13 ms·

Work from Home and Productivity

150 points by Dowwie 5y ago

Dowwie 5y ago
"Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%. "
- DeRock 5y ago
  Excludes commute time from work-from-office hours, which makes the comparison moot. I'd rather be unproductive at home, than unproductive in traffic. Also, this surveyed a single "large Asian IT services company". Its an anecdote with significant cultural work biases that may make this inapplicable to eg. American firms.
  - kaskakokos 5y ago
    Understandable, in my case I commuted by bike in 20 min, I have changed 40 min of healthy biking for 2+ hours of extra work. And these are not cold numbers from an study, it is my reality and it can explain my bad mood of the last times.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Why are you working an extra two hours? Can't you bike 20 minutes around your neighbourhood finish two hours earlier and do a quick 20 minutes after work?
      - refactor_master 5y ago
        That’s what I do. Now I can allow myself a 20-min ride in the middle of the day. Does incredibly things for clearing your thoughts.
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
      > in my case I commuted by bike in 20 min So ... you admit that you're an outlier, yet offer your opinion anyway. On HN, pedantry is our job.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Important to note that: > Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company I suspect companies that already had strong WFH and remote friendly practices in place probably had very different outcomes. Western companies probably also have very different communication styles that would lead to different outcomes as well.
stakkur 5y ago
They used tracking software on employee's computers. That alone was enough for me to close the link without reading further. My company uses Microsoft's inane version of this, and the only real thing it measures is the amount of money going into Microsoft's account.
- Guest42 5y ago
  One of the measures/trackers is the various spreadsheets that get opened. This certainly hurts the employees that have automated those aspects of their jobs. One of my initial roles had me inherit 15 different spreadsheet reports and over time I pushed all the report logic upstream so that I never had to open them. This made me much more productive whereas the tracking would show me as contributing very little.
- themanmaran 5y ago
  "the analytics software takes into account whether an employee actually engages in a relevant task (which counts as work time) or merely procrastinates at their desk (not counted), by monitoring which software tools the employee uses" That's genuinely awful. I wonder to what extent employees are aware of the analytics, and how many people just set up macros look busy.
  - ultrastable 5y ago
    I agree it's awful, not to mention the fact that employees weren't informed of the Microsoft tracking software being used in the firstplace, but what's funny is that according to their analytics having yr IDE open & wiggling the mouse cursor counts as "engaged in a relevant task". whereas going on Twitter to get answers about a programming question would be counted as unproductive social media use
  - avgDev 5y ago
    These tools are definitely awful. Last week I spent hours reading a programming book because I was unsure about certain part of my code and needed a refresher. Also, a lot times I just need to think without typing anything. There are days where I only type few lines of code but getting the knowledge to write it takes hours of looking at the business and making sure there is no ill effects somewhere. I still deliver and my boss doesn't need to hold my hand.
hvocode 5y ago
It’s a shame the WFH experiment is blended with the pandemic. It’s hard to decouple the “effectiveness of WFH” from the “pervasive impact of a global pandemic on all aspects of daily life”. I think a lot of people got a negative taste for WFH for reasons that are less WFH and more pandemic.
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  Lockdowns specifically, not just the pandemic.
- rustybelt 5y ago
  Having three kids at home doing remote schooling is such a huge confounding factor. Anecdotally, my WFH productivity (or at least my uninterrupted work time tracked via RescueTime) seems to have improved since my older two went back to in-person school this quarter.
  - jethro_tell 5y ago
    Yeah, that's tough, and the younger ones can't do very much of it by themselves without help. Read the instructions here to learn how to read >
    - pdfernhout 5y ago
      Your comment reminded me of "The Maker" short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDXOioU_OKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDXOioU_OKM "A strange creature races against time to make the most important and beautiful creation of his life."
  - moshmosh 5y ago
    Not only that, but even if one had someone else to watch the kids during that time, one couldn't go work from a coffee shop or whatever like one normally might, for a change of scenery or to avoid at-home distractions.
- ptmcc 5y ago
dominotw 5y ago
JP morgan is forcing me to come into office, i am still waiting for my second dose. Jamie is forcing ppl to come into work and making up stupid anecdotes about how ppl are unproductive at home. Him being "fed up" means i have to risk my life. [1] I don't understand how he is getting away with this. 1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/jamie-dimon-fed-up-with-zoom-calls-and-remote-work-says-commuting-to-offices-will-make-a-comeback.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/jamie-dimon-fed-up-with-zoom...
- whoisburbansky 5y ago
  Kroger's CEO getting paid bonuses [1] to avoid giving front-line workers hazard pay while continuing to put their lives literally on the line over the past year gives me little hope that anyone will ever be held accountable for this sort of behavior. https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/kroger-blasted-for-ending-hazard-pay-gave-its-ceo-22-million#:~:text=to%20frontline%20workers.-,(Bloomberg)%20%2D%2D%20Kroger%20Co.,for%20store%20and%20warehouse%20workers https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/kroger-blasted-for-endi....
- potatoman22 5y ago
  Probably because studies like this and others show that WFH is less productive.
  - dominotw 5y ago
    I highly doubt he is making his decisions based on academic studies. He is quoting dubious personal anecdotes to justify his decisions.
- macd 5y ago
  > (They) would fully expect that by early July, all U.S.-based employees will be in the office on a consistent rotational schedule. > Employee rotations at JPMorgan will be subject to a 50% occupancy cap until U.S. authorities revise their social-distancing guidelines, according to Tuesday’s memo. The bank advised workers that “with this time frame in mind you should start making any needed arrangements to help with your successful return.” Why are you trying to make it seem like they told you to come in every day starting this week, whether you're vaccinated or not? 1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/jpmorgan-to-bring-back-all-u-s-staff-on-rotation-basis-in-july https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/jpmorgan-...
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
COVID does not constitute a natural experiment! A useful natural experiment is when something changes in a way that can only (or at least almost entirely) affect your outcome by way of the cause you're interested in. In the cause and effect chain of A -> B -> C, if A affects B, but not C, then you can exploit wild things in A to learn about how B affects C. But if A affects C outside of B, you can't tell the effects apart. COVID does not constitute a natural experiment! It's a mantra that apparently needs repeating. The pandemic changed work from home. Work from home presumable changes productivity. The pandemic also changes productivity, so you can't tell where the pandemic-driven productivity changes are from more granularly. Learning anything that generalizes requires tremendous care.
- ineptech 5y ago
  Agreed! The elephants in the room for me are the self-reported hours (Did "hours worked" really increase, or was that time spent changing laundry and running errands that got classified as work time) and the obvious confounder of children being at home rather than in school.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    > (Did "hours worked" really increase, or was that time spent changing laundry and running errands that got classified as work time) Let's keep in mind here too that "hours between commute to/from office" != "hours working." Coffee shop runs, lunches, snack breaks, chatting, walking around...
