When lockdown started and my workplace transitioned to working from home, they were very candid with us that our productivity metrics went up. Can't help but notice how no companies pushing hard...
When lockdown started and my workplace transitioned to working from home, they were very candid with us that our productivity metrics went up. Can't help but notice how no companies pushing hard for return to office seem able to quote similar metrics to demonstrate a business case for bringing people back in. Nobody seems to even claim that productivity metrics are down in the WFH era. It's either a very abstract "we'll collaborate better" or an increasingly stern "because we said so". It makes me suspect that either productivity isn't down, or the company is not keeping good metrics and is just eyeballing "butts in seats" to tell who's working hard, which needless to say is not good or informed management.
People are willing to resign themselves to a lot of bullshit to make a living, but being greatly inconvenienced by arbitrary exercises of authority, that don't even benefit the authorities responsible, that's a whole other level of insult. Morale must be abysmal.
Honestly I'm surprised this is still cropping us as an issue so much, I imagine every time an office lease comes up for renewal the company management are going to look at the rates and reconsider if WFH isn't so bad after all. In a few months my own company is leaving one of our two buildings and putting all staff into the remaining one. Must be saving them a pretty penny.
Thinking about it from a purely technical perspective, an office is simply an expensive piece of legacy hardware that has been replaced by software solutions. And for many people in leadership...
Exemplary
Thinking about it from a purely technical perspective, an office is simply an expensive piece of legacy hardware that has been replaced by software solutions. And for many people in leadership roles, this hardware was essential to all business success.
Yes, a lot of tech we rely on did exist 20+ years ago, but it was not nearly as accessible or widespread as it is today. The office was slack, it was secure data storage, mail service. Hell it's easy to forget that most software was a manual processes that often required multiple people and a crap ton of heavy, bulky and fragile paper. An office is a complex and bespoke mechanism that required specialized skills to use properly. It just so happens that all of these mechanisms can also be run virtually.
There wasn't really a productivity gain from WFH, we just cut out the losses and bottlenecks from running a parallel system. And it seems like a lot of hard line return-to-office execs are people who can't understand why things are still running.
Some organizations own the buildings they use and they need to justify the cost. To a lesser extent some organizations have rigid managements and rigid organizational cultures. As someone else...
Some organizations own the buildings they use and they need to justify the cost. To a lesser extent some organizations have rigid managements and rigid organizational cultures. As someone else mentioned, forcing a "back to the office" order can be a way to get people to quit instead of going to the expense and reputation damage of laying them off.
Believe me when I say that the bean counters in those organizations are acutely aware that they posted record profits without using one of the largest items in the expense column - real estate.
Believe me when I say that the bean counters in those organizations are acutely aware that they posted record profits without using one of the largest items in the expense column - real estate.
100% real estate issues, and likely some additional reasons, but not related to productivity. My company did the same. Was one of the first to tell us to work from home even before it was mandated...
100% real estate issues, and likely some additional reasons, but not related to productivity. My company did the same. Was one of the first to tell us to work from home even before it was mandated when covid was starting up, we all praised them for thinking of employees first. Things were great for a while.
My industry got hit hard this last year or two, and when they told us we were going to be forced to return to office for the usual BS reasons ("increased collaboration" and "increased chance encounters", whatever that means), we all suspected it was twofold:
Real estate investments were down so they wanted to create artificial demand and make it look like the offices were in use and needed.
They knew the move would make people quit so it was a way to reduce headcount without actually having to pay severance when letting people go.
Sure enough when we got our financial results for the quarter, "lower than expected real estate investments" was quoted as one of the reasons for the poor financial results, and a re-org happened soon after that resulted in some people being laid off.
To be clear, we were doing well financially during covid and the work from home times. The current struggles with my company financially have nothing to do with work from home, it was external factors that every company in my industry is facing. The mandated return to office had nothing to do with productivity loss.
I'm actually happy that the company I worked for during Covid had JUST sold their head office and rented it instead. The remote work transfer was pretty seamless. The boss said that if you need to...
I'm actually happy that the company I worked for during Covid had JUST sold their head office and rented it instead.
The remote work transfer was pretty seamless. The boss said that if you need to grab anything heavy to take home, the company will pay for a Taxi (people commuted using public transit). Then we got a 1k€ one time grant to get our home offices in shape. (Mine was already so I upgraded my home theater with it :P)
From the LA times , the one study quoted: That's some stupid conclusion. Along the same lines of "9 women can make a baby in a month." Actual output is not down. Output is same, but hours are...
Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%.
That's some stupid conclusion. Along the same lines of "9 women can make a baby in a month." Actual output is not down. Output is same, but hours are (supposedly) increased. By how this study measure metrics, they'd see I work a 10 hour day 5 days a week. But what really happens is that I work about 5 hours a day, with extensive and frequent breaks throughout to help with kids. Or I sign in at 6 AM, check some emails, don't do anything till 9:30 for morning meeting. I have a lot of flexibility in how I do my work, and as such both my home and work life is better for it. And I'll bet a lot of studies won't capture that. In part, because not everyone's employer would be cool with 3 hour breaks during business hours. If they dragged me into the office "to increase productivity", they'd get about 1 useful working hour out of me because of all the "office theater" that needs performed. If the output is the same, let the worker choose remote or not....not the boss.
