16 ms·

At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

137 points by davidw 6y ago

ghaff 6y ago
Dimon kind of throws them under the bus, doesn't he: "Work output by younger employees was particularly affected on Mondays and Fridays, according to findings discussed by Chief Executive Office Jamie Dimon in a private meeting with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analysts. That, along with worries that remote work is no substitute for organic interaction, are part of why the biggest U.S. bank is urging more workers to return to offices over the coming weeks." Of course, if one were cynical, you might suspect he wanted return to office anyway and young workers are a convenient and safe group to blame.
- joezydeco 6y ago
  What kind of work are these junior employees doing that is this highly measurable?
  - ghaff 6y ago
    JPMC is a huge institution so it's hard to answer. Certainly there are many roles in trading, working with clients, support, etc. that will have pretty quantified metrics associated with them.
    - dv_dt 6y ago
      How does anyone take quantified metrics seriously if trying to compare pre-covid market bubble data to in-covid recession/market bubble. The environments are completely different.
      - ivalm 6y ago
        One can do differential comparison for day of week. AggregateOverEmployeesByAgeGroup(AggregateDatesBeforeCovid(Prod(employee_i | day of week)/AggregateDatesAfterCovid(Prod(employee_i | day of week before covid))) Then see if it is flat or if there is changes (such as it dips on monday/friday)
        nwienert 6y ago
        Yea, but the Prod function still entirely determines if it’s comparable.
        dv_dt 6y ago
        Thats .. an adjustment. It really doesn't tell you if the work inputs allocated to young vs old groups shifted before and after covid. Also, I question the validity of the Prod( ) function as, like much other information work, the productivity yields on different timeframes and can be very difficult to correlate inputs vs outputs.
        babesh 6y ago
        There were 3 things mentioned in the article. Younger vs older, Monday and Friday vs rest of week for younger, and creativity. You could theoretically measure younger vs older in the same job and also compare those two groups by M/F vs rest of work week. Compare those groups before and after COVID-19.
  - carriganisms 6y ago
    Agreed, this claim feels totally baseless.
  - jpmcdude 6y ago
    They are almost all proxy metrics of course. For engineering you can look at commits, PRs, incidents, deployments, etc and most of those metrics actually improved quite dramatically the first few months after everyone worked from home. Many of the offices are hot-desked high capacity environments and I cannot get anything done in them, so the initial reports were completely unsurprising. I can't speak to what is being said now as I'm not really tracking any of it. I don't believe it's pure bullshit. It could be that people are just picking up bad habits. It could be stress and distractions from all the stuff that's swirling around now. It could be an exaggerated stance to signal to real estate in the affected markets that JPMC isn't packing up and getting out of town. Who knows. I will say that the technical infrastructure has been very good, due in part to long term investments in remote infrastructure for years now and it's pretty seamless switching from the office to remote. I personally will quit before I go back full time to the chaos of high capacity office environments. I'm not built for it.
- zepto 6y ago
  Do you think he’s just lying about it? When I was a younger worker I certainly did slack off on Friday and Monday when I could get away with it. I’ve worked in more than one office where people started drinking on Friday afternoon in the office when the CEO was out of town.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >Do you think he’s just lying about it? Not really. But the general impression from the piece is that he has various less-quantified reasons for wanting more people back to the office and slacker younger workers does seem like a convenient excuse -- especially if there's some truth to it (which is entirely possible). FWIW, if I were in my twenties at this time, I'm not sure I would trust myself to keep plugging away.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      I’m in my 30s and I personally have a hard time being productive when the world is literally and metaphorically on fire and plague stricken. Being in an office would not change this.
      - dv_dt 6y ago
        Being in an office would make me more distracted imho. Between wondering if the ventilation is giving me covid from careless co-workers, to being more separate from family and home should another disaster crop up. Edit: careless not carless ... lol
        dmoy 6y ago
        Right now I'd pay good money for corporate HVAC. I'm coughing myself to death in my own home right now
        shard 6y ago
        If this is because of high PM2.5 concentration (due to wildfires or otherwise), I suggest building a DIY air filter, such as the one in the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5APw_SLUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5APw_SLUU When the Air Quality Index shot up to ~150 in my area (you want to keep it below 100, preferably below 50), I went to Home Depot and bought box fans and furnace filters and built my own. You can check the air quality in your area on this site: https://aqicn.org https://aqicn.org
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
  LOL - as a data analyst - I would love to know how they measured this and what their confidence interval is. It's interesting they didn't share any percentages. And it's interesting that they didn't talk about weekend work at all. A lot of people where I work are working shorter days, but also working a little bit on the weekends. I realize JPM is a pretty big company - but the way this works at a lot of companies is - someone has a narrative they want to tell, does shitty analysis until they find some data point that fits their narrative, and then the company makes decisions based on that. How do you boil productivity down to a metric that's easy to even discuss? Anyone can get more work done by performing it at a lower quality. Even if this was just for bankers that have a list of tickets to close - are we just talking about sheer number of tickets closed? Is the quality for each ticket going up or down?
  - mimikatz 6y ago
    This is very on point to how large companies operate.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Yeah when you dig you'll often find out "decrease in productivity" is in the noise of the data. CEOs and managers enjoy control and surveying their minor kingdoms. I think it's more about ego than efficiency. I know that I am dramatically more productive at home. I hate the distractions at work. The random drop bys, the "do you have a second", the "15 minute (oops 1 hour)" meetings that could be done over slack or email. It's ridiculous. I know it really depends on your work and personality but by and large managerials are type A with egos and they are starting to feel less important so everybody needs to get back to the office stat.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  I felt the same. I'm sure JD had particular results in mind. When you have that much juice you tend to get what you want. It'll be interesting to see the social media reaction once it breaks that employees are being ordered back en mass, no opt out, etc.
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/JG7Sn https://archive.is/JG7Sn
el_don_almighty 6y ago
The old guys want us back in the office as well. The party is over. It's a shame. I am getting so much more done at home. I can't believe I have to go back to that hell hole. There's no way I can replicate my home office setup. I think I am going to glue my headphones to my head claim it as an ADA accommodation...
lwigo 6y ago
Am I supposed to feel bad for JPMC?
jimbob45 6y ago
I’m inclined to believe he’s afraid of change and is abusing his power to push his feelings-based agenda. To me, this goes one of two ways. One, he loses a huge swath of young workers that apply to different companies instead and his company folds. Two, he still loses a huge swath of young workers who don’t apply but his feelings turn out to be true and the company comes out stronger. Either way, we won’t know until many years down the line.
- smeeth 6y ago
  You seem to be operating under the assumption that all young employees want to work from home. I'm a young person who can't wait to go back to the office, and I know I'm not the only one. WFH is a much better setup for people who have two kids and a dog, not single people in small studio apartments.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - sidlls 6y ago
    What makes you think that WFH is better for people with kids and a dog?
pydry 6y ago
Younger employees probably have less space. Apartment/house shares, etc. I've known some who are working on their bed. This isn't healthy nor is it likely to be conducive to productivity.
- fma 6y ago
  As opposed to older employees...who have a spouse, who may also WFH, and and kids...who are doing remote learning?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - PudgePacket 6y ago
    Distractions are orthogonal to space. It's generally not productive to play "who has it worse".
  - epistasis 6y ago
    I have a spouse and a kid, and though it's super taxing trying to get any work done, at least I have these super great relationships to lean on. I know that if I were on month six of having roommates that were not close friends, I'd be going absolutely bonkers. Of course every personality type deals with this differently, as we all need different things in life. And if I didn't have such a luckily great family life I could easily be miserable. I seem to notice more breakups and divorces recently, but that's hard to quantify beyond my acquaintances. Maybe a social scientist will measure this.
- AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  I don't think space cannot be blamed here: modern offices are crowded and noisy. My scientific wild-ass guess would be that younger employees naturally require more coaching, while the older, more experienced folks know the stuff and just keep doing what they've been doing for the past ten years.
- gotaran 6y ago
