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> I can only assume because that doesn't happen, they would rather not say, which in turn actually says volumes. If a CEO posted on here, “Here’s data that sho

> I can only assume because that doesn't happen, they would rather not say, which in turn actually says volumes. If a CEO posted on here, “Here’s data that shows RTO was better for us” would that change anyone’s mind here? No, people who hate RTO would continue to hate it.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> people who hate RTO would continue to hate it It's honestly mindblowing that we're having so much difficulty parsing multiple optima. RTO works. WFH works. Hybrid works. They don't each work for everyone or every company. But these are preferences, not hard and fast rules. It's like people arguing over whether driving on the left or right side is better. It doesn't matter. As long as everyone in a system is in sync, it works.
- paulcole 2y ago
  > It's like people arguing over whether driving on the left or right side is better. It doesn't matter. As long as everyone in a system is in sync, it works. I 100% agree with you and this is a great analogy. The biggest problem of all is that the left-lane (remote) contingent will say, “I don’t care what lane you drive in as long as I get to drive in the left lane.”
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > biggest problem of all is that the left-lane (remote) contingent will say, “I don’t care what lane you drive in as long as I get to drive in the left lane." Which obviously doesn't work. But what also doesn't work is companies pretending they're WFH or hybrid friendly when they're really not.
    - paulcole 2y ago
      No, my point was that people who like remote work like to believe that as long as they are working where they want to work (their homes) then everyone else is happy as well if they can work where they want to work. They miss the point that Person A working in an office while Person B works at home is generally not what Person A wants. Person A generally wants to work with other people in the same physical space. The pro-remote crowd does not mind upsetting others as long as they can continue to work from home.
      - AbstractH24 2y ago
        That’s making a lot of assumptions about Person A
        paulcole 2y ago
        Do you think there are no Person As in the world? And you think I’m not making assumptions about Person B?
      - no_wizard 2y ago
        Why does anyone have to cater to Person A? Frankly if people can work where they want to work that’s fine, but you’re saying that because one person wants to be in office their entire team does too?
        paulcole 2y ago
        Believe it or not, that’s not at all what I’m saying. Let’s say Person A wants to be in the office with other people also in that office. Then Person B wants to work in their home and doesn’t care where other people work. If Person B gets their way (thru remote work) then Person A is dissatisfied. If Person A gets their way (thru companywide RTO) then Person B is dissatisfied. My point is Why should anyone have to cater to either Person B or Person A? Whichever choice a company makes, someone is going to be dissatisfied. There are no right or wrong choices here, just choices. The employees have choices, too. They can get new jobs or they can deal with a situation they find dissatisfying in some way.
        no_wizard 2y ago
        This is more reasonable, and I agree with it. I think people should be able to work where they are most productive, assuming the work can reasonably accommodate such things, and business process and culture should adapt / grow accordingly. If a bunch of people really want to work in an office together, go ahead. Want to work from home? go ahead. Want to work hybrid? Have at it. The problem is, business culture hates worker flexibility, but sure loves executive flexibility.
no_wizard 2y ago
It would, if such data existed, and was proven to be reasonably obtained in a nonpartisan fashion. Same metric I used for the productivity studies of working from home. The ones with the most data and least bias indicated an up and to the right trajectory of both productivity and satisfaction.
- paulcole 2y ago
  I can assure you that any data found would certainly be determined by you to be unreasonably obtained in a partisan fashion. You want the numbers to go up and to the right! https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=3978cee2-1ef4-45f4-b9f6-faaae7db17f4 https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?g... > It’s true that widespread studies based on standard measures of efficiency have found that fully remote employees are 10% to 20% less productive than those working on company premises. The surely partisan and unreasonably obtained data: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3846680 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3846680 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kqbngD8pemqxAkZmWCOQ32Yk6PXK9eVA/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kqbngD8pemqxAkZmWCOQ32Yk6PX...
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    The problem with both those studies is one only focuses on workers in Asia - with no comparative studies in US, Canada or Western Europe- and the other gets all its negative data from an IT outsourcing firm in India, and even notes that within the US productivity rose by at least 2%. Its own summary is misleading when you read it. I’ve seen both of these as initially RTO advocates rolled them out a lot but lots of folks poked holes in the research, especially since the bigger body of studies around the topic disagree with the takeaways by a wide margin.
    - no_wizard 2y ago
      To add to this, the IMF did a broad global meta analysis of all the different WFH studies, and found it was at worst neutral, and at best increased productivity by a median of 2-9%. That's the most objective study I've been able to find, largely because it aggregates all available research at the time of its publication together and does a reasonably good job of making sense of it.
dgfitz 2y ago
> No, people who hate RTO would continue to hate it What a microchasm of today. People don’t like being told “I’m smarter than you and this is the best thing.” Just isn’t in the cards anymore.
- Yeul 2y ago
  As a boss you have the right to treat people like shit but you shouldn't complain about not being able to fill vacancies that way.
BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
I hate RTO, no doubt about it, but I also would admit that it’s less productive if the data emerged to support that conclusion. Personally, I’d be happy to have the economy take a small hit in productivity in order for a lot of workers to have much better lives.
intended 2y ago
The evidence shows that WFH is more productive. There’s multiple papers on this topic at this point. Including one from the NBER as I recall. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30866 https://www.nber.org/papers/w30866 https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/06/working-from-home-covid-nber/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/06/working-from-home-co...
- paulcole 2y ago
  The NBER study you linked seems to say that WFH saves workers 2 hours per week not that it increases their at-work productivity. It goes on to say that they claim to work more but it doesn’t say they actually get more done as a result.
  - intended 2y ago
    > There will be a 5% productivity boost in the post-pandemic economy due to re-optimized working arrangements and less time spent commuting, NBER adds. If this isn’t good enough do search yourself. There’s multiple papers and analyses by this point. And these are all analyses to satisfy the all important business productivity goals of our corporations. For humans, the actual workers? The saved time on commute, improved quality of life and invigoration of local markets far outweigh those corporate gains.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> people who hate RTO would continue to hate it It's honestly mindblowing that we're having so much difficulty parsing multiple optima. RTO works. WFH works. Hybrid works. They don't each work for everyone or every company. But these are preferences, not hard and fast rules. It's like people arguing over whether driving on the left or right side is better. It doesn't matter. As long as everyone in a system is in sync, it works.

