10 ms·

SBA executives ‘beyond doubt’ that teleworking employees are more productive

106 points by dtmmax33 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
The SBA is referring specifically to their own employees doing SBA work, not necessarily telework in general. Interestingly, they attribute the additional productivity to the fact that their telework employees are simply working more hours: > “It doesn’t matter to me where your eight-, 10-, 12-hour day is, but as long as we’re getting coverage from that perspective,” Rivera said. > While some federal managers have expressed skepticism with telework productivity, Deputy CIO Luis Campudoni said employees are, if anything, putting in longer hours than they normally would working in the office. > “From an eight-hour workday that you would normally experience in the office, now, without asking the workforce, certainly get 10-12 hours of work done on a daily basis. It’s because of that flexibility, people appreciate that,” Campudoni said. I would also expect productivity to go up if everyone was working 25-50% more hours under the new system. I don't know if that's sustainable though. If these jobs are paid hourly and the extra hours aren't mandatory then the employees aren't necessarily getting a bad deal. However, if the extra hours are unpaid or the 12-hour days become mandatory, this could fall apart fast.
- VectorLock 5y ago
  I'm okay with spending the X% percent of hours I would be commuting doing productive work, and double-okay with my employer reaping the productivity benefits from it.
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    People who have an unenjoyable commute, like stop-and-go-traffic, probably feel this way. But people who commute while exercising (bicycle riders) or consume books/podcasts/news while commuting probably wouldn't be so inclined.
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      I'm perfectly capable of consuming books/podcasts/news on my own and not because of a mandatory commute that is simultaneously exhausting, expensive and dangerous.
    - VectorLock 5y ago
      I'd say people who have an "enjoyable" commute is likely in the vanishing minority. And then they can simply reproduce their commute in their leisure time.
      - gnicholas 5y ago
        Surely anyone can do these activities in their leisure time. My point was that if someone's commute is spent largely doing things like reading or listening to podcasts, one would not share GP's inclination to spend part of one's prior commute time working, and have one's employer reap the benefits of that. I have commuted on trains at various times and used my commute time in this way. Also, where I live in CA there are lots of people who bike to work (pre-COVID) and enjoy the forced exercise of their commute. Perhaps this is unique to warm-weather locations, where biking is easy for most of the year?
        phobosanomaly 5y ago
        I had a boss who finished an online master's degree on his train commute every day. It was a good way for him to timebox the work, and stay consistent day-in-day-out without having to burn through a ton of self-discipline.
        VectorLock 5y ago
        The good part about not commuting is that even if you enjoyed that time, you still _have_ that time to do what you want, you don't necessarily have to work.
        gnicholas 5y ago
        Sure, but OP mentioned being willing to let his work bleed over into what would have been his commute time. Your perspective is totally valid, but is not consistent with OP's willingness to spend a commute time doing more work with no additional comp.
  - walshemj 5y ago
    Why - its not like your getting paid for it.
    - VectorLock 5y ago
      Exactly. You're not getting paid to commute. But you are getting paid to work when you would otherwise be commuting. If you're salary, its a wash. If you're hourly, you make more.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      If my salaried job used to make me commute, then work 8 hours, then commute home, I think it's a mistake to think that they were only paying me for the middle part. When I negotiated the position and considered my options, you bet I considered the commute as part of the deal.
      - walshemj 5y ago
        um no salaried means you don't have fixed hours you might want to read this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philanthropists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philanthr... Your also subsidizing your employers office costs so will they be paying 25% of your property taxes that's the going rate in the UK like when I had to use one room for all my dialysis supplies.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  I think a lot of it has to do with the nature of the work. I know where I currently am, my hours have smeared to cross 12 hours of the day. I have meetings as early as 8 AM, and as late as 7 PM, routinely (sometimes even later). That's to accommodate people in other timezones. But, my middle of the day is oftentimes empty. I'll use that time to go out to a botanical garden, or play a game, or work on personal pursuits, or nap. It's hard to say whether I'm more productive or not; I changed jobs mid-pandemic and so I don't have much to compare to (and I left my prior job because I was bored; I'm a manager, and wasn't feeling productive, but that's because everything I was empowered to change I had running so smoothly it didn't need my attention, and all I was doing was small boring implementation stuff so the team could have the interesting work). But I can say that the extra hours aren't really helpful toward being productive (and that I've taken steps to keep them from being harmful). So I'm not sure that people doing stuff across 12 hours of the day really equates to 12 hours of work.