  Not to minimize the struggles of suburban parents, but I do feel they might be divorced from what single urban life is like right now. As a "younger" (30 year old) tech employee, in addition to living in a cramped space with 3 roommates in SF with no privacy, I have to work in a dining room because my bedroom has very thin walls. I also have to do cook and clean way more often, when I previously used to get 3 meals a day at work. I also have to haul groceries a couple times a week, which is super painful without a car, and then I have to compete for very limited fridge space. I also haven't met friends and family in over 6 months, and my dating life's been obliterated. It's been mentally taxing in a way that living with your loved ones in a McMansion isn't. I can't even handle Zoom calls with friends anymore. It's the last thing I want to do after the 3 hours of back to back Zoom meetings I get roped into because I'm "senior". Again, I don't mean to minimize the struggles of parents, college kids, the many people unemployed, our essential workers keeping things running, or our elderly who are at risk of dying. I'm in a very privileged position. But it's clear that all the lifestyle changes I've been forced to make have been a huge drain on my productivity.
frompdx 6y ago
There is a lot of certainty in the quotes this article shares given the complete lack of hard data. > “The WFH lifestyle seems to have impacted younger employees, and overall productivity and ‘creative combustion’ has taken a hit,” What exactly is "creative combustion" and how can one measure it? > “Overall, Jamie thinks a shift back to the office will be good for the young employees and to foster creative ideas,” Kleinhanzl wrote. This is yet another remote work hit piece. There are not metrics presented, perhaps none collected, and the immeasurable "creativity" is used in place of facts. For any of these claims to have credibility the following need to presented at minimum. 1. What was measured. 2. How it was measured. 3. What the sample size was. 4. How long it was measured. 5. The delta in measurements alongside the raw data. But I suspect Dimon and his cohort don't care about credibility. They just want to find a way to rationalize their decision.
- traskjd 6y ago
  Where’s all of this for your side of the argument? Thanks!
mjfl 6y ago
As a young guy who was a full time remote worker for about 6 months, and also very honest with myself: I was more distracted as a remote employee. I wasn't as focused as I needed to be and when I was on site working next to the guy I reported to I was much more productive.
- djmips 6y ago
  That's true but you were fooling yourself. Wait until you get fired and then you'll realize it's about getting your work done and not where you are sitting. Discipline should come from within.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mjfl 6y ago
    > That's true but you were fooling yourself. When did I fool myself? What are you talking about?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
fhood 6y ago
I despise working from home, and think my productivity has taken a massive hit as a result. Believe it or not I like being able to switch between a work and home environment, and find it vastly improves my mood and productivity.
koolba 6y ago
The younger employees clearly haven’t mastered the art of the automated Monday morning 7:47am email or how to rewrite git commit history to edit the author time stamp.
OminousWeapons 6y ago
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I honestly can't wait to get back to the office (or any other workspace that isn't my home). I really hate working at home. I don't have enough space or privacy, it becomes far more difficult to partition work and play when they occur in the same spaces / I find myself distracted more easily, and there is no one to socialize with when I'm sitting by myself every day. Could I remedy all of these problems with extra effort? Sure, but it's far easier for me to simply go to the office.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- echelon 6y ago
  I've officially reached zero productivity today. I'm sick of being stuck in my tiny condo with the noise from neighbors and zero work/life balance. The constant streams of asks on Slack that wake me up in the morning and keep me up at night. I'm making more in the stock market than my job.
  - kzrdude 6y ago
    Can you sign off from slack when you finish working for the day? That should be step one for getting a balance.
    - pkaye 6y ago
      I don't use Slack anymore but I think there is a feature to specify your working hours so it will not notify you outside of those hours.
      - jonas21 6y ago
        I don't think the issue is technical, but cultural. If everybody else is available all the time, it's hard to do differently.
        6y ago
spike021 6y ago
I'm not nearly as productive in my 1 bedroom apartment as I am at the office. I try to only go to my desk during work hours but it's where my dining area would be, so while cooking I like to browse the internet/watch Youtube on my ultrawide monitor. At the same time, it's a small apartment, so the dining area is part of my living room. This means I'm in the same room for pretty much the entirety of the day. I try to avoid going into my bedroom outside of night time sleep hours so that I can at least keep that space as more of a nighttime only relaxing one. I desperately need a completely separate space. I was already planning to move to a new, nicer apartment this year, and because of COVID WFH I'm considering getting a 2br and taking the hit on the additional cost just so that I can have an entirely separate office space. But regardless, while I don't mind WFH once or twice a week, I really prefer a separate office a majority of the time. I need and value the separation.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  As someone who has that extra room, which I have made into an office, I say, if you can afford it, do it. Not only is it good for WFH, it makes a good hobby room/library for me. I agree with you about WFH in the future, as well. When I can go back to an office, 1-2 WFH days a week is about what I want. That would be a bit of an uptick for me, since I normally would take 1-2 WFH days a month, but there's enough to like about it that I don't want to give up (getting the commute time back is nice sometimes), and I've gotten good enough at it to sustain it.
- jfoutz 6y ago
  It sounds a little silly, but a uniform can help. Pick some clothes that are work clothes, put them on when you "go to work" and then switch back out when you're done. Sort of like how changing into gym clothes helps (me anyway) motivate myself to go out and excercise.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 6y ago
    It’s a pretty powerful psychological motivator - if I change into my gym clothes there’s no way I’m not working out - imagine going through the trouble to change into your gym clothes and then changing back out without doing anything. To me it’s almost unimaginable.
m00dy 6y ago
Landlords in NYC will feel happy about this.
- vertbhrtn 6y ago
  From their perspective, it would be rational to cut a deal with JPMC: they bring workforce back to offices, landlords get their money and give a % of that to a few execs at JPMC. And all the health related problems won't be a JPMC's problem. In some sense, JPMC's execs suggest to burn the workforce now, pocket the extra money, and depart to greener pastures (less contaminated with viruses) shortly before the fallout.
refurb 6y ago
Not surprised in the least. My hypothesis is that we won't see a massive shift towards WFH with the exception of a few big name tech companies. Most employers will require people to be in the office, at least a part of the week. And even those companies who say "ok" to WFH, will start second guessing their decision within a couple years.
mcqueenjordan 6y ago
I prefer arrangements where I go in to work ~80% of the time. (e.g. ~1 day each week WFH of my own choosing, completely spontaneous day-of decision.) That being said, I don't think my productivity has taken a hit during this long period of WFH. If anything, I think I'm being more productive. I do miss the social interaction, though. That's why I prefer the 80/20 arrangement.
tchalla 6y ago
> The bank has noticed the productivity decline among “employees in general, not just younger employees,” JPMorgan spokesman Michael Fusco clarified in an emailed statement, adding that younger workers “could be disadvantaged by missed learning opportunities” by not being in offices. From the article
boring_twenties 6y ago
At this point I'm not sure I care whether I'm more productive at home or in the office. I'm simply not going to consider ever going into an office again unless someone wants to pay me at least double what I'd make working at home, and that's that. FWIW my honest assessment is that I'm more productive at home on average, but with much higher variance.
JamesLeonis 6y ago
I want to bring up another question: How much of the work was synchronous vs asynchronous? A company that is deeply in bed with meetings and face-to-face cooperation will suffer in a remote-first environment. The article, as others have noted, talks a lot about feelings of the upper management rather than any hard data. Reading a linked article further down [0] says that JPMC, and other banks, were ramping up the return to the office for months, and it's now when they are making it mandatory. Also, several weeks ago large New York landlords [1] were urging Wall Street banks to bring their staff back into work. Might be a coincidence, but the timing certainly warrants a look. [0]: https://archive.is/qJYRo https://archive.is/qJYRo [1]: https://archive.is/LSp9t https://archive.is/LSp9t
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
I see it as good news. If employees can be fully productive while working from home, they can be equally productive while working from Mumbai. I'd rather be in NYC office.
- ralphc 6y ago
  I somewhat disagree. For a lot of work you want workers to be in, or near the time zone of the majority of the workers. 10+ hours offset means no real-time communication and email chains take days instead of minutes.
babesh 6y ago
Ramping employees new to the workforce is probably best done in person over the course of several months. There are so many things that someone new can spin their wheels on for hours that you can solve immediately. Younger employees won’t be getting the full support they need.
daxfohl 6y ago
