The productivity of working from home: Evidence from Japan
voxeu.org
voxeu.org
Nonetheless, and I say this as someone who is by no means opposed to WFH (I have often done it, depending on the contract), the results are not surprising. More work gets done in a dedicated space for work, surrounded by other people engaged in related work, and this is especially true if some of the team members are young and inexperienced. It's the same reason we have gyms for exercise, yoga studios for yoga, art studios for painting, and so on. I'm glad that these researchers tried to measure it, but the results are not at all surprising.
I also think that being watched produces a certain level of anxiety that is counter-productive.
I know this isn't a problem for most people, but this is such a huge issue for me. If you are talking in my vicinity, my brain locks on to your speech and prevents me from thinking about anything else. Unless I am listening to someone else speaking that is closer to me / louder there is no way to mentally block this out. If I'm trying to program and someone is talking near me, my productivity drops by maybe 80%. I either put on noise cancelling headphones, ask people to talk elsewhere (which irritates people who don't understand), or get nothing done.
Plus many acquaintances of mine reported that they had to resort to making a small room in their apartment a dedicated home office which they had to lock in order to prevent distractions from their kids.
I've always had the ability to work out from home, and during the pandemic I've pretty much had to, but I greatly prefer going to the gym. I'm really not social at all, but I just feel like I can get much more "in the zone" at a gym than my house.
For some people like the two us, having a dedicated recreational space is motivating you to do the recreational activity. Trying to do it at home invokes thoughts like "What's the point? I'll inhale so much dust and smog, what's the healthy aspect of that?".
So for us it boiled down to a psychological lock which seems mostly bound to proper air and temperature conditioning at the gym.
I don't think that first part ("dedicated space for work") is so significant.
In my experience working remotely answering bug bounty reports, what most helped with working was the presence of a chat channel containing the rest of the team. It was used, in part, to discuss or ask for help with difficult reports, but primarily for making fun of stupid reports. (One of my favorites in this category being "If I zoom in too far on your mobile app, the text starts to become blurry.")
That might not sound especially productive, but you can't do it if you're not looking at the reports. You could view the channel more abstractly as providing irregular notifications of the form "I just did some work" -- participating requires you to do some work, and that helps you keep working.
Always be careful about shipping your org chart.
More work gets done when you're tired from being up early for your commute, then the commute itself, and surrounded by distracting coworkers? Not for me, not ever again if I can help it.
All coffee and smoke breaks actually are aimed at taking a step back and gain some small extra energy to keep going.
I agree. And its value and time commitment needed does not change if you work from office or home.
In a modern tech company with all the wfh and productivity bells and whistles I now watch as my productive days vanish into 6 hours of meetings.
(If you are one of those poor souls with a 90 minute commute, I understand your pain, but you shouldn't try to generalize your experience)
10 minutes in a car is far less pleasant (to me) than a 25 minute walk.
Also 25 minute commute means 50 minutes out of the day, every workday. That adds up.
Yes, that sums up to over 4 hours per week, i.e. half a working day.
I can also now take a quick shower in the middle of the day when I need to get away from the screen to think.
Or I can make a granola bowl while I'm in a meeting. Or walk the dog, or do any number of low cognitive load things (especially for meetings that I'm expected to attend even when they are only tangential to my work).
Even if the commute was 30 minutes (a good day), I'd usually need to buffer time to plan for being late due to traffic accidents and construction (frequent).
Switching to remote work gave me back at least an hour every morning, and at least 1.5 hours in the evening. Anecdotally this has led to massive performance and quality of life increases.
But how many of the people making up this average leave home an hour earlier than most of us just to beat traffic?
How much buffer time is then also factored in, and wasted?
No even taking into account the cognitive and emotional cost of the commute.
i.e. the subway in Paris is full of stressed out people, stinks, is more or less reliable and makes an awful lot of stressful loud noises.