    - munk-a 5y ago
      It's really unfortunate that modern productivity metrics try and maximize things like butt-in-chair hours and time spent actively typing. I work in a rather creative part of CS and those coffee runs and walks are pretty productively spent time for me. One of my issues early on into the pandemic is that I was fearful of taking walks and my productivity actually dropped as my physical exercise decreased. When I realized this and started emphasizing active movement while working (dancing to techno) and taking walks to get in bursts of fresh air I found that things more than reversed. I would note that I have to deal with ADD and physical activity has a long history of positive impacts on folks with such - so that advice might not go for everyone.
rkk3 5y ago
"Employees with children living at home ... suffered a bigger decline in productivity than those without children" Surprising No One.
- jrcii2 5y ago
  I'd be curious to hear about the effects of pets, especially since so many people added them at some point during the pandemic so you could get some interesting before and after stats.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  That’s part of the point. Sometimes you’ll be surprised. If you test lots of hypotheses getting results that surprise you along with lots that don’t increases your confidence that the surprising results are probably real. If you don’t test obvious things you’ll never be surprised by disconfirmation.
dml2135 5y ago
I'd question how conclusions are being drawn here. I think the key takeaway is that output did not change. The authors then go on to say that since hours worked increased, productivity decreased. But how do we define what an "hour worked" really means? I know that I definitely spend more time "working" during WFH in the sense that I am either being responsive to colleagues or actively working on my own work. However during that time I am also doing way more household tasks than I would be working in an office. You may call that a loss of productivity, but I'd call it an increase in flexibility, freedom, and job satisfaction. And to reiterate, output stayed the same, so what's the problem?
- jrcii2 5y ago
  That's an interesting twist. I like the positive aspect of it given I've mostly felt guilty for being able to flexibly take on more household tasks while taking breaks from work. I do think things would trend even more positively had this not been a pandemic. Folks would have more flexibility in work location and could "pick their spots" better in the sense that they'd have more control over their environment and could tailor it to specific tasks.
- taylodl 5y ago
  I'm with you. I mix personal tasks and work tasks throughout the day. My work output is the same or better, but the stuff I'm getting done around the house - SKYROCKET! My quality of life has improved dramatically.
- discardable_dan 5y ago
  Honestly, I think the study sort of damns itself with this line: > Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably. You can easily translate this as: > Without workers in the office, middle management was left to spend additional time on pointless meetings, inhibiting their workers from spending their time on work tasks. If that is true, let's consider the facts: 1. Workers worked longer hours. 2. Workers spent more time in meetings than before. 3. Workers achieved roughly the same output. Now, if we stare at these three things really hard, I think the conclusion is that additional meetings do not play the supplemental role that many managers seem to believe it does, and in fact minimizing meetings will increase productivity.
justAnIdea 5y ago
Obvious. Logical. Especially with kids at home. But many don't want to admit it.
ultrastable 5y ago
"Sapience time measurement is sophisticated and designed to be resilient to simple manipulatio nattempts. Merely keeping the computer on for longer or watching videos instead of working does not increase Input. Rather, it would require having the relevant work software as the active window,and giving continuous user input (via mouse, keyboard)." doesn't sound that sophisticated to me lol. in any case their claim that their output measure (completed tasks) is "rigorous and objective" is questionable to put it mildly: "The company uses a normalized measure of output to make different jobs and roles comparable.For example, for a programmer the output measure might be programming tasks completed divided by tasks assigned, times 100. For other roles, Output might be the number of reviews (e.g., of code) completed relative to the monthly target, or the number of reports delivered relative to the target.". no mention made of the relative effort required for each programming task, or the quality of reports delivered - not to mention no assessment of whether those targets accurately measure anything that's beneficial to the company.
- josephorjoe 5y ago
  lol, this would result in engineering teams generating progressively smaller scoped tickets to maximize tasks and reviews completed. Update Text For Button -- started 5/10, completed 5/11 Update Color Of Button -- started 5/11, completed 5/12 Update Margins Of Button -- started 5/12, completed 5/13 Update Border Radius Of Button -- started 5/13
  - ultrastable 5y ago
    the curse of Taylorism
rammy1234 5y ago
I don't see they have considered , daycares being closed, kids at home, remote schooling, no where to go, mental agony , loneliness, overworked, many new to remote work culture, non-remote friendly processes etc. Analyzing WFH when a pandemic is ongoing is not helping anyone and it is doing no good.
jll29 5y ago
It could well be that CoVid19 led to a 50% productivity loss (processes had to be completely reengineered or stood up from scratch without setting foot in the office). Then, if the actual measured loss is 20% then perhaps it actually went up by 30% (the difference). One cannot really conclude much from this study due to a lack of control, and I hope this is discussed honestly in the paper. One thing I could observe is that working from home required a lot of people that are not used to it to learn to communicate professionally in writing, which they weren't used to. With the option of clarifying via a quick personal chat on the corridor taken due to an "all remote" forced work mode, poor communicators really do need a lot of overhead in terms of extra Teams/Zoom/Slack... meetings to get their message across. Another observation was there was suddenly a lot of extra work. Initially I expected to have more time due to less business. In reality, CoVid19 also presented new opportunities, so extra projects were launched that would not have been required without the pandemic. Another variable that can't really be controlled. Working from home as a planned/rolled out thing for a percentage of people is vastly different from a pandemic improptu shutdown. I was actually surprised how quickly the whole business world adjusted. I've been arguing for years in favour of working from home but was told it can't be done, or people won't do enough work.
- esyir 5y ago
  If there's something I've realised about the hn gestalt, it's that any anecdote in favour of wfh is taken as true by default, while any critique of wfh is assumed to be bunk unless absolutely faultness.
bcrosby95 5y ago
The arguments back and forth on this are always interesting to me. I don't particularly care either way since I've been work from home for the last 15 years. All I can say is that working from home during the pandemic isn't the same as normal times. Even if you don't have kids at home, there's a huge difference between working from home and staying at home all day long every day, versus going out for lunches (especially with friends), dinners, doing things on weekends, etc. I'm lucky enough to live in a suburb and have nice walking trails that I could use that were pretty much empty during this whole thing - for much lunch break I regularly eat lunch and take a small walk along a creek. Or take a quick dip in my swimming pool. I've had it a lot better than some of my friends in larger cities that felt like they could go practically nowhere and do almost nothing.
Havoc 5y ago
