with less time spent commuting, some people have moved out of cities, and the lines between work and home life have blurred. Despite these noteworthy effects, in this Letter we find little evidence in industry data that the shift to remote and hybrid work has either substantially held back or boosted the rate of productivity growth. Our findings do not rule out possible future changes in productivity growth from the spread of remote work. The economic environment has changed in many ways during and since the pandemic, which could have masked the longer-run effects of teleworking. Continuous innovation is the key to sustained productivity growth. Working remotely could foster innovation through a reduction in communication costs and improved talent allocation across geographic areas. However, working off-site could also hamper innovation by reducing in-person office interactions that foster idea generation and diffusion. The future of work is likely to be a hybrid format that balances the benefits and limitations of remote work.
In this Economic Letter, we ask whether we can detect the effects of remote work in the productivity performance of different industries. There are large differences across sectors in how easy it is to work off-site. Thus, if remote work boosts productivity in a substantial way, then it should improve productivity performance, especially in those industries where teleworking is easy to arrange and widely adopted, such as professional services, compared with those where tasks need to be performed in person, such as restaurants. After controlling for pre-pandemic trends in industry productivity growth rates, we find little statistical relationship between telework and pandemic productivity performance. We conclude that the shift to remote work, on its own, is unlikely to be a major factor explaining differences across sectors in productivity performance. By extension, despite the important social and cultural effects of increased telework, the shift is unlikely to be a major factor explaining changes in aggregate productivity. [...]
The shift to remote and hybrid work has reshaped society in important ways, and these effects are likely to continue to evolve. For example, with less time spent commuting, some people have moved out of cities, and the lines between work and home life have blurred. Despite these noteworthy effects, in this Letter we find little evidence in industry data that the shift to remote and hybrid work has either substantially held back or boosted the rate of productivity growth. Our findings do not rule out possible future changes in productivity growth from the spread of remote work. The economic environment has changed in many ways during and since the pandemic, which could have masked the longer-run effects of teleworking. Continuous innovation is the key to sustained productivity growth. Working remotely could foster innovation through a reduction in communication costs and improved talent allocation across geographic areas. However, working off-site could also hamper innovation by reducing in-person office interactions that foster idea generation and diffusion. The future of work is likely to be a hybrid format that balances the benefits and limitations of remote work.
At home vs office (Score:3)
I probably feel less concerned about a trip to the kitchen for a drink and make more trips during the day than I would at the office. Unless I'm on the phone, my work doesn't actually require me to be staring at my screens 100% of the time, so this doesn't make a big difference.
I am definitely better rested due to not having a commute. I'm never late back from lunch. The nice bit is that when I'm on lunch... nobody can casually find me to bother me. For something important, they can still phone, but that's not the kind of interruption that usually happens at lunch.
I save a lot on gas. I save a lot of time. Since my children and wife are close to home, if there's some kind of emergency or doctor's appointment or whatever, the company loses less of my time while I'm dealing with it. Maybe none if it can all be handled within my lunch.
What the company doesn't get is some kind of perverse joy out of forcing me into a cubicle with a handful of others when management themselves can't even be bothered to come in. And yes, I mostly work at the office and really, really resent that.
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I find the amount of time actually working doesn't change, but the amount of time pretending to be working is done away with.
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>the amount of time pretending to be working is done away with.
Also, pants.
If it doesn't show in a video chat, it doesn't matter, right?
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Until you forget and stand up.
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This. None of us is productive 8hrs plus every day... Everyone who is adamant about being so, is a liar (they even lie to themselves).
I am pretty convinced we humans operate on bursts of productivity... the more the task is mental, the more we also operate on bursts of creativity.
If anything, you get more of those the more you switch it up.
Simple fact is I can go days doing nothing of real importance in my job whether I am at home or in the office. I just feel worse when being in the office, I get bored far
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It turns out this is the actual reason, and the problem is the lack of diversity in the C-suite. Yes, that woke word crops up again, and it's forcing RTO.
Think of it for a moment - most C-suite executives are all white males, typically conservative. Who grew up bein
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Think of it for a moment - most C-suite executives are all white males, typically conservative. Who grew up being in the office 5 days a week and are completely uncomfortable with the "work from home" idea. So uncomfortable they force their employees to come into the office because that's what they're used to, no matter what.
