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U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

washingtonpost.com

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Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#31
post #25
post #7

> In the first half of 2022, productivity — the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour — plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. > The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus pandemic forced an overnight switch to remote work…

I'm of the opinion that WFH has been a net negative to productivity. Measuring productivity was much easier for managers to do when everyone was in the office as employees would find it more difficult to hide attempts at slacking off. Those who are less productive when WFH are less willing to admit it and I believe it's the reason why whenever the topic of WFH comes up, it's drowned by the voices of all those who say…

Measuring productivity is hard in and out of the office.

From personal experience, it was incredibly easy to do nothing when working from the office while remote you’re more held to your deliverables. In an office, it’s very common to see people look busy, but are just doing unrelated things.

The only difference is that in an office people mask their lack of productivity by pretending to be busy, whereas remote you don’t have to do that.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#32

A couple of reasons I can see, just my opinion * My buddies in trade-based fields say they are working harder than ever, as their backlog has only increased in size * Less scrutiny when working from home, more fooling around, less work * Feeling that "grass is greener" elsewhere, therefore no longer being committed * Polling has shown that their ideal job for Gen-Z is being a CEO of a company, but few seem motivated…

Business formation surged since the pandemic, but Gen Z is going to have a hard time with it because they’ll be more broke than millennials

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#34
post #26
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During Covid, people were hiding in their homes, quarantined, with nothing to do but work. This year, companies expect workers to return to office, despite little change in conditions, except now we have to deal with all of the above issues you've just mentioned, AND the fact that employees have now proven they can work remotely perfectly well. It should neither be surprising that in a system where healthcare is tied…

All of what you've both said, plus the number of people who thought or still think COVID-19 is "no big deal" who now have a pulmonary deficiency and long-term mental fog.

Indeed.

In support of this—part of it!—here’s one paper of many: “The Neurobiology of Long COVID” by M. Monje, neurobiologist at Stanford, and A. Iwasaki, immunologist at Yale.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2022.10.006

People with measurable neurobiological issues will show a measurable productivity drop.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#35

I'm pretty sure I know why... The working environment changed. Bit by bit I moved from an environment with gentleman's agreements and so on towards something in which everything was codified, safetyism became rampant, etc. In the UK over the past few years I went from going into a nice office in a number of beautiful old buildings, getting my stuff done with cameraderie, having lunch together and playing board games,…

> But is it just me?

No. I go into the office every day because I feel the same. I need to get out of the house and see people. (It is OK if you, reader, do not feel this way! People are different!) There's a handful of other folks who come in every day. I'm starting up a project this week to revive our office culture a bit, to try to spring back from the COVID devastation.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#36
post #4

Perhaps people are at the point of revolt over the ever widening productivity vs pay gap? https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ Productivity kept on climbing and wages stagnated post ~1980 Time for the workers to reap some of that benefit.

It could also be a generalized disillusion in the system. I believe what pushed americans through for generations was the american dream. No american believed to be poor, they were all simply "future millionaires". But what if people realized that it was only a delusion, that it can never be that everyone is rich, because then who would do the dirty jobs? There is no social pyramid without a base, this system is litt…

consider that small business people had done their daily things for thirty years, not been chatting on the Internet; many of those local biz people relied on walk-in customers, and many of those local biz people are part of the Boomer generation. Those people paid their bills and participated in the general economy.

At the same time, corporate outsourcing reached epic proportions, with the associated transfer of power in the HR and Exec realms.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#37
post #35

I'm pretty sure I know why... The working environment changed. Bit by bit I moved from an environment with gentleman's agreements and so on towards something in which everything was codified, safetyism became rampant, etc. In the UK over the past few years I went from going into a nice office in a number of beautiful old buildings, getting my stuff done with cameraderie, having lunch together and playing board games,…

> But is it just me? No. I go into the office every day because I feel the same. I need to get out of the house and see people. (It is OK if you, reader, do not feel this way! People are different!) There's a handful of other folks who come in every day. I'm starting up a project this week to revive our office culture a bit, to try to spring back from the COVID devastation.

Hello fellow space traveler.

I appreciate your message. Good luck.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#40
It's difficult to be productive when you're waiting on a shipment of parts, for one thing. We've been working for decades to make industries work with more advanced logistics and less stock on hand. Now there are supply chain issues, and you can't assemble and sell something if you don't have the parts whether it's a car, a computer, or a rose hip half skim gigante honey latte.

Real wages are up a bit, but revenues are way up despite the supply chain issues. People are being forced back into offices who don't need to be there. Maybe morale is low. I know of concrete instances of low morale, and I'm sure there are others.

People's life changing because of RTO requires attention.

People are often looking to move or to change jobs recently, which requires attention.

Millions of people have been ill with a respiratory/vascular virus which sometimes causes long term damage. More than a million in the US have died from it. Survivors often have pulmonary issues and long-term mental fog which may be permanent or take years to recover. They have less energy and stamina. It's harder for many of them to concentrate. Some of those who died were in the workforce, and whatever knowledge they had about their job died with them. Other deaths were people's family and friends. Funerals, cleaning out houses, donating their belongings, and the grief itself aren't exactly good for worker productivity but they are things humans need to do.

Lots of micromanagers exist. For people who haven't returned to office with no open floor plan to walk around, many of them use a messaging app like Slack to micromanage. Water cooler conversation is in Slack channels. Meetings are in Slack, Teams, or Zoom or something else, and everyone's supposed to be engaged rather than working on their laptop until it's their turn to speak. There are often more officially designated meetings because people can't drop by one another's offices. Lots of work is concentration-based work, or "flow" work. Constant interruptions are bad for anyway, but when it takes 20 or 30 minutes to get all the context in your head to solve a problem and a three-minute interruption to lose all of that, more interruptions can be catastrophic for productivity.

Some types of business have minimum staffing requirements. You can cut staff and try to "right size", but you need enough staff to keep the place open if that's your goal. If orders are down enough, your staff will sometimes have less to do. If because of the shortages mentioned before your ability to fill orders is down, the same thing applies. You have a choice of eating some less profitable quarters until the supply chain levels out or just closing shop. You can't lay off 100% of your trained staff and count on rehiring them later.

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