Someone1234 5y ago
Does it matter though? I mean that literally, does actual data matter? The data in support of telecommuting has been around for years if you want to find it, heck you even pay employees less in some circumstances as they can live in lower COL areas (plus cost savings in fewer offices/smaller offices/rental instead of ownership/etc). But the reality is that a certain type of employee rises through the ranks: Those who have a strong aptitude towards interpersonal connection (i.e. extraverts). They're also a loud[er] group. They benefit more from in-person than telecommuting, and they also often make the decisions. Do you really expect a group of decision makers, who gained power via their interpersonal skills, wanting to give up that skill advantage and potential turn their business into a meritocracy? COVID was a rare blip, because it tipped the scales just enough to make their position untenable, but in five years I do not anticipate any broad change in landscape. Heck even before a lot of people had a chance to get vaccinated many businesses are RUSHING back into the office, why? The same inexplicable reason we're there to begin with.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  It was a world-wide pre/post test to be sure. I think that most companies will be better off to go back into the offices because the alternative is to carefully think through the work and write a lot of things down. People would rather talk than write, on average.
  - solosoyokaze 5y ago
    > It was a world-wide pre/post test to be sure. I think that most companies will be better off to go back into the offices because the alternative is to carefully think through the work and write a lot of things down. Companies that do this will be at a distinct advantage over companies that rely on informal, ad-hoc, in-person conversations. There are many companies that have been started during the pandemic that are remote first and have the process to back it up. I don't think in-person companies can compete between lack of access to talent, undocumented communication, office politics, employee stress and fatigue due to commuting, living in a high cost of living area and the previously mentioned politics... I'd also say a lot of management is actually unneeded, which also comes to light in remote first companies.
tick_tock_tick 5y ago
I am more productive but my team as a whole is less productive. Highly individual tasks are great for this whole setup but anything requiring high degrees of coordination seems to have suffered.
- m463 5y ago
  I think coordination was terrible in the beginning. But over time folks have worked out lots of things. I've seen gradual, but sustained improvement in WFH skills. For example, teleconferencing skills. People have learned to share their screens, then people gradually adapted to have an agenda on-screen to show and step through, people figured out how to send links and files during a meeting. Even silly stuff like how to contact someone who forgot about a meeting. And some of it is more democratized. Regular folks are figuring out how to do peer-to-peer meetings, which were normally organized and driven by managers. This also goes for other tools like wiki, shared documents, teams, calendars, email, slack. Another thing is a gradual spool up of WFH support. It took a while for people to figure out a webcam that works, or a microphone or headset. Or a chair, or a room setup, or just a rhythm.
- sologoub 5y ago
  I’ve experienced the opposite - as others have noted, making communication just a bit more structured and accessible to others in our org helped get clearer on what/how/why AND incorporate voices often left out because they are not the loudest in the room (or don’t want to speak up in a large public setting). Just on the merits of inclusion, video conferencing has been a big win for me. Yes, there are adjustments and downsides, but net net, I feel a lot more confident that my team are being heard and no one is overlooked because of social tendencies, etc.
  - Salgat 5y ago
    Agreed. It's very much dependent on managers shaping corporate culture to foster effective communication habits, but once established, it very much helps productivity. I work with several teams in any given week and I find myself most productive when we use a private channel for dedicated discussion (which I can scan through later very quickly as a form of documentation), while the few meetings I have are dragged out, ineffective, and extremely inefficient since they bottleneck communication to a single speaker at any given time, preventing parallel discussion in separate threads. Also in a meeting I can't just turn off my ears and look up something to check and if needed ask questions, I have to keep my attention on the speaker, which harms feedback and discussion even more.