paulcole 2y ago
> It's like people arguing over whether driving on the left or right side is better. It doesn't matter. As long as everyone in a system is in sync, it works. I 100% agree with you and this is a great analogy. The biggest problem of all is that the left-lane (remote) contingent will say, “I don’t care what lane you drive in as long as I get to drive in the left lane.”
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > biggest problem of all is that the left-lane (remote) contingent will say, “I don’t care what lane you drive in as long as I get to drive in the left lane." Which obviously doesn't work. But what also doesn't work is companies pretending they're WFH or hybrid friendly when they're really not.
  - paulcole 2y ago
    No, my point was that people who like remote work like to believe that as long as they are working where they want to work (their homes) then everyone else is happy as well if they can work where they want to work. They miss the point that Person A working in an office while Person B works at home is generally not what Person A wants. Person A generally wants to work with other people in the same physical space. The pro-remote crowd does not mind upsetting others as long as they can continue to work from home.
    - AbstractH24 2y ago
      That’s making a lot of assumptions about Person A
      - paulcole 2y ago
        Do you think there are no Person As in the world? And you think I’m not making assumptions about Person B?
    - no_wizard 2y ago
      Why does anyone have to cater to Person A? Frankly if people can work where they want to work that’s fine, but you’re saying that because one person wants to be in office their entire team does too?
      - paulcole 2y ago
        Believe it or not, that’s not at all what I’m saying. Let’s say Person A wants to be in the office with other people also in that office. Then Person B wants to work in their home and doesn’t care where other people work. If Person B gets their way (thru remote work) then Person A is dissatisfied. If Person A gets their way (thru companywide RTO) then Person B is dissatisfied. My point is Why should anyone have to cater to either Person B or Person A? Whichever choice a company makes, someone is going to be dissatisfied. There are no right or wrong choices here, just choices. The employees have choices, too. They can get new jobs or they can deal with a situation they find dissatisfying in some way.
        no_wizard 2y ago
        This is more reasonable, and I agree with it. I think people should be able to work where they are most productive, assuming the work can reasonably accommodate such things, and business process and culture should adapt / grow accordingly. If a bunch of people really want to work in an office together, go ahead. Want to work from home? go ahead. Want to work hybrid? Have at it. The problem is, business culture hates worker flexibility, but sure loves executive flexibility.

