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For us in Hong Kong, the effect of working from home was the fact that revenues and productivity plummeted, and we are now forced to take one day of unpaid leav

by hkai 7y ago

For us in Hong Kong, the effect of working from home was the fact that revenues and productivity plummeted, and we are now forced to take one day of unpaid leave per week while still putting in 40 hours a week and taking a 20% pay cut for the privilege. Just sharing as a perspective on why some people may feel that work from home may not be a great idea.

jacquesm 7y ago
Any idea why productivity dropped that much?
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  I suspect that a lot of the "productivity drop" in general is a result of trying to measure productivity for remote workers but not office workers. If someone is in the office, managers commonly assume they're working, even if they're spending most of the day faffing around on the internet. If they're at home, you can't see what they're doing so you try to measure it by results. Which shows that they're only doing a couple hours of real work in a day, which gets called a productivity drop even though it was just the baseline. I mean think about it. If people were less productive then to do the same work you'd need them to work more hours, not fewer, right? And it's even worse if your metrics do something silly like measure by lines of code or time spent typing. If someone spends an hour walking in a park figuring out how to implement something and then five minutes when they get home to type it into a computer, it's obviously bad accounting to call that an hour of leisure and five minutes of working.
Johnny555 7y ago
If work from home meant I really never had to come from the office and could work from anywhere, I'd take that pay cut and would move to a smaller, less expensive town. I pay a lot of money and put up with a lot of traffic to live within commuting distance of the office.
logicchains 7y ago
What industry do you work in, out of interest? If it's something driven by sales/physical interaction it seems that even if everyone worked just as hard from home, revenue woud still take a hit.
tanilama 7y ago
Hong Kong is a different case, the space per person is too small.
nexus2045 7y ago
Born and raised in HK but don't live/work there, and obviously I can't speak for everyone, but we get brought up in a pretty top-down authoritarian system, with parents/teachers being very stern and unforgiving, so we end up using our smarts to cheat the system at any given opportunity. Autonomy isn't really ingrained into us. Working in the west, I feel that there is more assumed trust and less micromanagement.
loco5niner 7y ago
Can't just jump straight into something like that with no preparation...

by hkai 7y ago

jacquesm 7y ago

Any idea why productivity dropped that much?

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
I suspect that a lot of the "productivity drop" in general is a result of trying to measure productivity for remote workers but not office workers. If someone is in the office, managers commonly assume they're working, even if they're spending most of the day faffing around on the internet. If they're at home, you can't see what they're doing so you try to measure it by results. Which shows that they're only doing a couple hours of real work in a day, which gets called a productivity drop even though it was just the baseline. I mean think about it. If people were less productive then to do the same work you'd need them to work more hours, not fewer, right? And it's even worse if your metrics do something silly like measure by lines of code or time spent typing. If someone spends an hour walking in a park figuring out how to implement something and then five minutes when they get home to type it into a computer, it's obviously bad accounting to call that an hour of leisure and five minutes of working.

Johnny555 7y ago

If work from home meant I really never had to come from the office and could work from anywhere, I'd take that pay cut and would move to a smaller, less expensive town. I pay a lot of money and put up with a lot of traffic to live within commuting distance of the office.

logicchains 7y ago

What industry do you work in, out of interest? If it's something driven by sales/physical interaction it seems that even if everyone worked just as hard from home, revenue woud still take a hit.

tanilama 7y ago

Hong Kong is a different case, the space per person is too small.

nexus2045 7y ago

Born and raised in HK but don't live/work there, and obviously I can't speak for everyone, but we get brought up in a pretty top-down authoritarian system, with parents/teachers being very stern and unforgiving, so we end up using our smarts to cheat the system at any given opportunity. Autonomy isn't really ingrained into us. Working in the west, I feel that there is more assumed trust and less micromanagement.

loco5niner 7y ago

Can't just jump straight into something like that with no preparation...