A big surprise to me was the impact on having "real talk" discussions with my boss. I joined during covid and obviously working at home I was used to everything being truly 1:1 just between us. (I'm blessed with a great boss) The few back at office days rattled me a bit in terms of "who is listening/judging" in open plan. I've spent years in open plan so that aspect isn't new...but somehow the covid contrast rattled me
- Huiokko 5y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. I book 1:1 with my manager and it was always in a meeting room. Is it common for you to have 1:1 in your cubicle?
  - QuercusMax 5y ago
    Pre-covid, I only ever had manager 1:1s in a meeting room, or much more commonly, walking around the campus. Very occasionally a 1:1 in a deserted corner of a cafeteria during non-meal hours. A manager 1:1 in a nonprivate space sounds awful.
    - NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
      I would argue a meeting in a non-private space isn't a 1:1 at all. That's awful.
      - QuercusMax 5y ago
        You're right - any conversation at people's desks in an open plan office should essentially be considered open for anyone to listen and join in. Otherwise it's just plain rude or inappropriate.
js8 5y ago
I think it is, frankly, irrelevant. Companies need to understand that their employees are adults, and should be able to pick whichever way of working is comfortable for them. If that decreases productivity, they should get less in compensation. I doubt it will change, though, unless employees start to organize in unions and demand to be treated in less patronizing way.
tobr 5y ago
What raises my eyebrows here is that the output is 100.00% in both periods, for both the 1st and 3rd quartile. This seems extremely artificial. Basically, when 1 task is assigned, 1.0000 tasks will be completed. I’ve only skimmed but didn’t see any discussion of how the tasks are assigned - is there any variation on that end?
tdeck 5y ago
> The jobs involve significant cognitive work, developing new software or hardware applications or solutions, collaborating with teams of professionals, working with clients, and engaging in innovation and continuous improvement. > The company provided rich data for a large sample of more than 10,000 employees, for 17 months before and during WFH, from its personnel records and workforce analytics systems. It has a highly-developed process for setting goals and tracking progress towards them, culminating in a primary output measure for each employee. I am skeptical. Why? I've never seen a half-decent way of quantifying output in all my time on the job at 7 companies. Sure, this company complies enough numbers so that clients and upper management feel the performance is quantified, but that's not the same thing. At a minimum this productivity metric needs to be interrogated more closely.
not2b 5y ago
So, about the same amount of work got done, but it took more hours of working to get it done. Seems about right; efficiency per hour went down but the company got about the same amount of work from the employees. The per-hour productivity loss would be less if commute time were to be factored in: I'm putting in more hours of work, but my commute was more than an hour a day.
0xCAP 5y ago
Being able to use my own toilet gave me a 400% performance boost tbh.
heisenbit 5y ago
> but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably. How can that happen - kids aside? The best part of WFH uninterrupted time for the more complicated tasks. We used to call with our phones and felt obliged to pick up. Now we call via Teams and you can simply tune out or be in a non-interruptible state and people are less tempted to call when I'm trying to focus.
xhrpost 5y ago
A lot of comments here saying that this is a flawed study because we don't know how the pandemic may have impacted a statistical decline in productivity. I must ask, why is this not a concern when someone anecdotally or statistically shows an increase in productivity from Covid WFH? The response is instead something like "we've known it all along! WFH is better!".
- tayo42 5y ago
  Probably just intuition, wfh was more productive despite a global pandemic. Intuitively covid is a disruption that would decrease in productivity like other distractions
- andersource 5y ago
  For me personally, the reason is that I fully expect the pandemic to negatively impact productivity in ways completely unrelated to WFH (children in home instead of school, stress, lack of preparedness to proper WFH, etc.). In contrast, I find it difficult to think of pandemic-related but not WFH-related aspects that I expect to improve productivity. I'd be happy to be convinced otherwise.
  - theleftfielder 5y ago
    I think the biggest one is that most people's social lives also dried up during the pandemic. You weren't finishing up WFH and then rushing out to get dinner and see a movie with friends. You weren't traveling or taking vacation. I've had a lot of conversations with people on my team over the last year that were some version of: Them: "I finished this over the weekend." Me: "That's great, but you're to be clear you're not expected to do that. You should feel free to take weekends off to recharge!" Them: "Yeah but what else am I going to do right now?" If there hadn't been a pandemic, they would've been doing all of these other things and then more likely to cut back on work when the end of work hours roll around.
    - andersource 5y ago
      That's a good point, thanks!
batterseapower 5y ago
This is an associative study and thus can't really tell us anything about the causal impact of working from home. A recent properly-conducted randomized controlled trial found that WFH improves productivity: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18871 https://www.nber.org/papers/w18871
missedthecue 5y ago
It never seemed surprising to me to think that the disaster that has been high school and college from home might also be a problem for working from home. After all, one major difference between working from home and learning from home is that working relies on human interaction much more heavily than studying. But no one seems to even bother disputing that college-from-home is an inefficient way to learn compared to in-person. It is practically a universally accepted fact. Meanwhile, the entire internet seems to rush to find flaws, no matter how minute, in any study that casts the faintest negative light on working-from-home.
- denimnerd42 5y ago
  i learned my entire curriculum from youtube 2014-2018 so i dispute that remote college is inefficient. however i would not dispute that universities would have any motivation to make the remote learning process work well for fear of future consequences.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Perhaps 'inefficient' was a poor choice of terms on my part. What I mean to say is that getting your education at an institution yields superior results compared to watching youtube videos. When learning in-person, cheating is less easily facilitated, student engagement is more naturally promoted, discussion and interaction is inherently encouraged, distractions are much fewer, and the general atmosphere is fully conducive to the retainment of information and study material.
    - denimnerd42 5y ago
      actually i highly dispute that. as good youtube videos have highly skilled tutors or highly skilled professors conveying the content. not random adjuncts, graduate students, assistant professors, and sometimes the occasional skilled lecturer. if i didn’t watch youtube vidoes i would have never have passed. my experience in class was abysmal and going to class to figure out the exam content and then watching videos afterwards resulted in way better grades.
pojzon 5y ago
Ofcourse my productivity dived.. I have to spend 3h per day on meetings to align with ppl on various thing because ppl force me to have f2f meetings over zoom. Things that could have been an email. On top of that are kids and wife who drive me crazy and constantly interrupt when you have to focus. This is not a correct way to measure WFH, during normal WFH situation my kids would be in school and my wife at work.. And coworkers wouldnt be so desperate for interactions with others.
- ok_coo 5y ago
