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Isn't there now a mountain of evidence, thanks to the pandemic, that remote employees were in fact more productive? Why should remote employees take a pay cut

Isn't there now a mountain of evidence, thanks to the pandemic, that remote employees were in fact more productive? Why should remote employees take a pay cut at all? After all their employer is saving a great deal of money on office space.

Supermancho 5y ago
> Isn't there now a mountain of evidence, thanks to the pandemic, that remote employees were in fact more productive? I never believed it to begin with. Seemed like a way to try to prop up confidence in markets, rather than hard science. Afaik, all organizations are horrible at measuring productivity.
- ssully 5y ago
  My place of work had an all hands a few months into the pandemic where they basically said they were surprised how everything is running as usual/better while everyone was WFH. I honestly don't know what they expected. People are slacking off while at home, but people slacked off at work too. It was not uncommon for me to lose my entire morning in the office to people coming to asking a simple question that then turns into a 30+ min conversation about random bullshit.
j4yav 5y ago
I think that is just the outcome that you inevitably get to if you start from the assumption that humans are lazy and just waiting to slack off and work back from there. If you believe that then work needs to be a prison to function.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
benrbray 5y ago
Among my early-20s friends, I don't think I've talked to a single person who thinks their office is running more effectively than it was before. If there is such a mountain of evidence, you should at least be able to point us to the foothills.
- cwilkes 5y ago
  How many jobs do early 20’s people have to compare it with? They might also have a bias as it is their first job out of school and are excited about meeting other people. Also the pandemic where 600k people died in the US alone might put a damper on things.
  - benrbray 5y ago
    I mean, they were all working the same jobs for 2-4 years before the pandemic hit. They experienced the decrease in productivity first-hand. And yeah, I'm sure the pandemic had am impact on the effectiveness of remote work. But I'm disputing the aforementioned "mountain of evidence" which I so far haven't been able to view from my vantage point.
fairity 5y ago
I've seen this data too, but I don't think it's representative of post-covid WFH productivity because: 1) there are far fewer productivity distractions during COVID due to everyone being cooped up at home 2) people are still learning how to slack off while seeming productive 3) the novelty of WFH helps spur productivity
sokoloff 5y ago
There's a mountain of evidence that people self-report they're more productive. That's not to say there aren't elements of that which are true, but it's not entirely clear to me that remote employees can continue to be meaningfully more productive than those teams would be in a traditional office setting, especially once the world opens back up. The pandemic did give strong evidence that it was at least close, which was somewhat surprising to me, due in part the difficulties of formalizing previously ad-hoc communication patterns and in shared whiteboarding.
- ghaff 5y ago
  >The pandemic did give strong evidence that it was at least close, And it may be worth noting a couple other things: - A fair number of people didn't have a great working situation at home whether in terms of the lack of a good work area or childcare/teaching on the side - Under normal circumstances, it's not 100% virtual versus in-office. Distributed teams routinely get together for on-sites/off-sites which can provide a lot of the collaboration and team-building that people are lamenting the loss of with remote
moshmosh 5y ago
I know some people doing 2-4 hours of work per day, getting 100% as much done as they did in the office, then playing with their kids or cooking or reading or making art or just watching TV while they leave work chat open. Many not in tech. Office work generally is full of slack and meaningless butt-in-seat time. There are complaints/observations of this dating back to at least the 1950s (see the wasteful faux-activity pretending-to-be-busy office work described in Revolutionary Road, for instance—it could have been written today, except there'd be more email, and it doesn't read as one bit exaggerated) so it's not like modern office workers are wildly less industrious than their predecessors from The Greatest Generation or the Baby Boomers or whatever. Office work under a modern corporation or other bureaucracy is just largely BS, evidently by nature. So there may be about the same work getting done, but possibly way less "work".

Supermancho 5y ago

> Isn't there now a mountain of evidence, thanks to the pandemic, that remote employees were in fact more productive? I never believed it to begin with. Seemed like a way to try to prop up confidence in markets, rather than hard science. Afaik, all organizations are horrible at measuring productivity.

ssully 5y ago
My place of work had an all hands a few months into the pandemic where they basically said they were surprised how everything is running as usual/better while everyone was WFH. I honestly don't know what they expected. People are slacking off while at home, but people slacked off at work too. It was not uncommon for me to lose my entire morning in the office to people coming to asking a simple question that then turns into a 30+ min conversation about random bullshit.

j4yav 5y ago

I think that is just the outcome that you inevitably get to if you start from the assumption that humans are lazy and just waiting to slack off and work back from there. If you believe that then work needs to be a prison to function.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

benrbray 5y ago

Among my early-20s friends, I don't think I've talked to a single person who thinks their office is running more effectively than it was before. If there is such a mountain of evidence, you should at least be able to point us to the foothills.

cwilkes 5y ago
How many jobs do early 20’s people have to compare it with? They might also have a bias as it is their first job out of school and are excited about meeting other people. Also the pandemic where 600k people died in the US alone might put a damper on things.
- benrbray 5y ago
  I mean, they were all working the same jobs for 2-4 years before the pandemic hit. They experienced the decrease in productivity first-hand. And yeah, I'm sure the pandemic had am impact on the effectiveness of remote work. But I'm disputing the aforementioned "mountain of evidence" which I so far haven't been able to view from my vantage point.

fairity 5y ago

I've seen this data too, but I don't think it's representative of post-covid WFH productivity because: 1) there are far fewer productivity distractions during COVID due to everyone being cooped up at home 2) people are still learning how to slack off while seeming productive 3) the novelty of WFH helps spur productivity

sokoloff 5y ago

There's a mountain of evidence that people self-report they're more productive. That's not to say there aren't elements of that which are true, but it's not entirely clear to me that remote employees can continue to be meaningfully more productive than those teams would be in a traditional office setting, especially once the world opens back up. The pandemic did give strong evidence that it was at least close, which was somewhat surprising to me, due in part the difficulties of formalizing previously ad-hoc communication patterns and in shared whiteboarding.

ghaff 5y ago
>The pandemic did give strong evidence that it was at least close, And it may be worth noting a couple other things: - A fair number of people didn't have a great working situation at home whether in terms of the lack of a good work area or childcare/teaching on the side - Under normal circumstances, it's not 100% virtual versus in-office. Distributed teams routinely get together for on-sites/off-sites which can provide a lot of the collaboration and team-building that people are lamenting the loss of with remote

moshmosh 5y ago

I know some people doing 2-4 hours of work per day, getting 100% as much done as they did in the office, then playing with their kids or cooking or reading or making art or just watching TV while they leave work chat open. Many not in tech. Office work generally is full of slack and meaningless butt-in-seat time. There are complaints/observations of this dating back to at least the 1950s (see the wasteful faux-activity pretending-to-be-busy office work described in Revolutionary Road, for instance—it could have been written today, except there'd be more email, and it doesn't read as one bit exaggerated) so it's not like modern office workers are wildly less industrious than their predecessors from The Greatest Generation or the Baby Boomers or whatever. Office work under a modern corporation or other bureaucracy is just largely BS, evidently by nature. So there may be about the same work getting done, but possibly way less "work".