The other linked study basically threw up its hands and said "there's too many confounding factors, but here's our best guesses."
The Fortune article is citing those same articles. It's not new studies, it's an editorial echo chamber. A bunch of exec types trying to find studies to justify their desires and willing to use any definition of "productivity" that makes their arguement sound plausible to anyone whom doesn't question the sources.
Productivity is output per hour, not output. If time worked goes up for the same output that’s a bad thing. That means people aren’t able to use their time efficiently. If people are claiming to...
Actual output is not down. Output is same, but hours are (supposedly) increased.
Productivity is output per hour, not output. If time worked goes up for the same output that’s a bad thing. That means people aren’t able to use their time efficiently.
If people are claiming to work time they aren’t working, that is also a bad thing. People understandably would prefer everyone just work an honest workday and leave than be on all day not doing much. And incidentally being on while not accomplishing a lot still exacts a psychic toll on the worker and contributes to burnout.
Output also isn’t the only marker if a businesses success over the long term. There’s also harder to measure things like “quality” or “innovation/creativity.” As a PM I’ve noticed both regress as WFH has dragged on and natural staff churn leads to teams losing the cohesion they had built before going full time remote.
Hence the point of the person you're responding to: you can't effectively measure how many hours you're doing real work in a day, you can only measure the output at the end of the day/week/month.
Productivity is output per hour, not output
Hence the point of the person you're responding to: you can't effectively measure how many hours you're doing real work in a day, you can only measure the output at the end of the day/week/month.
Edit: I now realize I spent a lot of this just reiterating and expanding my previous comment. Leaving as-is, but skip the 2nd and 3rd paragraph if wanting to avoid most of that. I'm betting 90%+...
Edit: I now realize I spent a lot of this just reiterating and expanding my previous comment. Leaving as-is, but skip the 2nd and 3rd paragraph if wanting to avoid most of that.
I'm betting 90%+ of remote workers are salaried, and thus, for the most part, productivity per hour has always been a meaningless metric.
It's just now, instead of spending an hour on bathroom and coffee breaks (because of added walking distance), 2 hours of commuting, and an hour of deadtime of gaps between meetings....I have an extra 4 hours at which to do my my work at a more leisurely pace. I was only effectively working maybe 3 hours a day (including meetings) before...often less because of the spinup time from transitioning resulted in a lot of internet waste time.
So yea, my output/hour is technically lower. But it's about 99% less stressful in doing so. I'm happier than I ever was going into the office. I help more around the house and see my kids more. I suppose if they mandated a punchclock to track down my 'sitting and actively working they would be able to figure out I'm only actually working 4 hours per day, not 11 or 12, but they'd incorrectly think I was working 8 hours a day before.
IMO, everyone should pad their clock, in the office or out. Anyone who doesn't is asking to get overloaded as soon as there's a random spike in difficulty. Add in that most employers like that salary means 40hr+ and not 'accomplish stated obectives,' we have created an incentive system to make workers lie about potential productivity in order to self-balance their workloads and achieve a suitable work-life balance. I could get everything I need done in 25 hour workweeks, but I have no incentive to tell my employer that, because either they'll load on double the work (for maybe a 5% raise) or cut me to part time (and kill my wage and benefits).
That said, I get the team cohesion thing. I think it's very much one of the things the Stanford paper mentioned...it's highly dependent on both aptitude of the workers and the staff to work remotely. I learned to build cohesion via online gaming from a young age, and having a manager that has done the same makes all the difference. I switched teams and I feel closer to my new team after 1 year than I did my old team after 3.
But anyway the reason to keep up the hard fight for WFH, is because as soon as sufficient people are back onsite, businesses will start cutting paying for the tools that enable quality WFH. People will stop doing meetings remote-first, cutting remote people out of the loop.
And then we lose it all. And all the benefits vanish in the name of 'improving productivity.'
No because their allocation is still being managed. How else do you know they’re putting their energy towards its most useful ends? Even if they’re not formally logging hours (which many salaried...
I'm betting 90%+ of remote workers are salaried, and thus, for the most part, productivity per hour has always been a meaningless metric.
No because their allocation is still being managed. How else do you know they’re putting their energy towards its most useful ends? Even if they’re not formally logging hours (which many salaried workers still have to do) they’re tracking rough allocation through their managers.
But it's about 99% less stressful in doing so.
Maybe your’s is, but mine becomes more stressful when everyone is stretching their workday out to span 12 hours. I have to review and proofread stuff before it goes out and be on point to provide clarification and answer questions. If people put off working on stuff until after I’m logging off the pace to get stuff done at high quality drags.
If you’re single and childless and don’t have many personal obligations then yeah you do get to stretch your time out and pad the clock. When your non-paid work hours are also a different kind of work it’s much less workable. Time discipline, in that case, is what ameliorates stress.
we have created an incentive system to make workers lie about potential productivity in order to self-balance their workloads and achieve a suitable work-life balance.
