Why are some people better at working from home than others?
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Re: Why are some people better at working from home than others?
#2I’ve found the WFH experiment very unsurprising. Diligent and reliable coworkers are just as diligent and reliable. People who were iffy in person are basically non-existent WFH.
Re: Why are some people better at working from home than others?
#3For the same reason some people are better at working from the office than others - they just do the work and are diligent about putting in the time required. Someone who is motivated to do the work will do the work from anywhere. I'm one of those people. If I didn't want to be doing the work, I'd be shirking my duties at the office too. And tech is still good enough for us workers that I'd go down the street for a new job before I ever got to the point where I didn't want to do the work anymore.
Re: Why are some people better at working from home than others?
#4If you have a baby and two young children around who you also have to homeschool for 8 hours a day then you're not going to be "productive" working at home.
People who slack at work by hide it by having lots of meetings / playing politics are useless whilst working-from home because they don't know how operate when their productivity is more visible.
Re: Why are some people better at working from home than others?
#5I haven't found the results of WFH to be surprising.
The self-motivated people are getting just as much if not more work done.
The people who are chatty in the office are more unproductive at home simply because the main reason they stopped chatting was because the boss walked by. I don't think they are more productive as shirking work in the office is equally easy. Just claim to be doing "background research."
Work from home just removes the outside influences, causing people to become more like who they would otherwise be.
In my case, I ignore meetings and just have them on in the background. I am barely in attendance. I can't do that in the office as my managers/team are watching. That is my one behavioral change.
Re: Why are some people better at working from home than others?
#6If you have a baby and two young children around who you also have to homeschool for 8 hours a day then you're not going to be "productive" working at home. People who slack at work by hide it by having lots of meetings / playing politics are useless whilst working-from home because they don't know how operate when their productivity is more visible.
Also, some people are terrible at written communication and just can't do without face-to-face conversations.
Re: Why are some people better at working from home than others?
#7Kids.
Re: Why are some people better at working from home than others?
#8While working in an office, I considered myself one of the more productive members of my team, and one colleague called me the most productive team member. Now, working from home, I am often standing up, walking around and dreaming for hours. I am glad I was allowed to return to an office alone this Monday. I am not 100% sure it is all due to WFH because my assigned project changed at about the same time but I can only hope I'll recover when I'm in an office again, even if nobody else is there to watch over me.
Re: Why are some people better at working from home than others?
#9If you have a baby and two young children around who you also have to homeschool for 8 hours a day then you're not going to be "productive" working at home. People who slack at work by hide it by having lots of meetings / playing politics are useless whilst working-from home because they don't know how operate when their productivity is more visible.
Also, some people are terrible at written communication and just can't do without face-to-face conversations.
We have video meetings, though. WFH hasn't really changed the amount of written communication in my work.
My closest collaborator falls pretty squarely under "terrible at written communication", but we still have sufficiently frequent face-to-face time to be about as productive as before.
I'm in agreement with the general sentiment elsewhere in this thread, though. I've found nothing about people's WFH productivity that's surprising. People with kids are handicapped, but are often determined enough to find a way to make it work. For everybody else, it seems like the inequality in productivity just goes up, and it's harder to mask non-productivity by socializing well.
Re: Why are some people better at working from home than others?
#10If you have a baby and two young children around who you also have to homeschool for 8 hours a day then you're not going to be "productive" working at home. People who slack at work by hide it by having lots of meetings / playing politics are useless whilst working-from home because they don't know how operate when their productivity is more visible.
Our solution is that I go to bed at 8pm and get up at 4am and work like mad until breakfast which is around 9am. Thats 5h of uninterrupted coding time, which is about the max my old brain can handle anyway. The hard part is doing 'working hours' business, but hey, I just email everyone from the potty.
Sorry, ahem, bathroom.