I’ve switched to cycling 2 years ago, and even when I get home drenched by the rain and frozen by the wind do I still not miss the "métro". At all.
And I’d bet driving can be quite stressful too.
Also, the less time you spend commuting by automobile, the less likely you are to be involved in an expensive, injurious or deadly accident, especially if you're commuting while while you or others are tired in the morning, or are tired after working all day.
Also consider overuse of cars is a big issue environmentally, while use of public transport tends to increase one's commute (bad schedules, detours).
[1]: https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans...
Now I have a 60-75 minute commute over underground, and I'm not looking forward to the return to the office. There's definitely aspects of working where I long for the office, but others where I'm glad for the solitude.
If we have to return 5 days a week I'll probably have to move and pay much more or have a tiny living space.
I value my time more than my comfort so am accepting of this, but it still frustrates me after living the afore mentioned dream.
I'd also note that I regularly start work an hour or two early since working from home - with >2hrs of commuting slashed from my day, if I get a good thought at breakfast why not bash it out?
When you're facing 12hrs as a baseline for your working day it's much less appealing to contribute outside that time.
I worked from home before the pandemic hit and been doing it on and off for 15 years, but I took the habit of going out for a walk before starting to work, it actually wakes me up for real and sharpens my thoughts.
It also forces me to dress and take care of my hygiene.
A thing that many home workers I know, adults like me, don't do everyday. Which is, IMO, a set back.
Now that due to the pandemic I am confined at home, I feel tired all day and my productivity has gone down, to the point that I have to work 7 or 8 hours a day, while 5 were enough before.
Suffering for waking up early for a commute is only a symptom of not being a morning person, I negotiate comfortable starting work hours in all my contracts and never had to wake up early in the past 10 years.
And you know the main reason the employer accepted it as a reasonable argument?
because out of the rush hour commuting is easier (which is actually true)
they never heard from me "I am late because the bus/subway/train/whatever was full"
In my experience distracting coworkers are a lot worse when you are online all day remotely: you can close the door, but can't block them on teams.
Finally: consider that the majority of people all over the World have much better work spaces than home offices.
Usually home offices for regular people suck and/or people live in small homes.
Especially in Japan or Europe.
one last bit: WFH workers that are less experienced have harder times getting a promotion than in presence.
It's sad thinking about a state of affairs where I would be biased towards the person in my team I see most often - either through better guidance/collaboration (affecting promotability over time) or mere water-cooler familiarity.
IMO working from home can even further destroy your work-life balance -- but only if you let it, which is sadly easy in these conditions. So I agree with you there, we have to get out of our way -- literally and figuratively -- to compensate for some negative WFH traits.
And, it's true that commuting and working in badly designed open office spaces are extremely bad for productivity.
On the other hand working in a group can be a lot more productive than alone in the home office even connected electronically because we are humans and need social stimulation, but this is not true for everybody.
We should not forget these points when commenting.
*We* are not going back.
Not going back to long commutes. Open office plans and office politics.
Not going back to cheap lunch in a plastic/cardboard box that costs a lot.
Not going back to paying high rent in bad cities without any quality.
Not going back to frivolous meeting.
Now after almost 2 years we have proved that yes the company can be run remotely, several things that were "not possible" are and the ultimate thing:
We can choose where we want to live and with whom.
We are not going back as same we are not going back to cable anymore.
People who have little choice will do as their employer commands. The rest will move on.
Then Covid-22
Then ... ...
Not to mention the constant "we lock / we don't lock", "kids go to school / kids don't go to school".
I tend to think this is likely true. I also tend to think that WFH productivity is improving as people adjust to it. A lot of people who found themselves suddenly WFH had to setup a workspace, buy a decent chair,desk, etc. There were also mental adjustments. Now people are pretty used to it and it's become the new normal. Going back to an office (if we do that) is also going to mean a performance hit as well because people will have to adjust to that change. Any kind of major change is going to lead to a performance hit for a period of time as people adjust to it.