Lying about your workload doesn’t create work life balance unless you have a manager who doesn’t understand how your job is actually done. If your manager knows the discipline they’ll just think you’re stupid or lazy.
I can live with that. It's only going to be noticed if you're an average worker doing sub-average work. I'm an above-average worker doing average work, and I don't let my employer know that,...
If your manager knows the discipline they’ll just think you’re stupid or lazy.
I can live with that. It's only going to be noticed if you're an average worker doing sub-average work. I'm an above-average worker doing average work, and I don't let my employer know that, because then, as you say, I'm stigmatized as lazy.
Could I get more money doing above-average work? Almost certainly. But the work/life balance suffers for that.
I feel like you can succesfully transition a functioning office to the WFH format quite easily, but as the years go by and new people join and others leave, I do suspect that the fabric of the...
I feel like you can succesfully transition a functioning office to the WFH format quite easily, but as the years go by and new people join and others leave, I do suspect that the fabric of the team degrades. You get so much more communication and interaction by physically sharing a space. Once that "work" is done, it can be easily carried over to a remote environment, but I question whether WFH allows that "work" to be carried out in the first place.
I guess it goes to show that nobody's experience is universal. But even if you enjoy fully remote, and I enjoy some sort of blend, that's still a huge downsizing opportunity for a typical office.
I guess it goes to show that nobody's experience is universal. But even if you enjoy fully remote, and I enjoy some sort of blend, that's still a huge downsizing opportunity for a typical office.
Yeah I think it’s possible actually, but establishing a remote-first culture takes a lot more discipline and investment than just “we do our meetings on Zoom now.” I also think the resistance a...
Yeah I think it’s possible actually, but establishing a remote-first culture takes a lot more discipline and investment than just “we do our meetings on Zoom now.”
I also think the resistance a lot of people have to being in meetings needs to change if you do full WFH. Small team collab meetings and working sessions need to be more frequent, not less when you’re primarily remote.
I also don’t think any remote work stuff has adequately replaced a bunch of people around a whiteboard.
If I had to design one, I’d issue each person a “work phone” in addition to their work computer. The phone would actually be something like a tablet with a webcam, speakers, and mic synced to the computer. But the company would have some number of channels with each one representing a “conference room.” You can flip to whichever open channel you want to sit in on and the screen would sync up to what everyone else in the channel is drawing onto their tablet so it’d work like a tele-whiteboard.
One could accomplish most of this via Teams or whatever, but dedicated hardware would be much more elegant and the fact that everyone gets a “work phone” means better office/home division.
Depending on the topic/goal the remote version of the whiteboard is better than the offline version, because multiple people can write/draw at the same time. No need to stop your thinking because...
I also don’t think any remote work stuff has adequately replaced a bunch of people around a whiteboard.
Depending on the topic/goal the remote version of the whiteboard is better than the offline version, because multiple people can write/draw at the same time. No need to stop your thinking because you need to wait for your turn. Also it is easier to preserve a copy, since it is already digital. No need to upload a photo that can't be searched in anyway. (Well, with the new AI it maybe can)
You can even keep a history, so you can go back to previous ideas if needed. People who were not present can follow the thought process if they want. It is also the end of unreadable handwriting.
If the physical presence is important for the team to get energized, then the offline version is better, of course. Otherwise the online version already wins with the current tools, I think.
I stand corrected. I was going to say you never see it in these kind of "return to office" PR videos, but obviously there's a strong selection bias in terms of which ones go viral. In this...
I stand corrected. I was going to say you never see it in these kind of "return to office" PR videos, but obviously there's a strong selection bias in terms of which ones go viral. In this specific example though, I think if they had data that clearly showed a productivity gap, they would have lead with that instead of the riskier "we're not asking, we're telling" approach.
I'm lucky that my bosses pushed hard to our leadership board to go permanent WFH early last year, after we spent at least half of 2021 and 2022 WFH (the rest was hybrid). We're still trying to...
I'm lucky that my bosses pushed hard to our leadership board to go permanent WFH early last year, after we spent at least half of 2021 and 2022 WFH (the rest was hybrid). We're still trying to sell our building, but the likelihood of going back is practically zero. We're now renting a small office (like the size of bedroom) in a coworking space, but aside from certain times of the year, there's almost never anyone there.
I do think there were some self-serving reasons for going perma-WFH. For example, my boss the CEO, has been considering moving for at least a year and a half. He and his wife just signed on a house in Detroit yesterday (we're based in Kansas City), so perma-WFH obviously allowed them to do that. And the former 2IC, who was also instrumental in this, has preschool and elementary-aged children. So WFH allowed him to become a pseudo stay-at-home dad. Either way, I'm glad they brought us all along for the ride, instead of doing how some leaders do with a "rules for thee, none for me" thing and go remote, while the peons slog their way to the office everyday.
It's not without its challenges, but I think we've been able to overcome most of them. And the remaining few we're still working on, with good progress. But many of our customers don't even realize we're perma-WFH, which is good.
Have you considered that productivity initially went up and then dropped down below original levels as people realized how easy it was to either do less of their job, or in some cases, overemploy...
It makes me suspect that either productivity isn't down, or the company is not keeping good metrics and is just eyeballing "butts in seats" to tell who's working hard, which needless to say is not good or informed management.
