At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

First off, let me say that I have happily WFH for a few years now. I'm not opposed to it. It works for some people.

However, this is likely a problem that will get worse, not better, over time. The early WFH experience was able to cruise on the office connections, cross-training, personal knowledge, team-building, etc. that had happened previously. The longer people are away from the office, the more that hard-to-quantify stuff will decay. Plus, onboarding a new college grad has got to be challenging when there's not a group of experienced team members around them to be able to see when they're struggling or headed off the wrong path without realizing it.

All of these problems can be mitigated, but they won't be eliminated. There will always be some positions and employees where WFH makes sense; as I said, it has often worked for me. But the idea that half or even a quarter of employees would become permanently WFH, is fantasy. It's kind of like having a long-distance relationship. You can do it for a while, but the penalty mounts over time in ways that are hard to quantify, but real nonetheless.

People should work in the way that suits the job they're paid to do best. At some workplaces, you need to be present in the office because the company, for various business reasons, has not invested in developing the necessary structures to make effective and well-directed remote work possible. At some workplaces, they have done so.

I prefer working from home, I'm happier doing so, and my boss says I'm even more productive than usual (and he hasn't been concerned about my productivity, and my boss's boss expressed concerns about me working too hard and hitting burnout in our last in-person one-on-one). But my company, organizationally, is not set up this way and we were dragged into it unprepared in March. I'm doing very well on the things where I know how to work autonomously, and I have a good-sized backlog, but at some point I'll run out, and once we're back in the office, I'm going to want to be around for all of the "distractions" and "socialization" that help me develop a good idea of what I should be working on. It does the company no good - and it does me no good, come performance review season - to be highly productive at the wrong thing.

And the "diversity" argument doesn't work here. You need to pick one context where things happen, unless you want to effectively run multiple companies. Either you go remote-first and you adopt the Apache-style policy of "if it didn't happen on the mailing list, it didn't happen," or the folks who are seeing each other in person will chat in person, come up with ideas in person, make decisions in person, consult each other for design reviews in person, etc. and cut the remote workers out of the loop.

Now, yes, I think my company probably should develop the structures needed to work remotely, but I'm aware that's a self-serving belief. I genuinely don't know if my company has enough people who have the "discipline" (in your words; I might also add "lack of roommates, spouse, or children") that this switch is the right thing for the company. It's rather like my position on whether my company should pay me more: I'm not going to argue that I don't want the money, since it would certainly be good for me, but there is certainly some finite salary level where it's no longer in the business's interest to do so.

This is a great comment

I think it's increasingly clear that blanket policies and one-size-fits-all WFH plans are just not going to work. People may gripe, but it seems like WFH is not going to be for everybody, in every position, at every stage in their careers. Hell, it might not even be feasible depending on the project you're working on this year.

Agree. If it were true "work from anywhere" and the preparation was all in place and the employee was going in with the right tools and set up and the mindset of being a true remote worker, we might not see the same drop in productivity.

> Employees always figure out how to abuse productivity metrics.

If people can abuse your productivity metric, then it's a bad measure of productivity - not a fault of the worker.