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Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]

86 points by amadeuspagel 5y ago

st8675309 5y ago
Surprised this post isn’t getting more comments. The result is pretty clear with over 10,000 participants in the study. >>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%. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably.
- altdataseller 5y ago
  All from the same company though.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Anecdotally, I've seen this happen on my team, and it is the single biggest factor that makes me somewhat receptive to going back into the office. It's easier to draw a line between work and home that way. Maybe we should just turn Slack off altogether outside of business hours, and only enable it in emergencies. LOL
  - chasedehan 5y ago
    You should turn Slack off outside business hours! And, remove from your phone. If there is a true emergency, this is why people are on call. This applies equally to whether wfh or in office.
- carabiner 5y ago
  Interesting. This contradicts the prevailing HN sentiment that WFH increases productivity because there's less time spent socializing or dealing with distractions.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    It varies dramatically by circumstance. I had coworkers who struggled with 3-4 kids and working spouse at home. For me, my son is 9 and my wife was partially at home. No big deal for my productivity. For my sister, she sold her car and hired a nanny for a year.
  - postalrat 5y ago
    I'm confident that HN sentiment is a fantasy created by people who are barely working.
  - astrange 5y ago
    Maybe if you do nothing but greenfield coding, but when does that ever happen? You'd need to be in a startup or a company with severe NIH that also likes to rewrite everything every few years.
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      > a company with severe NIH that also likes to rewrite everything every few years. Like a FAANG? Well at least, the F and and the G do.
  - reportingsjr 5y ago
    I brought up concerns about WFH productivity once in another thread and quickly realized that many people on here do not want to discuss the facts and only want to consider anecdotal evidence in favour of WFH. I'm glad to see that there are studies being published that show how certain companies are actually doing, rather than a handful of people loudly saying "my group is equally as productive WFH so no one should work from offices". I don't think those people are going to be so happy as more research is published and company leaders realize what is happening to productivity.
- tetranomiga 5y ago
  >The result is pretty clear with over 10,000 participants in the study. They're all from the same Asian company, it's far from clear.
  - nmstoker 5y ago
    Yes, this was my concern with applying the lessons more broadly. I would love to see a similar assessment for a company that was substantially staffed from other locations to see how much this is a universal picture or not.
    - reportingsjr 5y ago
      I can't mention the company, but I was told from someone at a very large financial company in the US that their productivity tanked over the last year. I won't be surprised if this is generally the case for WFH.
      - tetranomiga 5y ago
        So you heard from a second-hand source that productivity at a bank tanked, and that's making you think that negative WFH productivity is the norm? Maybe base your opinions off a little more information than a friend's story.
- geodel 5y ago
  > Surprised this post isn’t getting more comments. From article: "The company that provided data is one of the world’s largest IT services companies. They have over 150,000 employees who work with clients across the globe. Most work in the home country, a rapidly- developing Asian nation." This is about a half-assed Indian "IT Services" company. (From where I am. Need to specify lest I also be branded as racist white dude or whatever). So there is hardly anything to learn in general. Of course similar type IT companies can learn that their lazy micro-managers need to do even more micro managing to get anything done. The only thing I learned is that one can get even prestigious institution like University of Chicago to do shady shit if there is enough money to motivate.
  - mym1990 5y ago
    Pretty hostile here from multiple angles. You ok?
    - geodel 5y ago
      Never been better. Thanks for asking!
    - shard972 5y ago
      @Dang rule violation!
  - yoloyoloyoloa 5y ago
    Great comment
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    Imagine observing lower productivity in HCL, Wipro, Tata, Techmahindra. Having worked with all of them I assume detecting lower productivity would require a mirror to see if they were breathing.
dang 5y ago
Whoops, I put this in the second-chance pool but it looks like this already had a discussion. Sorry! Work from Home and Productivity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27154368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27154368 - May 2021 (131 comments)
adflux 5y ago
