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Work from Home and Productivity

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Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#11

Post by DeRock »

Dowwie wrote: post #2

"Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%. "

Excludes commute time from work-from-office hours, which makes the comparison moot. I'd rather be unproductive at home, than unproductive in traffic.

Also, this surveyed a single "large Asian IT services company". Its an anecdote with significant cultural work biases that may make this inapplicable to eg. American firms.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#12

Post by rustybelt »

hvocode wrote: post #7

It’s a shame the WFH experiment is blended with the pandemic. It’s hard to decouple the “effectiveness of WFH” from the “pervasive impact of a global pandemic on all aspects of daily life”. I think a lot of people got a negative taste for WFH for reasons that are less WFH and more pandemic.

Having three kids at home doing remote schooling is such a huge confounding factor. Anecdotally, my WFH productivity (or at least my uninterrupted work time tracked via RescueTime) seems to have improved since my older two went back to in-person school this quarter.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#13

Post by jethro_tell »

rustybelt wrote: post #12
hvocode wrote: post #7

It’s a shame the WFH experiment is blended with the pandemic. It’s hard to decouple the “effectiveness of WFH” from the “pervasive impact of a global pandemic on all aspects of daily life”. I think a lot of people got a negative taste for WFH for reasons that are less WFH and more pandemic.

Having three kids at home doing remote schooling is such a huge confounding factor. Anecdotally, my WFH productivity (or at least my uninterrupted work time tracked via RescueTime) seems to have improved since my older two went back to in-person school this quarter.

Yeah, that's tough, and the younger ones can't do very much of it by themselves without help.

Read the instructions here to learn how to read >

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#14

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

COVID does not constitute a natural experiment!

A useful natural experiment is when something changes in a way that can only (or at least almost entirely) affect your outcome by way of the cause you're interested in. In the cause and effect chain of A -> B -> C, if A affects B, but not C, then you can exploit wild things in A to learn about how B affects C. But if A affects C outside of B, you can't tell the effects apart.

COVID does not constitute a natural experiment!

It's a mantra that apparently needs repeating. The pandemic changed work from home. Work from home presumable changes productivity. The pandemic also changes productivity, so you can't tell where the pandemic-driven productivity changes are from more granularly. Learning anything that generalizes requires tremendous care.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#15

Post by whoisburbansky »

dominotw wrote: post #9

JP morgan is forcing me to come into office, i am still waiting for my second dose. Jamie is forcing ppl to come into work and making up stupid anecdotes about how ppl are unproductive at home. Him being "fed up" means i have to risk my life. [1] I don't understand how he is getting away with this. 1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/jamie-dimon-fed-up-with-zoom...

Kroger's CEO getting paid bonuses [1] to avoid giving front-line workers hazard pay while continuing to put their lives literally on the line over the past year gives me little hope that anyone will ever be held accountable for this sort of behavior.

https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/kroger-blasted-for-endi....

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#16

Post by moshmosh »

rustybelt wrote: post #12
hvocode wrote: post #7

It’s a shame the WFH experiment is blended with the pandemic. It’s hard to decouple the “effectiveness of WFH” from the “pervasive impact of a global pandemic on all aspects of daily life”. I think a lot of people got a negative taste for WFH for reasons that are less WFH and more pandemic.

Having three kids at home doing remote schooling is such a huge confounding factor. Anecdotally, my WFH productivity (or at least my uninterrupted work time tracked via RescueTime) seems to have improved since my older two went back to in-person school this quarter.

Not only that, but even if one had someone else to watch the kids during that time, one couldn't go work from a coffee shop or whatever like one normally might, for a change of scenery or to avoid at-home distractions.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#17

Post by bigmattystyles »

stakkur wrote: post #5

They used tracking software on employee's computers. That alone was enough for me to close the link without reading further. My company uses Microsoft's inane version of this, and the only real thing it measures is the amount of money going into Microsoft's account.

Is that the thing called Insight that showed up in my corporate outlook?

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#19

Post by potatoman22 »

dominotw wrote: post #9

JP morgan is forcing me to come into office, i am still waiting for my second dose. Jamie is forcing ppl to come into work and making up stupid anecdotes about how ppl are unproductive at home. Him being "fed up" means i have to risk my life. [1] I don't understand how he is getting away with this. 1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/jamie-dimon-fed-up-with-zoom...

Probably because studies like this and others show that WFH is less productive.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#20

Post by dml2135 »

I'd question how conclusions are being drawn here. I think the key takeaway is that output did not change.

The authors then go on to say that since hours worked increased, productivity decreased. But how do we define what an "hour worked" really means? I know that I definitely spend more time "working" during WFH in the sense that I am either being responsive to colleagues or actively working on my own work. However during that time I am also doing way more household tasks than I would be working in an office.

You may call that a loss of productivity, but I'd call it an increase in flexibility, freedom, and job satisfaction. And to reiterate, output stayed the same, so what's the problem?

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