I'll venture a good chunk of that is due to an out-of-sync-with-reality issue. I think we'd all feel more productive and motivated working from home if the world wasn't collapsing all around us. Working on some new feature shaving a few milliseconds off an API call for investment bankers seems a bit out of touch, whether at home or in the office. Blaming loss of productivity solely on working from home may be the wrong conclusion.
- avolcano 6y ago
  This has been a massive issue for me. I've had the same problem off-and-on over the past few years, whether in offices or at home. The work I do feels rather pointless in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future. I at least sometimes get pulled back into feeling good about what I work on because it's a consumer app that does have a large userbase that depends on it for their happiness, and I do feel good about contributing to that, but if I was working in finance? No way. Anyone who has been able to stay productive, let alone get more productive, in this reality is either in denial or far more optimistic than I'll ever be.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    > in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future. This is just your world-view being shaped by your “news” sources. Maybe get off of social media for a while or only follow people who do not talk about politics/current events. > but if I was working in finance? No way. People who say this tend to underestimate the importance of finance. For example, enabling easy mobile banking for tech illiterate people is going to have a much larger impact on society than 99% of the apps already out there. Another: imagine if you can fix budgeting for the 90% of people who don’t bother. Don’t shit on fields you don’t understand. It makes you look ignorant and blocks you from even realizing the opportunities in the world.
    - wsatb 6y ago
      > This is just your world-view being shaped by your “news” sources. Maybe get off of social media for a while or only follow people who do not talk about politics/current events. This is a good way to escape reality, but not much more. I've done this plenty of times, but the world doesn't stop moving because you're ignoring what's going on. You become ignorant, and that is far worse. > Don’t shit on fields you don’t understand. It makes you look ignorant and blocks you from even realizing the opportunities in the world. I took the comment as they are not interested in finance. Maybe they've worked in the field in the past and don't like it. They didn't "shit on" anything.
holidayacct 6y ago
Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred million dollars before they finally realized it wasn't generalizable. They had to scrap the entire project. It isnt possible to measure employee productivity because its impossible to properly quantify the relative importance of a task. Properly scoping problems is a massive task and finally its impossible to adjust for employees gaming the system, collusion or simply malicious behavior. Employees always figure out how to abuse productivity metrics.
- yhoneycomb 6y ago
  > Employees always figure out how to abuse productivity metrics. If people can abuse your productivity metric, then it's a bad measure of productivity - not a fault of the worker.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    Parent agrees, and further observes that all measures of productivity are "bad".
    - yhoneycomb 6y ago
      Parent does not agree, if parent agreed, then parent would not have used the word "abuse", which implies that the worker is the one at fault. There are many nuances to the English language that are difficult for non-native speakers to pick up.
      - montenegrohugo 6y ago
        > There are many nuances to the English language that are difficult for non-native speakers to pick up. Being condescending is bad, but being condescending whilst also being clearly wrong is doubly so. Get out.
lindenksv85 6y ago
I think it’s unfortunate that people are taking statistics (or anecdotes) from this period to support or not support WFH. At this point in time, it would be rather audacious for anyone to claim that productivity is more tied to the location of your desk than to the fact that people are working through the apocalypse, and some people are working through more than one “once in a lifetime” disaster. If productivity is down, maybe it’s because we expect people to keep adding to billionaire bottom lines when their entire lives are falling apart, in many cases irreparably??
- oh-4-fucks-sake 6y ago
  Chiming in here. I moved across the country to SoCal and returned to the company I left, (re)-starting in Sept. 2019 as full-time WFH. I worked 4-5 days in the office before the move. I'm a good control here because I've worked for the same company: 1. In the office 2. WFH pre-Covid 3. WFH during-Covid What's more, all of my favorite activities: golf, hiking, cooking--are largely unaffected by the pandemic. My income's been the same and the work activities have been roughly similar. I felt relatively productive WFH pre-Covid but something has changed that's affected my productivity/motivation--and I can't put my finger on it. I think it's the general, subconscious, back-of-my-mind feeling that things are profoundly going to shit that's dragging me down. It's been a struggle now when it's not been before. This is all purely anecdotal, but I think I'm a good case-in-point example of your position: that WFH is a convenient strawman to hand-wave away the effects of people living in the final pages of a Vonnegut novel. I love WFH; I want to be productive; but I don't think that shoe-horning people back into offices (wearing a mask all day, nonetheless) is going to magically turn everyone back into creative, chipper good-time-charlies.
  - mepiethree 6y ago
    if we're doing anecdotes, the apocalypse makes me more productive since good work allows me to hide from everything else in the world being terrible
rossdavidh 6y ago
First off, let me say that I have happily WFH for a few years now. I'm not opposed to it. It works for some people. However, this is likely a problem that will get worse, not better, over time. The early WFH experience was able to cruise on the office connections, cross-training, personal knowledge, team-building, etc. that had happened previously. The longer people are away from the office, the more that hard-to-quantify stuff will decay. Plus, onboarding a new college grad has got to be challenging when there's not a group of experienced team members around them to be able to see when they're struggling or headed off the wrong path without realizing it. All of these problems can be mitigated, but they won't be eliminated. There will always be some positions and employees where WFH makes sense; as I said, it has often worked for me. But the idea that half or even a quarter of employees would become permanently WFH, is fantasy. It's kind of like having a long-distance relationship. You can do it for a while, but the penalty mounts over time in ways that are hard to quantify, but real nonetheless.
- kochikame 6y ago
  This is a great comment I think it's increasingly clear that blanket policies and one-size-fits-all WFH plans are just not going to work. People may gripe, but it seems like WFH is not going to be for everybody, in every position, at every stage in their careers. Hell, it might not even be feasible depending on the project you're working on this year.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > onboarding a new college grad has got to be challenging when there's not a group of experienced team members around them to be able to see when they're struggling or headed off the wrong path without realizing it Has anyone figured this one out? It’s inhibiting hiring quite significantly at our firm. I can’t imagine we’re the only ones.
  - rubidium 6y ago
    For fresh grads: x2 Manager checkins daily for first 2 months For the 2-5 yr expirence: x1 checkin daily for the first month For the 5+ yr experience engineer: x1 checkin daily first week. For all: reduce checkins as appropriate for each, case-by-case.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Could they have chosen a more inane data point? These companies hire one person for the job of three people, underpays them for the number of years they squeeze from their stressed lives, then spits out the ones that can’t handle the hazing.
anti-shill 6y ago
the same jp morgan with massive investments in commercial real estate? https://wallstreetonparade.com/2019/09/jpmorgan-chase-has-billions-in-cre-loans-riding-on-wework-surviving/ https://wallstreetonparade.com/2019/09/jpmorgan-chase-has-bi...
yalogin 6y ago
I don’t get it. How does one even measure productivity and that too on a daily basis? How do they know that productivity fell on Mondays and fridays? Are they stalking their employees and tracking their every keystroke?
didibus 6y ago
It's important to keep in mind we can't distinguish between work from home and having to work during a pandemic affecting everyone's daily routine and moral and keeping us from our normal activities.
wirthjason 6y ago
With a 1.5 year old daughter WFH is great. Sure, there’s distractions — she wants to climb on my lap and bang the keyboard and play with the mouse. In the start I used to get upset about the interruption but now I take a 5-10 min break and play with her. It gives me purpose to why I’m behind the keyboard in the first place. If I were in an office I’d miss these moments, leaving the house before she wakes up and returning just before she goes to bed.
Ericson2314 6y ago
Don't young bank employees just sit around all day until their boss asks at 7pm for powerpoint they rush to research and make for the next 3 hours?
- muttled 6y ago
  At least it would match the college experience of working those hours.
nym3r0s 6y ago
I've worked in two of these top investment banks and the amount of red tape that needs to be crossed is just breathtaking. Something as simple as provisioning a kafka topic? Go raise 2 requests, have it approved by these 4 people including your manager, then create multiple system accounts for each environment, each with its own approval steps. Agreed that these approvals and audit trails are necessary - but surely they can be simplified. In office - you always knew someone who knew someone in that team. It was just a matter of picking up the phone, calling them and getting them to expedite your request. Now that everyone is WFH, you ping them on IM and wait for them to respond. With back-to-back zoom calls, it's honestly the last thing people want to do. Couple that with the fact that there isn't a divide (like commute) between work and home anymore - so there's just more fatigue and higher levels of irritability.
