5 ms·
Honestly, I think the study sort of damns itself with this line: > Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours s
by 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.
- sabellito 5y agoBig if there, Dan. You sound a bit bitter about meetings, that's not the case everywhere.
- christophilus 5y agoI’d put money on it being the case everywhere.
- calvinmorrison 5y agoI mean not really. I have 2 one hour meetings per week. One is a 1on1 with my boss and one is with my team. That is about perfect
- saurik 5y agoThat just means you already managed to not have those meetings that the average company is apparently wasting time on, not that those meetings you already don't have are beneficial.
- malshe 5y agoI have meetings with my research group and I look forward to them!
- discardable_dan 5y agoWhat are you even getting at? Are you saying that people misreported "uninterrupted work time" while in the office? Because I know if a coworker asks me a question in the middle of the day, it definitely isn't uninterrupted work time.
- ma2rten 5y agoOr maybe people need to have more formal meetings because they can’t have informal conversations like they would in the office.
- fpig 5y agoThe study also damns itself because they chose the absolute worst possible timing for their “research” and measuring wfh productivity. It’s like they don’t understand how much the pandemic changes everything.
- discardable_dan 5y agoSort of? The largest outlier is child care time. Under non-pandemic conditions, where the children are not in the house, WFH is a decidedly different beast. As a WFH employee, even pre-pandemic, I firmly believe it is not the same style of social interaction; it has a much stronger "contractor" feel. If you are comfortable and familiar with a standard work environment, the transition can be difficult. That said, the numbers here are very bad: it looks like most things just devolved into meetings.
- dd_roger 5y ago> 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. You're just drawing meaningless conclusions based on nothing but your hatred of management lol. >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. I think the actualy conclusion is that people are less productive at home because many people can't work properly due to an unfavorable working environment. Meanwhile since there's no office hour anymore (no commute to divide personal time from working time) people work from breakfast until dinner. In the end you get the same amount of work done but the timeslot that was dedicated to work during the day was 2-3 hours longer than when working from the office.