Aka "I suffered from it so why should you have it any better?"
A petty little man wearing way too big shoes.
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It turns out this is the actual reason, and the problem is the lack of diversity in the C-suite. Yes, that woke word crops up again, and it's forcing RTO.
...
Had we had more diversity, things could be different. Women know the problems of juggling work and home life - raising a kid isn't easy, so they have the work-life aspect. They know what it's like to work from home so you can take care of your sick kid, and thus are more likely to embrace WFH, because being forced to go to the office sucks a lot.
And yet Yahoo's work-from-home policy was torn down by Marissa Meyer.
Or take minorities, who suffer from racism. May not be overt, but being in the office they are subject to it - usually little things. Work from home means everyone is on equal footing and the work speaks for itself.
And yet Google's RTO was forced by a minority, with a woman CFO.
You're not wrong that we need more diversity, but that's largely orthogonal. When you're at the C-suite level, groupthink is a real problem. It doesn't to matter where the leaders come from if they don't have the guts to stand up to other leaders who are all saying the same thing. And groupthink is self-perpetuating. Introducing women and minorities likely won't make much
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It turns out this is the actual reason, and the problem is the lack of diversity in the C-suite. Yes, that woke word crops up again, and it's forcing RTO.
...
Had we had more diversity, things could be different. Women know the problems of juggling work and home life - raising a kid isn't easy, so they have the work-life aspect. They know what it's like to work from home so you can take care of your sick kid, and thus are more likely to embrace WFH, because being forced to go to the office sucks a lot.
And yet Yahoo's work-from-home policy was torn down by Marissa Meyer.
Or take minorities, who suffer from racism. May not be overt, but being in the office they are subject to it - usually little things. Work from home means everyone is on equal footing and the work speaks for itself.
And yet Google's RTO was forced by a minority, with a woman CFO.
So it turns out that women can also be psychopaths, and what we foremost need is fewer psychopaths in C- and above level positions? Who knew?
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So it turns out that women can also be psychopaths, and what we foremost need is fewer psychopaths in C- and above level positions? Who knew?
IMO, the question becomes one of cause and effect: Is the deck stacked such that only people who lack empathy can rise to the highest positions, or does rising to the highest positions in a company strip you of your empathy?
Yeah, they found that (Score:2)
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Yeah, something tells me that the Nikki Haley/WeWork/Dunkin Donuts sponsored survey will have somewhat different results.
Re:Yeah, they found that (Score:5, Funny)
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You have weird names for your worker unions.
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Re: Yeah, they found that (Score:2)
Re: Yeah, they found that (Score:2)
AI - from home (Score:1)
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If your job can be done from home= you are a good candidate for the chopping block in the near future. It is coming like a tsunami.
Yup. If a person does insist on working at home, they better be in the top .01 percent, and irreplaceable.
It's pretty difficult for much empathy to be developed for people who are never seen other than in a zoom meeting. And it's a lot more difficult to let go of people in person that you see every day than it is to send an email out to the person who won't come to a workplace. So when the downturn happens, they get shitcanned first.
Re:AI - from home (Score:5, Informative)
If your job can be done by a computer instead, then it doesn't matter how much time you spend in the office.
The calculation is simple: employees are expensive and computers are cheap. Employers are eager to cut staff thanks to AI, and everyone knows it. Your idea that showing up at the office will somehow garner you enough sympathy that your boss won't fire you, even though he can and make more money that way, is plainly naive. Money talks, and your paycheck is just as much of an unwanted cost center as that of any remote worker.
Incidentally, jobs that require physical labor aren't safe either. There is way too much incentive to automate those jobs away with robots, too.
The bottom line is: no job is safe. But that is completely separate from any facts about the efficiency of remote work.
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No job was ever safe. But if told to cut my team in half you're a lot more likely to stay if I'm having lunch with you every week than if I only see a tiny picture during meetings.
Re:AI - from home (Score:4, Insightful)
That seems intuitive assuming that the in-office person has the same skills and the same contributions as the remote worker.
Maybe that is true on your team. It's a team of clones and everyone is fungible.
But in most teams each person has unique skills and serves a unique roll. To put it directly: an order to reduce the size of the QA staff won't be satisfied by cutting loose the remote-working programmers. Or similarly, an order to reduce the least essential staff would very likely motivate you to drop the junior developer who knows little about your product and keep the senior one who knows a lot about it, regardless of which one worked remotely.