Have you considered that productivity initially went up and then dropped down below original levels as people realized how easy it was to either do less of their job, or in some cases, overemploy and do another job as well?
Companies are not stupid, they don’t want people to come back to the office because it will hurt the company’s productivity. I don’t know why people think this.
I have considered that, but I also think if there were clear numbers that showed that, they would be front and centre in that video. I've also talked to plenty of people who interface with their...
I have considered that, but I also think if there were clear numbers that showed that, they would be front and centre in that video. I've also talked to plenty of people who interface with their management and are finding them just as confused as anyone about the execs' calls to return to office.
Companies are not stupid
Companies are big complex things that often do stupid things because it's difficult to make every aspect of a big complex thing behave sensibly and consistently. My fiancé is being made to commute over 90 minutes each way just to talk to her team over zoom anyway because they're all on another continent, I defy anyone to tell me that isn't stupid. It's not deliberately stupid, it's just because they made an inflexible policy and didn't leave room for exceptions.
they don’t want people to come back to the office because it will hurt the company’s productivity
Of course not, but if they base decisions on bad information they can hurt productivity anyway. For example, if someone in leadership has a strong belief that employees will laze about if not monitored constantly, it might seem so self-evidently obvious to them that it never occurs to them to confirm it with hard numbers.
I have been reading these pieces for close to two years now, and anytime someone defends companies requiring employees to be back in-office, they seem to universally be either a) management who...
I have been reading these pieces for close to two years now, and anytime someone defends companies requiring employees to be back in-office, they seem to universally be either a) management who misses underlings to punt around, or b) extroverted and lonely. I don’t have demonstrable proof, just two years of empirical evidence, but I’m convinced lol
There’s also c) people who bizarrely seem to hate their partner/kids and live their lives in the office to escape being at home rather than doing anything about their lot in life
There’s also c) people who bizarrely seem to hate their partner/kids and live their lives in the office to escape being at home rather than doing anything about their lot in life
This seems like a really weird take to me. It is not "hating one's kids" to want to with in an environment with fewer distractions, nor is it "hating one's wife" to not want to spend 24 hours with...
This seems like a really weird take to me. It is not "hating one's kids" to want to with in an environment with fewer distractions, nor is it "hating one's wife" to not want to spend 24 hours with the same person every day.
Fwiw, I seem to fit into a fourth category here: I am an introvert, and I have a completely fulfilling social life outside of work. But I like going into an office because I am usually more productive, I have all my gear there, and I enjoy company during my day instead of sitting isolated at home the whole time. I happily work from home when I want, but I honestly don't want to most of the time.
Moreover, speaking to friends and colleagues, this seems to be the majority view. Sure, it's likely that I'm in my own bubble, where I've self-selected a social group and workplace where these feelings are the norm, but the apparent hatred for offices that you get in these sorts of threads is completely outside of my experience.
I completely agree that working from home should be more encouraged for those who want it. What I find weird is the assumption that I must be an abusive manager, a loner, or hate my wife in order to have a different opinion to you.
My experience aligns closely with yours. I like working in the office sometimes, and would love it if I could do ten (at most) in-office days per month. I do use the personal relationships built...
My experience aligns closely with yours. I like working in the office sometimes, and would love it if I could do ten (at most) in-office days per month. I do use the personal relationships built up in-person to work better when I'm working from home, and I would have struggled to build those relationships as quickly or as well if I were based entirely from home.
So even our experience should allow for cost-savings from a smaller office. I don't love hot-desking, but it's the price I think a worker has to pay so that the employer can downsize significantly, thus making it a real win-win situation.
People who want to work in an office away from their wife and kids don't hate their family, that's an insane thing to think. I have a 2 bedroom apartment and a 3 year old. I can't work with her...
People who want to work in an office away from their wife and kids don't hate their family, that's an insane thing to think.
I have a 2 bedroom apartment and a 3 year old. I can't work with her around. If you're lucky or privileged enough to have an office in your house, that's great. For some of us, we need to go into work be productive, particularly for think-y stuff.
Unless my eye deceives me, it seems a special kind of ironic that all the executive staff filmed themselves using a green screen with their image superimposed on the office that they are clearly...
Unless my eye deceives me, it seems a special kind of ironic that all the executive staff filmed themselves using a green screen with their image superimposed on the office that they are clearly not present at themselves. They couldn’t be bothered enough to do so even for this video.
Even more bizarre is that the green screen backgrounds are almost exclusively of empty offices. This really was a master class on how not to announce return to office.
Even more bizarre is that the green screen backgrounds are almost exclusively of empty offices. This really was a master class on how not to announce return to office.
It's especially noticable with the guy at 1:05 who is clearly looking slightly to the side at his laptop. I think there are two factors contributing to the back-to-office push - Real estate, and...
It's especially noticable with the guy at 1:05 who is clearly looking slightly to the side at his laptop.
I think there are two factors contributing to the back-to-office push - Real estate, and managerial control.
A lot of these companies probably have expensive office leases that would go unused if people to continue to work from home, and they want to get a "return" from their expenses (irrespective of if staff are happier - an underappreciated metric- or more productive at home).
