By virtue of my role I have access to all sorts of data, even down to how many emails a day any given person might be reading or how many Teams calls they're in

By virtue of my role I have access to all sorts of data, even down to how many emails a day any given person might be reading or how many Teams calls they're in. I don't ever dig into this on an individually-recognisable level (because that is overreach), although I do look into anonymised trends & aggregates, because it is useful and interesting to know these trends across teams. I also have access to other more obvious task-tracking metrics like the number of pull requests, or Jira task completion, or stack deploys. I also have team calendars where team members plug in whether they're working from home or from the office. It's fairly trivial to punch a bunch of this data into BI tooling to get an approximation of how work from home makes a difference to how much actually gets done. Is it 100% accurate? Certainly not. Would I ever use it for an actual performance conversation? Nope. But it does help as a component of the gestalt that is my understanding of WFH performance. The other major component of my understanding is more direct. I go out for lunch with my teams or for beers with my teams, and I listen to what they have to say. I know that a reasonable number of my team members head out at 3PM to pick their kids up from school every time they work from home, because they tell me that to my face. The guy with the new baby is not 100% focused on work when he's home, because he's got tiny human to deal with. It's also very important to note that performance is squishy and hard to quantify at the best of times, before you even get into things like Goodhart's Law. For example. employee retention is important and as a rate of turnover fairly easy to measure, and is a significant factor for total velocity, but causes of turnover are almost always orthogonal to the root cause of job dissatisfaction... More importantly, though, do we decrease the negative impacts of turnover commensurate to the loss of productivity by allowing WFH? Who knows! I have way way way more that I could say on the topic, but I might be being a bit hypocritical by continuing to talk about it while at work. ;]