rtlfe 6y ago
> Work output was particularly affected on Mondays and Fridays, according to findings discussed by Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon in a private meeting with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analysts. How would they measure that? It seems basically impossible, and the article has no details.
13rac1 6y ago
Apples to Oranges. This is not Work From Home. This is Work From Home during a Pandemic during Natural Disasters. WFHPND is a bit long for an acronym though. Productivity may, actually, fall for younger employees at home, but data from this year is not valid for a calculation vs prior years.
topkai22 6y ago
We took an entire society from in-person offices with norms structured around a clear delineation between home/work to full WFH basically overnight. There was little to no training, often limited or confused technology rollout, and no planned culture transition. On top of that, many people had their kids kept home as well and had other essential services disrupted. The fact that it is difficult to measure whether or not WFH had an impact on productivity or not is a HUGE mark in its favor. This should have just fallen apart, no consultant or advisor would have every recommended trying a mass remote working initiative this way. Instead it seems to have mostly worked. I say mostly, because now we are at the point where it takes concious thought to build processes and culture to sustain a remote work culture. Developing young talent is difficult regardless of the circumstances, but in the in person office we have well developed norms, culture, programs, and processes to support them. Have you and your organization spent significant time thinking adapting and developing those cultural factors? I'm a remote work advocate because I've seen it work not just for me but for those around me, including junior talent, but you have to think about it, experiment, and work at it. Beyond the workplace, a lot of people have complained about the sudden transition to WFH do to them being not set up for it. I've heard this expressed as because they have limited space / lots of roommates or just being uncomfortable with the lack of home/work seperation. The root cause of these is (mostly) the unique circumstances of this experiment. If WFH was a strong social norm, people would have chosen different living accommodations and would have "seperate spaces" without needing a corporate office. While not every job ultimately can or should become primarily remote/WFH, I think the benefits for most information workers and their companies will win out. But right now we are going to see the long and hard process of rebuilding culture and norms in a new work environment.
- notfromhere 6y ago
  I don’t know about you, but work/life delineation pre-Covid wasn’t much better. The reason that employees are feeling it worse now is because even that pretense is gone, even if it barely existed before.
Zoo3y 6y ago
Imagine for a second these comments but for an article praising productivity while working from home.
jrochkind1 6y ago
It's a good thing that in this natural experiment nothing else that might effect productivity changed between February and March except switching to work from home, right? Since factors that might effect anxiety, physical and psychological health, priorities, demands on time and attention, and external factors effecting success stayed largely the same, but for switching from working in an office to working from home, so we know it was "the WFH lifestyle" (lifestyle?!?) that caused a 'hit' to 'overall productivity', so we can be confident that instructing employees to return to the office regardless of safety will restore this stolen productivity. (not)
actuator 6y ago
I used to enjoy short periods of remote work but I have hated WFH since it started during the Covid period. - I miss talking with colleagues on things related to tech, but not necessarily related to the current task. - Video meetings are exhausting to be a part of for resolving simple things. It was way faster to just talk in person. - Video meetings feel less collaborative in general for open ended discussions, I see far fewer participation from teammates if it is not their own task. - New employees who onboarded during Covid feel isolated as they didn't get to build personal rapport with others in the same or different teams. - Interaction with people from different teams has almost disappeared, not everytime you had a new idea, you were actively looking for it. - As much as I enjoy cooking, I hate that it feels like a chore at this point to do day in, day out. - I hate that personal time and work time boundaries have merged and it seems like I am working at all hours and relaxing at all hours at the same time.
codygman 6y ago
> extended remote work may not be all it’s cracked up to be, at least for some job functions. While pre-pandemic studies found remote workers were just as efficient as those in offices, there were questions about how employees would perform under compulsory lockdowns. Or maybe ya know... A pandemic has its own negative effect on productivity.
conductr 6y ago
Something I’ve observed is middle management is doing more of the doing. That is to say, they are cutting out their (younger) subordinates. This is happening as they want to be in the best position to survive layoffs. I sadly have overseen the talent reviews aka lay-off rankings and I’ve heard from colleagues that this is happening at their companies too.
- user5994461 6y ago
  This. Interns and new graduates are mostly dead weight right now. They're impossible to train and bring up to speed without being physically together. Layoffs will come and younger employees will be the first to go.
Mountain_Skies 6y ago
I've enjoyed working from home for the past four years but have serious reservations about how well it would have worked for me at the beginning of my career. Though I came into the labor market with a good degree from a good school, there was so much to learn and much of that happened informally and organically while in the physical presence of others with more experience. Perhaps the nature or structure of work will adapt in such a way that those early in their careers will not be hampered by being remote but in the meantime it does seem like there is going to be a need for extra patience in developing younger employees into higher levels of productivity.
mirekrusin 6y ago
Maybe if they offered desk, stand+keyboard+mouse/desktop so people don't have to work from the "kitchen table" the results would be better?
aussieguy1234 6y ago
Are bank employees that work on securities permitted to use common collaboration apps such as Slack? Or are they prevented from doing so to crack down on insider trading etc? If they can't use common collaboration apps you in a remote setting you could see how this could impact their productivity.
- thr0waway2 6y ago
  You can chat to other people on internal IM apps or on Symphony/Bloomberg to external people. They're all monitored and recorded along with Zoom calls. My drop in productivity as a trader was mostly due to the fact that despite we were raking in a lot of cash I could just see us barely getting paid at the end of the year so I just made sure our books weren't blowing up and spent most of my time finding a hedge fund job.
simonCGN 6y ago
Sounds like propaganda to me. No word on how they have measured it.
flashyfaffe2 6y ago
For those who don't know, Bloomberg journalist have their bonus linked to their capacity to have their articles impacting th market. Bloomberg has developed a tool to monitor this.
FpUser 6y ago
Without giving even the slightest idea on what productivity and how did they measure it I would say it is just plain propaganda from managers discovering that some of them (maybe a good lot) are becoming redundant. As for learning things - there is insane amount of knowledge online and if one is unable to use it they have bigger problems than being/or not in the office.
Kiro 6y ago
Report: "WFH has made productivity go up." HN: "Of course you're more productive. WFH is the best, I hope we never return to the office!" Report: "WFH has made productivity go down." HN: "Don't trust this. Productivity can't be measures."
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
awalton 6y ago
Going way out on a limb here, maybe productivity has dropped due to the overall stress of the situation, and not being at home? It doesn't seem like it's ever going to be possible to separate the noise from the signal here - everyone's experiencing an unprecedented in their lifetime event causing an immeasurable amount of extra stressors...
ecmascript 6y ago
I work from home and have done so for a couple of years. It all depends, like most stuff in life. It depends on the person working from home, their situation, what their job is etc. It works great for me since I have a dedicated office at home which is larger than any office space I've had before. I can have this because I can live on the country side where housing is cheaper. I can walk my dogs when I need to and I can focus a lot more here than I ever could in an open office. I have respect for people who claim they cannot and see no reason (except a pandemic) why people should always work from home. I can imagine why a 20-year old in his or her 20 square meter apartment isn't as productive as they would be at a big, bright office. For me, if I had to go to an office, I would have to leave my dogs in some dog care facility in the morning, stressing in my commute to work since I am forever a optimist when it comes to time. I wouldn't feel good, I would be tired and unable to focus. I have been there and done that. I know I am more productive at home. I think it's nice to offer people the ability so that for the people who thrives in it (like me) can have the ability to work from home. It has been hard, because the WFH mentality is either all or nothing. Why can't people and companies simply be a bit more laid back and offer both? The world isn't black and white, just let people decide for themselves since we are all grown ups. I expect companies not to treat me as a child and so should you.
m0zg 6y ago
> At JPMorgan, productivity falls How can it "fall" when JPMorgan doesn't actually _produce_ anything?
LatteLazy 6y ago
The fact that JP Morgan have managed to actually measure productivity for any complex role is frankly incredible. That alone will get them the (non-) Nobel prize in economics I imagine...