Your hypothetical is actually fairly unlikely. Are you on a team that has two QAs and two BAs and two programmers, all with matched skill levels? And in that fully redundant team of people, the specific order of "cut in half" is the order that rolls down from on high? Both of these seem unlikely.
For massive layoffs, entire divisions will get cut, with no regard to who worked remotely or not. Or entire teams. It is true, what you are imagining is still within the realm of possibility, but it is so far out in the edge of unlikely that it isn't worth considering.
The best strategy is to make one's self valuable to the company by having unique skills that are hard to replace. If you don't have that, then showing up in the office a lot isn't much of a security blanket. And if you do have that, then working remotely a lot isn't much of a risk.
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My teams have varied from 1 to 50+ people across multiple areas (devops, customer support, IT, sysadmin, dba, network) depending on company stage. Typically when I joined there was either 1 guy or no one so I had to hire everyone.
Initially, the goal was to hire super senior people with multiple skill sets to build out the environment, put automation and monitoring in place, etc. Once that was done, there was room for normal senior and mid level people to fill out roles and relieve the super stars of grunt
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My teams have varied from 1 to 50+ people across multiple areas (devops, customer support, IT, sysadmin, dba, network) depending on company stage. Typically when I joined there was either 1 guy or no one so I had to hire everyone.
Initially, the goal was to hire super senior people with multiple skill sets to build out the environment, put automation and monitoring in place, etc. Once that was done, there was room for normal senior and mid level people to fill out roles and relieve the super stars of grunt work so they could focus on serious long term project rather than the daily grind. And finally bring in junior people to relieve the senior/mids of the worst of the daily grind and if I'm lucky a few of them can be mentored into mids/seniors.
The proper plan in your situation. Hiring seniors with good skillsets is critical. Then development of the mid level people - yup, that's a good plan.
What I see is how a workplace evolves. And in general, people who don't want to interact with others in any manner than Zoom or email are not participating in the process. They are restricting themselves. They are not terribly upwardly mobile.
So I automatically end up with multiple people who have at least functional mastery of each critical skill set. The only place without overlap is the cutting edge work the superstars are doing and they're not getting cut during a layoff anyway unless everyone is gone.
That has been my experience as well. In my case, we had people who didn't want to expand their skillset. We even had
You're assuming rational thought here (Score:2)
You're right of course, if a person really has unique skills, they will be less at risk. But in practice most groups have people of varying skill levels at various areas, with few unique skills. Being reminded of the contribution of person X because they are with you at lunch compared with the somewhat better skills of Y who is ignored because of working form home, is clearly an issue. Plus the person you go to lunch with you will have a real person in mind when wielding the axe.
People are NOT as rational a
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That seems intuitive assuming that the in-office person has the same skills and the same contributions as the remote worker.
Maybe that is true on your team. It's a team of clones and everyone is fungible.
But in most teams each person has unique skills and serves a unique roll. To put it directly: an order to reduce the size of the QA staff won't be satisfied by cutting loose the remote-working programmers.
To put it directly, a person who refuses to come into work is doing something they might get away with for a while. And as I noted earlier, a person that can refuse and be considered irreplaceable will do okay. For a while.
But there is a real big elephant in this room. Stasis. In any normal situation, you shouldn't expect to be a basic programmer forever. People work, people get promotions. But if you won't come to an office, you are restricting your employability.
You won't be a department head or man
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But if told to cut my team in half you're a lot more likely to stay if I'm having lunch with you every week than if I only see a tiny picture during meetings
And this is why people who scream, "we don't need programs for (XYZ) to foster equality, people should not hire folks with no skill" is always a red herring. Because back of the brain shit like this that sounds logical always bubbles up somewhere. There's no part of if they're a tiny picture or eating lunch with you that correlates to actual skill. It's just a soft judgement based on fondness and emotion. And you saying that, that's actually not uncommon. This kind of subconscious decision making that
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And this is why people who scream, "we don't need programs for (XYZ) to foster equality, people should not hire folks with no skill" is always a red herring. Because back of the brain shit like this that sounds logical always bubbles up somewhere. There's no part of if they're a tiny picture or eating lunch with you that correlates to actual skill. It's just a soft judgement based on fondness and emotion. And you saying that, that's actually not uncommon. This kind of subconscious decision making that bases on human appeal happens easily 80% to 90% of the time. Rarely does hiring decisions get made on actual skill and I mean right here is an excellent example of "uh oh, someone said the quiet part out loud."