addicted 5y ago
The big thing they seem to have done is a good job scaling up. But likely the primary reason they were able to scale up so rapidly was that in the midst of a pandemic, there were millions of workers looking for jobs and after the twin impacts of the Great Recession and the pandemic in less than a decade, a much larger cohort who were likely more predisposed towards the safety of a government job than pretty much anytime in the past half century.
dleslie 5y ago
I am _ridiculously_ more productive at home. When I hear folks complain about the pains of working from home, what I often hear are their stories about how they were needlessly disruptive to their coworkers. Having impromptu hallway meetings mean that your peers, and subordinates, must keep an ear open for such events should they risk being left out of important decision making processes. Having watercooler conversations means that your office-mates must take effort to overcome their human desire for social communication in order to focus on their task at hand. And so on. Generally, I find having a team that works wholly remote means that we schedule communications clearly and are able to maintain the focus on our work before us.
- Guest42 5y ago
  I think WFH works well because it takes extra effort to reach out to someone and therefore is used more as a necessity. For me, the office has lent itself to a number of one-off tasks that didn't end up being important that distracted working on the recurring production items that make a larger impact. Removing the starting and stopping lends itself to more productivity and being able to answer the phone as opposed to having to step out of the office after going down the elevator has been great.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    I agree! Having a _minimal_ barrier to communication acts as a filter, in a similar way that requiring registration acts as a quality filter for a forum. Folks must gather interest in the meeting, rather than interrupt and demand focus; this, at minimum, gives them some time to reconsider the concepts that they want to raise with their coworkers.
    - biomcgary 5y ago
      Not just any minimal barrier. Extroverts wired to speak spontaneously (i.e., have high Foxp2 gene expression) are the most likely to disrupt others for non-functional reasons. Requiring verbal communication to be initiated through written means is a great way to increase the signal-to-noise threshold for communication. Meanwhile, those who are not spontaneously verbal have a relatively low barrier (a sentence in chat).
01100011 5y ago
Oh great, we can have this debate again. WFH is either the greatest thing ever, or the worst, depending on many factors(kids, quiet space, your need for socialization, your career positioning, etc). WFH part time is either the greatest thing ever or the worst, depending on if you need to maintain an extra office and remain living in an expensive tech hub.
passivate 5y ago
People around the world are different, companies are structured differently, work cultures vary. We should not try to "homogenize" everything. And as such, why use data from a global set to apply it to a local set? If teleworking works for your company, great keep doing it! If it doesn't, don't do it. And lets not demonize when a company makes a decision that is right for them in their particular case. For our company, we've made the decision to not allow teleworking, and it is only approved temporarily on a strict case by case basis. I think it has helped our work culture and productivity over the many years.
znpy 5y ago
The biggest changes I've seen is that whenever I meet something new that I'm not familiar with, I learn way faster in the tranquility of my home than in the office. That means I get productive more quickly and thus more productive. In the last year I was able to pick up a lot of technologies that I've been putting off for years because I couldn't find quiet time to sit down and bang my head against the documentation.
someonehere 5y ago
Reading this makes me happy. I almost read this as the door is open for more people to apply and work remote. That to me means someone who would have never considered working for SBA or moving to work there, can now be employed from anywhere there is internet. Maybe this is how we revitalize towns that were wiped out by outsourcing the labor pool (read China manufacturing)?
- emodendroket 5y ago
  If nobody ever needs to be in an office it would seem like there is more temptation to hire outside the US for these jobs too.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    That's true in general, but probably untenable for SBA jobs specifically (just from the optics of it).
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      I assumed we were thinking more generally if it was a strategy to revitalize flagging towns.
ping_pong 5y ago
Both Yahoo and IBM rolled back their very flexible WFH strategies. I don't think super flexible WFH is a lasting trend, because it's obvious that is doesn't work for most of the people. I personally love WFH and I know a lot of HN do too, but I think human nature is that it probably won't work very well for most companies.
- e40 5y ago