I have been unfortunate enough to be "diagnosed" with ADHD at a young age. Oh how strange it is that a child can't concentrate with 25 of his peers hopping and chatting around him, let's medicate him as soon as possible! /rant off Well, a few years ago I rented an office space with a friend of mine, just the two of us in a very spacious (100m2), light and well-ventilated office. We received no phone calls, there were no people walking in, or cats and girlfriends asking for attention. I had less distractions than I had at home, and much less than in a traditional office. And it was a dedicated area for "work". A comfortable desk and chair, two monitors and a fast pc. All these factors made it so much easier to concentrate and get into the flow... If I had to put a number on it I'd say I would be at least 1.5x more effective working in an area like that compared to a traditional office or at my desk at home. I will NEVER again say that I am someone who has trouble concentrating, having worked in a place like that. I wonder if (and how much) the lack of a proper workplace explains the decrease in output when working from home in this study. I can imagine a decrease in productivity if you have to share your home and workplace with other people or even children... But when your children and partner are at work, or if you have a seperate workspace, I wonder how the two compare then.
- throwasquirrel 5y ago
  I have been unfortunate enough to not be diagnosed with ADHD until middle age, and I'm sorry to hear about your apparent misdiagnosis but for people who actually do have the condition, it's very real and it very much sucks. It's not just "someone walked into the room and I lost my train of thought", it's "I have one simple task to do and I know exactly how to do it and it's been hours but I still can't make myself do the thing no matter how much I want to." It's "I haven't done my taxes for 18 months even though it would only take a day, and I cannot force myself to do it no matter how hard I try." It's "I've been unable to fold my laundry for six weeks even though I've alphabetized my cutlery drawer, twice." It's "I have to document this project but no matter how much I want to just do it, I nevertheless continually find myself on imgur or Facebook or Hacker News or some random other website reading up about how switched-reluctance motors or Monte Carlo tree search or whatever works." It's lack of executive function when you need it and it's the inability to think about anything else when something's grabbed your focus and it's a built-in character flaw that you can't "just choose to not have" and it's growing up thinking you're "just lazy" but "have so much potential" and it just. f*king. sucks. If all you need in order to focus on the thing you want to focus on is for no-one to interrupt you, you don't have ADHD. /rant
taneq 5y ago
> Employees with children living at home increased hours workedmore than those without children at home, and suffered a bigger decline in productivity than thosewithout children. This tells you all you need to know about the study. You can't analyse the relative effectiveness of working from home and working in the office when you're conflating "remote work" with "trying to get something done on your laptop on the kitchen table while working from home due to the pandemic, while your two early-primary-school-aged kids, who you are simultaneously trying to home-school due to the pandemic, are running amok in the lounge room."
- _jal 5y ago
  > This tells you all you need to know about the study. Your comment only tells me you wanted a different study than the one they did. Asking what happened in the real world, including in a range of work situations, is a very interesting question to ask. Looking for/at the delta between optimal work-at-home and the office would also be interesting, for different reasons.
  - taneq 5y ago
    Then call it what it is, "Working from home while homeschooling during a pandemic, compared with normal office work: Evidence from the trenches."
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    > Your comment only tells me you wanted a different study than the one they did. Of course, don't we all? It would be much more useful to have data on what remote work will be like in the future (i.e., when kids are in school/daycare). There is something interesting about knowing the pros/cons of what happened during the pandemic, but most of the time research is done so that the conclusions can inform future decisions. Here, the future decisions about WFH would benefit from disentangling the WFH aspect from the COVID-induced remote school aspect. One way to accomplish this is to assume that all workers who have kids (and lost productivity as a result) would have had the same productivity gains of people without kids. There are probably smarter/more nuanced ways to determine the global pros/cons of WFH in the future.
saas_sam 5y ago
I remember reading on a different post (can't find it) that productivity went up sharply at the beginning of the pandemic-induced WFH trend, but then subsided over time. The thinking was that people were on their toes early on for fear of being viewed as a slacker, but then once they adjusted to WFH they relaxed. Maybe someone else saw this study...
- mikelward 5y ago
  People were running on adrenaline at first. Then the fatigue of having kids at home and not having the usual ways to let off steam eventually hit.
  - reader_x 5y ago