137 points by davidw 6y ago

Dimon kind of throws them under the bus, doesn't he: "Work output by younger employees was particularly affected on Mondays and Fridays, according to findings discussed by Chief Executive Office Jamie Dimon in a private meeting with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analysts. That, along with worries that remote work is no substitute for organic interaction, are part of why the biggest U.S. bank is urging more workers to return to offices over the coming weeks." Of course, if one were cynical, you might suspect he wanted return to office anyway and young workers are a convenient and safe group to blame.

joezydeco 6y ago
What kind of work are these junior employees doing that is this highly measurable?
- ghaff 6y ago
  JPMC is a huge institution so it's hard to answer. Certainly there are many roles in trading, working with clients, support, etc. that will have pretty quantified metrics associated with them.
  - dv_dt 6y ago
    How does anyone take quantified metrics seriously if trying to compare pre-covid market bubble data to in-covid recession/market bubble. The environments are completely different.
    - ivalm 6y ago
      One can do differential comparison for day of week. AggregateOverEmployeesByAgeGroup(AggregateDatesBeforeCovid(Prod(employee_i | day of week)/AggregateDatesAfterCovid(Prod(employee_i | day of week before covid))) Then see if it is flat or if there is changes (such as it dips on monday/friday)
      - nwienert 6y ago
        Yea, but the Prod function still entirely determines if it’s comparable.
      - dv_dt 6y ago
        Thats .. an adjustment. It really doesn't tell you if the work inputs allocated to young vs old groups shifted before and after covid. Also, I question the validity of the Prod( ) function as, like much other information work, the productivity yields on different timeframes and can be very difficult to correlate inputs vs outputs.
        babesh 6y ago
        There were 3 things mentioned in the article. Younger vs older, Monday and Friday vs rest of week for younger, and creativity. You could theoretically measure younger vs older in the same job and also compare those two groups by M/F vs rest of work week. Compare those groups before and after COVID-19.
- carriganisms 6y ago
  Agreed, this claim feels totally baseless.
- jpmcdude 6y ago
  They are almost all proxy metrics of course. For engineering you can look at commits, PRs, incidents, deployments, etc and most of those metrics actually improved quite dramatically the first few months after everyone worked from home. Many of the offices are hot-desked high capacity environments and I cannot get anything done in them, so the initial reports were completely unsurprising. I can't speak to what is being said now as I'm not really tracking any of it. I don't believe it's pure bullshit. It could be that people are just picking up bad habits. It could be stress and distractions from all the stuff that's swirling around now. It could be an exaggerated stance to signal to real estate in the affected markets that JPMC isn't packing up and getting out of town. Who knows. I will say that the technical infrastructure has been very good, due in part to long term investments in remote infrastructure for years now and it's pretty seamless switching from the office to remote. I personally will quit before I go back full time to the chaos of high capacity office environments. I'm not built for it.
zepto 6y ago
Do you think he’s just lying about it? When I was a younger worker I certainly did slack off on Friday and Monday when I could get away with it. I’ve worked in more than one office where people started drinking on Friday afternoon in the office when the CEO was out of town.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >Do you think he’s just lying about it? Not really. But the general impression from the piece is that he has various less-quantified reasons for wanting more people back to the office and slacker younger workers does seem like a convenient excuse -- especially if there's some truth to it (which is entirely possible). FWIW, if I were in my twenties at this time, I'm not sure I would trust myself to keep plugging away.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    I’m in my 30s and I personally have a hard time being productive when the world is literally and metaphorically on fire and plague stricken. Being in an office would not change this.
    - dv_dt 6y ago
      Being in an office would make me more distracted imho. Between wondering if the ventilation is giving me covid from careless co-workers, to being more separate from family and home should another disaster crop up. Edit: careless not carless ... lol
      - dmoy 6y ago
        Right now I'd pay good money for corporate HVAC. I'm coughing myself to death in my own home right now
        shard 6y ago
        If this is because of high PM2.5 concentration (due to wildfires or otherwise), I suggest building a DIY air filter, such as the one in the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5APw_SLUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5APw_SLUU When the Air Quality Index shot up to ~150 in my area (you want to keep it below 100, preferably below 50), I went to Home Depot and bought box fans and furnace filters and built my own. You can check the air quality in your area on this site: https://aqicn.org https://aqicn.org
onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
LOL - as a data analyst - I would love to know how they measured this and what their confidence interval is. It's interesting they didn't share any percentages. And it's interesting that they didn't talk about weekend work at all. A lot of people where I work are working shorter days, but also working a little bit on the weekends. I realize JPM is a pretty big company - but the way this works at a lot of companies is - someone has a narrative they want to tell, does shitty analysis until they find some data point that fits their narrative, and then the company makes decisions based on that. How do you boil productivity down to a metric that's easy to even discuss? Anyone can get more work done by performing it at a lower quality. Even if this was just for bankers that have a list of tickets to close - are we just talking about sheer number of tickets closed? Is the quality for each ticket going up or down?
- mimikatz 6y ago
  This is very on point to how large companies operate.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Yeah when you dig you'll often find out "decrease in productivity" is in the noise of the data. CEOs and managers enjoy control and surveying their minor kingdoms. I think it's more about ego than efficiency. I know that I am dramatically more productive at home. I hate the distractions at work. The random drop bys, the "do you have a second", the "15 minute (oops 1 hour)" meetings that could be done over slack or email. It's ridiculous. I know it really depends on your work and personality but by and large managerials are type A with egos and they are starting to feel less important so everybody needs to get back to the office stat.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
I felt the same. I'm sure JD had particular results in mind. When you have that much juice you tend to get what you want. It'll be interesting to see the social media reaction once it breaks that employees are being ordered back en mass, no opt out, etc.

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/JG7Sn https://archive.is/JG7Sn

el_don_almighty 6y ago

The old guys want us back in the office as well. The party is over. It's a shame. I am getting so much more done at home. I can't believe I have to go back to that hell hole. There's no way I can replicate my home office setup. I think I am going to glue my headphones to my head claim it as an ADA accommodation...

lwigo 6y ago

Am I supposed to feel bad for JPMC?

jimbob45 6y ago

I’m inclined to believe he’s afraid of change and is abusing his power to push his feelings-based agenda. To me, this goes one of two ways. One, he loses a huge swath of young workers that apply to different companies instead and his company folds. Two, he still loses a huge swath of young workers who don’t apply but his feelings turn out to be true and the company comes out stronger. Either way, we won’t know until many years down the line.

smeeth 6y ago
You seem to be operating under the assumption that all young employees want to work from home. I'm a young person who can't wait to go back to the office, and I know I'm not the only one. WFH is a much better setup for people who have two kids and a dog, not single people in small studio apartments.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sidlls 6y ago
  What makes you think that WFH is better for people with kids and a dog?

pydry 6y ago

Younger employees probably have less space. Apartment/house shares, etc. I've known some who are working on their bed. This isn't healthy nor is it likely to be conducive to productivity.

fma 6y ago
As opposed to older employees...who have a spouse, who may also WFH, and and kids...who are doing remote learning?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- PudgePacket 6y ago
  Distractions are orthogonal to space. It's generally not productive to play "who has it worse".
- epistasis 6y ago
  I have a spouse and a kid, and though it's super taxing trying to get any work done, at least I have these super great relationships to lean on. I know that if I were on month six of having roommates that were not close friends, I'd be going absolutely bonkers. Of course every personality type deals with this differently, as we all need different things in life. And if I didn't have such a luckily great family life I could easily be miserable. I seem to notice more breakups and divorces recently, but that's hard to quantify beyond my acquaintances. Maybe a social scientist will measure this.
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
I don't think space cannot be blamed here: modern offices are crowded and noisy. My scientific wild-ass guess would be that younger employees naturally require more coaching, while the older, more experienced folks know the stuff and just keep doing what they've been doing for the past ten years.
gotaran 6y ago
Not to minimize the struggles of suburban parents, but I do feel they might be divorced from what single urban life is like right now. As a "younger" (30 year old) tech employee, in addition to living in a cramped space with 3 roommates in SF with no privacy, I have to work in a dining room because my bedroom has very thin walls. I also have to do cook and clean way more often, when I previously used to get 3 meals a day at work. I also have to haul groceries a couple times a week, which is super painful without a car, and then I have to compete for very limited fridge space. I also haven't met friends and family in over 6 months, and my dating life's been obliterated. It's been mentally taxing in a way that living with your loved ones in a McMansion isn't. I can't even handle Zoom calls with friends anymore. It's the last thing I want to do after the 3 hours of back to back Zoom meetings I get roped into because I'm "senior". Again, I don't mean to minimize the struggles of parents, college kids, the many people unemployed, our essential workers keeping things running, or our elderly who are at risk of dying. I'm in a very privileged position. But it's clear that all the lifestyle changes I've been forced to make have been a huge drain on my productivity.