The number of times I've seen hiring managers bring in someone great with softskills enough to bullshit themselves into a position of Jr. dev, only to have to show them an exit after being a nuance for nearly a year. But the hiring manager always assures me, "they've got great energy!" Just give me a person with some fucking skill. I don't care if they're a tiny picture or chewing with their mouth open in the lunchroom. It's strictly a skill based thing and it should always be a skill based thing. Tiny picture isn't even on the radar for making calls and anyone who says they are, are a bad manager.
Ah, but you are missing that fact that those "soft skills" are simply partof a skillset.
This is not a digital situation, where people who know how to network are stupid and incapable of doing the work needed. If you intend to have no interactions and reply on only your technical chops, you damn well better be as close to irreplaceable as a human can be.
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No job was ever safe. But if told to cut my team in half you're a lot more likely to stay if I'm having lunch with you every week than if I only see a tiny picture during meetings.
So your decisions are based on ass-kissing and not performance?
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No. I never said I keep an incompetent person over a skilled person.
Most people are not especially more highly skilled than anyone else so yes the deciding factor between two similar people is personal. If you think people skills are unimportant in a group environment then you've never had to deal with some of the sociopathic assholes in tech.
There are asshole managers and guess what? There are asshole employees too. Just like there are good managers and good employees.
I figured out a long time ago the
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No. I never said I keep an incompetent person over a skilled person.
Most people are not especially more highly skilled than anyone else so yes the deciding factor between two similar people is personal. If you think people skills are unimportant in a group environment then you've never had to deal with some of the sociopathic assholes in tech.
There are asshole managers and guess what? There are asshole employees too. Just like there are good managers and good employees.
I figured out a long time ago there are very few divas worth the drama they bring.
I don't see what any of that has to do with working from home. If anything, from my perspective, a person who says stuff like "you're a lot more likely to stay if I'm having lunch with you every week than if I only see a tiny picture during meetings" comes across as an asshole. Its the difference of letting people work in ways most productive for them vs making people work in a way that is most productive for you. That sounds more like diva behavior to me. If people are getting shit done, it shouldn't matte
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No. I never said I keep an incompetent person over a skilled person.
He was proving your name here is spot on! 8^)
Most people are not especially more highly skilled than anyone else so yes the deciding factor between two similar people is personal. If you think people skills are unimportant in a group environment then you've never had to deal with some of the sociopathic assholes in tech.
There are asshole managers and guess what? There are asshole employees too. Just like there are good managers and good employees.
I figured out a long time ago there are very few divas worth the drama they bring.
Exactly. I do expect some personal decency in people. But here's what I have found out:
A person who rises in the corporate/research world has a much better chance of being a decent person than the people who start at the bottom and don't rise much.
And one of the red flags is bitching about interactions being somehow bad. What is more, you can handle introverts when you know they are introverts. They might be awkward about interacting, but you do it one on on
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No job was ever safe. But if told to cut my team in half you're a lot more likely to stay if I'm having lunch with you every week than if I only see a tiny picture during meetings.
So your decisions are based on ass-kissing and not performance?
It's all part of a skillset. I've worked with high performing people who were disruptive and caused problems with other people.
What is more, your concept that interactions are "ass kissing" shows us that you have a bad attitude.
In my field, my skillset is top-notch in technical aspects. It is also top notch in the ability to interact and work with people. And the networking is a big part of that. And no, it is not "ass kissing" in any way shape or form. Try defying me, and see how long it takes to be e
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You would axe people based on your personal preference rather than their skill level?
Remind me to never hire you as a manager.
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I had to deal with sociopathic assholes. Most of them are very eager to meet people face to face so they can better manipulate them.
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No job was ever safe. But if told to cut my team in half you're a lot more likely to stay if I'm having lunch with you every week than if I only see a tiny picture during meetings.
That just means you are a bad manager who would put more priority on your own feelings than what is best for the team. Getting away from you by whatever means would be a good career move in the long term.