    I agree, there was the adrenaline at first. Plus, pandemic made my work suddenly WFH on a project already underway, with coworkers I already knew, so we went into it with momentum, perhaps even greased by being suddenly free of meetings, brown bags, time taken forever birthday celebrations down the hall, etc. Gradually, however, those projects finished and new began. Yet, those new projects lacked the momentum. The toll of zero socializing crept up. Then, 8 months into pandemic, I started a new job at new company. Onboarding 100% remote. Have never met new coworkers in person. I definitely feel I’m flying blind, that coworkers don’t really understand what the others work on. But the corrosion is subtly happening at just about the speed of rust. I miss the meetings, the brown bags, the casual chats in the hall, the conversation at lunch that make unexpected connections or spark ideas. My takeaways: 1. WFH isn’t static; effect changes over time as projects turn over and new employees onboard. 2. The organizational effect of the difference between 100% vs. 75% WfH, as compared to 75% vs 50% WFH is NOT = 25%; some other logarithmic scale of corrosiveness is resulting as we move to higher % WFH. Personally, I think I’d be most productive at 50% WFH (2-3 days per week). (PS-none of above relates to trying to WFH with kids; that’s just impossible and a completely different topic.)
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    An obvious possible explanation is that work from home was running on the momentum early on and once people started having to move on to new tasks and new projects work from home got in the way.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rodcoelho 5y ago
This doesn't really take into consideration that a lot of businesses/teams within orgs had to quickly pivot strategies due to market conditions. Scrapping plans and shifting priorities last minute, a.k.a. thrash, comes at a cost. So yes it's not totally surprising that people had to work more hours to accomplish a similar output
geodel 5y ago
I hope people do not much from this study done in a single IT Service company based in India. One critically important thing to remember is they are "Outlay based" instead of "Outcome based". So things measured are hours billed, time-sheets filled and reports generated. What work got done and was it even half useful to client is of secondary importance at these companies. I interviewed few years back so thing they ask it if person is married or have kids because they are likely to take more vacations. I wish they actually detailed the company name. Because if they did and my guess is correct this company is getting hammered as J2EE/.net support model is collapsing. There were some very large layoffs in last few year even before Covid.
- reportingsjr 5y ago
  This study matches what I've heard from other companies, for what it's worth. About a month ago I discussed productivity with someone at one of the large financial companies. They do pretty heavy tracking of employee productivity and noted a pretty significant decrease since everyone's gone WFH. I don't think it's some other factor that caused this decrease for the company in the study. I'm pretty sure it's consistent across the board. I voiced this a month or two ago in another thread about WFH, and warned people not to go off of anecdotal productivity claims (which is mostly where I've been seeing the "working from home is significantly better for everything") and got downvoted in to oblivion.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - osigurdson 5y ago
    If a company seriously believes that developer productivity can be accurately tracked, why not directly tie compensation to it? It really shouldn't matter at all where work happens in this case. On the other hand, if they only believe that productivity can only be accurately measured in secret then the "trackers" have some explaining to do in terms of the actual value they are adding to the organization.
songshuu 5y ago
While it is given a brief nod in the paper, it is worth reiterating: WFH during a global pandemic is not the same as WFH generally. I say this as someone who has been remote for years. Run this same study starting in September (barring huge Delta variant outbreak in the US) and you'll see a totally different set of numbers.
jvanderbot 5y ago
Vitriolic discussion around this. I'm completely unsurprised. All the key findings are easy to see in my own group. People are working longer hours because they are unaccustomed to working from home near their gaming rigs, or are making up unproductive day hours that their kids interrupted. Its harder to drop in and get quick exchange of information, leading to more meetings, etc. The danger is that people (c-suite) see this and think it can't be done. It can, but COVID was an imperfect laboratory for studying this.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I managed mixed WFH teams before COVID. It was widely understood that WFH was a productivity obstacle long before quarantines. We usually gave it as a perk to high performing employees who had already proven their ability to get things done and self-manage, or for exceptional employees who couldn’t or wouldn’t relocate near an office. The idea that WFH is no different than in-office work didn’t really become popular until COVID. Offices and in-person communication are unmatched for collaboration and communication efficiency. Any company doing work that requires significant collaboration (most tech companies of size) pays a price for WFH. For many companies that overhead is fine if accounted for and managed, but it’s still a price.
stinkbomb 5y ago