frompdx 6y ago

There is a lot of certainty in the quotes this article shares given the complete lack of hard data. > “The WFH lifestyle seems to have impacted younger employees, and overall productivity and ‘creative combustion’ has taken a hit,” What exactly is "creative combustion" and how can one measure it? > “Overall, Jamie thinks a shift back to the office will be good for the young employees and to foster creative ideas,” Kleinhanzl wrote. This is yet another remote work hit piece. There are not metrics presented, perhaps none collected, and the immeasurable "creativity" is used in place of facts. For any of these claims to have credibility the following need to presented at minimum. 1. What was measured. 2. How it was measured. 3. What the sample size was. 4. How long it was measured. 5. The delta in measurements alongside the raw data. But I suspect Dimon and his cohort don't care about credibility. They just want to find a way to rationalize their decision.

traskjd 6y ago
Where’s all of this for your side of the argument? Thanks!

mjfl 6y ago

As a young guy who was a full time remote worker for about 6 months, and also very honest with myself: I was more distracted as a remote employee. I wasn't as focused as I needed to be and when I was on site working next to the guy I reported to I was much more productive.

djmips 6y ago
That's true but you were fooling yourself. Wait until you get fired and then you'll realize it's about getting your work done and not where you are sitting. Discipline should come from within.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mjfl 6y ago
  > That's true but you were fooling yourself. When did I fool myself? What are you talking about?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

fhood 6y ago

I despise working from home, and think my productivity has taken a massive hit as a result. Believe it or not I like being able to switch between a work and home environment, and find it vastly improves my mood and productivity.

koolba 6y ago

The younger employees clearly haven’t mastered the art of the automated Monday morning 7:47am email or how to rewrite git commit history to edit the author time stamp.

OminousWeapons 6y ago

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I honestly can't wait to get back to the office (or any other workspace that isn't my home). I really hate working at home. I don't have enough space or privacy, it becomes far more difficult to partition work and play when they occur in the same spaces / I find myself distracted more easily, and there is no one to socialize with when I'm sitting by myself every day. Could I remedy all of these problems with extra effort? Sure, but it's far easier for me to simply go to the office.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
echelon 6y ago
I've officially reached zero productivity today. I'm sick of being stuck in my tiny condo with the noise from neighbors and zero work/life balance. The constant streams of asks on Slack that wake me up in the morning and keep me up at night. I'm making more in the stock market than my job.
- kzrdude 6y ago
  Can you sign off from slack when you finish working for the day? That should be step one for getting a balance.
  - pkaye 6y ago
    I don't use Slack anymore but I think there is a feature to specify your working hours so it will not notify you outside of those hours.
    - jonas21 6y ago
      I don't think the issue is technical, but cultural. If everybody else is available all the time, it's hard to do differently.
      - 6y ago

spike021 6y ago

I'm not nearly as productive in my 1 bedroom apartment as I am at the office. I try to only go to my desk during work hours but it's where my dining area would be, so while cooking I like to browse the internet/watch Youtube on my ultrawide monitor. At the same time, it's a small apartment, so the dining area is part of my living room. This means I'm in the same room for pretty much the entirety of the day. I try to avoid going into my bedroom outside of night time sleep hours so that I can at least keep that space as more of a nighttime only relaxing one. I desperately need a completely separate space. I was already planning to move to a new, nicer apartment this year, and because of COVID WFH I'm considering getting a 2br and taking the hit on the additional cost just so that I can have an entirely separate office space. But regardless, while I don't mind WFH once or twice a week, I really prefer a separate office a majority of the time. I need and value the separation.

pmiller2 6y ago
As someone who has that extra room, which I have made into an office, I say, if you can afford it, do it. Not only is it good for WFH, it makes a good hobby room/library for me. I agree with you about WFH in the future, as well. When I can go back to an office, 1-2 WFH days a week is about what I want. That would be a bit of an uptick for me, since I normally would take 1-2 WFH days a month, but there's enough to like about it that I don't want to give up (getting the commute time back is nice sometimes), and I've gotten good enough at it to sustain it.
jfoutz 6y ago
It sounds a little silly, but a uniform can help. Pick some clothes that are work clothes, put them on when you "go to work" and then switch back out when you're done. Sort of like how changing into gym clothes helps (me anyway) motivate myself to go out and excercise.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 6y ago
  It’s a pretty powerful psychological motivator - if I change into my gym clothes there’s no way I’m not working out - imagine going through the trouble to change into your gym clothes and then changing back out without doing anything. To me it’s almost unimaginable.

m00dy 6y ago

Landlords in NYC will feel happy about this.

vertbhrtn 6y ago
From their perspective, it would be rational to cut a deal with JPMC: they bring workforce back to offices, landlords get their money and give a % of that to a few execs at JPMC. And all the health related problems won't be a JPMC's problem. In some sense, JPMC's execs suggest to burn the workforce now, pocket the extra money, and depart to greener pastures (less contaminated with viruses) shortly before the fallout.

refurb 6y ago

Not surprised in the least. My hypothesis is that we won't see a massive shift towards WFH with the exception of a few big name tech companies. Most employers will require people to be in the office, at least a part of the week. And even those companies who say "ok" to WFH, will start second guessing their decision within a couple years.

mcqueenjordan 6y ago

I prefer arrangements where I go in to work ~80% of the time. (e.g. ~1 day each week WFH of my own choosing, completely spontaneous day-of decision.) That being said, I don't think my productivity has taken a hit during this long period of WFH. If anything, I think I'm being more productive. I do miss the social interaction, though. That's why I prefer the 80/20 arrangement.

tchalla 6y ago

> The bank has noticed the productivity decline among “employees in general, not just younger employees,” JPMorgan spokesman Michael Fusco clarified in an emailed statement, adding that younger workers “could be disadvantaged by missed learning opportunities” by not being in offices. From the article

boring_twenties 6y ago

At this point I'm not sure I care whether I'm more productive at home or in the office. I'm simply not going to consider ever going into an office again unless someone wants to pay me at least double what I'd make working at home, and that's that. FWIW my honest assessment is that I'm more productive at home on average, but with much higher variance.

JamesLeonis 6y ago

I want to bring up another question: How much of the work was synchronous vs asynchronous? A company that is deeply in bed with meetings and face-to-face cooperation will suffer in a remote-first environment. The article, as others have noted, talks a lot about feelings of the upper management rather than any hard data. Reading a linked article further down [0] says that JPMC, and other banks, were ramping up the return to the office for months, and it's now when they are making it mandatory. Also, several weeks ago large New York landlords [1] were urging Wall Street banks to bring their staff back into work. Might be a coincidence, but the timing certainly warrants a look. [0]: https://archive.is/qJYRo https://archive.is/qJYRo [1]: https://archive.is/LSp9t https://archive.is/LSp9t

AlexTWithBeard 6y ago

I see it as good news. If employees can be fully productive while working from home, they can be equally productive while working from Mumbai. I'd rather be in NYC office.

ralphc 6y ago
I somewhat disagree. For a lot of work you want workers to be in, or near the time zone of the majority of the workers. 10+ hours offset means no real-time communication and email chains take days instead of minutes.

babesh 6y ago

Ramping employees new to the workforce is probably best done in person over the course of several months. There are so many things that someone new can spin their wheels on for hours that you can solve immediately. Younger employees won’t be getting the full support they need.