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Oh, and since you mention it, I have a career long history of people at multiple companies trying to get into my teams and have mentored countless people into much better careers than they had before meeting me because I recognized and rewarded talent. But you'd be welcome to leave on your own if you brought the team down with your negative energy. Bad energy divas need not apply. Everyone else, see you at lunch.
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Oh, and since you mention it, I have a career long history of people at multiple companies trying to get into my teams and have mentored countless people into much better careers than they had before meeting me because I recognized and rewarded talent. But you'd be welcome to leave on your own if you brought the team down with your negative energy. Bad energy divas need not apply. Everyone else, see you at lunch.
Considering that we spend a huge percentage of our life at work, it only makes sense that the energy brought to it matches our overall energy.
Yes, a lot of the programmer heavy environment that Slashdot is will have some tendency to lean toward the introvert part of the spectrum. But some people seem to conflate introversion with misanthropy and bad attitude. And misanthropy with competence.
One thing I have learned in my long career is that antisocial people have an issue with overestimating their ski
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No job was ever safe. But if told to cut my team in half you're a lot more likely to stay if I'm having lunch with you every week than if I only see a tiny picture during meetings.
That just means you are a bad manager who would put more priority on your own feelings than what is best for the team. Getting away from you by whatever means would be a good career move in the long term.
Tell me you have no idea of what a good manager is without telling me you have no idea.
You sir, have an attitude that is not conducive to an efficient and successful workplace. I don't know if it is the propensity of Slashdotters to be introverted to the point that they adopt a narrative that human interactions are inherently evil, or what.
Uncle Ol gonna dispense some truth.
Sheer raw competency is not the Alpha and Omega of the workplace. Skillsets do not find competency and ability to interact with
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my experience differs. It seems that at least half the people who always show up for meetings never contribute during those meetings/are just there to be seen.
In my experience, at least half the people don't actually need to be there, and are just there because they were told they had to be there. I can't recall a situation where people were just there to be seen by their own choice.
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If your job can be done by a computer instead, then it doesn't matter how much time you spend in the office.
I don't disagree, but it's a little tangentential to the conversation about remote vs in person productivity. But okay.
The calculation is simple: employees are expensive and computers are cheap. Employers are eager to cut staff thanks to AI, and everyone knows it. Your idea that showing up at the office will somehow garner you enough sympathy that your boss won't fire you,even though he can and make more money that way, is plainly naive.
Well, in that sort of future, all of the programmers will be out of work.
How many times have we had these incredible inventions that were going to put everyone out of work? From farming to industry to electronics? I recall many changes in my career over time as one or another technology becomes obsolete. I just moved onto something new. That doesn't seem to be too popular of an idea aro
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Empathy? You think a C-Level has any empathy for you?
You're dealing with psychopaths here, they have no empathy. If they had any empathy, they would not be in that position. Anyone with empathy would at some point in their career pause and say "wait, should I really do that?" and no later than there, the psychopath shoves them aside and down the cliff.
You don't have time to waste on that empathy shit if you play in that league.
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Empathy? You think a C-Level has any empathy for you?
You're dealing with psychopaths here, they have no empathy. If they had any empathy, they would not be in that position. Anyone with empathy would at some point in their career pause and say "wait, should I really do that?" and no later than there, the psychopath shoves them aside and down the cliff.
You don't have time to waste on that empathy shit if you play in that league.
My experience has perhaps been different. I was well taken care of, and treated much better by the C-suite than those at my level.
Now whether that was because of my value added and it just served their purposes, or they actually liked me and/or considered me as some sort of equal intellectually, matters not to me.
This isn't to say that there were no jackasses or unsavory types in mahogany row. But my experience was/is that they ran a mixture of types, in similar manner to humanity as a whole.
And post
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And it's a lot more difficult to let go of people in person that you see every day than it is to send an email out to the person who won't come to a workplace.
You've never worked closely with management, have you? If you had, then you would know that most management types were psychopaths who have no real sympathy and won't break a sweat firing anyone close to them if that would advance their own career.
People who aren't as cold blooded simply would not have done whatever it took to get to senior management positions. If you saw a C-suite manager showing sympathy, he is just pretending to make people like him more.
Wasting 2+ hours of your life to commute to off
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Excellent point. 520 hours a year is enough for some sort of serious self improvement, a masters degree, tackling a new computing domain or working down a difficult certification. Making yourself easily hirable is definitely a better strategy than making yourself less firable.