Higher-up managers are increasingly disconnected from the work that actually gets done, which risks misinforming them into making bad business decisions. Rather than fix the problem from the managerial side - educating them on what work gets done, which takes effort on their part - the easy way out is just to watch people to make sure work is getting done, which return-to-office does (as does time-tracking/surveillance software on laptops/phones).
I had a job with a company that was all about the bottom line. They would eat their own mothers if they could save money on food. The pandemic lockdowns came, they implemented WFH, saw no change...
I had a job with a company that was all about the bottom line. They would eat their own mothers if they could save money on food. The pandemic lockdowns came, they implemented WFH, saw no change in productivity and they could not go permanent with it fast enough when they saw how much money they could save on rent.
In retrospect it should not have been a surprise to me either. Half the team was in another state. I went into the office to work on a PC and do meetings over conference calls with the phone on the desk. We all could do both of those things at home. Desktop sharing via MS Teams was a lot more comfortable than standing over someone's computer or vice-versa too.
This has got to do with many business owners having deep links and investments in real estate related businesses like builders, rent and lease operations, hotels, etc. and sometimes even real...
This has got to do with many business owners having deep links and investments in real estate related businesses like builders, rent and lease operations, hotels, etc. and sometimes even real estate mafiyas!
These other businesses who start accumulating losses will then try to influence and even coerce our business owner to stop WFH and call their employees to work. For that's the only way these other businesses will start earning (some are still recouping losses of the pandemic lockdown).
Most of my job is very doable telework wise. If there is a valid reason or a net positive to coming in, I don't mind! The fact is, there isn't even the same space and privacy to do my job on site...
Most of my job is very doable telework wise. If there is a valid reason or a net positive to coming in, I don't mind! The fact is, there isn't even the same space and privacy to do my job on site anymore. I have a nice home office setup, no distractions, a window, etc. I can't provide the same or better service in my role in person. There a few aspects that are collaborative and team based that make sense, and I go in person for those. That's less than 1-2 times a week, however.
If there were valid contexts and situations, and I am sure there are, I would have no problem with it. The workplace as I know it now and before the COVID-19 pandemic work from home evolution does not reward me going back in. However, if the spaces became more conducive for creativity, exploration, and I was able to get something more out of job satisfaction I couldn't get out of working from home, then there would be no reason for odd passive aggressive or threatening videos from management like this.
When lockdown started and my workplace transitioned to working from home, they were very candid with us that our productivity metrics went up. Can't help but notice how no companies pushing hard for return to office seem able to quote similar metrics to demonstrate a business case for bringing people back in. Nobody seems to even claim that productivity metrics are down in the WFH era. It's either a very abstract "we'll collaborate better" or an increasingly stern "because we said so". It makes me suspect that either productivity isn't down, or the company is not keeping good metrics and is just eyeballing "butts in seats" to tell who's working hard, which needless to say is not good or informed management.
People are willing to resign themselves to a lot of bullshit to make a living, but being greatly inconvenienced by arbitrary exercises of authority, that don't even benefit the authorities responsible, that's a whole other level of insult. Morale must be abysmal.
Honestly I'm surprised this is still cropping us as an issue so much, I imagine every time an office lease comes up for renewal the company management are going to look at the rates and reconsider if WFH isn't so bad after all. In a few months my own company is leaving one of our two buildings and putting all staff into the remaining one. Must be saving them a pretty penny.
Thinking about it from a purely technical perspective, an office is simply an expensive piece of legacy hardware that has been replaced by software solutions. And for many people in leadership roles, this hardware was essential to all business success.
Yes, a lot of tech we rely on did exist 20+ years ago, but it was not nearly as accessible or widespread as it is today. The office was slack, it was secure data storage, mail service. Hell it's easy to forget that most software was a manual processes that often required multiple people and a crap ton of heavy, bulky and fragile paper. An office is a complex and bespoke mechanism that required specialized skills to use properly. It just so happens that all of these mechanisms can also be run virtually.
There wasn't really a productivity gain from WFH, we just cut out the losses and bottlenecks from running a parallel system. And it seems like a lot of hard line return-to-office execs are people who can't understand why things are still running.
What a wonderful way to express this.
Some organizations own the buildings they use and they need to justify the cost. To a lesser extent some organizations have rigid managements and rigid organizational cultures. As someone else mentioned, forcing a "back to the office" order can be a way to get people to quit instead of going to the expense and reputation damage of laying them off.
Believe me when I say that the bean counters in those organizations are acutely aware that they posted record profits without using one of the largest items in the expense column - real estate.
100% real estate issues, and likely some additional reasons, but not related to productivity. My company did the same. Was one of the first to tell us to work from home even before it was mandated when covid was starting up, we all praised them for thinking of employees first. Things were great for a while.
My industry got hit hard this last year or two, and when they told us we were going to be forced to return to office for the usual BS reasons ("increased collaboration" and "increased chance encounters", whatever that means), we all suspected it was twofold:
Real estate investments were down so they wanted to create artificial demand and make it look like the offices were in use and needed.
They knew the move would make people quit so it was a way to reduce headcount without actually having to pay severance when letting people go.
