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At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

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Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#121
We took an entire society from in-person offices with norms structured around a clear delineation between home/work to full WFH basically overnight. There was little to no training, often limited or confused technology rollout, and no planned culture transition. On top of that, many people had their kids kept home as well and had other essential services disrupted.

The fact that it is difficult to measure whether or not WFH had an impact on productivity or not is a HUGE mark in its favor. This should have just fallen apart, no consultant or advisor would have every recommended trying a mass remote working initiative this way. Instead it seems to have mostly worked.

I say mostly, because now we are at the point where it takes concious thought to build processes and culture to sustain a remote work culture. Developing young talent is difficult regardless of the circumstances, but in the in person office we have well developed norms, culture, programs, and processes to support them. Have you and your organization spent significant time thinking adapting and developing those cultural factors? I'm a remote work advocate because I've seen it work not just for me but for those around me, including junior talent, but you have to think about it, experiment, and work at it.

Beyond the workplace, a lot of people have complained about the sudden transition to WFH do to them being not set up for it. I've heard this expressed as because they have limited space / lots of roommates or just being uncomfortable with the lack of home/work seperation. The root cause of these is (mostly) the unique circumstances of this experiment. If WFH was a strong social norm, people would have chosen different living accommodations and would have "seperate spaces" without needing a corporate office.

While not every job ultimately can or should become primarily remote/WFH, I think the benefits for most information workers and their companies will win out. But right now we are going to see the long and hard process of rebuilding culture and norms in a new work environment.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#122
post #71

I'll venture a good chunk of that is due to an out-of-sync-with-reality issue. I think we'd all feel more productive and motivated working from home if the world wasn't collapsing all around us. Working on some new feature shaving a few milliseconds off an API call for investment bankers seems a bit out of touch, whether at home or in the office. Blaming loss of productivity solely on working from home may be the wro…

What are you talking about? The world have made incredible progress in just the last 20 years, lifting billions of people out of poverty, and the exact financial system you're talking about was, and is, one of the main reasons behind this push. These milliseconds translate into liquidity provided into market, which in turn translates into more efficient and less risky allocation of capital, which in turn translates into efficient production and use of labour, and so on and so on.

All of that sounds incredibly boring, but that's the case with any real human progress. It's the same with a famous, and incredibly stupid quote "the brightest minds of our generation are working on making people click ads". Every time I hear it, I remember all the small businesses and ventures that only exist because of Instagram, Facebook and Google Ads. Housewives baking cakes, a leatherworker making custom backpacks, a blacksmith restoring antique knives - those are just personal friends of mine who wouldn't be able to build their businesses if not for what those brightest minds of our generation are doing.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent agrees, and further observes that all measures of productivity are "bad".

Parent does not agree, if parent agreed, then parent would not have used the word "abuse", which implies that the worker is the one at fault. There are many nuances to the English language that are difficult for non-native speakers to pick up.

I think the parent comment reads like it was written by a native speaker.

I don't see how the term abuse means that the parent doesn't agree?

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#124
post #112

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…

Just because it cannot be measured to a high precision does not mean it can't be measured. People clearly have some sense of when they are and aren't productive.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's quantifiable, rather than qualifiable.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#125

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…

> Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem.

I totally disagree. That's the whole point of your manager and reviews.

In addition, JPMorgan isn't just programmers. It's a lot of people who talk to people and process paper--a LOT of paper. And they can quite clearly measure how much paper is being processed per person.

> Employees always figure out how to abuse productivity metrics.

That's a different problem from being able to see that productivity is up or down.

Now, the larger question is whether productivity is down because of work-from-home or productivity is down because the economy is in a complete shambles.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#127

I see it as good news. If employees can be fully productive while working from home, they can be equally productive while working from Mumbai. I'd rather be in NYC office.

I somewhat disagree. For a lot of work you want workers to be in, or near the time zone of the majority of the workers. 10+ hours offset means no real-time communication and email chains take days instead of minutes.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#128
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how much is your salary for you to be on that living arrangement? sounds awful when 250K/year in SF can't buy any decent living space.

About $450k all in (not FAANG but a mid sized public company in SF I'm sure you've heard of). Fwiw, it wasn't a terrible living space before the pandemic; it just isn't conducive to WFH situations. I'd found that rent controlled spot, and I was paying $1100/mo for a room in an apartment with a backyard, in-unit washer/dryer, and a dishwasher. As a single dude, I really didn't need anything else, I wasn't willing to p…

> living in a cramped space with 3 roommates in SF with no privacy

> About $450k all in

What.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#129
It's a good thing that in this natural experiment nothing else that might effect productivity changed between February and March except switching to work from home, right?

Since factors that might effect anxiety, physical and psychological health, priorities, demands on time and attention, and external factors effecting success stayed largely the same, but for switching from working in an office to working from home, so we know it was "the WFH lifestyle" (lifestyle?!?) that caused a 'hit' to 'overall productivity', so we can be confident that instructing employees to return to the office regardless of safety will restore this stolen productivity.

(not)

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#130
post #125

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…

> Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. I totally disagree. That's the whole point of your manager and reviews. In addition, JPMorgan isn't just programmers. It's a lot of people who talk to people and process paper--a LOT of paper. And they can quite clearly measure how much paper is being processed per person. > Employees always figure out how to abuse productivity metric…

Working somewhere where it's thought that 'whole point of my manager' is measuring my productivity sounds like a real nightmare.
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