Not to mention all the extra shit that will come your way with a groveling mindset at work.
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Excellent point. 520 hours a year is enough for some sort of serious self improvement, a masters degree, tackling a new computing domain or working down a difficult certification. Making yourself easily hirable is definitely a better strategy than making yourself less firable. Not to mention all the extra shit that will come your way with a groveling mindset at work.
What are you going to do with all of this "self improvement'? You might have to go be around other people and we all know you can't handle that. Just being some rando programmer if that's what you are - you are already trained at your ceiling.
The idea that a person that shows up at a workplace is groveling is silly and just shows your bad attitude. I suppose you are some independent person answerable to no one, never taking instructions? Sounds like God almighty. Otherwise, someone above you will bothe
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Work is groveling for a few scraps while you make other people rich. Someone asks you to do two unpaid hours to come into the office to score points with a guy 4 rungs up the ladder as he nervously eyes his commercial real estate holdings? You think that’s dignified?
Our job market is about to shrink drastically and they wont miss a chance to trim back expensive perks, pay you less, or do a round of layoffs. I will take every penny I can from my employer and never miss a chance to ask for more.
There
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Work is groveling for a few scraps while you make other people rich. Someone asks you to do two unpaid hours to come into the office to score points with a guy 4 rungs up the ladder as he nervously eyes his commercial real estate holdings?
You mad bro? You sound mad.
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And it's a lot more difficult to let go of people in person that you see every day than it is to send an email out to the person who won't come to a workplace.
You've never worked closely with management, have you?
Only every day and every hour of my career.
If you had, then you would know that most management types were psychopaths who have no real sympathy and won't break a sweat firing anyone close to them if that would advance their own career.
I see. You appear to have gotten your experience with management types from popular memes. Repeat after me: "Boss gets a dollar, I get a dime, that's why I shit on company time."
People who aren't as cold blooded simply would not have done whatever it took to get to senior management positions. If you saw a C-suite manager showing sympathy, he is just pretending to make people like him more.
Wasting 2+ hours of your life to commute to office is a very inefficient
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If a person does insist on working at home, they better be in the top .01 percent, and irreplaceable.
There are many other factors to consider. Is being in the same timezone important? Is being able to come to the office every now and then important, even if 99% WFH? Is being able to mail stuff to them without crossing borders important?
I'm not deluded enough to think I'm top 0.01%, but my employer doesn't seem to have an issue with me working literally 99% from home (a couple of days a year in the office),
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If a person does insist on working at home, they better be in the top .01 percent, and irreplaceable.
There are many other factors to consider. Is being in the same timezone important? Is being able to come to the office every now and then important, even if 99% WFH? Is being able to mail stuff to them without crossing borders important?
I'm not deluded enough to think I'm top 0.01%, but my employer doesn't seem to have an issue with me working literally 99% from home (a couple of days a year in the office), and taking 5 week holidays etc.
The problem as I see it, is that there are a whole lot of different careers, in a whole lot of places. And there is a huge difference between getting a remote job and refusing to do anything but remote. Remote work in and of itself is neutral.
As I've noted in here before, half of my present job is from home, and the other half a non-negotiable presence on site. So if I refused to work other than from home, I wouldn't have it. Would that matter?
Given that most people in here - at least commenting - are
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It's pretty difficult for much empathy to be developed for people who are never seen other than in a zoom meeting.
I've worked at exactly one job where everyone was in the same office, and that was a defense contractor where for obvious reasons the work couldn't leave the premises. Even then at least one person was almost always on travel somewhere.
The other 25 years of my career were spent trying not to talk over each other on shitty teleconference lines. Companies have multiple offices and rarely have I been on a team where everyone was in the same timezone, never mind physical office. If all your meetings are goin
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It's pretty difficult for much empathy to be developed for people who are never seen other than in a zoom meeting.
I've worked at exactly one job where everyone was in the same office, and that was a defense contractor where for obvious reasons the work couldn't leave the premises. Even then at least one person was almost always on travel somewhere.
The other 25 years of my career were spent trying not to talk over each other on shitty teleconference lines. Companies have multiple offices and rarely have I been on a team where everyone was in the same timezone, never mind physical office. If all your meetings are going to be zoom meetings anyway who cares if there are 9 little squares with one person each or 3 boxes with 3 people each. At least with zoom everyone has a full duplex headset/mic.
