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What surprises me about this whole discourse is how quickly the narrative has been rewritten. Read any article from the likes of HBR from 2019 and it's apparen
by kristianc 6y ago
What surprises me about this whole discourse is how quickly the narrative has been rewritten.
Read any article from the likes of HBR from 2019 and it's apparent that much, much research shows that offices, and open offices in particular are toxic for productivity - and that the 'water cooler' collaboration effect has been vastly overstated.
Sometimes in an open office you could go several hours without getting anything done at all because someone had decided to hold an impromptu meeting by your desk. And irony of all ironies - you put your headphones in at a loud enough volume to drown out the noise and then get tapped on the shoulder for 'distracting' people.
Fast forward a year and a half and the 'water cooler' myth seems to be accepted as fact, and none of the business press seems to mention at all the harmful effects of open offices on productivity. It's not like good ideas ever came from those interactions - they tended to produce the half baked ideas, and definitely didn't produce the x-functional alignment it actually takes to get anything done in most orgs.
The switching cost of interruption - or even the fear that you could at any moment be interrupted - is a complete inhibitor to deep work. My only hope is that when people are inevitably forced back into the office, people will be able to be more productive because of 40% fewer people being in them.
- ErrantX 6y agoSo I wonder if the answer actually is; this is an example of correlation != causation. Or in other words; negative drivers to productivity are not related as closely to locale as previously thought.
- betterunix2 6y agoMaybe everyone working from home has been even worse for productivity than open offices. I know my own productivity has suffered, and I know I am not an outlier. People with toddlers in their home face constant interruptions (daycare has become unreliable -- one positive COVID test can shut a daycare down for two weeks), many people have limited space for a home office and nowhere to put a proper desk, etc. My own team frequently used whiteboards when we were at the office and touchscreens (of whatever size) really are not the same. I know WFH has been fine, even positive, for some people. For a lot of us it has been a disaster and it seems that Google determined that it is a net negative.
- jader201 6y agoA lot of what you’re describing is a result of COVID, not WFH. NormaL WFH under normal conditions looks very different for most, and in many aspects. This happened without much time to prepare for one thing (e.g. suboptimal desk/office setup), and while everyone else was stuck at home with you, for another. Don’t try to compare WFH during COVID with WFH when kids are back in school/daycare, and we’re not locked down at home trying to stay healthy.
- nonameiguess 6y agoPeople experience bad things due to being in the middle of a pandemic, and work from home is a lot more difficult when you're perpetually socially isolated, aren't allowed to go places you'd normally want to go, and your kids are also home bugging you while you try to work when normally they'd be at school. Uncharitably, these effects get attributed to "work from home" and people think they're yearning for a return to the office when really they're yearning for the pandemic to end.