My company started doing a serious WFH 'experiment' about 18 months before COVID hit. The team I oversee consists of a dozen or so teams of about 40-50 developers each, with a manager that reports directly to me. I don't manage the devs directly, but deal with dev productivity and budgets for (amongst other things) staffing. So our N is not small, but not huge either. 50% of our devs - randomly selected - were offered the chance to WFH, and about 95% of them wound up doing WFH at least 3 days a week, rising to 5 days a week after a few months. The other 50% stayed in the office. The teams that went WFH and the other 50% don't work on the same projects or in the same location. After about 6 months, we started looking at productivity metrics using a couple Pinpoint-like tools that we built. Simple metrics like: backlog change time, on-time delivery, workload balance, LOC/Checkins ratio, etc. We also tracked things like non-code calendar hours, time logging delays, and other non-development related activity. Neither group knew what we were tracking or how often. The results were pretty clear as soon as 6 - 9 months in: WFH numbers sucked pretty hard. Everything was down across the board, and it seemed like WFH devs were spending 15-30% more time in non-development tasks, their PR reject rate was as much as 40% higher than office-based devs. Things were so bad that if COVID had not hit, we were going to abandon the idea of letting people WFH altogether outside of extreme circumstances. We aren't a unique shop. We're not doing anything out of the ordinary - we're developing on a variety of web and RT device platforms, but doing the same stuff in similar ways as other companies. We have a pretty flat team structure, and teams have a lot of flexibility and decision-making power, which has always worked well for us. However, it's clear to me and the other execs that WFH absolutely does not work for us.
- wcarss 5y ago
  This is really interesting! Do you know anything about the tools/methodologies of the teams that went part WFH and the adjustments they made when changing up their workstyle? For example, do you know things like whether meetings were held at their previously scheduled times, vs. whether people started shifting them around to "meet when we're all here", or whether conversations and decisions were pushed organizationally to be more public, visible, and documented, vs made by whoever was in the office, because they could have a hallway chat? Anecdotally, a friend of mine works at a "remote-first" company, where even when the whole team is in the office, they'll typically meet through zoom/hangouts at their desks, and I have other friends who are "the remote person" on an in-office team. There's a huge gap in the experiences of those two, which is why I ask about those kind of factors in your experience.
holoduke 5y ago
Working from home alone is nice the first couple of weeks. Then it becomes boring. Motivation to work decreases significantly. Level of trust to other (mostly new never seen) colleagues become zero. Compassion to the company seizes to exist. Connection to the product, vision and the general 'us' feeling is completely gone. No team spirit, no fun. Yes working from home isn't (in many cases) a big success in the long term.
- rijoja 5y ago
  > Connection to the product, vision and the general 'us' feeling is completely gone Maybe you just realise that the vision and the 'us' feeling is fake.
slavapestov 5y ago
I'm happy to report that my productivity has steadily decreased over the last four years. I credit this to becoming a parent, picking up more hobbies, and working from home. And yet, my compensation has doubled during that time. I really have very little to complain about these days. It's great!
sam0x17 5y ago
Important note: IT != software engineering
pkolaczk 5y ago
Comparing office work with a WFH situation when kids are at home is unfair - apples to oranges. If you were in the office, where would your kids be? Who would take care of them? If you want a fair comparison, compare to a situation when you bring your kids to the office. But no one is doing that, right? WFH works fine if your kids are where they are supposed to be normally: school, daycare, kindergarten, with nanny or with your spouse. If they can't be taken care of for some reason (e.g. they are ill), you'd be forced to take a leave if you didn't have WFH possibility. So your productivity would be exactly 0. Now with WFH and kids at home maybe you'd not manage to get top productivity, but it would be still greater than 0. So overall it is a net win, even when taking kids into account.
jaggs 5y ago
How on earth are you supposed to get meaningful data from a report like this? Does nobody understay the attendant mental health strain of being in the middle of a deadly global pandemic. The fear uncertainty and complete disconnect from family and friends in many cases? And even outside of a pandemic, why should productivity be measured in just work output? Wouldn't it make more sense to look at overall mental health, work/life balance, stress etc? It's widely accepted that workplace stress is increasing, or was before COVID. We're about overdue to try and tackle that surely, before we face a new epidemic of mental health breakdown?
d4nt 5y ago
Having worked with a few large IT services companies, I’d question their definition of “productivity”. I suspect it’s related to Jira tickets completed or short term revenue (eg billable hours). I doubt it’s measured in terms of end user outcomes. My experience of these large IT services companies is that their middle management is very focused on maximising profitability for the work their engineers are doing. To the point that they hold engineers back from doing the “right” thing. Eg “don’t add logging to this new feature - it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the change request”. You could argue this correct from a purist capitalist perspective of course. But that just underlines my belief that outsourcing IT to outside services providers is always more expensive in the long run. For me, the fact that remote working lessens the influence of middle management is a feature not a bug, even if it hurts the large IT Services provider business model.

