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Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

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Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#91

Post by cameldrv »

ak39 wrote: post #13

First para hits the nail on the head. The issue is: trust between managers and employees. Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome. And changing that management style is not easy. Managing outcomes requires managers to understand not only the strategic agendas set by the bosses higher up but also the technical paths to achieve them confr…

Trust is a continuum. If I'm a manager, I can't afford to know every single detail of what you're doing. Managing outcome sounds nice, but suppose I assign you a task that I think will take two days in my limited understanding, and it takes you two weeks. I have to figure out the cause. Some common ones are:

1. Neither of us understood the full complexity of the task at the outset. If we want to improve, we'll have to put in more work upfront to figure out the problem.

2. You're less capable than I thought you were -- it just takes you longer or you make more mistakes than I had expected.

3. I didn't adequately describe the job to you, and you spent time going down blind alleys and readjusting trying to figure out what exactly I want.

4. You're a slacker, you didn't work very hard on it and so it took longer.

It's easy to say that I should manage outcome, but if you repeatedly fail to achieve the outcome, what should I do? It depends on why. If you're remote, you're going to say it was #1 with a fallback position of #3. If you're in the office I can probably get a reasonable sense of whether or not it's #4, and if it's #3, we're naturally going to communicate more and so I'm more likely to fix it sooner. This is why office space in SF costs so much.

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#92

Post by deepGem »

ivanhoe wrote: post #87
ak39 wrote: post #13

First para hits the nail on the head. The issue is: trust between managers and employees. Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome. And changing that management style is not easy. Managing outcomes requires managers to understand not only the strategic agendas set by the bosses higher up but also the technical paths to achieve them confr…

> Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome Problem with this is that it puts the burden of bad estimates on employees. They'll end up working more hours to cover the mistakes in estimates in order to meet the expected outcomes. And that is exactly the same issue that makes freelancing suck, except that freelancers charge more in order to…

Almost all estimates are based on past experience. So good luck with such estimates when you are entering new domain or even new tech. I honestly believe that there is no need for estimates. Your delivery date is set by the customer or the market or competition. So it's a lot healthier to work backwards from that date and figure out which of the features can be delivered, than to breakdown the work into quite meaningless chunks, figure out the estimates for those chunks and god forbid, build a Gantt chart.

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#93

Post by afarrell »

Rainymood wrote: post #55

PhD student here so take my opinion with a grain of salt. I personally love the fact that I can choose to work at home or at the office. I can really concentrate at home (private room where I feel comfy) but on the other hand it is also significantly easier to distract yourself from work. Netflix is just one tab away and there's no one to look over your shoulder and whisper in your ear "Don't watch Netflix when you'r…

> Netflix is just one tab away

Tools like https://selfcontrolapp.com/ and https://freedom.to/ are really helpful here.

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#95

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

cameldrv wrote: post #91
ak39 wrote: post #13

First para hits the nail on the head. The issue is: trust between managers and employees. Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome. And changing that management style is not easy. Managing outcomes requires managers to understand not only the strategic agendas set by the bosses higher up but also the technical paths to achieve them confr…

Trust is a continuum. If I'm a manager, I can't afford to know every single detail of what you're doing. Managing outcome sounds nice, but suppose I assign you a task that I think will take two days in my limited understanding, and it takes you two weeks. I have to figure out the cause. Some common ones are: 1. Neither of us understood the full complexity of the task at the outset. If we want to improve, we'll have t…

In practice, being a slacker when working from home is not really an option. I know very well that if I don't perform well enough, I'll be fired. Why should I take the risk? Also, when I realize a job is going to take longer than expected, I notify my boss immediately and clearly explain the reasons. It's not that I wake up after two weeks that I'm 12 days late - I probably realize something is wrong immediately or after a couple of hours at most.

