Remote work doesn't seem to affect productivity, Fed study finds

I can't help but read this as a severely pessimistic take on the capabilities of markets, since we can trace trying to "optimize productivity" back to essentially the earliest things even remotely resembling the modern economy and most of the enormous amount of research, money, and effort that has been poured into this endeavor has been at best occasionally better than chance at consistently improving any kind of "productivity" in the long term through labor practices, unless we directly define the suffering of workers as "productivity."

Most meaningful gains in productive capacity come from either resource windfalls or technological progress, and general theories of how to reproducibly increase worker productivity via policy are more akin to sacred rituals than settled science.

To be clear, I personally do think that markets function as optimizers, though as with any optimizer this tends to function in a very narrow scope. Most extant companies, for example, are driven by capital markets, not consumer ones, which means that ROI for shareholders - even when that's driven by essentially marketing stocks or goosing metrics - is the main thing being optimized. Hypothetically, markets could optimize for organizational productivity in some other sense, but I think it's even pretty unclear whether there's a way to subdivide that usefully into any kind of apples-to-apples comparison of individual workers within organizations.

That's an interesting perspective.

I think that for most people, commuting time is neither work time nor personal time: For most workers, it is just unpaid downtime that is (or at least was) necessary for work.

And especially for those who commute by driving: It's not really a good time to improve their skills, in particular because notetaking and sketching out problems and whatnot is kind of out of the question while performing the primary task of driving. It really is mostly just downtime and it can't (safely) be much more than that.

And now that many folks no longer have such an every-day downtime commute: Why should they use that new-found time to further their skillset, instead of do anything else that they might wish to do?

Is it wrong that they take some of that new time to prepare and cook a healthy, fresh, and delicious meal for lunch instead of packing a lunch or going out (or visiting the cafeteria or, in some workplaces, the breakroom's Wheel of Death)? Is it wrong that they spend the extra hour or two (or three, or whatever) that they've gained in a day with their families, or to enjoy nature by themselves, to goof around, or exercise, or work on a hobby (or a dumb game, or a good game) or to get ahead on housework, or to finally get a chance at a healthy amount of sleep?

Why is it even remarkable that when a person finds that they have an extra hour or two every day, that they don't immediately use that time for education and career-oriented self-improvement to directly boost their workplace productivity?

And I'm not saying that career-oriented skills should never be improved on one's own time, or that doing so is in any way an undesirable thing, either. There's absolutely nothing inherently wrong with doing that with one's own free time, either. And many do, as many always have.

But I am saying that I think the subset of folks who chose to use some of their personal free time educationally before the plague are likely to closely resemble the same subset of people who choose to use their time that way after the plague. And certainly, some do use their new time for more of that.

Subtracting a commute from a day doesn't necessarily change one's personal proclivities at all, I don't think, but it may enable some of them to actually be possible.

(This prompts another question. If some people who are predisposed to spend their free time learning are spending more of that time learning, and individually becoming more productive, then: Why is productivity still averaging flat?

Remote work can also allow for more opportunities for active slacking while on the clock for those who are predisposed for slack, for one example of a way in which the average can be brought down.

Mouse wigglers, anyone?)

>5 to 6 hours of standing meetings

Jeeeesus... Yeah, I bet your engineers thrive.

I manage a small (understaffed) team and we managed wonders during the pandemic. Other teams in our company also kept producing like crazy.

Now that we are forced back into the office, morale is crashing.

A. This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments.

B. Language issues, cultural issues, and time zone issues all have negative effects.

C. Or it could mean labour is more productive because it has more free time and is less stressed. There's no pointless commute and some chores can be done in the background. Getting slightly distracted by laundry is far less of a loss to productivity than being constantly distracted by conversations, office noise, pointless meetings, and so on.

Your arguments are all MBA-level arguments, which means they look superficially convincing but they lack systemic insight.

There's plenty of evidence that happier workers are more productive. Treating workers like people instead of machinery has comprehensive business benefits. The only real cost is a reduction in the self-perceived relative status of the C-suite.

Essentially this is an argument about hierarchy and loss of face, and not so much about measurable business costs/benefits.