I have significantly less wasted time working from home. At work, if I have 2 or 3 meetings in a day, that day is practically wasted for other work between walking to the meeting (I work on a large multi-building site), waiting for everyone to arrive, etc. Then it seems like people never want to end a meeting until its scheduled stop time even if we're done after 20 minutes. Then I have to get back to my office... Zoom has changed all of that. Zero time wasted at the beginning or end, and people don't seem to have as much of a problem saying "all right that's all we have, see you later" and ending a meeting early.
I can also get a bit more sleep in the mornings because I don't have to get ready to leave the house, commute, park, get to my office, etc. When the end of the day comes, I'm already home, giving me an automatic hour of extra time each day. You can do a lot with 5 more hours of free time each week. I get to see my kids for more time, especially my youngest, who I watch, as my wife oversees distance learning for the other two.
Even with the added distractions of working with at home with kids present, This past year has been one of the most productive in my entire career.
I'm sure that mine is neither a unique experience, but also not how it works for everyone else. But the mindset that says it's mostly more productive to work on-site is why some places ban WFH, as mine did before the pandemic.
I do, however, agree that WFH is least likely to result in the same or higher level of productivity for junior staff.
No. We have gyms for exercise because there is an economy of scale. Who wants to buy a rowing machine, weight machines, stair machines, etc.
Yoga studios are because people go there to have a class led by an instructor. And most artists don’t “go” to a studio, they have a place in their house.
For typing on a computer, there’s really not much requirement for an external place unless your house is such that you don’t have a desk in which to work.
I think this is the big one for me, at least with the experience of WFH for Covid, it is so much harder for people to ramp up and learn in a WFH situation, you can't just ask your neighbor about a weird compile issue, or why the IDE isn't able to run your tests and be helped promptly with them just showing you right away. Instead you ask in a Slack, get a slow churn of reponse, nothing helpful enough, so you then schedule an actual short meeting with someone else to walk you over it, etc. And this support doesn't naturally distribute like it would at the office, it seems it's always the same more senior person remotely who has to now help new members in these more formal ways.
I've also seen so much more just confusion around like, what to do, who's doing what, when to do it, etc. Getting everyone aligned and in-sync is much harder. And that adds a lot of overhead and creates a lot more churn I feel to projects.
On the flip side, when you have a clear task to do and you know what needs to be done and it doesn't depend on others, you can really crush through it. And you save a lot of time from commute, launches are faster, etc.
I've also found, appart from Covid, remote work is pretty nice in terms of work/life balance. You can make laundry while you work for example, saving you time in your day.
So I'm still a bit mixed feelings about WFH, I like some aspect of it, mostly no commute, convenience of being at home so I can easily cook my launches at launch time, do some laundry or have the oven repair person show up and manage them while I work and all that. But I also feel doing the actual day to day work is harder, the coordination overhead is pretty high, and everyone is more siloed, so anything that involves collaboration has more friction.
To be fair, I too could use some more socialization but not sure that work is the ideal vector for me. I'd rather have a less stressful job on my terms (in my home office) and/or with less hours and then just proceed and make my free time more pleasant around other people.
Coworkers and bosses ambling over to my desk for a "quick" interruption? Meetings that only make the meeting makers feel like they've accomplished something? No thanks.
I create a space of discipline at home with discipline. If the only thing keeping you from indulging in whatever Clubhouse-flavor-of-the-week distraction is the enforcement of order from above, you need to take a strong look at what is motivating you to work your job in the first place. I specifically exempt parents: my condolences for the chaos that must be to your peace.
We need to stop treating employees like automatons to be filled by the directives of middle management and start trusting them to produce.
There is a strong truth in looking at what motivates you though, for me it is just as much the interaction with colleagues working towards a common goal that is key. That goal is so much harder to accomplish in a WFH setting.
Other than that i very much agree that too many meetings is one of the biggest productivity killers.