daxfohl 6y ago

I'll venture a good chunk of that is due to an out-of-sync-with-reality issue. I think we'd all feel more productive and motivated working from home if the world wasn't collapsing all around us. Working on some new feature shaving a few milliseconds off an API call for investment bankers seems a bit out of touch, whether at home or in the office. Blaming loss of productivity solely on working from home may be the wrong conclusion.

avolcano 6y ago
This has been a massive issue for me. I've had the same problem off-and-on over the past few years, whether in offices or at home. The work I do feels rather pointless in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future. I at least sometimes get pulled back into feeling good about what I work on because it's a consumer app that does have a large userbase that depends on it for their happiness, and I do feel good about contributing to that, but if I was working in finance? No way. Anyone who has been able to stay productive, let alone get more productive, in this reality is either in denial or far more optimistic than I'll ever be.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future. This is just your world-view being shaped by your “news” sources. Maybe get off of social media for a while or only follow people who do not talk about politics/current events. > but if I was working in finance? No way. People who say this tend to underestimate the importance of finance. For example, enabling easy mobile banking for tech illiterate people is going to have a much larger impact on society than 99% of the apps already out there. Another: imagine if you can fix budgeting for the 90% of people who don’t bother. Don’t shit on fields you don’t understand. It makes you look ignorant and blocks you from even realizing the opportunities in the world.
  - wsatb 6y ago
    > This is just your world-view being shaped by your “news” sources. Maybe get off of social media for a while or only follow people who do not talk about politics/current events. This is a good way to escape reality, but not much more. I've done this plenty of times, but the world doesn't stop moving because you're ignoring what's going on. You become ignorant, and that is far worse. > Don’t shit on fields you don’t understand. It makes you look ignorant and blocks you from even realizing the opportunities in the world. I took the comment as they are not interested in finance. Maybe they've worked in the field in the past and don't like it. They didn't "shit on" anything.

holidayacct 6y ago

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred million dollars before they finally realized it wasn't generalizable. They had to scrap the entire project. It isnt possible to measure employee productivity because its impossible to properly quantify the relative importance of a task. Properly scoping problems is a massive task and finally its impossible to adjust for employees gaming the system, collusion or simply malicious behavior. Employees always figure out how to abuse productivity metrics.

yhoneycomb 6y ago
> Employees always figure out how to abuse productivity metrics. If people can abuse your productivity metric, then it's a bad measure of productivity - not a fault of the worker.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  Parent agrees, and further observes that all measures of productivity are "bad".
  - yhoneycomb 6y ago
    Parent does not agree, if parent agreed, then parent would not have used the word "abuse", which implies that the worker is the one at fault. There are many nuances to the English language that are difficult for non-native speakers to pick up.
    - montenegrohugo 6y ago
      > There are many nuances to the English language that are difficult for non-native speakers to pick up. Being condescending is bad, but being condescending whilst also being clearly wrong is doubly so. Get out.

lindenksv85 6y ago

I think it’s unfortunate that people are taking statistics (or anecdotes) from this period to support or not support WFH. At this point in time, it would be rather audacious for anyone to claim that productivity is more tied to the location of your desk than to the fact that people are working through the apocalypse, and some people are working through more than one “once in a lifetime” disaster. If productivity is down, maybe it’s because we expect people to keep adding to billionaire bottom lines when their entire lives are falling apart, in many cases irreparably??

oh-4-fucks-sake 6y ago
Chiming in here. I moved across the country to SoCal and returned to the company I left, (re)-starting in Sept. 2019 as full-time WFH. I worked 4-5 days in the office before the move. I'm a good control here because I've worked for the same company: 1. In the office 2. WFH pre-Covid 3. WFH during-Covid What's more, all of my favorite activities: golf, hiking, cooking--are largely unaffected by the pandemic. My income's been the same and the work activities have been roughly similar. I felt relatively productive WFH pre-Covid but something has changed that's affected my productivity/motivation--and I can't put my finger on it. I think it's the general, subconscious, back-of-my-mind feeling that things are profoundly going to shit that's dragging me down. It's been a struggle now when it's not been before. This is all purely anecdotal, but I think I'm a good case-in-point example of your position: that WFH is a convenient strawman to hand-wave away the effects of people living in the final pages of a Vonnegut novel. I love WFH; I want to be productive; but I don't think that shoe-horning people back into offices (wearing a mask all day, nonetheless) is going to magically turn everyone back into creative, chipper good-time-charlies.
- mepiethree 6y ago
  if we're doing anecdotes, the apocalypse makes me more productive since good work allows me to hide from everything else in the world being terrible

rossdavidh 6y ago

First off, let me say that I have happily WFH for a few years now. I'm not opposed to it. It works for some people. However, this is likely a problem that will get worse, not better, over time. The early WFH experience was able to cruise on the office connections, cross-training, personal knowledge, team-building, etc. that had happened previously. The longer people are away from the office, the more that hard-to-quantify stuff will decay. Plus, onboarding a new college grad has got to be challenging when there's not a group of experienced team members around them to be able to see when they're struggling or headed off the wrong path without realizing it. All of these problems can be mitigated, but they won't be eliminated. There will always be some positions and employees where WFH makes sense; as I said, it has often worked for me. But the idea that half or even a quarter of employees would become permanently WFH, is fantasy. It's kind of like having a long-distance relationship. You can do it for a while, but the penalty mounts over time in ways that are hard to quantify, but real nonetheless.

kochikame 6y ago
This is a great comment I think it's increasingly clear that blanket policies and one-size-fits-all WFH plans are just not going to work. People may gripe, but it seems like WFH is not going to be for everybody, in every position, at every stage in their careers. Hell, it might not even be feasible depending on the project you're working on this year.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> onboarding a new college grad has got to be challenging when there's not a group of experienced team members around them to be able to see when they're struggling or headed off the wrong path without realizing it Has anyone figured this one out? It’s inhibiting hiring quite significantly at our firm. I can’t imagine we’re the only ones.
- rubidium 6y ago
  For fresh grads: x2 Manager checkins daily for first 2 months For the 2-5 yr expirence: x1 checkin daily for the first month For the 5+ yr experience engineer: x1 checkin daily first week. For all: reduce checkins as appropriate for each, case-by-case.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Could they have chosen a more inane data point? These companies hire one person for the job of three people, underpays them for the number of years they squeeze from their stressed lives, then spits out the ones that can’t handle the hazing.

anti-shill 6y ago

the same jp morgan with massive investments in commercial real estate? https://wallstreetonparade.com/2019/09/jpmorgan-chase-has-billions-in-cre-loans-riding-on-wework-surviving/ https://wallstreetonparade.com/2019/09/jpmorgan-chase-has-bi...

yalogin 6y ago

I don’t get it. How does one even measure productivity and that too on a daily basis? How do they know that productivity fell on Mondays and fridays? Are they stalking their employees and tracking their every keystroke?

didibus 6y ago

It's important to keep in mind we can't distinguish between work from home and having to work during a pandemic affecting everyone's daily routine and moral and keeping us from our normal activities.

wirthjason 6y ago

With a 1.5 year old daughter WFH is great. Sure, there’s distractions — she wants to climb on my lap and bang the keyboard and play with the mouse. In the start I used to get upset about the interruption but now I take a 5-10 min break and play with her. It gives me purpose to why I’m behind the keyboard in the first place. If I were in an office I’d miss these moments, leaving the house before she wakes up and returning just before she goes to bed.

Ericson2314 6y ago

Don't young bank employees just sit around all day until their boss asks at 7pm for powerpoint they rush to research and make for the next 3 hours?

muttled 6y ago
At least it would match the college experience of working those hours.

nym3r0s 6y ago

I've worked in two of these top investment banks and the amount of red tape that needs to be crossed is just breathtaking. Something as simple as provisioning a kafka topic? Go raise 2 requests, have it approved by these 4 people including your manager, then create multiple system accounts for each environment, each with its own approval steps. Agreed that these approvals and audit trails are necessary - but surely they can be simplified. In office - you always knew someone who knew someone in that team. It was just a matter of picking up the phone, calling them and getting them to expedite your request. Now that everyone is WFH, you ping them on IM and wait for them to respond. With back-to-back zoom calls, it's honestly the last thing people want to do. Couple that with the fact that there isn't a divide (like commute) between work and home anymore - so there's just more fatigue and higher levels of irritability.

rtlfe 6y ago

> Work output was particularly affected on Mondays and Fridays, according to findings discussed by Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon in a private meeting with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analysts. How would they measure that? It seems basically impossible, and the article has no details.