86 points by amadeuspagel 5y ago

Surprised this post isn’t getting more comments. The result is pretty clear with over 10,000 participants in the study. >>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%. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably.

altdataseller 5y ago
All from the same company though.
rootusrootus 5y ago
Anecdotally, I've seen this happen on my team, and it is the single biggest factor that makes me somewhat receptive to going back into the office. It's easier to draw a line between work and home that way. Maybe we should just turn Slack off altogether outside of business hours, and only enable it in emergencies. LOL
- chasedehan 5y ago
  You should turn Slack off outside business hours! And, remove from your phone. If there is a true emergency, this is why people are on call. This applies equally to whether wfh or in office.
carabiner 5y ago
Interesting. This contradicts the prevailing HN sentiment that WFH increases productivity because there's less time spent socializing or dealing with distractions.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  It varies dramatically by circumstance. I had coworkers who struggled with 3-4 kids and working spouse at home. For me, my son is 9 and my wife was partially at home. No big deal for my productivity. For my sister, she sold her car and hired a nanny for a year.
- postalrat 5y ago
  I'm confident that HN sentiment is a fantasy created by people who are barely working.
- astrange 5y ago
  Maybe if you do nothing but greenfield coding, but when does that ever happen? You'd need to be in a startup or a company with severe NIH that also likes to rewrite everything every few years.
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    > a company with severe NIH that also likes to rewrite everything every few years. Like a FAANG? Well at least, the F and and the G do.
- reportingsjr 5y ago
  I brought up concerns about WFH productivity once in another thread and quickly realized that many people on here do not want to discuss the facts and only want to consider anecdotal evidence in favour of WFH. I'm glad to see that there are studies being published that show how certain companies are actually doing, rather than a handful of people loudly saying "my group is equally as productive WFH so no one should work from offices". I don't think those people are going to be so happy as more research is published and company leaders realize what is happening to productivity.
tetranomiga 5y ago
>The result is pretty clear with over 10,000 participants in the study. They're all from the same Asian company, it's far from clear.
- nmstoker 5y ago
  Yes, this was my concern with applying the lessons more broadly. I would love to see a similar assessment for a company that was substantially staffed from other locations to see how much this is a universal picture or not.
  - reportingsjr 5y ago
    I can't mention the company, but I was told from someone at a very large financial company in the US that their productivity tanked over the last year. I won't be surprised if this is generally the case for WFH.
    - tetranomiga 5y ago
      So you heard from a second-hand source that productivity at a bank tanked, and that's making you think that negative WFH productivity is the norm? Maybe base your opinions off a little more information than a friend's story.
geodel 5y ago
> Surprised this post isn’t getting more comments. From article: "The company that provided data is one of the world’s largest IT services companies. They have over 150,000 employees who work with clients across the globe. Most work in the home country, a rapidly- developing Asian nation." This is about a half-assed Indian "IT Services" company. (From where I am. Need to specify lest I also be branded as racist white dude or whatever). So there is hardly anything to learn in general. Of course similar type IT companies can learn that their lazy micro-managers need to do even more micro managing to get anything done. The only thing I learned is that one can get even prestigious institution like University of Chicago to do shady shit if there is enough money to motivate.
- mym1990 5y ago
  Pretty hostile here from multiple angles. You ok?
  - geodel 5y ago
    Never been better. Thanks for asking!
  - shard972 5y ago
    @Dang rule violation!
- yoloyoloyoloa 5y ago
  Great comment
- foobiekr 5y ago
  Imagine observing lower productivity in HCL, Wipro, Tata, Techmahindra. Having worked with all of them I assume detecting lower productivity would require a mirror to see if they were breathing.

dang 5y ago

Whoops, I put this in the second-chance pool but it looks like this already had a discussion. Sorry! Work from Home and Productivity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27154368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27154368 - May 2021 (131 comments)

adflux 5y ago

I have been unfortunate enough to be "diagnosed" with ADHD at a young age. Oh how strange it is that a child can't concentrate with 25 of his peers hopping and chatting around him, let's medicate him as soon as possible! /rant off Well, a few years ago I rented an office space with a friend of mine, just the two of us in a very spacious (100m2), light and well-ventilated office. We received no phone calls, there were no people walking in, or cats and girlfriends asking for attention. I had less distractions than I had at home, and much less than in a traditional office. And it was a dedicated area for "work". A comfortable desk and chair, two monitors and a fast pc. All these factors made it so much easier to concentrate and get into the flow... If I had to put a number on it I'd say I would be at least 1.5x more effective working in an area like that compared to a traditional office or at my desk at home. I will NEVER again say that I am someone who has trouble concentrating, having worked in a place like that. I wonder if (and how much) the lack of a proper workplace explains the decrease in output when working from home in this study. I can imagine a decrease in productivity if you have to share your home and workplace with other people or even children... But when your children and partner are at work, or if you have a seperate workspace, I wonder how the two compare then.