But IMO working from home did outline some inefficiencies in the office work that finally started getting more closely inspected (like the needless meetings).
We only have so much time in a day, and I’m not sure that the balance of productivity factors will continue to weigh obviously in the direction of in-office work.
https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Work%20from%20An...
I’m sure the culture, infrastructure, and other variables as they relate to a company have an ability to greatly change the outcome.
This being purely subjective, and especially based on employers’ assessments only, discredits the entire study. And on top of that, these are not normal conditions - people are obviously under way more pressure and in fragile states due to the pandemic.
IIRC Google did have some objective data that purely looked at average commit rates and lines of code before and after working from home, and they saw a significant decrease in productivity during WFH (again, to your point, this was pretty early on in the pandemic and tons of people were dealing with childcare issues, etc.)
I remember people commenting "oh, lines of code, ha ha, you can't use that to measure productivity", and while that may be true for comparing individuals and groups, across a very large sample size over time (i.e. all Google developers), this is actually an excellent objective metric to gauge productivity.
In trying to find out more info on this, I only found references to an internal subjective survey (which as you point out are not that valuable):
>...Most notably from the June internal survey, only 31% of company engineers reported feeling "highly productive," down 8% from earlier this year. Furthermore, only 53% of engineers reportedly felt satisfied with their ability to manage their workloads. Of those, 30% spent less time coding that quarter than the previous quarter.
When google was asked for comment:
>...In a response to The Information, a Google spokesperson said the company-wide productivity rebounded after a short decline and has since exceeded pre-quarantine levels.
I don't know if this measure of productivity was objective either, but I suspect, that Google is much more interested in meeting product deadlines, numbers of deferred features and those kinds of things are fairly easy to measure. It sounds like Google's experience has been similar to every other tech company and having the bulk of people working from home has not hurt productivity.
Never quite understood the thinking behind that. My hunch is that I'm not understanding "face" properly.
Simple answer, they don't.
They spend a lot of time at work looking busy, but they don't actually do that much actual work. For me (a lazy Frenchman), Americans are the hardest working people I know in terms of actual productive work.
> Japan ranks twenty-first for labor productivity among the 36 nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to the Japan Productivity Center’s International Comparison of Labor Productivity report. Based on OECD data, the report found that Japan’s per-hour labor productivity in 2018 was $46.8 (equivalent in purchasing power to ¥4,744); this is less than half the $102.3 level in Ireland and roughly 60% the $74.7 level in the United States. The government has raised “work-style reform” as a key task and aimed to lift productivity, but Japan has continued to be dead last among Group of Seven nations since 1970, when survey records were first available.
Once I realised that the culture is based on far more on appearance than truth, so many things made sense that hadn't before.
[1] https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00619/japan%E2%80%99s-...
I don't blame the workers of course, I blame the leadership. Japan in particular seems just like the countries of the former Soviet Bloc (like mine -- Bulgaria) where good media propaganda is prioritized much more than actually working on the country's economy.
Still, again anecdotally, I can't say that I find Japan a place of particularly efficient work. Long working hours, certainly, but efficiency… not in my experience.
It's baffling to me that Japan is always singled out in these situations. If the same news was about any of our neighbours (South Korea, China, Taiwan) the amount of cultural explanations would be much smaller, and the discussion would be much more focused on the fundamental principles of the problem.
I understand that we are guilty of furthering this sort of discussion, but it is really frustrating to me.
If coronavirus is contained in South Korea, it is due to smart government, if it is contained in New Zealand, it is due to good policies... but if we are discussing Japan, suddenly we are talking about a "collectivist society" with face masks explanations extrapolating to some daimyo actions 400 years ago.
This makes it quite hard to reach the central points of anything that happens here - there's always a random cultural sidetracking. Maybe when a government official is caught lying and apologizes, he is just trying to save himself, and a shame oriented collectivist society is not the central point - a lying politician is.