  Doesn't work for "most of the people" is highly dependent on the company and position. It works very well for 80% of the positions at my company. I'm sure there are companies for which it only works for a small percentage. The ultimate YMMV.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I find most of my work goes well but anything that requires coordination a lot of time gets wasted waiting to hear from people.
- mullingitover 5y ago
  These don't seem like the greatest examples - eliminating WFH didn't turn Yahoo around (it might've done them in, who knows) and IBM is...well IBM. What the last year has done was to force knee-jerk 'butts in seats' mentality managers to experiment with remote work. It sure seems like the bottom line results haven't proven remote work to be a failure, and while some old timers may force everyone back to the office, I think many are going to be a lot more open to remote work where they never would've considered it in the pre-pandemic era.
- zhengyi13 5y ago
  From what I recall of talking to a couple Yahoo employees at the time, they felt that Yahoo had a significant issue with tracking/accountability that was a large driver in the decision to roll those policies back and demand butts in seats.
  - varispeed 5y ago
    Tracking as in literally tracking where people are and what they do? Shouldn't they only be interested in outcomes? I'd hate to work with someone constantly looking over my shoulder.
sb_student 5y ago
If we gave managers/business owners the choice of (1) a traditional in-office, no WFH environment and a smaller profit, OR (2) a partial/full WFH setup and a larger profit, my gut sense (I can't back it up) is that a huge percentage of businesses would forgo profit for the psychological benefit of seeing their employees daily. Maybe it makes them feel more in control, or more important, or just loneliness.
awillen 5y ago
I don't understand why we can't just all agree that some people are more productive at home and others are not. It depends on personality, type of role and type of business. We're literally talking about hundreds of millions of people here, so pretty much any universal statement is going to be wrong.
- danans 5y ago
  Because, at least in tech, many who insist that one or the other are absolutely superior are motivated by unstated resentments against higher cost of living near their employers' offices, or sometimes by cultural or political aversion to the majority culture in those areas. There's nothing wrong with either of those motivations, but often the WFH versus office debate is a smoke screen for one of them.
- solosoyokaze 5y ago
  The problem is that a lot of people are productive WFH but until very recently, this contingent had little to no sway or voice. With the pandemic, for the first time there's a major shift to WFH and now some companies want to start reigning that in. People who much prefer WFH are fighting not to lose the momentum of the last year.
  - slavapestov 5y ago
    Yeah. I highly doubt there’s going to be some massive shift where offices will suddenly disappear. People that prefer working from an office should just work from an office once they’re vaccinated and local pandemic restrictions end.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  I think one reason we argue about this is we're trying to understand which factors affect WFH success, and if/how we can control them. For example, your post seems to assume that wfh aptitude is a fixed quality of each worker. But after more discussion, it seems clear that the home office environment is a major consideration as well.
- phobosanomaly 5y ago
stolenmerch 5y ago
I think the solution has to be some kind of hybrid arrangement. Anyone who is fighting strongly for 100% remote teams doesn't understand that some folks just don't have a good situation to work from home. Likewise, an aggressive office-only policy fails to see how adding flexibility to people's work lives can be a huge boon to productivity and happiness.
geodel 5y ago
I see another thing on WFH vs going to work is 'just a job' vs 'career'. In my 'job' where I am doing about same thing for last 5 years and will be similar in foreseeable future. So all office gossip, impromptu meeting, new project ideas coming while talking to boss and so on does not happen and neither I particularly care. But these things do seem to matter to those who are just starting career, or have ambition to grow in current place by going beyond doing assigned tasks.
fma 5y ago
Devil is in the details: "From an eight-hour workday that you would normally experience in the office, now, without asking the workforce, certainly get 10-12 hours of work done on a daily basis. It’s because of that flexibility, people appreciate that,”... Employees are working 50% more. That's why it's "more productive". Personally, I'm at my desk way earlier, and way later than I should be. It's hard to disconnect when everything is still there. The time I spent on commuting is now spent working - rather than on a hobby and such. I'm certain I'm not the only one, and sure maybe some of you can "disconnect" and get more time to yourself or your family. Statistics from my employer (a very large multinational) says the same, too. Emails getting sent more on off hours, people logged in more.