throwasquirrel 5y ago
I have been unfortunate enough to not be diagnosed with ADHD until middle age, and I'm sorry to hear about your apparent misdiagnosis but for people who actually do have the condition, it's very real and it very much sucks. It's not just "someone walked into the room and I lost my train of thought", it's "I have one simple task to do and I know exactly how to do it and it's been hours but I still can't make myself do the thing no matter how much I want to." It's "I haven't done my taxes for 18 months even though it would only take a day, and I cannot force myself to do it no matter how hard I try." It's "I've been unable to fold my laundry for six weeks even though I've alphabetized my cutlery drawer, twice." It's "I have to document this project but no matter how much I want to just do it, I nevertheless continually find myself on imgur or Facebook or Hacker News or some random other website reading up about how switched-reluctance motors or Monte Carlo tree search or whatever works." It's lack of executive function when you need it and it's the inability to think about anything else when something's grabbed your focus and it's a built-in character flaw that you can't "just choose to not have" and it's growing up thinking you're "just lazy" but "have so much potential" and it just. f*king. sucks. If all you need in order to focus on the thing you want to focus on is for no-one to interrupt you, you don't have ADHD. /rant

taneq 5y ago

> Employees with children living at home increased hours workedmore than those without children at home, and suffered a bigger decline in productivity than thosewithout children. This tells you all you need to know about the study. You can't analyse the relative effectiveness of working from home and working in the office when you're conflating "remote work" with "trying to get something done on your laptop on the kitchen table while working from home due to the pandemic, while your two early-primary-school-aged kids, who you are simultaneously trying to home-school due to the pandemic, are running amok in the lounge room."

_jal 5y ago
> This tells you all you need to know about the study. Your comment only tells me you wanted a different study than the one they did. Asking what happened in the real world, including in a range of work situations, is a very interesting question to ask. Looking for/at the delta between optimal work-at-home and the office would also be interesting, for different reasons.
- taneq 5y ago
  Then call it what it is, "Working from home while homeschooling during a pandemic, compared with normal office work: Evidence from the trenches."
- gnicholas 5y ago
  > Your comment only tells me you wanted a different study than the one they did. Of course, don't we all? It would be much more useful to have data on what remote work will be like in the future (i.e., when kids are in school/daycare). There is something interesting about knowing the pros/cons of what happened during the pandemic, but most of the time research is done so that the conclusions can inform future decisions. Here, the future decisions about WFH would benefit from disentangling the WFH aspect from the COVID-induced remote school aspect. One way to accomplish this is to assume that all workers who have kids (and lost productivity as a result) would have had the same productivity gains of people without kids. There are probably smarter/more nuanced ways to determine the global pros/cons of WFH in the future.

saas_sam 5y ago

I remember reading on a different post (can't find it) that productivity went up sharply at the beginning of the pandemic-induced WFH trend, but then subsided over time. The thinking was that people were on their toes early on for fear of being viewed as a slacker, but then once they adjusted to WFH they relaxed. Maybe someone else saw this study...

mikelward 5y ago
People were running on adrenaline at first. Then the fatigue of having kids at home and not having the usual ways to let off steam eventually hit.
- reader_x 5y ago
  I agree, there was the adrenaline at first. Plus, pandemic made my work suddenly WFH on a project already underway, with coworkers I already knew, so we went into it with momentum, perhaps even greased by being suddenly free of meetings, brown bags, time taken forever birthday celebrations down the hall, etc. Gradually, however, those projects finished and new began. Yet, those new projects lacked the momentum. The toll of zero socializing crept up. Then, 8 months into pandemic, I started a new job at new company. Onboarding 100% remote. Have never met new coworkers in person. I definitely feel I’m flying blind, that coworkers don’t really understand what the others work on. But the corrosion is subtly happening at just about the speed of rust. I miss the meetings, the brown bags, the casual chats in the hall, the conversation at lunch that make unexpected connections or spark ideas. My takeaways: 1. WFH isn’t static; effect changes over time as projects turn over and new employees onboard. 2. The organizational effect of the difference between 100% vs. 75% WfH, as compared to 75% vs 50% WFH is NOT = 25%; some other logarithmic scale of corrosiveness is resulting as we move to higher % WFH. Personally, I think I’d be most productive at 50% WFH (2-3 days per week). (PS-none of above relates to trying to WFH with kids; that’s just impossible and a completely different topic.)
- foobiekr 5y ago
  An obvious possible explanation is that work from home was running on the momentum early on and once people started having to move on to new tasks and new projects work from home got in the way.

