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Working from home is powering productivity

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Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#141
Tell that one to Amazon. It's really not all about productively.

There's more incentives for large businesses, whether that's tax breaks, existing office space obligations or just the feeling of lording over the workers.

I don't think that will change too much. A remote company has to be fundamentally remote on all levels otherwise it'd fall apart. That kinda buy in is difficult and usually companies who start remote work best like that. As everyone has already self selected for remote work.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the city care about number of people in the office if they are deriving the money from commercial property taxes?

Why would the city care if no one is working downtown?

People being downtown are people more likely to spend money downtown then someone who lives in the suburbs and doesn't come to downtown. Therefore more sales taxes collected, more businesses in downtown, etc...

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#143
post #90

Work from home makes me LOYAL to a company, and makes me work my arse off! If you want to keep good employees, give them agency. I do hybrid, I’m half-half from home and in the office. I work so hard when I work from home, and I’m so happy when I work from home, my desk is setup how I need, I get free coffee, I can listen to music, my dog sleeps on the bed. Most importantly, more of the work gets done. I think the op…

I WFH 100% of the time. This allows my spouse and I to work. Without this one of us would have to leave the workforce to take the children to school. But because I WFH I can do the school runs and I realize I have it so good, it makes me unwilling to consider any other potential job offers. And BTW, because I don't have to commute 3 hours like I used to I can now work as late if a task requires me to. So yeah the abi…

with a commute like that I hope travel time is work time

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#144
post #35

I love working from home and I plan to keep doing it. But I can't deny that when a coworker needs help, rolling my chair next to theirs in office allows for a much larger bandwidth of knowledge sharing. On the other hand my production skyrockets at home.

I've found that Tuple and (if people are okay with it) screen recording makes me more productive from getting knowledge transfers at home. Whenever the CTO would go on a tangent, that tangent was recorded. I'd rewatch those recordings and learn a lot more than if I'd had just been sitting next to him IRL.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#146

I am literally at least 10x when I work from home. I have ADHD and through years of discipline, cultivating my workspace to suit my needs, and hard work I can be productive most of the day in the zone without (much) sidetracking. Literally impossible for me to do in the modern software dev sweatshop. I also make more money, can spend more time with my family because I don’t commute, and plenty of other positives. I l…

You are the anomaly, not the norm. WFH takes discipline, work ethic and honestly the ability to manage a work life balance. Doing this is hard, like you said.

Problem is most people aren’t disciplined:)

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#147
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ding ding ding … this is the most overlooked aspect of the RTO/WFH dynamic.

"RTO is definitely the play: the CEO says all his friends are doing it; activist-investors want RTO for their own porfolios, PR says breaking the lease on our newish HQ is embarrassing while Legal says it makes more work for them; Accounting says we'll pay more in tax unless we can prove X jobs created locally; our middle-managers need it in order to tell if work is happening, and HR notes that we can slim our workfo…

While all of that is true, I wonder how much of it is re-affirmation of a social hierarchy.

From the bosses point of view RTO is a costly signal that demonstrates how much people want to work for them - signals must be costly in order to be effective. Promoting WFO as more productive and less costly destroys the signaling aspect. Perhaps workers could offer other costly signals - maybe regular arduous in person team building exercises that management can show their friends photos. I really can't think of many alternative socially acceptable costly signals that can be required from employees which is probably why RTO continues to remain so popular.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#148
post #35

I love working from home and I plan to keep doing it. But I can't deny that when a coworker needs help, rolling my chair next to theirs in office allows for a much larger bandwidth of knowledge sharing. On the other hand my production skyrockets at home.

My experience aligns with this as well. I work hybrid, and if a coworker needs help, I would go to the office rather than staying home & online.

There's something about the lack of cues that makes online conversations' flow more challenging and harder to read. In person, Visual cues like body language & facial expression helps signal when someone is about to speak, and that helps me tremendously.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.

I keep seeing this being brought up, I haven't researched it too much, but it's a bit hard for me to believe that this could truly be the case, that there's such huge influence from commercial real estate owners on CEOs of much larger companies? What causes them to have such power over large companies?

It's not like, a direct marching order.

It's just a general attitude that has filtered around C suites or whatever. Go watch any daytime cable news investment shows and you'll see it.

Just run of the mill cohort thinking. No big conspiracy.

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