106 points by dtmmax33 5y ago

The SBA is referring specifically to their own employees doing SBA work, not necessarily telework in general. Interestingly, they attribute the additional productivity to the fact that their telework employees are simply working more hours: > “It doesn’t matter to me where your eight-, 10-, 12-hour day is, but as long as we’re getting coverage from that perspective,” Rivera said. > While some federal managers have expressed skepticism with telework productivity, Deputy CIO Luis Campudoni said employees are, if anything, putting in longer hours than they normally would working in the office. > “From an eight-hour workday that you would normally experience in the office, now, without asking the workforce, certainly get 10-12 hours of work done on a daily basis. It’s because of that flexibility, people appreciate that,” Campudoni said. I would also expect productivity to go up if everyone was working 25-50% more hours under the new system. I don't know if that's sustainable though. If these jobs are paid hourly and the extra hours aren't mandatory then the employees aren't necessarily getting a bad deal. However, if the extra hours are unpaid or the 12-hour days become mandatory, this could fall apart fast.

VectorLock 5y ago
I'm okay with spending the X% percent of hours I would be commuting doing productive work, and double-okay with my employer reaping the productivity benefits from it.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  People who have an unenjoyable commute, like stop-and-go-traffic, probably feel this way. But people who commute while exercising (bicycle riders) or consume books/podcasts/news while commuting probably wouldn't be so inclined.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    I'm perfectly capable of consuming books/podcasts/news on my own and not because of a mandatory commute that is simultaneously exhausting, expensive and dangerous.
  - VectorLock 5y ago
    I'd say people who have an "enjoyable" commute is likely in the vanishing minority. And then they can simply reproduce their commute in their leisure time.
    - gnicholas 5y ago
      Surely anyone can do these activities in their leisure time. My point was that if someone's commute is spent largely doing things like reading or listening to podcasts, one would not share GP's inclination to spend part of one's prior commute time working, and have one's employer reap the benefits of that. I have commuted on trains at various times and used my commute time in this way. Also, where I live in CA there are lots of people who bike to work (pre-COVID) and enjoy the forced exercise of their commute. Perhaps this is unique to warm-weather locations, where biking is easy for most of the year?
      - phobosanomaly 5y ago
        I had a boss who finished an online master's degree on his train commute every day. It was a good way for him to timebox the work, and stay consistent day-in-day-out without having to burn through a ton of self-discipline.
      - VectorLock 5y ago
        The good part about not commuting is that even if you enjoyed that time, you still _have_ that time to do what you want, you don't necessarily have to work.
        gnicholas 5y ago
        Sure, but OP mentioned being willing to let his work bleed over into what would have been his commute time. Your perspective is totally valid, but is not consistent with OP's willingness to spend a commute time doing more work with no additional comp.
- walshemj 5y ago
  Why - its not like your getting paid for it.
  - VectorLock 5y ago
    Exactly. You're not getting paid to commute. But you are getting paid to work when you would otherwise be commuting. If you're salary, its a wash. If you're hourly, you make more.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    If my salaried job used to make me commute, then work 8 hours, then commute home, I think it's a mistake to think that they were only paying me for the middle part. When I negotiated the position and considered my options, you bet I considered the commute as part of the deal.
    - walshemj 5y ago
      um no salaried means you don't have fixed hours you might want to read this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philanthropists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philanthr... Your also subsidizing your employers office costs so will they be paying 25% of your property taxes that's the going rate in the UK like when I had to use one room for all my dialysis supplies.
lostcolony 5y ago
I think a lot of it has to do with the nature of the work. I know where I currently am, my hours have smeared to cross 12 hours of the day. I have meetings as early as 8 AM, and as late as 7 PM, routinely (sometimes even later). That's to accommodate people in other timezones. But, my middle of the day is oftentimes empty. I'll use that time to go out to a botanical garden, or play a game, or work on personal pursuits, or nap. It's hard to say whether I'm more productive or not; I changed jobs mid-pandemic and so I don't have much to compare to (and I left my prior job because I was bored; I'm a manager, and wasn't feeling productive, but that's because everything I was empowered to change I had running so smoothly it didn't need my attention, and all I was doing was small boring implementation stuff so the team could have the interesting work). But I can say that the extra hours aren't really helpful toward being productive (and that I've taken steps to keep them from being harmful). So I'm not sure that people doing stuff across 12 hours of the day really equates to 12 hours of work.