13rac1 6y ago

Apples to Oranges. This is not Work From Home. This is Work From Home during a Pandemic during Natural Disasters. WFHPND is a bit long for an acronym though. Productivity may, actually, fall for younger employees at home, but data from this year is not valid for a calculation vs prior years.

topkai22 6y ago

We took an entire society from in-person offices with norms structured around a clear delineation between home/work to full WFH basically overnight. There was little to no training, often limited or confused technology rollout, and no planned culture transition. On top of that, many people had their kids kept home as well and had other essential services disrupted. The fact that it is difficult to measure whether or not WFH had an impact on productivity or not is a HUGE mark in its favor. This should have just fallen apart, no consultant or advisor would have every recommended trying a mass remote working initiative this way. Instead it seems to have mostly worked. I say mostly, because now we are at the point where it takes concious thought to build processes and culture to sustain a remote work culture. Developing young talent is difficult regardless of the circumstances, but in the in person office we have well developed norms, culture, programs, and processes to support them. Have you and your organization spent significant time thinking adapting and developing those cultural factors? I'm a remote work advocate because I've seen it work not just for me but for those around me, including junior talent, but you have to think about it, experiment, and work at it. Beyond the workplace, a lot of people have complained about the sudden transition to WFH do to them being not set up for it. I've heard this expressed as because they have limited space / lots of roommates or just being uncomfortable with the lack of home/work seperation. The root cause of these is (mostly) the unique circumstances of this experiment. If WFH was a strong social norm, people would have chosen different living accommodations and would have "seperate spaces" without needing a corporate office. While not every job ultimately can or should become primarily remote/WFH, I think the benefits for most information workers and their companies will win out. But right now we are going to see the long and hard process of rebuilding culture and norms in a new work environment.

notfromhere 6y ago
I don’t know about you, but work/life delineation pre-Covid wasn’t much better. The reason that employees are feeling it worse now is because even that pretense is gone, even if it barely existed before.

Zoo3y 6y ago

Imagine for a second these comments but for an article praising productivity while working from home.

jrochkind1 6y ago

It's a good thing that in this natural experiment nothing else that might effect productivity changed between February and March except switching to work from home, right? Since factors that might effect anxiety, physical and psychological health, priorities, demands on time and attention, and external factors effecting success stayed largely the same, but for switching from working in an office to working from home, so we know it was "the WFH lifestyle" (lifestyle?!?) that caused a 'hit' to 'overall productivity', so we can be confident that instructing employees to return to the office regardless of safety will restore this stolen productivity. (not)

actuator 6y ago

I used to enjoy short periods of remote work but I have hated WFH since it started during the Covid period. - I miss talking with colleagues on things related to tech, but not necessarily related to the current task. - Video meetings are exhausting to be a part of for resolving simple things. It was way faster to just talk in person. - Video meetings feel less collaborative in general for open ended discussions, I see far fewer participation from teammates if it is not their own task. - New employees who onboarded during Covid feel isolated as they didn't get to build personal rapport with others in the same or different teams. - Interaction with people from different teams has almost disappeared, not everytime you had a new idea, you were actively looking for it. - As much as I enjoy cooking, I hate that it feels like a chore at this point to do day in, day out. - I hate that personal time and work time boundaries have merged and it seems like I am working at all hours and relaxing at all hours at the same time.

codygman 6y ago

> extended remote work may not be all it’s cracked up to be, at least for some job functions. While pre-pandemic studies found remote workers were just as efficient as those in offices, there were questions about how employees would perform under compulsory lockdowns. Or maybe ya know... A pandemic has its own negative effect on productivity.

conductr 6y ago

Something I’ve observed is middle management is doing more of the doing. That is to say, they are cutting out their (younger) subordinates. This is happening as they want to be in the best position to survive layoffs. I sadly have overseen the talent reviews aka lay-off rankings and I’ve heard from colleagues that this is happening at their companies too.

user5994461 6y ago
This. Interns and new graduates are mostly dead weight right now. They're impossible to train and bring up to speed without being physically together. Layoffs will come and younger employees will be the first to go.

Mountain_Skies 6y ago

I've enjoyed working from home for the past four years but have serious reservations about how well it would have worked for me at the beginning of my career. Though I came into the labor market with a good degree from a good school, there was so much to learn and much of that happened informally and organically while in the physical presence of others with more experience. Perhaps the nature or structure of work will adapt in such a way that those early in their careers will not be hampered by being remote but in the meantime it does seem like there is going to be a need for extra patience in developing younger employees into higher levels of productivity.

mirekrusin 6y ago

Maybe if they offered desk, stand+keyboard+mouse/desktop so people don't have to work from the "kitchen table" the results would be better?

aussieguy1234 6y ago

Are bank employees that work on securities permitted to use common collaboration apps such as Slack? Or are they prevented from doing so to crack down on insider trading etc? If they can't use common collaboration apps you in a remote setting you could see how this could impact their productivity.

thr0waway2 6y ago
You can chat to other people on internal IM apps or on Symphony/Bloomberg to external people. They're all monitored and recorded along with Zoom calls. My drop in productivity as a trader was mostly due to the fact that despite we were raking in a lot of cash I could just see us barely getting paid at the end of the year so I just made sure our books weren't blowing up and spent most of my time finding a hedge fund job.

simonCGN 6y ago

Sounds like propaganda to me. No word on how they have measured it.

flashyfaffe2 6y ago

For those who don't know, Bloomberg journalist have their bonus linked to their capacity to have their articles impacting th market. Bloomberg has developed a tool to monitor this.

FpUser 6y ago

Without giving even the slightest idea on what productivity and how did they measure it I would say it is just plain propaganda from managers discovering that some of them (maybe a good lot) are becoming redundant. As for learning things - there is insane amount of knowledge online and if one is unable to use it they have bigger problems than being/or not in the office.

Kiro 6y ago

Report: "WFH has made productivity go up." HN: "Of course you're more productive. WFH is the best, I hope we never return to the office!" Report: "WFH has made productivity go down." HN: "Don't trust this. Productivity can't be measures."

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

awalton 6y ago

Going way out on a limb here, maybe productivity has dropped due to the overall stress of the situation, and not being at home? It doesn't seem like it's ever going to be possible to separate the noise from the signal here - everyone's experiencing an unprecedented in their lifetime event causing an immeasurable amount of extra stressors...

ecmascript 6y ago

I work from home and have done so for a couple of years. It all depends, like most stuff in life. It depends on the person working from home, their situation, what their job is etc. It works great for me since I have a dedicated office at home which is larger than any office space I've had before. I can have this because I can live on the country side where housing is cheaper. I can walk my dogs when I need to and I can focus a lot more here than I ever could in an open office. I have respect for people who claim they cannot and see no reason (except a pandemic) why people should always work from home. I can imagine why a 20-year old in his or her 20 square meter apartment isn't as productive as they would be at a big, bright office. For me, if I had to go to an office, I would have to leave my dogs in some dog care facility in the morning, stressing in my commute to work since I am forever a optimist when it comes to time. I wouldn't feel good, I would be tired and unable to focus. I have been there and done that. I know I am more productive at home. I think it's nice to offer people the ability so that for the people who thrives in it (like me) can have the ability to work from home. It has been hard, because the WFH mentality is either all or nothing. Why can't people and companies simply be a bit more laid back and offer both? The world isn't black and white, just let people decide for themselves since we are all grown ups. I expect companies not to treat me as a child and so should you.

m0zg 6y ago

> At JPMorgan, productivity falls How can it "fall" when JPMorgan doesn't actually _produce_ anything?

LatteLazy 6y ago

The fact that JP Morgan have managed to actually measure productivity for any complex role is frankly incredible. That alone will get them the (non-) Nobel prize in economics I imagine...