  I've had a similar experience. Many more meetings now than when I was in the office. Middle managers not knowing what to do with themselves, so calling useless Zoom meetings. However, I've been super productive when I've been able to get some quiet time outside of meetings.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Impossible to decouple the pandemic from whatever happened with work from home productivity. Our management “COVID-paused” lots of projects because of uncertainty.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mekkkkkk 5y ago
It seems like the overwhelming majority of people here are positive to WFH. I can't stand it. To me, a "remote first" workplace sounds abysmal. I like to have a physical workplace where our company can gather and focus on our goals together, in person. Picking up business related discussions, small talking, sharing music, joking around. Attempting this through video meetings or voice chats feels like a bad simulacrum. I just hope there's a place for people like me in your visions of the future distributed workplace.
- SkyPuncher 5y ago
  It's possible to have that remotely! It takes effort and requires intentionality, but you can make it happen. We do daily 30 minute standups - which we intentionally run inefficiently at this point. It's a great time for watercooler talk, catching up, and generally building rapport that's hard to build at remote companies. We also do twice weekly hang-out sessions. It takes some time to develop the habit. It's probably not for everyone but it's been incredibly positive for our team.
  - nucleardog 5y ago
    Seconding this. WFH is more conscious effort in this regard, but you don't _have_ to lose those things. The biggest difference is organic conversations will not happen in big meetings. When only one person can talk at a time, you lose all those side chats, etc. So you need to book a lot of smaller meetings with people. I have daily stand-ups with my team. I've never made it explicitly clear but kind of driven it towards a routine of "get the work out of the way, then we have until X time to chat and bullshit". I have a weekly planning meeting with a few members of the team. Same deal. Get the planning out of the way, then the remainder is for general chit-chat, talking about personal projects, etc. Every week I have three hours blocked off where I do a "check-in" with a bunch of other team leads. It's dual-purpose: There's a lot of things they might be dealing with that they'd never feel rose to the level of scheduling a meeting to discuss (whether problems or just wanting input, etc; this was previously a lot of the water cooler talk), but when the time's already there then they'll find all sorts of productive ways to fill it. And chit-chat once that's all out of the way. I do an hour once a week with my boss one on one. The entire office does a monthly-ish hour to play some silly online games and hang out as well. We've been hiring like crazy so at this point a lot of these people are people I've never met in person but I've built a pretty good rapport and relationship purely over video chat and Slack. All-in, I spend like 6 hours a week on this. And most of it's scheduled around the beginning/very end of the day where most people aren't as interrupted or super productive to begin with. Truth be told, this is barely more (if any) than the amount of time that we were spending previously on socialization at work. If we account for the _lost_ productivity of being distracted in the office, then I've definitely gained time. The hardest part was just accepting that I was going to have to let some relationships go. As much as I really enjoyed talking to that one frontend engineer and it _occasionally_ resulted in some sort of productive action, the trade-off just isn't there so I need to rely more on the team leads to solve and communicate those issues.
anotherevan 5y ago
"You are not working from home; you are at your home during a crisis trying to work."
slumdev 5y ago
> Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company So, which one? TCS, Wipro, Infosys, IBM, Capgemini? I want to know so that I can avoid it, not because of the study results, but because they install this "Sapience" tool to spy on their employees.
j4yav 5y ago
This seems like they accidentally just proved that parents had a really hard time working and taking care of their kids at the same time during a global pandemic lockdown.
crossroadsguy 5y ago
I see the point of employees’ well being is always missing from these conversations as the main topic. Across companies I’m seeing it’s getting increasingly difficult for people who liked a simple 9-5 or 10-6 in the pre-pandemic days. On most days they could just switch-off from work in the early evening by leaving the work place. That boundary is now constantly stretching. Someone has a kid so they want a different time, someone has daily house chores so they’d rather take that 3-5pm off and then extend to 5-8pm and they’d expect others to adjust around it. It’s especially bad in my country, India. This place already had a chronic national work-life balance issue and it’s limitless in many ways now. US companies anyway treat this place as offshore software worker colony no matter how you’d want to dress this in words. I recently switched from an Indian startup (quite bad work-life balance) to a US firm and I could never imagine it would have changed for the worse. Anyway I’ve resigned and I’m interviewing only for very large MNCs where I know multiple people personally who can vouch for this part of work culture. Now of course you can be strict about your time and slowly become “that uncooperative person” in the team. Or you can just bleat about how that’s just company failing to streamline things. Problem is majority seems fine with not having a work boundary in their lives that used be a hard stop early in the evening and then everybody else is automatically expected be okay with this. There is no fix of this other than very clearly separating work and home.
noisy_boy 5y ago
Being able to work in my shorts on my giant monitor while listening to my favourite music without the discomfort of headphones itself probably has done double-digit contribution.
smlss_sftwr 5y ago
Given the stories I've heard about the rigor of UChicago's econometrics program, I'm somewhat surprised they would put out a working paper extrapolating what is effectively a single data point to make broader inferences about the efficacy of WFH practices. To be fair they qualify their findings in terms of the firm's employees, but given the tone of the title and conclusion focusing on WFH as a general trend it still seems to me that they are drawing from a sample size of n=1 instead of n=10000. The paper doesn't specify which Asian country is being studied but anecdotally I have several relatives/friends working in East Asian corporations who can attest to the pervasiveness of "managerial piety" culture even when working remotely, so I would also think they'd want to replicate the study across similar companies in other parts of the world to account for potentially confounding cultural factors in assessing WFH productivity
TheGigaChad 5y ago
Hah, not a big surprised I havent worked more than 2 hours a day in the last year.
LionBlack8 5y ago
I like studying from home and thus wouldn't want to go back to school unless I had to (simply to avoid the commute). I pretty successfully accomplish tasks with help of https://writinguniverse.com/essay-types/compare-and-contrast-essays/ https://writinguniverse.com/essay-types/compare-and-contrast... . However, I wouldn't mind going in if I had to. Covid doesn't bother me or my family. In fact the few times I went into the office over the past year didn't scare me at all.
Giooo 5y ago
I like studying from home and thus wouldn't want to go back to school unless I had to (simply to avoid the commute). I pretty successfully accomplish tasks with help of https://writinguniverse.com/essay-types/compare-and-contrast-essays/ https://writinguniverse.com/essay-types/compare-and-contrast... . However, I wouldn't mind going in if I had to. Covid doesn't bother me or my family. In fact the few times I went into the office over the past year didn't scare me at all..
anngrant 5y ago
I like studying from home and thus wouldn't want to go back to school unless I had to (simply to avoid the commute). I pretty successfully accomplish tasks with help of https://writinguniverse.com/essay-types/compare-and-contrast-essays/ https://writinguniverse.com/essay-types/compare-and-contrast... . However, I wouldn't mind going in if I had to. Covid doesn't bother me or my family. In fact the few times I went into the office over the past year didn't scare me at all....