Someone1234 5y ago

Does it matter though? I mean that literally, does actual data matter? The data in support of telecommuting has been around for years if you want to find it, heck you even pay employees less in some circumstances as they can live in lower COL areas (plus cost savings in fewer offices/smaller offices/rental instead of ownership/etc). But the reality is that a certain type of employee rises through the ranks: Those who have a strong aptitude towards interpersonal connection (i.e. extraverts). They're also a loud[er] group. They benefit more from in-person than telecommuting, and they also often make the decisions. Do you really expect a group of decision makers, who gained power via their interpersonal skills, wanting to give up that skill advantage and potential turn their business into a meritocracy? COVID was a rare blip, because it tipped the scales just enough to make their position untenable, but in five years I do not anticipate any broad change in landscape. Heck even before a lot of people had a chance to get vaccinated many businesses are RUSHING back into the office, why? The same inexplicable reason we're there to begin with.

sokoloff 5y ago
It was a world-wide pre/post test to be sure. I think that most companies will be better off to go back into the offices because the alternative is to carefully think through the work and write a lot of things down. People would rather talk than write, on average.
- solosoyokaze 5y ago
  > It was a world-wide pre/post test to be sure. I think that most companies will be better off to go back into the offices because the alternative is to carefully think through the work and write a lot of things down. Companies that do this will be at a distinct advantage over companies that rely on informal, ad-hoc, in-person conversations. There are many companies that have been started during the pandemic that are remote first and have the process to back it up. I don't think in-person companies can compete between lack of access to talent, undocumented communication, office politics, employee stress and fatigue due to commuting, living in a high cost of living area and the previously mentioned politics... I'd also say a lot of management is actually unneeded, which also comes to light in remote first companies.

tick_tock_tick 5y ago

I am more productive but my team as a whole is less productive. Highly individual tasks are great for this whole setup but anything requiring high degrees of coordination seems to have suffered.

m463 5y ago
I think coordination was terrible in the beginning. But over time folks have worked out lots of things. I've seen gradual, but sustained improvement in WFH skills. For example, teleconferencing skills. People have learned to share their screens, then people gradually adapted to have an agenda on-screen to show and step through, people figured out how to send links and files during a meeting. Even silly stuff like how to contact someone who forgot about a meeting. And some of it is more democratized. Regular folks are figuring out how to do peer-to-peer meetings, which were normally organized and driven by managers. This also goes for other tools like wiki, shared documents, teams, calendars, email, slack. Another thing is a gradual spool up of WFH support. It took a while for people to figure out a webcam that works, or a microphone or headset. Or a chair, or a room setup, or just a rhythm.
sologoub 5y ago
I’ve experienced the opposite - as others have noted, making communication just a bit more structured and accessible to others in our org helped get clearer on what/how/why AND incorporate voices often left out because they are not the loudest in the room (or don’t want to speak up in a large public setting). Just on the merits of inclusion, video conferencing has been a big win for me. Yes, there are adjustments and downsides, but net net, I feel a lot more confident that my team are being heard and no one is overlooked because of social tendencies, etc.
- Salgat 5y ago
  Agreed. It's very much dependent on managers shaping corporate culture to foster effective communication habits, but once established, it very much helps productivity. I work with several teams in any given week and I find myself most productive when we use a private channel for dedicated discussion (which I can scan through later very quickly as a form of documentation), while the few meetings I have are dragged out, ineffective, and extremely inefficient since they bottleneck communication to a single speaker at any given time, preventing parallel discussion in separate threads. Also in a meeting I can't just turn off my ears and look up something to check and if needed ask questions, I have to keep my attention on the speaker, which harms feedback and discussion even more.