deleted 5y ago

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rodcoelho 5y ago

This doesn't really take into consideration that a lot of businesses/teams within orgs had to quickly pivot strategies due to market conditions. Scrapping plans and shifting priorities last minute, a.k.a. thrash, comes at a cost. So yes it's not totally surprising that people had to work more hours to accomplish a similar output

geodel 5y ago

I hope people do not much from this study done in a single IT Service company based in India. One critically important thing to remember is they are "Outlay based" instead of "Outcome based". So things measured are hours billed, time-sheets filled and reports generated. What work got done and was it even half useful to client is of secondary importance at these companies. I interviewed few years back so thing they ask it if person is married or have kids because they are likely to take more vacations. I wish they actually detailed the company name. Because if they did and my guess is correct this company is getting hammered as J2EE/.net support model is collapsing. There were some very large layoffs in last few year even before Covid.

reportingsjr 5y ago
This study matches what I've heard from other companies, for what it's worth. About a month ago I discussed productivity with someone at one of the large financial companies. They do pretty heavy tracking of employee productivity and noted a pretty significant decrease since everyone's gone WFH. I don't think it's some other factor that caused this decrease for the company in the study. I'm pretty sure it's consistent across the board. I voiced this a month or two ago in another thread about WFH, and warned people not to go off of anecdotal productivity claims (which is mostly where I've been seeing the "working from home is significantly better for everything") and got downvoted in to oblivion.
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- osigurdson 5y ago
  If a company seriously believes that developer productivity can be accurately tracked, why not directly tie compensation to it? It really shouldn't matter at all where work happens in this case. On the other hand, if they only believe that productivity can only be accurately measured in secret then the "trackers" have some explaining to do in terms of the actual value they are adding to the organization.

songshuu 5y ago

While it is given a brief nod in the paper, it is worth reiterating: WFH during a global pandemic is not the same as WFH generally. I say this as someone who has been remote for years. Run this same study starting in September (barring huge Delta variant outbreak in the US) and you'll see a totally different set of numbers.

jvanderbot 5y ago

Vitriolic discussion around this. I'm completely unsurprised. All the key findings are easy to see in my own group. People are working longer hours because they are unaccustomed to working from home near their gaming rigs, or are making up unproductive day hours that their kids interrupted. Its harder to drop in and get quick exchange of information, leading to more meetings, etc. The danger is that people (c-suite) see this and think it can't be done. It can, but COVID was an imperfect laboratory for studying this.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I managed mixed WFH teams before COVID. It was widely understood that WFH was a productivity obstacle long before quarantines. We usually gave it as a perk to high performing employees who had already proven their ability to get things done and self-manage, or for exceptional employees who couldn’t or wouldn’t relocate near an office. The idea that WFH is no different than in-office work didn’t really become popular until COVID. Offices and in-person communication are unmatched for collaboration and communication efficiency. Any company doing work that requires significant collaboration (most tech companies of size) pays a price for WFH. For many companies that overhead is fine if accounted for and managed, but it’s still a price.