Sure enough when we got our financial results for the quarter, "lower than expected real estate investments" was quoted as one of the reasons for the poor financial results, and a re-org happened soon after that resulted in some people being laid off.
To be clear, we were doing well financially during covid and the work from home times. The current struggles with my company financially have nothing to do with work from home, it was external factors that every company in my industry is facing. The mandated return to office had nothing to do with productivity loss.
I'm actually happy that the company I worked for during Covid had JUST sold their head office and rented it instead.
The remote work transfer was pretty seamless. The boss said that if you need to grab anything heavy to take home, the company will pay for a Taxi (people commuted using public transit). Then we got a 1k€ one time grant to get our home offices in shape. (Mine was already so I upgraded my home theater with it :P)
Tons of people make that claim.
https://fortune.com/2023/07/06/remote-workers-less-productive-wfh-research/
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-01-04/2024-year-employers-clamp-down-on-remote-work-not-so-fast
I'm not going to put in much time to get more sources because it's so common.
From the LA times , the one study quoted:
That's some stupid conclusion. Along the same lines of "9 women can make a baby in a month." Actual output is not down. Output is same, but hours are (supposedly) increased. By how this study measure metrics, they'd see I work a 10 hour day 5 days a week. But what really happens is that I work about 5 hours a day, with extensive and frequent breaks throughout to help with kids. Or I sign in at 6 AM, check some emails, don't do anything till 9:30 for morning meeting. I have a lot of flexibility in how I do my work, and as such both my home and work life is better for it. And I'll bet a lot of studies won't capture that. In part, because not everyone's employer would be cool with 3 hour breaks during business hours. If they dragged me into the office "to increase productivity", they'd get about 1 useful working hour out of me because of all the "office theater" that needs performed. If the output is the same, let the worker choose remote or not....not the boss.
The other linked study basically threw up its hands and said "there's too many confounding factors, but here's our best guesses."
The Fortune article is citing those same articles. It's not new studies, it's an editorial echo chamber. A bunch of exec types trying to find studies to justify their desires and willing to use any definition of "productivity" that makes their arguement sound plausible to anyone whom doesn't question the sources.
I'm just illustrating that it's a common claim, not making a statement on its accuracy.
Productivity is output per hour, not output. If time worked goes up for the same output that’s a bad thing. That means people aren’t able to use their time efficiently.
If people are claiming to work time they aren’t working, that is also a bad thing. People understandably would prefer everyone just work an honest workday and leave than be on all day not doing much. And incidentally being on while not accomplishing a lot still exacts a psychic toll on the worker and contributes to burnout.
Output also isn’t the only marker if a businesses success over the long term. There’s also harder to measure things like “quality” or “innovation/creativity.” As a PM I’ve noticed both regress as WFH has dragged on and natural staff churn leads to teams losing the cohesion they had built before going full time remote.
Hence the point of the person you're responding to: you can't effectively measure how many hours you're doing real work in a day, you can only measure the output at the end of the day/week/month.
Edit: I now realize I spent a lot of this just reiterating and expanding my previous comment. Leaving as-is, but skip the 2nd and 3rd paragraph if wanting to avoid most of that.
I'm betting 90%+ of remote workers are salaried, and thus, for the most part, productivity per hour has always been a meaningless metric.
It's just now, instead of spending an hour on bathroom and coffee breaks (because of added walking distance), 2 hours of commuting, and an hour of deadtime of gaps between meetings....I have an extra 4 hours at which to do my my work at a more leisurely pace. I was only effectively working maybe 3 hours a day (including meetings) before...often less because of the spinup time from transitioning resulted in a lot of internet waste time.
So yea, my output/hour is technically lower. But it's about 99% less stressful in doing so. I'm happier than I ever was going into the office. I help more around the house and see my kids more. I suppose if they mandated a punchclock to track down my 'sitting and actively working they would be able to figure out I'm only actually working 4 hours per day, not 11 or 12, but they'd incorrectly think I was working 8 hours a day before.
IMO, everyone should pad their clock, in the office or out. Anyone who doesn't is asking to get overloaded as soon as there's a random spike in difficulty. Add in that most employers like that salary means 40hr+ and not 'accomplish stated obectives,' we have created an incentive system to make workers lie about potential productivity in order to self-balance their workloads and achieve a suitable work-life balance. I could get everything I need done in 25 hour workweeks, but I have no incentive to tell my employer that, because either they'll load on double the work (for maybe a 5% raise) or cut me to part time (and kill my wage and benefits).
That said, I get the team cohesion thing. I think it's very much one of the things the Stanford paper mentioned...it's highly dependent on both aptitude of the workers and the staff to work remotely. I learned to build cohesion via online gaming from a young age, and having a manager that has done the same makes all the difference. I switched teams and I feel closer to my new team after 1 year than I did my old team after 3.
But anyway the reason to keep up the hard fight for WFH, is because as soon as sufficient people are back onsite, businesses will start cutting paying for the tools that enable quality WFH. People will stop doing meetings remote-first, cutting remote people out of the loop.
And then we lose it all. And all the benefits vanish in the name of 'improving productivity.'
