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Work from Home and Productivity

bfi.uchicago.edu

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Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#21

Post by dominotw »

potatoman22 wrote: post #19
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.

I highly doubt he is making his decisions based on academic studies. He is quoting dubious personal anecdotes to justify his decisions.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#23

Post by macd »

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...

> (They) would fully expect that by early July, all U.S.-based employees will be in the office on a consistent rotational schedule.

> Employee rotations at JPMorgan will be subject to a 50% occupancy cap until U.S. authorities revise their social-distancing guidelines, according to Tuesday’s memo. The bank advised workers that “with this time frame in mind you should start making any needed arrangements to help with your successful return.”

Why are you trying to make it seem like they told you to come in every day starting this week, whether you're vaccinated or not?

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/jpmorgan-...

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#24

Post by ultrastable »

"Sapience time measurement is sophisticated and designed to be resilient to simple manipulatio nattempts. Merely keeping the computer on for longer or watching videos instead of working does not increase Input. Rather, it would require having the relevant work software as the active window,and giving continuous user input (via mouse, keyboard)."

doesn't sound that sophisticated to me lol. in any case their claim that their output measure (completed tasks) is "rigorous and objective" is questionable to put it mildly: "The company uses a normalized measure of output to make different jobs and roles comparable.For example, for a programmer the output measure might be programming tasks completed divided by tasks assigned, times 100. For other roles, Output might be the number of reviews (e.g., of code) completed relative to the monthly target, or the number of reports delivered relative to the target.". no mention made of the relative effort required for each programming task, or the quality of reports delivered - not to mention no assessment of whether those targets accurately measure anything that's beneficial to the company.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#25

Post by ineptech »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #14

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…

Agreed! The elephants in the room for me are the self-reported hours (Did "hours worked" really increase, or was that time spent changing laundry and running errands that got classified as work time) and the obvious confounder of children being at home rather than in school.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#26

Post by kaskakokos »

DeRock wrote: post #11
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.

Understandable, in my case I commuted by bike in 20 min, I have changed 40 min of healthy biking for 2+ hours of extra work.

And these are not cold numbers from an study, it is my reality and it can explain my bad mood of the last times.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#27

Post by ultrastable »

themanmaran wrote: post #8
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.

"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" That's genuinely awful. I wonder to what extent employees are aware of the analytics, and how many people just set up macros look busy.

I agree it's awful, not to mention the fact that employees weren't informed of the Microsoft tracking software being used in the firstplace, but what's funny is that according to their analytics having yr IDE open & wiggling the mouse cursor counts as "engaged in a relevant task". whereas going on Twitter to get answers about a programming question would be counted as unproductive social media use

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#28

Post by jfengel »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #14

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…

That's true, but it's a pretty common interpretation of the term "natural experiment".

Few, if any, "natural experiments" are actually experiments in a rigorous sense. But they are a thing that happens: you have an uncontrolled happenstance that allows you to infer, but not prove, something you want to learn more about.

When the surface meaning of a term has no referents, it will often be co-opted to refer to something people need a term for (assuming it's compact and convenient). Another example that comes to mind is "homophobia", which doesn't refer to actual "fear of homosexuals" but rather to a dislike for them -- a thing which is very common but doesn't have a convenient, short expression. (The term actually comes from being the opposite of "homophilia", a reasonably straightforward but outdated term for homosexuality.)

So it's true that we don't really have a good control and will have difficulty separating out real causes and effects. But a thing definitely happened and we can definitely try to learn something from it -- a notion that happens often enough to merit a name. If you've got a better one we can try to make it catch on.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#29

Post by majormajor »

ineptech wrote: post #25
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #14

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…

Agreed! The elephants in the room for me are the self-reported hours (Did "hours worked" really increase, or was that time spent changing laundry and running errands that got classified as work time) and the obvious confounder of children being at home rather than in school.

> (Did "hours worked" really increase, or was that time spent changing laundry and running errands that got classified as work time)

Let's keep in mind here too that "hours between commute to/from office" != "hours working." Coffee shop runs, lunches, snack breaks, chatting, walking around...

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#30

Post by rammy1234 »

I don't see they have considered , daycares being closed, kids at home, remote schooling, no where to go, mental agony , loneliness, overworked, many new to remote work culture, non-remote friendly processes etc. Analyzing WFH when a pandemic is ongoing is not helping anyone and it is doing no good.
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