Remote workers work longer, not more efficiently

No commute, rest when stressed by a problem, a deep dark secret that’s helped me just do the work or sleep. The simple rest has solved entire features for me. The humanity of it all is remarkable, but of course, a dirty little secret in this absurd world.

I’m human - come at me bro.

Edit: To deny the stress of the alarm clock, the commute, the theatrics of looking busy, like, I just can’t. We’re mentally healthier and I will absolutely not put up the bullshitters that say it isn’t true.

Though it's entirely possible that hurts efficiency.

> the number of hours they’ll work will go down

and it's possible that can improve efficiency.

> In order to better understand this decline in productivity, we examined data on employee time use from the analytics software. During WFH, employees spent more time engaged in various types of formal and informal meetings, especially video conferences. As a consequence they were able to spend substantially less time working without interruption. They also spent less time networking (both within the firm and with clients), and less time receiving coaching or 1:1 meetings with supervisors.These findings suggest that increased coordination costs during WFH at least partially explain the drop in productivity

Let's looks at this: More time in conferences - maybe but if one is looking closely there is a lot people get done in conferences when not watched - stuff in their household, talking a walk or real other work. Networking being measured as time with boss is ridiculous. The remote working setup in fact allows one to network fairly efficiently and the network structure changes. Instead of getting information from the boss one may now just get a pointer from the boss and gets the information from the horses mouth in a 1:1 call.

Interruptions in a shared/open floor plan office can not be silenced easily. Now one can just go offline and get things done - provided the company is sane and does not mechanically measure productivity.

And on the other hand one can indicate to be reachable while doing one's homework - allows for a small break and is a win/win for both sides but will blow up time logged into the system.

> In this paper we provide an analysis of the effects of the switch from WFO to WFH in a largeAsian IT services company.

Ok, let's parse this. There is "a" == "one" company and then it is Asian which covers a lot of countries but quite a number of them have a long working hour mindset. Not the best basis to extrapolate...

> The data also include information on hours worked, our primary input measure. This is measured in a sophisticated way, as the analytics software takes into account whether an employee actually engages in a relevant task (which counts as work time) or merely procrastinates at their desk (not counted), by monitoring which software tools the employee uses.

Right. The problem is that my coffee machine and my shower are not wired up to be monitored and a lot of great work has been done there.