Why would you expect remote to be less efficient? Working in an open office is incredibly distracting—of course there’s productivity gains from going remote.
I remember when I was a recruiter it was a life of KPIs handed on down from on high. Management would pat you on the shoulder as they walked by if you were on a call, expressing approval of your activity. We'd crack jokes only somewhat ironically like "any time is a good time for a client call!" If you were still in the office at 7, you could expect a heartfelt appreciative email from management. If you hadn't been on the phone for an hour, a boss may shout across the room "bit quiet over there, someone check if komali_2's napping!"
Then on the days that all of management was at an off-site, things got a lot "looser." Less calls, less grandstanding, more hanging out in the kitchen, longer lunch etc. I don't know if productivity was actually lower ( it probably wasn't ) but it felt that way, because of the culture of our work place.
To that business, the idea of working from home would be laughable. Never mind that there were independent recruiters working out of their house and pulling in literally millions in revenue. How could you be as productive as an office of hardcore recruiters with their managers setting excellent KPIs and tracking goals and establishing milestones and shouting "a bit quiet over there!" occasionally?
Of course now that I'm an engineer I'm easily more productive on my own at home or at a cafe than I am in my office for a multitude of reasons. My purpose is to explore and explain why some people, particular management, believe remote to be less efficient.
This sort of thing is horrible. Stop normalizing this. It's OK not to work all day.
My kid goes to bed at 7:30 and I hate that my colleagues are so willing to work late, normalizing the idea that 6-7PM calls are OK. I mean, I get it - it's not their fault I had a kid, but hell, when IS it OK to stop working?
This is a failure of management and should not be rewarded. Staying late is not a badge of honor. It's a reification of failure. Period.
How could you be as productive as an office of hardcore recruiters with their managers setting excellent KPIs and tracking goals and establishing milestones and shouting "a bit quiet over there!" occasionally?
Not everyone does well with remote work. For those that do, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were nearly universally more productive...so long as the company is being serious about supporting it.
Edit: I'm not saying remote is bad - just that in my experience I'm definitely less productive.
One thing that has really helped me I’d having a non-work group of online friends who also all work remote. We can commiserate and trade tips.
I work half of the time remote and sometimes feel very unmotivated due to lack of human contact. Having someone to just chat with would be awesome. Neat idea I wonder if there is a discord chat for that.
I've worked remotely for about 5 years now. Without the water cooler talk, chit chat, and misc distractions, I can easily fit a 8+ hour day into less than 6 hours when I work from home.
I’ve worked with new hires that literally take entire days off and give excuses why they were unreachable. Sadly they are just shuffled around the company instead of disciplined but that’s another topic. But I figure in that case, they were probably not so great workers in-office either.
But I can't really imagine how I would have done well working remotely towards the beginning of my career. It was a different time with far fewer communication tools but, even taking that out, it would have been very difficult both socially and in terms of work discipline.
I suppose that could be one measure of productivity. Another view would be an increase in the number of backlog items closed in the 8hour.
As an example, I'm currently working on a proof of concept using Rust to replace some existing C++ that coordinates some Gstreamer pipelines. This sounds like the perfect task for remote: self contained task, redoing existing code, fairly small scope. But remote (or more specifically the time difference) makes it pretty difficult. I don't know Gstreamer that well, and I don't know the existing code that well. I'll often run into a problem that I KNOW someone on my team could answer in 2minutes, and unblock me. Instead I need to push through wasting valuable time trying to figure it out myself, or wait till they are online. Perhaps this is the time difference not the remote aspect at fault. If they were on the same timezone, it'd be a quick Slack message away
Now, I am reduced to writing code that slots in around my team. As for actual empirical metrics, I don't have many. We tend to track achievements as a team (OKR's etc), and my team has been hitting there goals mostly. I do feel we could achieve more though if I was onsite. A probably non valuable one might be Github commit count, which dropped from ~ 3500 for the 2018 year to ~ 300 for the last 6 mo. So at least on code alone, I am churning substantially less of it out.
I'm not poo-pooing remote btw. I think my story would be totally different in a 100% remote company, or a company with substantial remote presence. I think for me though, in this situation, I prefer on site.
Not to say that your issue might not be remote in general, but for me I definitely think that having much more than the 3 hour difference I currently have with my team would be tricky: just too much time where someone is waiting for someone else.
People who "can't adapt to it" usually is resistant to using technology to communicate efficiently. They're usually the ones who think it's just fine to do a quick loud meeting with a colleague (next to someone else's desk who has nothing to do with the conversation and is deeply annoyed by it)
Of course, talking in person is important, but it is absolutely not necessary to discuss 90% of mundane stuff.
"How do you remote work?" The answer is "Always work as remote, even if your colleague is next to you"
Sure, the latter can be replaced with other forms of communications, but it's not a 1:1 replacement and I totally get why a lot of people wouldn't want to work remotely, at least not full-time.