No because their allocation is still being managed. How else do you know they’re putting their energy towards its most useful ends? Even if they’re not formally logging hours (which many salaried workers still have to do) they’re tracking rough allocation through their managers.
Maybe your’s is, but mine becomes more stressful when everyone is stretching their workday out to span 12 hours. I have to review and proofread stuff before it goes out and be on point to provide clarification and answer questions. If people put off working on stuff until after I’m logging off the pace to get stuff done at high quality drags.
If you’re single and childless and don’t have many personal obligations then yeah you do get to stretch your time out and pad the clock. When your non-paid work hours are also a different kind of work it’s much less workable. Time discipline, in that case, is what ameliorates stress.
Lying about your workload doesn’t create work life balance unless you have a manager who doesn’t understand how your job is actually done. If your manager knows the discipline they’ll just think you’re stupid or lazy.
I can live with that. It's only going to be noticed if you're an average worker doing sub-average work. I'm an above-average worker doing average work, and I don't let my employer know that, because then, as you say, I'm stigmatized as lazy.
Could I get more money doing above-average work? Almost certainly. But the work/life balance suffers for that.
I feel like you can succesfully transition a functioning office to the WFH format quite easily, but as the years go by and new people join and others leave, I do suspect that the fabric of the team degrades. You get so much more communication and interaction by physically sharing a space. Once that "work" is done, it can be easily carried over to a remote environment, but I question whether WFH allows that "work" to be carried out in the first place.
I guess it goes to show that nobody's experience is universal. But even if you enjoy fully remote, and I enjoy some sort of blend, that's still a huge downsizing opportunity for a typical office.
Yeah I think it’s possible actually, but establishing a remote-first culture takes a lot more discipline and investment than just “we do our meetings on Zoom now.”
I also think the resistance a lot of people have to being in meetings needs to change if you do full WFH. Small team collab meetings and working sessions need to be more frequent, not less when you’re primarily remote.
I also don’t think any remote work stuff has adequately replaced a bunch of people around a whiteboard.
If I had to design one, I’d issue each person a “work phone” in addition to their work computer. The phone would actually be something like a tablet with a webcam, speakers, and mic synced to the computer. But the company would have some number of channels with each one representing a “conference room.” You can flip to whichever open channel you want to sit in on and the screen would sync up to what everyone else in the channel is drawing onto their tablet so it’d work like a tele-whiteboard.
One could accomplish most of this via Teams or whatever, but dedicated hardware would be much more elegant and the fact that everyone gets a “work phone” means better office/home division.
Depending on the topic/goal the remote version of the whiteboard is better than the offline version, because multiple people can write/draw at the same time. No need to stop your thinking because you need to wait for your turn. Also it is easier to preserve a copy, since it is already digital. No need to upload a photo that can't be searched in anyway. (Well, with the new AI it maybe can)
You can even keep a history, so you can go back to previous ideas if needed. People who were not present can follow the thought process if they want. It is also the end of unreadable handwriting.
If the physical presence is important for the team to get energized, then the offline version is better, of course. Otherwise the online version already wins with the current tools, I think.
I stand corrected. I was going to say you never see it in these kind of "return to office" PR videos, but obviously there's a strong selection bias in terms of which ones go viral. In this specific example though, I think if they had data that clearly showed a productivity gap, they would have lead with that instead of the riskier "we're not asking, we're telling" approach.
I suspect that it's not in the company's interests to make their productivity metrics known owing to Goodhart's law.
I'm lucky that my bosses pushed hard to our leadership board to go permanent WFH early last year, after we spent at least half of 2021 and 2022 WFH (the rest was hybrid). We're still trying to sell our building, but the likelihood of going back is practically zero. We're now renting a small office (like the size of bedroom) in a coworking space, but aside from certain times of the year, there's almost never anyone there.
I do think there were some self-serving reasons for going perma-WFH. For example, my boss the CEO, has been considering moving for at least a year and a half. He and his wife just signed on a house in Detroit yesterday (we're based in Kansas City), so perma-WFH obviously allowed them to do that. And the former 2IC, who was also instrumental in this, has preschool and elementary-aged children. So WFH allowed him to become a pseudo stay-at-home dad. Either way, I'm glad they brought us all along for the ride, instead of doing how some leaders do with a "rules for thee, none for me" thing and go remote, while the peons slog their way to the office everyday.
It's not without its challenges, but I think we've been able to overcome most of them. And the remaining few we're still working on, with good progress. But many of our customers don't even realize we're perma-WFH, which is good.
Have you considered that productivity initially went up and then dropped down below original levels as people realized how easy it was to either do less of their job, or in some cases, overemploy and do another job as well?
Companies are not stupid, they don’t want people to come back to the office because it will hurt the company’s productivity. I don’t know why people think this.
I have considered that, but I also think if there were clear numbers that showed that, they would be front and centre in that video. I've also talked to plenty of people who interface with their management and are finding them just as confused as anyone about the execs' calls to return to office.