There’s a lot less living space in the typical Japanese house/apartment compared to the much of the west. A lot of the apartments young people live in in the cities are little more than bedrooms with a kitchen area and unit bathroom attached, often with poor natural lighting to boot. That wouldn’t be a pleasant space to work months on end in.
I lived for a number of years in a “2DK” (2x rooms + dining/kitchen) apartment in Tokyo. While a reasonable size by Tokyo standards, frankly it was small and cramped. I can’t imagine really enjoying WFH there.
Comparatively, I now live in Australia in a house with about 4x the floor area of that apartment. WFH here is great - I can start the day at the dining table while eating breakfast, move to my study during the day and then when I feel like a change I can move to the couch in the afternoon. I could even sit in the garden if I wanted. It’s a great environment for focusing on a particular task.
We’re doing 3 days in the office currently and I’m pushing to maintain that - office for collaboration and team building, home for focusing.
In Japan in comparison the current discussion seems to be about more people moving to the regions. That helps solve the living space problem but makes in office collaboration harder. It will be interesting to see if the trend sticks.
also japanese work culture: don't go home until the boss leaves, which more or less translates to people being used to working under oversight, and more likely to stop working if the oversight goes away.
I kinda suspected this, as I'd been doing certain work from home earlier – but I was always surprised to hear leadership exclaim their fears about WFH, and their suspicions of both efficiency and productivity.
The worst part is, though, that many are vying for a swift return to a traditional colocated work-place – even though they agree that the current situation works fine (pandemic, and its specifics aside). I've even heard some say it's different to actually be able to pop up and peek over their employees shoulders, to see "what they're actually doing", even in cases things are going better than planned already...
Rarely saw him in the office. He wanted the concept of me being there.
It infuriates me to no end that (bad) leaders would rather go by their own feeling of control, rather than look at the numbers.
The 23% is the total, some teams have a higher increase due to the “best” teams have not increased with much. The “less better” have a higher increase.
My case, WFH gave me the opportunity to hand out bonuses over the normal bonus and some team members feel less stressed and have time to exercise.
Right now, travel is difficult, restaurants are closed, events are nonexistent, etc., etc.
So, yes, people may mostly be working ok (if not great) at home -- but I wonder if that will be the same when the outside world isn't so dire and boring.
One has to ask the actual goal of anyone who refuses to adapt - do they want to perpetuate the current status quo at any cost, or do they actually want to achieve results for the company?
- Telecommunication environment: a quiet dedicated room.
- Requirements by rules and regulations that some tasks must be conducted in the office: N/A
- Types of work that cannot be completed at home: None
- Distractions from family: Not more than the distractions from people at the office (coffee walks, casual talk, loud conversations outside meeting rooms). I much rather be distracted by my family than some random dude asking about my weekend.
- Private room for work: check
- Loss of face to face communication: Yes, please.
- Lack of pressure from boss, colleagues and subordinates: N/A. I still have the same goals and the same deadlines.
- Interaction with customers: Over zoom.
- Other reasons: N/A
I never understood this actually. What is so bad/annoying about a colleague asking how was your weekend? When I hear similar things like "Football talk at the water cooler" etc I wonder what makes an individual hate their colleague this much that simple interactions like this become an annoyance.
I prefer taking a coffee break at home and talk to my kids rather than some random colleague at work that I will likely never see again in less than 3 years.
For me personally, I love working from home. The company I work for offers free lunch but the quality is terrible but the management usually invites you to a lunch meeting so I have to eat the unhealthy food. Not to mention ping pong after lunch, useless meetings and mandatory greetings (hello, how was your weekend, happy Monday, happy Friday) and etc.
> "The requirements by rules and regulations that some tasks must be conducted in the office": 57.7% (part of a multiple answers question)
Japan, for all the unexplained praise it gets in some media outlets, has been widely reported to be one of the worst places in the world in terms of a work-life balance. Nobody can generalize an entire country of course, but bad working conditions seem to be the default state of things there (I have several acquaintances and they all left Japan a year or so later after they started getting pressured into almost sleeping in the office).