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#96

Post by eksemplar »

konschubert wrote: post #77
eksemplar wrote: post #20

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…

>Sometimes they come in late and leave early, sometimes they work from home and I can tell by what they produce they spent half the day doing something else. 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 i…

I manage a mix of developers, architects, project managers and business processors/developers. I measure their productivity on team results compared to their team predictions as well as my own experience. I do have a long history of doing development projects in the public sector with a primary focus on increasing efficiency and benefit realization, but a lot of it is honestly gut feeling and softer management strategies where I encourage openness.

If people aren’t feeling well, maybe they are going through a divorce, maybe they’ve run out of motivation I want them to share it, so we can help them get to where they want to be or give them time to process.

I guess I could have a single inefficient worker and never spot it through measurements, but I typically notice because it changes the team dynamic and the way people interact.

I understand why this would worry some managers, but I don’t believe you can apply factory line thinking or strategies to brain-workers because it doesn’t suit them, especially not if you want them to cooperate in actual teams and not just be a bunch of grouped individuals competing not to be measured as the bottom 15%.

I am Scandinavian though, and our work-culture is very different from the American.

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#97

Post by gregshap »

deepGem wrote: post #92
ivanhoe wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome Problem with this is that it puts the burden of bad estimates on employees. They'll end up working more hours to cover the mistakes in estimates in order to meet the expected outcomes. And that is exactly the same issue that makes freelancing suck, except that freelancers charge more in order to…

Almost all estimates are based on past experience. So good luck with such estimates when you are entering new domain or even new tech. I honestly believe that there is no need for estimates. Your delivery date is set by the customer or the market or competition. So it's a lot healthier to work backwards from that date and figure out which of the features can be delivered, than to breakdown the work into quite meaning…

how do you figure out which features can be completed by the delivery date, if not by estimating?

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#98

Post by lagadu »

cameldrv wrote: post #91
ak39 wrote: post #13

First para hits the nail on the head. The issue is: trust between managers and employees. Also, "work from home" paradigm will only succeed when management paradigm changes from managing time to managing outcome. And changing that management style is not easy. Managing outcomes requires managers to understand not only the strategic agendas set by the bosses higher up but also the technical paths to achieve them confr…

Trust is a continuum. If I'm a manager, I can't afford to know every single detail of what you're doing. Managing outcome sounds nice, but suppose I assign you a task that I think will take two days in my limited understanding, and it takes you two weeks. I have to figure out the cause. Some common ones are: 1. Neither of us understood the full complexity of the task at the outset. If we want to improve, we'll have t…

> but suppose I assign you a task that I think will take two days in my limited understanding

Why would the manager be the one making estimates? That's a task either for the team, if applicable, or for the implementer.

edit: I work from home, every sprint we have a planning meeting where we do the estimates together, my manager isn't even involed in it.

Only if we're expecting to exceed an estimate by 20% do we contact the project manager (not my manager) so we can figure out how to proceed.

How we work: we have a bunch of tasks available that we create during the sprint planning and we pick them as we have time, some may be marked as priority. My manager only hears from me if I'm ever blocked for some reason and need him to either get in touch with the person that is blocking the task or similar, otherwise we don't.

For us at least the manager is someone who enables us to spend our time productively, generally speaking he'll have no idea what I'm doing most of the time. I guess you could say we're self-managed.

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#99

Post by hoorayimhelping »

gowld wrote: post #64
pilingual wrote: post #58

“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.

It's both. The whole point of that quote is that the programmer is in control when they work from home. If they want to work in their quiet 2nd bedroom with a door, they can. If they want to be around people, they can go to their neighborhood coffee shop, and work there.

But most importantly, they can leave those two locations when they feel like it.

Re: Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

#100

Post by ramblerman »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #25
eksemplar wrote: post #20

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…

> the biggest problem is getting them to only work the 37 hours they are hired to put in When I started working from home 10 years ago, this hit me hard. I used to work about 10 hour days in the office. When I started working from home I was working 13-14 hours most days. Over time that lead to burn out and that made me even less productive. Some of it was because I felt a little guilty working from home so I put in…

> When I started working from home I was working 13-14 hours most days.

Was this pure development because that seems so unfeasible (at least for me).

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