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Did their sample involve men with a 2 year old at home that constantly needs their attention as long as they are at home, and thinks that when their father is sitting on the laptop, he's making pink and blue spheres in paintbrush? Honestly, I can achieve little at home these days and feel like I'm doing injustice to both, work and the kid.
On the other hand, it is also imaginable that working at home away from everyone else makes communication harder, and more opaque. Or it can make you lonelier. Not every company has policies and culture that makes it conducive to work from home.
This is true is obvious situations, but also false in some interesting ways.
While physical proximity helps for communication within a team for instance, it also makes it harder to know what happens in other teams, as they also communicate offline.
That means for instance that if you want an idea of the status of a team you'd have to physically go there (are they super busy ? is half of the team off for the day? are they under stress or not ?). If the team is in another building there will be enough enough friction that you won't bother except if it's important.
In contrast, having more people remote would allow to peek into their room and see their exchanges.
You'd also catch some issues or insight on stuff that they wouldn't be discussing with other teams otherwise for instance.
Basically, there is a lot of indirect advantages to have people chat by text instead of direct communication. Does it completely offset the other shortcomings ? I don't know, but it's still a pretty nice effect I think.
> 500 employees were divided into two groups--a control group (who continued working at HQ) and volunteer work-from-homers (who had to have a private room at home, at least six-month tenure with Ctrip, and decent broadband access as conditions). That's a huge selection bias - if the 'treatment' group are self-selecting volunteers from your pool of all employees then that causes a whole host of issues.
> After a lottery draw, those employees with even-numbered birthdays were selected to work from home, and those with odd-numbered birthdates stayed in the office to act as the control group.
Participants were not even selected random Enter Bloom, who helped design a test whereby 500 employees were divided into two groups--a control group (who continued working at HQ) and volunteer work-from-homers (who had to have a private room at home, at least six-month tenure with Ctrip, and decent broadband access as conditions).
Came here to find this. Precisely what I thought - I think that some people work better remotely and some work better in an office setting (like myself). If you ask people to volunteer for remote work then people who are better remote workers are likely to volunteer and more likely to work harder to prove it can work.
“If companies want hackers to be productive, they should look at what they do at home. At home, hackers can arrange things themselves so they can get the most done. And when they work at home, hackers don't work in noisy, open spaces; they work in rooms with doors. They work in cosy, neighborhoody places with people around and somewhere to walk when they need to mull something over, instead of in glass boxes set in a…
> hackers don't work in noisy, open spaces; they work in rooms with doors. > They work in cosy, neighborhoody places with people around Which is it? That article did not age well.
The statements are not contradicting each other. The first statement is on the in-building level and the second one is on the out-of-building level.
I’m not sure realism/positivism is the best approach to empirical data on this. Only one of my workers is more productive from home, in the IT department almost all the workers are more productive from home. We haven’t done any research on the causality, but the personality’s profiles for or digitization and IT departments are vastly different, so too is the work we donald the way we go about it. If you looked at us…
Honest question.
You say you manage 20 people. How are your able to judge for 20 people at least weekly if the work they did was in line with your expectations?
I feel like I basically have to read and understand every line written by each developer on my team in order to really get a grasp at whether they're productive or not.
Sometimes people produce very little code but maybe that little code solves a very hard to find bug.
It's something I'm really struggling with as a manager:
My boss asks me if the people on my team are worth their money and I am really not sure how to answer this.
I had work from home. Never again in my life. Going to the office helped me to split the time in my day and mark when work and when I can rest. Also, when stressed a coworker can help much more easier than from home. My home is my home, my office is my office. Never mix these places.