Add to that that their office culture seems centered on interruptions, the much-hated by us the devs technique of "patting you on the shoulder to check how you're progressing", and the idolization of time spent in the office as opposed to "what did you actually do?", and I could have told you that productivity as Japanese understand it took a dive.
And as the currently top comment states, measuring WFH in conditions when most employees have no choice but to accept it makes for warped and likely non-objective metrics.
Moved to Germany staying in 1 Room 36 square meter apartment and can't work from home.
My meetings disturb wife. Her watching TV/Cooking disturbs me.
Now I work from office and feeling more happy. Talking to real people instead of Zoom call and going out to grab some lunch uplifts my mood
There's two things that makes WFH productivity incomparable to west at least. One is the ridiculously small homes majority of (young) Japanese have to live in; if you suddenly have to WFH in that house your living room, bed room, eating/cooking room + WFH office all becomes one 10-20sqm shared space. Expecting one to be productive here is kind of ludicrous. Second is the low digitization + old, conservative work culture. Low digitization means the old-school work culture can't adapt to remote work, and most people either do commute anyway (Lockdown in Japan is not legally enforceable) or just have to work in a unproductive structure to start with.
Survey data is completely unreliable.
Lots of companies never reply, since they wont even trust if their own data will not be used against them. Those who reply can have an agenda.
I do appreciate that they allowed people to enter values above 100 for “more productive”. I suspect very few did though. Some box plots would could be illuminating.
[1] https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/publications/summary/20090004.htm...
I’m not sure this survey can really speak to WFH. We need higher quality evidence than this.
[1] Woods and West, The psychology of work and organizations, 2020
Working from home is different, definitely has its own issues those need to be solved and may not work for all teams/companies/roles and/or all the time. But what occurred to me after actually reading the article is that if WFH is what a lot of people want, it might one of the ways we'll handle the fact that due to increased general productivity a lot of jobs won't have to be 40 hours/week. (Actually, as far as I'm aware, it's already around 35 hours on average in Germany.) So instead of cutting back to 30, you might be able choose to work (mostly) from home at a 70%-ish efficiency.
(Disclaimer: I've spent most of the past 10+ years working remotely. Mostly from home, sometimes from coworking places. Now those were fun and a productivity killer for sure.)
Clearly parents aren't the entire workforce but we're not a minor portion either.
Anyone know where the Hanko stamp is?
Granted they are privileged enough to have their own home office, with a door and are able to play music without headphones, and have no kids. As opposed to the office, which is in a cube farm.
I live alone and practically next to my office, so while there's still advantages it mainly means I have to do chores more often and cook a lot more.
That's what most people want where I work.
We're definitely going to see more hybridization and I think now that the number crunchers realize they can save on physical space (we cut down our 5 offices to only one still active), the savings will far outweigh the losses on paper.
I do think there is value in understanding nuance with an in person conversation though so i'm not sure 100% WF is the best long term plan.
* You're still stuck having to live near your work place (unless you are one of the few people who enjoy extra-long commutes).
* You need to have your stuff in two places, or move it several time a week (if you need or like to have stuff).
* It is a mess to coordinate, to know who's going to be there or not; if you hoped to meet Person A and Person B in the same stay; and so on.
* Remote becomes second class citizen. A remote situation which isn't thought as remote-first organisation is a pain. Too much information circulates off-band. Decision are taken without people which were remote that day. You basically just wait for people to come physically to get things done. Remote becomes some sort of bastardised day off.
I expect then productivity to fall when people start feeling burnout. I also feel new joiners don't get nearly enough attention and their productivity is impaired from the start. People who have worked for couple of years are getting more time for their tasks only because they have easier time fending off distractions -- but tasks behind those distractions don't necessarily go away and probably amass in some kind of technical / organizational debt due to less casual communication.