Companies are big complex things that often do stupid things because it's difficult to make every aspect of a big complex thing behave sensibly and consistently. My fiancé is being made to commute over 90 minutes each way just to talk to her team over zoom anyway because they're all on another continent, I defy anyone to tell me that isn't stupid. It's not deliberately stupid, it's just because they made an inflexible policy and didn't leave room for exceptions.
Of course not, but if they base decisions on bad information they can hurt productivity anyway. For example, if someone in leadership has a strong belief that employees will laze about if not monitored constantly, it might seem so self-evidently obvious to them that it never occurs to them to confirm it with hard numbers.
I have been reading these pieces for close to two years now, and anytime someone defends companies requiring employees to be back in-office, they seem to universally be either a) management who misses underlings to punt around, or b) extroverted and lonely. I don’t have demonstrable proof, just two years of empirical evidence, but I’m convinced lol
There’s also c) people who bizarrely seem to hate their partner/kids and live their lives in the office to escape being at home rather than doing anything about their lot in life
This seems like a really weird take to me. It is not "hating one's kids" to want to with in an environment with fewer distractions, nor is it "hating one's wife" to not want to spend 24 hours with the same person every day.
Fwiw, I seem to fit into a fourth category here: I am an introvert, and I have a completely fulfilling social life outside of work. But I like going into an office because I am usually more productive, I have all my gear there, and I enjoy company during my day instead of sitting isolated at home the whole time. I happily work from home when I want, but I honestly don't want to most of the time.
Moreover, speaking to friends and colleagues, this seems to be the majority view. Sure, it's likely that I'm in my own bubble, where I've self-selected a social group and workplace where these feelings are the norm, but the apparent hatred for offices that you get in these sorts of threads is completely outside of my experience.
I completely agree that working from home should be more encouraged for those who want it. What I find weird is the assumption that I must be an abusive manager, a loner, or hate my wife in order to have a different opinion to you.
My experience aligns closely with yours. I like working in the office sometimes, and would love it if I could do ten (at most) in-office days per month. I do use the personal relationships built up in-person to work better when I'm working from home, and I would have struggled to build those relationships as quickly or as well if I were based entirely from home.
So even our experience should allow for cost-savings from a smaller office. I don't love hot-desking, but it's the price I think a worker has to pay so that the employer can downsize significantly, thus making it a real win-win situation.
People who want to work in an office away from their wife and kids don't hate their family, that's an insane thing to think.
I have a 2 bedroom apartment and a 3 year old. I can't work with her around. If you're lucky or privileged enough to have an office in your house, that's great. For some of us, we need to go into work be productive, particularly for think-y stuff.
Unless my eye deceives me, it seems a special kind of ironic that all the executive staff filmed themselves using a green screen with their image superimposed on the office that they are clearly not present at themselves. They couldn’t be bothered enough to do so even for this video.
Even more bizarre is that the green screen backgrounds are almost exclusively of empty offices. This really was a master class on how not to announce return to office.
It's especially noticable with the guy at 1:05 who is clearly looking slightly to the side at his laptop.
I think there are two factors contributing to the back-to-office push - Real estate, and managerial control.
A lot of these companies probably have expensive office leases that would go unused if people to continue to work from home, and they want to get a "return" from their expenses (irrespective of if staff are happier - an underappreciated metric- or more productive at home).
Higher-up managers are increasingly disconnected from the work that actually gets done, which risks misinforming them into making bad business decisions. Rather than fix the problem from the managerial side - educating them on what work gets done, which takes effort on their part - the easy way out is just to watch people to make sure work is getting done, which return-to-office does (as does time-tracking/surveillance software on laptops/phones).
I had a job with a company that was all about the bottom line. They would eat their own mothers if they could save money on food. The pandemic lockdowns came, they implemented WFH, saw no change in productivity and they could not go permanent with it fast enough when they saw how much money they could save on rent.
In retrospect it should not have been a surprise to me either. Half the team was in another state. I went into the office to work on a PC and do meetings over conference calls with the phone on the desk. We all could do both of those things at home. Desktop sharing via MS Teams was a lot more comfortable than standing over someone's computer or vice-versa too.
Anyone have a link to the video? I'm sure it's been archived somewhere...
Ninja edit: Found it here.
This has got to do with many business owners having deep links and investments in real estate related businesses like builders, rent and lease operations, hotels, etc. and sometimes even real estate mafiyas!
These other businesses who start accumulating losses will then try to influence and even coerce our business owner to stop WFH and call their employees to work. For that's the only way these other businesses will start earning (some are still recouping losses of the pandemic lockdown).
Most of my job is very doable telework wise. If there is a valid reason or a net positive to coming in, I don't mind! The fact is, there isn't even the same space and privacy to do my job on site anymore. I have a nice home office setup, no distractions, a window, etc. I can't provide the same or better service in my role in person. There a few aspects that are collaborative and team based that make sense, and I go in person for those. That's less than 1-2 times a week, however.
If there were valid contexts and situations, and I am sure there are, I would have no problem with it. The workplace as I know it now and before the COVID-19 pandemic work from home evolution does not reward me going back in. However, if the spaces became more conducive for creativity, exploration, and I was able to get something more out of job satisfaction I couldn't get out of working from home, then there would be no reason for odd passive aggressive or threatening videos from management like this.