150 points by Dowwie 5y ago

"Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%. "

DeRock 5y ago
Excludes commute time from work-from-office hours, which makes the comparison moot. I'd rather be unproductive at home, than unproductive in traffic. Also, this surveyed a single "large Asian IT services company". Its an anecdote with significant cultural work biases that may make this inapplicable to eg. American firms.
- kaskakokos 5y ago
  Understandable, in my case I commuted by bike in 20 min, I have changed 40 min of healthy biking for 2+ hours of extra work. And these are not cold numbers from an study, it is my reality and it can explain my bad mood of the last times.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Why are you working an extra two hours? Can't you bike 20 minutes around your neighbourhood finish two hours earlier and do a quick 20 minutes after work?
    - refactor_master 5y ago
      That’s what I do. Now I can allow myself a 20-min ride in the middle of the day. Does incredibly things for clearing your thoughts.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    > in my case I commuted by bike in 20 min So ... you admit that you're an outlier, yet offer your opinion anyway. On HN, pedantry is our job.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

Important to note that: > Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company I suspect companies that already had strong WFH and remote friendly practices in place probably had very different outcomes. Western companies probably also have very different communication styles that would lead to different outcomes as well.

stakkur 5y ago

They used tracking software on employee's computers. That alone was enough for me to close the link without reading further. My company uses Microsoft's inane version of this, and the only real thing it measures is the amount of money going into Microsoft's account.

Guest42 5y ago
One of the measures/trackers is the various spreadsheets that get opened. This certainly hurts the employees that have automated those aspects of their jobs. One of my initial roles had me inherit 15 different spreadsheet reports and over time I pushed all the report logic upstream so that I never had to open them. This made me much more productive whereas the tracking would show me as contributing very little.
themanmaran 5y ago
"the analytics software takes into account whether an employee actually engages in a relevant task (which counts as work time) or merely procrastinates at their desk (not counted), by monitoring which software tools the employee uses" That's genuinely awful. I wonder to what extent employees are aware of the analytics, and how many people just set up macros look busy.
- ultrastable 5y ago
  I agree it's awful, not to mention the fact that employees weren't informed of the Microsoft tracking software being used in the firstplace, but what's funny is that according to their analytics having yr IDE open & wiggling the mouse cursor counts as "engaged in a relevant task". whereas going on Twitter to get answers about a programming question would be counted as unproductive social media use
- avgDev 5y ago
  These tools are definitely awful. Last week I spent hours reading a programming book because I was unsure about certain part of my code and needed a refresher. Also, a lot times I just need to think without typing anything. There are days where I only type few lines of code but getting the knowledge to write it takes hours of looking at the business and making sure there is no ill effects somewhere. I still deliver and my boss doesn't need to hold my hand.

hvocode 5y ago

It’s a shame the WFH experiment is blended with the pandemic. It’s hard to decouple the “effectiveness of WFH” from the “pervasive impact of a global pandemic on all aspects of daily life”. I think a lot of people got a negative taste for WFH for reasons that are less WFH and more pandemic.

throwaway3699 5y ago
Lockdowns specifically, not just the pandemic.
rustybelt 5y ago
Having three kids at home doing remote schooling is such a huge confounding factor. Anecdotally, my WFH productivity (or at least my uninterrupted work time tracked via RescueTime) seems to have improved since my older two went back to in-person school this quarter.
- jethro_tell 5y ago
  Yeah, that's tough, and the younger ones can't do very much of it by themselves without help. Read the instructions here to learn how to read >
  - pdfernhout 5y ago
    Your comment reminded me of "The Maker" short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDXOioU_OKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDXOioU_OKM "A strange creature races against time to make the most important and beautiful creation of his life."
- moshmosh 5y ago
  Not only that, but even if one had someone else to watch the kids during that time, one couldn't go work from a coffee shop or whatever like one normally might, for a change of scenery or to avoid at-home distractions.
ptmcc 5y ago

dominotw 5y ago

JP morgan is forcing me to come into office, i am still waiting for my second dose. Jamie is forcing ppl to come into work and making up stupid anecdotes about how ppl are unproductive at home. Him being "fed up" means i have to risk my life. [1] I don't understand how he is getting away with this. 1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/jamie-dimon-fed-up-with-zoom-calls-and-remote-work-says-commuting-to-offices-will-make-a-comeback.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/jamie-dimon-fed-up-with-zoom...

whoisburbansky 5y ago
Kroger's CEO getting paid bonuses [1] to avoid giving front-line workers hazard pay while continuing to put their lives literally on the line over the past year gives me little hope that anyone will ever be held accountable for this sort of behavior. https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/kroger-blasted-for-ending-hazard-pay-gave-its-ceo-22-million#:~:text=to%20frontline%20workers.-,(Bloomberg)%20%2D%2D%20Kroger%20Co.,for%20store%20and%20warehouse%20workers https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/kroger-blasted-for-endi....
potatoman22 5y ago
Probably because studies like this and others show that WFH is less productive.
- dominotw 5y ago
  I highly doubt he is making his decisions based on academic studies. He is quoting dubious personal anecdotes to justify his decisions.
macd 5y ago
> (They) would fully expect that by early July, all U.S.-based employees will be in the office on a consistent rotational schedule. > Employee rotations at JPMorgan will be subject to a 50% occupancy cap until U.S. authorities revise their social-distancing guidelines, according to Tuesday’s memo. The bank advised workers that “with this time frame in mind you should start making any needed arrangements to help with your successful return.” Why are you trying to make it seem like they told you to come in every day starting this week, whether you're vaccinated or not? 1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/jpmorgan-to-bring-back-all-u-s-staff-on-rotation-basis-in-july https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/jpmorgan-...

