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It's not guaranteed that it's a sunk cost fallacy. I'm going to make up some dumb numbers: suppose people are 5% more productive in the office, but the office
by hyperpape 4y ago
It's not guaranteed that it's a sunk cost fallacy.
I'm going to make up some dumb numbers: suppose people are 5% more productive in the office, but the office has an amortized cost of 10% total compensation. You shouldn't open an office. But say you've purchased an office outright, and maintenance is now only 2% of the cost of total compensation (8% of cost was paid up front). In that case, you would want people in the office.
In the real world, this is more complicated, because you also add in employee preferences as a reason for or against an office, you can't neatly measure productivity, you probably didn't buy the office in cash, you leased it, or borrowed money to buy it...).
- marcus_holmes 4y agoAll the evidence points to workers (especially programmers) being more productive when working from home, not less.
- medvezhenok 4y agoShort term yes, long term unclear. I’ve personally experienced something that could be cranked out in a multi day white boarding session stretch out for months of on/off meetings. It’s harder to collaborate remotely.
- ghaff 4y agoAt that point, have everyone get together for an offsite/onsite.
- medvezhenok 4y agoThat was the plan but unfortunately there was a company-wide travel freeze
- ghaff 4y agoThat is an issue right now at a lot of places. Distributed teams are pretty much stuck with video calls. But you deal with it. Most people aren't going to move cities at their own expense to avoid video calls.
- marcus_holmes 4y agoYou're probably an extrovert if you experience greater productivity from a whiteboard session than an email conversation. I used to do this, too; get the whole team together around a whiteboard and sketch a new thing out. Some of the team made very little contribution in the sessions; I always put this down to them not being very quick (they made good contributions later over email). When I took some management training later I learned that this style of collaboration doesn't suit everyone: the "quiet" folks were just extremely uncomfortable sharing their ideas in the public forum of the whiteboard session. Now I create a slack channel for this, and stretch the process out over a couple of days. I get more input and better ideas this way.