addicted 5y ago

The big thing they seem to have done is a good job scaling up. But likely the primary reason they were able to scale up so rapidly was that in the midst of a pandemic, there were millions of workers looking for jobs and after the twin impacts of the Great Recession and the pandemic in less than a decade, a much larger cohort who were likely more predisposed towards the safety of a government job than pretty much anytime in the past half century.

dleslie 5y ago

I am _ridiculously_ more productive at home. When I hear folks complain about the pains of working from home, what I often hear are their stories about how they were needlessly disruptive to their coworkers. Having impromptu hallway meetings mean that your peers, and subordinates, must keep an ear open for such events should they risk being left out of important decision making processes. Having watercooler conversations means that your office-mates must take effort to overcome their human desire for social communication in order to focus on their task at hand. And so on. Generally, I find having a team that works wholly remote means that we schedule communications clearly and are able to maintain the focus on our work before us.

Guest42 5y ago
I think WFH works well because it takes extra effort to reach out to someone and therefore is used more as a necessity. For me, the office has lent itself to a number of one-off tasks that didn't end up being important that distracted working on the recurring production items that make a larger impact. Removing the starting and stopping lends itself to more productivity and being able to answer the phone as opposed to having to step out of the office after going down the elevator has been great.
- dleslie 5y ago
  I agree! Having a _minimal_ barrier to communication acts as a filter, in a similar way that requiring registration acts as a quality filter for a forum. Folks must gather interest in the meeting, rather than interrupt and demand focus; this, at minimum, gives them some time to reconsider the concepts that they want to raise with their coworkers.
  - biomcgary 5y ago
    Not just any minimal barrier. Extroverts wired to speak spontaneously (i.e., have high Foxp2 gene expression) are the most likely to disrupt others for non-functional reasons. Requiring verbal communication to be initiated through written means is a great way to increase the signal-to-noise threshold for communication. Meanwhile, those who are not spontaneously verbal have a relatively low barrier (a sentence in chat).

01100011 5y ago

Oh great, we can have this debate again. WFH is either the greatest thing ever, or the worst, depending on many factors(kids, quiet space, your need for socialization, your career positioning, etc). WFH part time is either the greatest thing ever or the worst, depending on if you need to maintain an extra office and remain living in an expensive tech hub.

passivate 5y ago

People around the world are different, companies are structured differently, work cultures vary. We should not try to "homogenize" everything. And as such, why use data from a global set to apply it to a local set? If teleworking works for your company, great keep doing it! If it doesn't, don't do it. And lets not demonize when a company makes a decision that is right for them in their particular case. For our company, we've made the decision to not allow teleworking, and it is only approved temporarily on a strict case by case basis. I think it has helped our work culture and productivity over the many years.

znpy 5y ago

The biggest changes I've seen is that whenever I meet something new that I'm not familiar with, I learn way faster in the tranquility of my home than in the office. That means I get productive more quickly and thus more productive. In the last year I was able to pick up a lot of technologies that I've been putting off for years because I couldn't find quiet time to sit down and bang my head against the documentation.

someonehere 5y ago

Reading this makes me happy. I almost read this as the door is open for more people to apply and work remote. That to me means someone who would have never considered working for SBA or moving to work there, can now be employed from anywhere there is internet. Maybe this is how we revitalize towns that were wiped out by outsourcing the labor pool (read China manufacturing)?

emodendroket 5y ago
If nobody ever needs to be in an office it would seem like there is more temptation to hire outside the US for these jobs too.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  That's true in general, but probably untenable for SBA jobs specifically (just from the optics of it).
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    I assumed we were thinking more generally if it was a strategy to revitalize flagging towns.

ping_pong 5y ago

Both Yahoo and IBM rolled back their very flexible WFH strategies. I don't think super flexible WFH is a lasting trend, because it's obvious that is doesn't work for most of the people. I personally love WFH and I know a lot of HN do too, but I think human nature is that it probably won't work very well for most companies.