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

COVID does not constitute a natural experiment! A useful natural experiment is when something changes in a way that can only (or at least almost entirely) affect your outcome by way of the cause you're interested in. In the cause and effect chain of A -> B -> C, if A affects B, but not C, then you can exploit wild things in A to learn about how B affects C. But if A affects C outside of B, you can't tell the effects apart. COVID does not constitute a natural experiment! It's a mantra that apparently needs repeating. The pandemic changed work from home. Work from home presumable changes productivity. The pandemic also changes productivity, so you can't tell where the pandemic-driven productivity changes are from more granularly. Learning anything that generalizes requires tremendous care.

ineptech 5y ago
Agreed! The elephants in the room for me are the self-reported hours (Did "hours worked" really increase, or was that time spent changing laundry and running errands that got classified as work time) and the obvious confounder of children being at home rather than in school.
- majormajor 5y ago
  > (Did "hours worked" really increase, or was that time spent changing laundry and running errands that got classified as work time) Let's keep in mind here too that "hours between commute to/from office" != "hours working." Coffee shop runs, lunches, snack breaks, chatting, walking around...
  - munk-a 5y ago
    It's really unfortunate that modern productivity metrics try and maximize things like butt-in-chair hours and time spent actively typing. I work in a rather creative part of CS and those coffee runs and walks are pretty productively spent time for me. One of my issues early on into the pandemic is that I was fearful of taking walks and my productivity actually dropped as my physical exercise decreased. When I realized this and started emphasizing active movement while working (dancing to techno) and taking walks to get in bursts of fresh air I found that things more than reversed. I would note that I have to deal with ADD and physical activity has a long history of positive impacts on folks with such - so that advice might not go for everyone.

rkk3 5y ago

"Employees with children living at home ... suffered a bigger decline in productivity than those without children" Surprising No One.

jrcii2 5y ago
I'd be curious to hear about the effects of pets, especially since so many people added them at some point during the pandemic so you could get some interesting before and after stats.
barry-cotter 5y ago
That’s part of the point. Sometimes you’ll be surprised. If you test lots of hypotheses getting results that surprise you along with lots that don’t increases your confidence that the surprising results are probably real. If you don’t test obvious things you’ll never be surprised by disconfirmation.

dml2135 5y ago

I'd question how conclusions are being drawn here. I think the key takeaway is that output did not change. The authors then go on to say that since hours worked increased, productivity decreased. But how do we define what an "hour worked" really means? I know that I definitely spend more time "working" during WFH in the sense that I am either being responsive to colleagues or actively working on my own work. However during that time I am also doing way more household tasks than I would be working in an office. You may call that a loss of productivity, but I'd call it an increase in flexibility, freedom, and job satisfaction. And to reiterate, output stayed the same, so what's the problem?

jrcii2 5y ago
That's an interesting twist. I like the positive aspect of it given I've mostly felt guilty for being able to flexibly take on more household tasks while taking breaks from work. I do think things would trend even more positively had this not been a pandemic. Folks would have more flexibility in work location and could "pick their spots" better in the sense that they'd have more control over their environment and could tailor it to specific tasks.
taylodl 5y ago
I'm with you. I mix personal tasks and work tasks throughout the day. My work output is the same or better, but the stuff I'm getting done around the house - SKYROCKET! My quality of life has improved dramatically.
discardable_dan 5y ago
Honestly, I think the study sort of damns itself with this line: > Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably. You can easily translate this as: > Without workers in the office, middle management was left to spend additional time on pointless meetings, inhibiting their workers from spending their time on work tasks. If that is true, let's consider the facts: 1. Workers worked longer hours. 2. Workers spent more time in meetings than before. 3. Workers achieved roughly the same output. Now, if we stare at these three things really hard, I think the conclusion is that additional meetings do not play the supplemental role that many managers seem to believe it does, and in fact minimizing meetings will increase productivity.

justAnIdea 5y ago

Obvious. Logical. Especially with kids at home. But many don't want to admit it.

ultrastable 5y ago

"Sapience time measurement is sophisticated and designed to be resilient to simple manipulatio nattempts. Merely keeping the computer on for longer or watching videos instead of working does not increase Input. Rather, it would require having the relevant work software as the active window,and giving continuous user input (via mouse, keyboard)." doesn't sound that sophisticated to me lol. in any case their claim that their output measure (completed tasks) is "rigorous and objective" is questionable to put it mildly: "The company uses a normalized measure of output to make different jobs and roles comparable.For example, for a programmer the output measure might be programming tasks completed divided by tasks assigned, times 100. For other roles, Output might be the number of reviews (e.g., of code) completed relative to the monthly target, or the number of reports delivered relative to the target.". no mention made of the relative effort required for each programming task, or the quality of reports delivered - not to mention no assessment of whether those targets accurately measure anything that's beneficial to the company.

josephorjoe 5y ago
lol, this would result in engineering teams generating progressively smaller scoped tickets to maximize tasks and reviews completed. Update Text For Button -- started 5/10, completed 5/11 Update Color Of Button -- started 5/11, completed 5/12 Update Margins Of Button -- started 5/12, completed 5/13 Update Border Radius Of Button -- started 5/13
- ultrastable 5y ago
  the curse of Taylorism

rammy1234 5y ago

I don't see they have considered , daycares being closed, kids at home, remote schooling, no where to go, mental agony , loneliness, overworked, many new to remote work culture, non-remote friendly processes etc. Analyzing WFH when a pandemic is ongoing is not helping anyone and it is doing no good.

jll29 5y ago

It could well be that CoVid19 led to a 50% productivity loss (processes had to be completely reengineered or stood up from scratch without setting foot in the office). Then, if the actual measured loss is 20% then perhaps it actually went up by 30% (the difference). One cannot really conclude much from this study due to a lack of control, and I hope this is discussed honestly in the paper. One thing I could observe is that working from home required a lot of people that are not used to it to learn to communicate professionally in writing, which they weren't used to. With the option of clarifying via a quick personal chat on the corridor taken due to an "all remote" forced work mode, poor communicators really do need a lot of overhead in terms of extra Teams/Zoom/Slack... meetings to get their message across. Another observation was there was suddenly a lot of extra work. Initially I expected to have more time due to less business. In reality, CoVid19 also presented new opportunities, so extra projects were launched that would not have been required without the pandemic. Another variable that can't really be controlled. Working from home as a planned/rolled out thing for a percentage of people is vastly different from a pandemic improptu shutdown. I was actually surprised how quickly the whole business world adjusted. I've been arguing for years in favour of working from home but was told it can't be done, or people won't do enough work.

esyir 5y ago
If there's something I've realised about the hn gestalt, it's that any anecdote in favour of wfh is taken as true by default, while any critique of wfh is assumed to be bunk unless absolutely faultness.

bcrosby95 5y ago

The arguments back and forth on this are always interesting to me. I don't particularly care either way since I've been work from home for the last 15 years. All I can say is that working from home during the pandemic isn't the same as normal times. Even if you don't have kids at home, there's a huge difference between working from home and staying at home all day long every day, versus going out for lunches (especially with friends), dinners, doing things on weekends, etc. I'm lucky enough to live in a suburb and have nice walking trails that I could use that were pretty much empty during this whole thing - for much lunch break I regularly eat lunch and take a small walk along a creek. Or take a quick dip in my swimming pool. I've had it a lot better than some of my friends in larger cities that felt like they could go practically nowhere and do almost nothing.