Back in the day, my place had multiple locations, plus we had to have a secure link for sensitive work. Pretty horrifying.
At present, I use Zoom for a corporation I am CEO of. Works great. We went to Zoom when the plague hit, and what was nice is that everyone on the board is a busy person, so it was often a hardship with conflicting schedules. And if there are issues with voting, you have to have a quorum.
\ Since we went to Zoom, we haven't missed a quorum. But we also see each other in person at our
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It's pretty difficult for much empathy to be developed for people who are never seen other than in a zoom meeting.
I've worked at exactly one job where everyone was in the same office, and that was a defense contractor where for obvious reasons the work couldn't leave the premises. Even then at least one person was almost always on travel somewhere.
The other 25 years of my career were spent trying not to talk over each other on shitty teleconference lines. Companies have multiple offices and rarely have I been on a team where everyone was in the same timezone, never mind physical office. If all your meetings are going to be zoom meetings anyway who cares if there are 9 little squares with one person each or 3 boxes with 3 people each. At least with zoom everyone has a full duplex headset/mic.
By the way, the corporation I'm a CEO of is a 501(c)3, not a full time job.
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Care to say why?
Oh, you want to outsource my job to Bangalore? Yeah, you try to explain to the board why your security is working from a country that is potentially not quite friendly to you OR your business.
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Hahahaha, no. What is coming is some companies collapsing that are actually dumb enough to try that. There will be seom. "AI" is a cool party trick at this time, but it cannot perform even remotely reliably enough to be useful in a commercial setting by itself. It can also make actual experts a bit more productive, but not massively so.
Confused by a time-warped reference (Score:1)
As of December 2023, about 30% of paid workdays are still done remotely (Barrero, Bloom, and Davis 2021).
Is anyone else wondering how Barrero, Bloom, and Davis were able to report December 2023 data back in 2021?
That, and there is no reference that exactly matches "Barrero, Bloom, and Davis 2021". The closest one is
Barrero, Jose Maria, Nicolas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis. 2021. "Why Working from Home Will Stick." National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 28731. Updated survey results available from https://wfhresearch.com/ [wfhresearch.com].
Hybrid work is my hangup (Score:2)
Now that my work enforced a return to office / hybrid work environment I'm back to having to figure out how to get people that are in-office into a meeting room, realize people are not checking their slack because their doing some sort of in-office thing, etc.
Hybrid sucks for a remote worker.
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I'm not here to make someone happy, I'm here to get shit done.
If that changes, I will switch to a company that cares more about getting shit done than making useless people happy. This isn't charity work, it's a business, and a business that cares more about charity will go out of business.
Hahah (Score:2)
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Seems to be.
The logical consequence would be to fire management. All the way to the top. Just think how many productive workers we could hire for the money wasted on the C-suit alone!
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Essentially. This effect is not rare. "Managers" generally destroy productivity, and the higher up, the worse the effect gets.
Blasphemy!!!! (Score:2)
A seemingly pro-WFH article on Slashdot??? Oh the sacrilege.
The org I'm working for (contractor) is based in Europe - so we have important/leading team members there, but the actual grunt work is done by team members in a cheaper location. Conclusion: Our team needs to work remotely IN ANY CASE, whether we sit in an office or at home. For my part we could be 100% WFH.
We do have an office rotation that takes us to the office about 20-25% of the time. Those occasions are generally hated by our team on both
No progress (Score:2)
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So you're trying to use emotional blackmail to tie people to the company? Try paying a relevant salary.
Quite bluntly, there is no emotional attachment to companies anymore. A company that hires and fires at will should not expect their employees to give more than a "you pay money, I deliver work" attitude. I'm not engaged with the workplace, I do not form bonds with coworkers, I am as engaged as the work allows me to be and I am as loyal as I feel the company is to me.
And this has very little to do with whe
Re: No progress (Score:2)
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There also isn't really much to innovate here. What you describe here are phony managers, in person or online doesn't really make any kind of difference.
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Who the fuck does this when they are/were IN a physical office?
Look, work is something you do to earn money to support your lifestyle you wish to have OUTSIDE of work.
Nothing more.