stinkbomb 5y ago

My company started doing a serious WFH 'experiment' about 18 months before COVID hit. The team I oversee consists of a dozen or so teams of about 40-50 developers each, with a manager that reports directly to me. I don't manage the devs directly, but deal with dev productivity and budgets for (amongst other things) staffing. So our N is not small, but not huge either. 50% of our devs - randomly selected - were offered the chance to WFH, and about 95% of them wound up doing WFH at least 3 days a week, rising to 5 days a week after a few months. The other 50% stayed in the office. The teams that went WFH and the other 50% don't work on the same projects or in the same location. After about 6 months, we started looking at productivity metrics using a couple Pinpoint-like tools that we built. Simple metrics like: backlog change time, on-time delivery, workload balance, LOC/Checkins ratio, etc. We also tracked things like non-code calendar hours, time logging delays, and other non-development related activity. Neither group knew what we were tracking or how often. The results were pretty clear as soon as 6 - 9 months in: WFH numbers sucked pretty hard. Everything was down across the board, and it seemed like WFH devs were spending 15-30% more time in non-development tasks, their PR reject rate was as much as 40% higher than office-based devs. Things were so bad that if COVID had not hit, we were going to abandon the idea of letting people WFH altogether outside of extreme circumstances. We aren't a unique shop. We're not doing anything out of the ordinary - we're developing on a variety of web and RT device platforms, but doing the same stuff in similar ways as other companies. We have a pretty flat team structure, and teams have a lot of flexibility and decision-making power, which has always worked well for us. However, it's clear to me and the other execs that WFH absolutely does not work for us.

wcarss 5y ago
This is really interesting! Do you know anything about the tools/methodologies of the teams that went part WFH and the adjustments they made when changing up their workstyle? For example, do you know things like whether meetings were held at their previously scheduled times, vs. whether people started shifting them around to "meet when we're all here", or whether conversations and decisions were pushed organizationally to be more public, visible, and documented, vs made by whoever was in the office, because they could have a hallway chat? Anecdotally, a friend of mine works at a "remote-first" company, where even when the whole team is in the office, they'll typically meet through zoom/hangouts at their desks, and I have other friends who are "the remote person" on an in-office team. There's a huge gap in the experiences of those two, which is why I ask about those kind of factors in your experience.

holoduke 5y ago

Working from home alone is nice the first couple of weeks. Then it becomes boring. Motivation to work decreases significantly. Level of trust to other (mostly new never seen) colleagues become zero. Compassion to the company seizes to exist. Connection to the product, vision and the general 'us' feeling is completely gone. No team spirit, no fun. Yes working from home isn't (in many cases) a big success in the long term.

rijoja 5y ago
> Connection to the product, vision and the general 'us' feeling is completely gone Maybe you just realise that the vision and the 'us' feeling is fake.

slavapestov 5y ago

I'm happy to report that my productivity has steadily decreased over the last four years. I credit this to becoming a parent, picking up more hobbies, and working from home. And yet, my compensation has doubled during that time. I really have very little to complain about these days. It's great!

sam0x17 5y ago

Important note: IT != software engineering

pkolaczk 5y ago

Comparing office work with a WFH situation when kids are at home is unfair - apples to oranges. If you were in the office, where would your kids be? Who would take care of them? If you want a fair comparison, compare to a situation when you bring your kids to the office. But no one is doing that, right? WFH works fine if your kids are where they are supposed to be normally: school, daycare, kindergarten, with nanny or with your spouse. If they can't be taken care of for some reason (e.g. they are ill), you'd be forced to take a leave if you didn't have WFH possibility. So your productivity would be exactly 0. Now with WFH and kids at home maybe you'd not manage to get top productivity, but it would be still greater than 0. So overall it is a net win, even when taking kids into account.

jaggs 5y ago

How on earth are you supposed to get meaningful data from a report like this? Does nobody understay the attendant mental health strain of being in the middle of a deadly global pandemic. The fear uncertainty and complete disconnect from family and friends in many cases? And even outside of a pandemic, why should productivity be measured in just work output? Wouldn't it make more sense to look at overall mental health, work/life balance, stress etc? It's widely accepted that workplace stress is increasing, or was before COVID. We're about overdue to try and tackle that surely, before we face a new epidemic of mental health breakdown?

d4nt 5y ago

Having worked with a few large IT services companies, I’d question their definition of “productivity”. I suspect it’s related to Jira tickets completed or short term revenue (eg billable hours). I doubt it’s measured in terms of end user outcomes. My experience of these large IT services companies is that their middle management is very focused on maximising profitability for the work their engineers are doing. To the point that they hold engineers back from doing the “right” thing. Eg “don’t add logging to this new feature - it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the change request”. You could argue this correct from a purist capitalist perspective of course. But that just underlines my belief that outsourcing IT to outside services providers is always more expensive in the long run. For me, the fact that remote working lessens the influence of middle management is a feature not a bug, even if it hurts the large IT Services provider business model.