Havoc 5y ago

A big surprise to me was the impact on having "real talk" discussions with my boss. I joined during covid and obviously working at home I was used to everything being truly 1:1 just between us. (I'm blessed with a great boss) The few back at office days rattled me a bit in terms of "who is listening/judging" in open plan. I've spent years in open plan so that aspect isn't new...but somehow the covid contrast rattled me

Huiokko 5y ago
I'm not sure what you mean. I book 1:1 with my manager and it was always in a meeting room. Is it common for you to have 1:1 in your cubicle?
- QuercusMax 5y ago
  Pre-covid, I only ever had manager 1:1s in a meeting room, or much more commonly, walking around the campus. Very occasionally a 1:1 in a deserted corner of a cafeteria during non-meal hours. A manager 1:1 in a nonprivate space sounds awful.
  - NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    I would argue a meeting in a non-private space isn't a 1:1 at all. That's awful.
    - QuercusMax 5y ago
      You're right - any conversation at people's desks in an open plan office should essentially be considered open for anyone to listen and join in. Otherwise it's just plain rude or inappropriate.

js8 5y ago

I think it is, frankly, irrelevant. Companies need to understand that their employees are adults, and should be able to pick whichever way of working is comfortable for them. If that decreases productivity, they should get less in compensation. I doubt it will change, though, unless employees start to organize in unions and demand to be treated in less patronizing way.

tobr 5y ago

What raises my eyebrows here is that the output is 100.00% in both periods, for both the 1st and 3rd quartile. This seems extremely artificial. Basically, when 1 task is assigned, 1.0000 tasks will be completed. I’ve only skimmed but didn’t see any discussion of how the tasks are assigned - is there any variation on that end?

tdeck 5y ago

> The jobs involve significant cognitive work, developing new software or hardware applications or solutions, collaborating with teams of professionals, working with clients, and engaging in innovation and continuous improvement. > The company provided rich data for a large sample of more than 10,000 employees, for 17 months before and during WFH, from its personnel records and workforce analytics systems. It has a highly-developed process for setting goals and tracking progress towards them, culminating in a primary output measure for each employee. I am skeptical. Why? I've never seen a half-decent way of quantifying output in all my time on the job at 7 companies. Sure, this company complies enough numbers so that clients and upper management feel the performance is quantified, but that's not the same thing. At a minimum this productivity metric needs to be interrogated more closely.

not2b 5y ago

So, about the same amount of work got done, but it took more hours of working to get it done. Seems about right; efficiency per hour went down but the company got about the same amount of work from the employees. The per-hour productivity loss would be less if commute time were to be factored in: I'm putting in more hours of work, but my commute was more than an hour a day.

0xCAP 5y ago

Being able to use my own toilet gave me a 400% performance boost tbh.

heisenbit 5y ago

> but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably. How can that happen - kids aside? The best part of WFH uninterrupted time for the more complicated tasks. We used to call with our phones and felt obliged to pick up. Now we call via Teams and you can simply tune out or be in a non-interruptible state and people are less tempted to call when I'm trying to focus.

xhrpost 5y ago

A lot of comments here saying that this is a flawed study because we don't know how the pandemic may have impacted a statistical decline in productivity. I must ask, why is this not a concern when someone anecdotally or statistically shows an increase in productivity from Covid WFH? The response is instead something like "we've known it all along! WFH is better!".

tayo42 5y ago
Probably just intuition, wfh was more productive despite a global pandemic. Intuitively covid is a disruption that would decrease in productivity like other distractions
andersource 5y ago
For me personally, the reason is that I fully expect the pandemic to negatively impact productivity in ways completely unrelated to WFH (children in home instead of school, stress, lack of preparedness to proper WFH, etc.). In contrast, I find it difficult to think of pandemic-related but not WFH-related aspects that I expect to improve productivity. I'd be happy to be convinced otherwise.
- theleftfielder 5y ago
  I think the biggest one is that most people's social lives also dried up during the pandemic. You weren't finishing up WFH and then rushing out to get dinner and see a movie with friends. You weren't traveling or taking vacation. I've had a lot of conversations with people on my team over the last year that were some version of: Them: "I finished this over the weekend." Me: "That's great, but you're to be clear you're not expected to do that. You should feel free to take weekends off to recharge!" Them: "Yeah but what else am I going to do right now?" If there hadn't been a pandemic, they would've been doing all of these other things and then more likely to cut back on work when the end of work hours roll around.
  - andersource 5y ago
    That's a good point, thanks!

batterseapower 5y ago

This is an associative study and thus can't really tell us anything about the causal impact of working from home. A recent properly-conducted randomized controlled trial found that WFH improves productivity: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18871 https://www.nber.org/papers/w18871

missedthecue 5y ago

It never seemed surprising to me to think that the disaster that has been high school and college from home might also be a problem for working from home. After all, one major difference between working from home and learning from home is that working relies on human interaction much more heavily than studying. But no one seems to even bother disputing that college-from-home is an inefficient way to learn compared to in-person. It is practically a universally accepted fact. Meanwhile, the entire internet seems to rush to find flaws, no matter how minute, in any study that casts the faintest negative light on working-from-home.

denimnerd42 5y ago
i learned my entire curriculum from youtube 2014-2018 so i dispute that remote college is inefficient. however i would not dispute that universities would have any motivation to make the remote learning process work well for fear of future consequences.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Perhaps 'inefficient' was a poor choice of terms on my part. What I mean to say is that getting your education at an institution yields superior results compared to watching youtube videos. When learning in-person, cheating is less easily facilitated, student engagement is more naturally promoted, discussion and interaction is inherently encouraged, distractions are much fewer, and the general atmosphere is fully conducive to the retainment of information and study material.
  - denimnerd42 5y ago
    actually i highly dispute that. as good youtube videos have highly skilled tutors or highly skilled professors conveying the content. not random adjuncts, graduate students, assistant professors, and sometimes the occasional skilled lecturer. if i didn’t watch youtube vidoes i would have never have passed. my experience in class was abysmal and going to class to figure out the exam content and then watching videos afterwards resulted in way better grades.