All the crap about "corporate culture", was just a myth, that C-suite folks were stupid enough to pay $$$ to consultants
Will nobody think of the rich losing their shirts? (Score:1)
WFH is destroying the value of commercial property in city centres, and this is mostly owned by the rich, who have the influence to encourage businesses and government to campaign in favour of office attendance.
This is true - but it is only part of the story; there is a nasty potential for the losses to cascade onto banks - as borrowers abandon mortgaged properties to the mortgage holder, who gets left with a low value property. This has the potential to cascade to bank failures and the taxpayer picking up
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We're currently in a game of chicken between employers and employees. And quite a few employers are already chicken enough to offer the 100% WFH.
They're also the ones that will get the real talent. The ones that can easiest jump ship when something better comes along. And it's not even gonna cost them more, actually, it's gonna cost them less.
It is true (Score:1)
No doubt government output is unaffected (Score:2)
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20% more productive would be about right, representing commuting time saved and other factors. And yeah, the employer pays for that overhead in the end.
Re: Let me get my popcorn (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends on the situation. At my office, I'm on the main corridor to the cafeteria. People are constantly talking and jabbering by. I have co-workers that want to do water cooler type talk that is simply distracting. I almost exclusively devote in office time to checking emails and coordinating and cross-training type interactions.
Meanwhile at home, I have a private office. Better, ultra-widescreen monitors. And work after hours more because I don't mind jumping upstairs to finish stuff after dinner and then the next thing I know it's midnight. So it's usually better quality work and more hours at that.
But yea if your home setup is bad and you have kids running around in the background bothering you and you have a hard time focusing with household needs/entertainment options, then yea. Working from home is not for you.
Re: Let me get my popcorn (Score:5, Insightful)
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My company has somehow arrived at a worse middle ground... the boring cubicles with transparent partitions so you can be distracted by every little thing. I guess it helps the boss survey the things he owns as he struts around.
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The open offices are an attempt to save money, but then they try to avoid the obvious saving of eliminating the office space entirely.
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Re: Let me get my popcorn (Score:4, Informative)
Pre-pandemic, our company had a policy that new hires had to demonstrate they knew the system well enough that they could effectively work from home. This included getting to know their co-workers, the company's culture, and the specific job elements. Their new supervisors had to get a general baseline of the employee's work productivity and how well they worked unsupervised. Basically you had to earn the right to telework, even though management never phrased it that way.
We still have a soft policy that says no new hires can work from home during their first six months, which is also their probationary hire period. This lets the new hires know they will not immediately be working from home but allows for the possibility they will be soon.
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you can quickly tell who comes in and who does not based off how much of the system they have learned, and works keeps on falling to the onsite people to handle things offsite workers can't
Then your problem is management. If someone is not productive remotely, then they need to improve, come in to the office or be fired.
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But yea if your home setup is bad and you have kids running around in the background bothering you
Covid will have skewed things somewhat, as kids were at home who would normally have been at school during working hours.
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That's pretty much how the perceived productivity boost from WFH comes into existence.
In an office, you get to work around 9 because of the damn traffic, first have to deal with coworkers getting to and from their coffee break and telling you whatever stupid thing about their stupid kids you couldn't give two fucks about, then it's lunch break which takes an hour to get there, get your food, wolf it down and get back, have a meeting, then the inevitable afternoon coffee, and whether you want to have one or
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Re:Let me get my popcorn (Score:4, Funny)
I'll have you know I do just as little work at the office as I do at home.
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And that's the problem. Because at work, such people drag down someone else because they keep yakking and trying to find someone to pester to pass the time faster, so they're dragging someone down with them that would otherwise actually do some meaningful work.
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Re: Let me get my popcorn (Score:2)
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The difference is that, if you notice a meeting is pointless while you're in a WFH environment, you can just minimize the window, turn down the speakers so the droning doesn't distract too much and do some meaningful work.
It's kinda frowned upon to just open up the laptop while in a face2face meeting and blatantly showing everyone that their crap is of no use to you.
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Nah, I want to work and not sit in a meeting with some useless narcissist droning on how awesome they are. That's less of a problem in a WFH environment, he can drone all day long in a window I minimize while working.
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How did politics enter this?
Could we have ONE topic, just one please, where we don't derail the discussion to talk about someone's pet peeve?
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You sound like Putin’s puppet.