e40 5y ago
Doesn't work for "most of the people" is highly dependent on the company and position. It works very well for 80% of the positions at my company. I'm sure there are companies for which it only works for a small percentage. The ultimate YMMV.
emodendroket 5y ago
I find most of my work goes well but anything that requires coordination a lot of time gets wasted waiting to hear from people.
mullingitover 5y ago
These don't seem like the greatest examples - eliminating WFH didn't turn Yahoo around (it might've done them in, who knows) and IBM is...well IBM. What the last year has done was to force knee-jerk 'butts in seats' mentality managers to experiment with remote work. It sure seems like the bottom line results haven't proven remote work to be a failure, and while some old timers may force everyone back to the office, I think many are going to be a lot more open to remote work where they never would've considered it in the pre-pandemic era.
zhengyi13 5y ago
From what I recall of talking to a couple Yahoo employees at the time, they felt that Yahoo had a significant issue with tracking/accountability that was a large driver in the decision to roll those policies back and demand butts in seats.
- varispeed 5y ago
  Tracking as in literally tracking where people are and what they do? Shouldn't they only be interested in outcomes? I'd hate to work with someone constantly looking over my shoulder.

sb_student 5y ago

If we gave managers/business owners the choice of (1) a traditional in-office, no WFH environment and a smaller profit, OR (2) a partial/full WFH setup and a larger profit, my gut sense (I can't back it up) is that a huge percentage of businesses would forgo profit for the psychological benefit of seeing their employees daily. Maybe it makes them feel more in control, or more important, or just loneliness.

awillen 5y ago

I don't understand why we can't just all agree that some people are more productive at home and others are not. It depends on personality, type of role and type of business. We're literally talking about hundreds of millions of people here, so pretty much any universal statement is going to be wrong.

danans 5y ago
Because, at least in tech, many who insist that one or the other are absolutely superior are motivated by unstated resentments against higher cost of living near their employers' offices, or sometimes by cultural or political aversion to the majority culture in those areas. There's nothing wrong with either of those motivations, but often the WFH versus office debate is a smoke screen for one of them.
solosoyokaze 5y ago
The problem is that a lot of people are productive WFH but until very recently, this contingent had little to no sway or voice. With the pandemic, for the first time there's a major shift to WFH and now some companies want to start reigning that in. People who much prefer WFH are fighting not to lose the momentum of the last year.
- slavapestov 5y ago
  Yeah. I highly doubt there’s going to be some massive shift where offices will suddenly disappear. People that prefer working from an office should just work from an office once they’re vaccinated and local pandemic restrictions end.
CoastalCoder 5y ago
I think one reason we argue about this is we're trying to understand which factors affect WFH success, and if/how we can control them. For example, your post seems to assume that wfh aptitude is a fixed quality of each worker. But after more discussion, it seems clear that the home office environment is a major consideration as well.
phobosanomaly 5y ago

stolenmerch 5y ago

I think the solution has to be some kind of hybrid arrangement. Anyone who is fighting strongly for 100% remote teams doesn't understand that some folks just don't have a good situation to work from home. Likewise, an aggressive office-only policy fails to see how adding flexibility to people's work lives can be a huge boon to productivity and happiness.

geodel 5y ago

I see another thing on WFH vs going to work is 'just a job' vs 'career'. In my 'job' where I am doing about same thing for last 5 years and will be similar in foreseeable future. So all office gossip, impromptu meeting, new project ideas coming while talking to boss and so on does not happen and neither I particularly care. But these things do seem to matter to those who are just starting career, or have ambition to grow in current place by going beyond doing assigned tasks.

fma 5y ago

Devil is in the details: "From an eight-hour workday that you would normally experience in the office, now, without asking the workforce, certainly get 10-12 hours of work done on a daily basis. It’s because of that flexibility, people appreciate that,”... Employees are working 50% more. That's why it's "more productive". Personally, I'm at my desk way earlier, and way later than I should be. It's hard to disconnect when everything is still there. The time I spent on commuting is now spent working - rather than on a hobby and such. I'm certain I'm not the only one, and sure maybe some of you can "disconnect" and get more time to yourself or your family. Statistics from my employer (a very large multinational) says the same, too. Emails getting sent more on off hours, people logged in more.