no_wizard 2y ago

It would, if such data existed, and was proven to be reasonably obtained in a nonpartisan fashion. Same metric I used for the productivity studies of working from home. The ones with the most data and least bias indicated an up and to the right trajectory of both productivity and satisfaction.

paulcole 2y ago
I can assure you that any data found would certainly be determined by you to be unreasonably obtained in a partisan fashion. You want the numbers to go up and to the right! https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=3978cee2-1ef4-45f4-b9f6-faaae7db17f4 https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?g... > It’s true that widespread studies based on standard measures of efficiency have found that fully remote employees are 10% to 20% less productive than those working on company premises. The surely partisan and unreasonably obtained data: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3846680 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3846680 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kqbngD8pemqxAkZmWCOQ32Yk6PXK9eVA/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kqbngD8pemqxAkZmWCOQ32Yk6PX...
- no_wizard 2y ago
  The problem with both those studies is one only focuses on workers in Asia - with no comparative studies in US, Canada or Western Europe- and the other gets all its negative data from an IT outsourcing firm in India, and even notes that within the US productivity rose by at least 2%. Its own summary is misleading when you read it. I’ve seen both of these as initially RTO advocates rolled them out a lot but lots of folks poked holes in the research, especially since the bigger body of studies around the topic disagree with the takeaways by a wide margin.
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    To add to this, the IMF did a broad global meta analysis of all the different WFH studies, and found it was at worst neutral, and at best increased productivity by a median of 2-9%. That's the most objective study I've been able to find, largely because it aggregates all available research at the time of its publication together and does a reasonably good job of making sense of it.

dgfitz 2y ago

> No, people who hate RTO would continue to hate it What a microchasm of today. People don’t like being told “I’m smarter than you and this is the best thing.” Just isn’t in the cards anymore.

Yeul 2y ago
As a boss you have the right to treat people like shit but you shouldn't complain about not being able to fill vacancies that way.

BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago

I hate RTO, no doubt about it, but I also would admit that it’s less productive if the data emerged to support that conclusion. Personally, I’d be happy to have the economy take a small hit in productivity in order for a lot of workers to have much better lives.

intended 2y ago

The evidence shows that WFH is more productive. There’s multiple papers on this topic at this point. Including one from the NBER as I recall. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30866 https://www.nber.org/papers/w30866 https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/06/working-from-home-covid-nber/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/06/working-from-home-co...

paulcole 2y ago
The NBER study you linked seems to say that WFH saves workers 2 hours per week not that it increases their at-work productivity. It goes on to say that they claim to work more but it doesn’t say they actually get more done as a result.
- intended 2y ago
  > There will be a 5% productivity boost in the post-pandemic economy due to re-optimized working arrangements and less time spent commuting, NBER adds. If this isn’t good enough do search yourself. There’s multiple papers and analyses by this point. And these are all analyses to satisfy the all important business productivity goals of our corporations. For humans, the actual workers? The saved time on commute, improved quality of life and invigoration of local markets far outweigh those corporate gains.