pojzon 5y ago

Ofcourse my productivity dived.. I have to spend 3h per day on meetings to align with ppl on various thing because ppl force me to have f2f meetings over zoom. Things that could have been an email. On top of that are kids and wife who drive me crazy and constantly interrupt when you have to focus. This is not a correct way to measure WFH, during normal WFH situation my kids would be in school and my wife at work.. And coworkers wouldnt be so desperate for interactions with others.

ok_coo 5y ago
I've had a similar experience. Many more meetings now than when I was in the office. Middle managers not knowing what to do with themselves, so calling useless Zoom meetings. However, I've been super productive when I've been able to get some quiet time outside of meetings.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Impossible to decouple the pandemic from whatever happened with work from home productivity. Our management “COVID-paused” lots of projects because of uncertainty.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mekkkkkk 5y ago

It seems like the overwhelming majority of people here are positive to WFH. I can't stand it. To me, a "remote first" workplace sounds abysmal. I like to have a physical workplace where our company can gather and focus on our goals together, in person. Picking up business related discussions, small talking, sharing music, joking around. Attempting this through video meetings or voice chats feels like a bad simulacrum. I just hope there's a place for people like me in your visions of the future distributed workplace.

SkyPuncher 5y ago
It's possible to have that remotely! It takes effort and requires intentionality, but you can make it happen. We do daily 30 minute standups - which we intentionally run inefficiently at this point. It's a great time for watercooler talk, catching up, and generally building rapport that's hard to build at remote companies. We also do twice weekly hang-out sessions. It takes some time to develop the habit. It's probably not for everyone but it's been incredibly positive for our team.
- nucleardog 5y ago
  Seconding this. WFH is more conscious effort in this regard, but you don't _have_ to lose those things. The biggest difference is organic conversations will not happen in big meetings. When only one person can talk at a time, you lose all those side chats, etc. So you need to book a lot of smaller meetings with people. I have daily stand-ups with my team. I've never made it explicitly clear but kind of driven it towards a routine of "get the work out of the way, then we have until X time to chat and bullshit". I have a weekly planning meeting with a few members of the team. Same deal. Get the planning out of the way, then the remainder is for general chit-chat, talking about personal projects, etc. Every week I have three hours blocked off where I do a "check-in" with a bunch of other team leads. It's dual-purpose: There's a lot of things they might be dealing with that they'd never feel rose to the level of scheduling a meeting to discuss (whether problems or just wanting input, etc; this was previously a lot of the water cooler talk), but when the time's already there then they'll find all sorts of productive ways to fill it. And chit-chat once that's all out of the way. I do an hour once a week with my boss one on one. The entire office does a monthly-ish hour to play some silly online games and hang out as well. We've been hiring like crazy so at this point a lot of these people are people I've never met in person but I've built a pretty good rapport and relationship purely over video chat and Slack. All-in, I spend like 6 hours a week on this. And most of it's scheduled around the beginning/very end of the day where most people aren't as interrupted or super productive to begin with. Truth be told, this is barely more (if any) than the amount of time that we were spending previously on socialization at work. If we account for the _lost_ productivity of being distracted in the office, then I've definitely gained time. The hardest part was just accepting that I was going to have to let some relationships go. As much as I really enjoyed talking to that one frontend engineer and it _occasionally_ resulted in some sort of productive action, the trade-off just isn't there so I need to rely more on the team leads to solve and communicate those issues.

anotherevan 5y ago

"You are not working from home; you are at your home during a crisis trying to work."

slumdev 5y ago

> Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company So, which one? TCS, Wipro, Infosys, IBM, Capgemini? I want to know so that I can avoid it, not because of the study results, but because they install this "Sapience" tool to spy on their employees.

j4yav 5y ago

This seems like they accidentally just proved that parents had a really hard time working and taking care of their kids at the same time during a global pandemic lockdown.

crossroadsguy 5y ago

I see the point of employees’ well being is always missing from these conversations as the main topic. Across companies I’m seeing it’s getting increasingly difficult for people who liked a simple 9-5 or 10-6 in the pre-pandemic days. On most days they could just switch-off from work in the early evening by leaving the work place. That boundary is now constantly stretching. Someone has a kid so they want a different time, someone has daily house chores so they’d rather take that 3-5pm off and then extend to 5-8pm and they’d expect others to adjust around it. It’s especially bad in my country, India. This place already had a chronic national work-life balance issue and it’s limitless in many ways now. US companies anyway treat this place as offshore software worker colony no matter how you’d want to dress this in words. I recently switched from an Indian startup (quite bad work-life balance) to a US firm and I could never imagine it would have changed for the worse. Anyway I’ve resigned and I’m interviewing only for very large MNCs where I know multiple people personally who can vouch for this part of work culture. Now of course you can be strict about your time and slowly become “that uncooperative person” in the team. Or you can just bleat about how that’s just company failing to streamline things. Problem is majority seems fine with not having a work boundary in their lives that used be a hard stop early in the evening and then everybody else is automatically expected be okay with this. There is no fix of this other than very clearly separating work and home.

noisy_boy 5y ago

Being able to work in my shorts on my giant monitor while listening to my favourite music without the discomfort of headphones itself probably has done double-digit contribution.

smlss_sftwr 5y ago

Given the stories I've heard about the rigor of UChicago's econometrics program, I'm somewhat surprised they would put out a working paper extrapolating what is effectively a single data point to make broader inferences about the efficacy of WFH practices. To be fair they qualify their findings in terms of the firm's employees, but given the tone of the title and conclusion focusing on WFH as a general trend it still seems to me that they are drawing from a sample size of n=1 instead of n=10000. The paper doesn't specify which Asian country is being studied but anecdotally I have several relatives/friends working in East Asian corporations who can attest to the pervasiveness of "managerial piety" culture even when working remotely, so I would also think they'd want to replicate the study across similar companies in other parts of the world to account for potentially confounding cultural factors in assessing WFH productivity

TheGigaChad 5y ago

Hah, not a big surprised I havent worked more than 2 hours a day in the last year.

LionBlack8 5y ago

I like studying from home and thus wouldn't want to go back to school unless I had to (simply to avoid the commute). I pretty successfully accomplish tasks with help of https://writinguniverse.com/essay-types/compare-and-contrast-essays/ https://writinguniverse.com/essay-types/compare-and-contrast... . However, I wouldn't mind going in if I had to. Covid doesn't bother me or my family. In fact the few times I went into the office over the past year didn't scare me at all.

Giooo 5y ago

anngrant 5y ago