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Comment by bhupy | Hacker News Reader

> According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nonfarm business labor productivity rose by over 10% over the course of 2020, despite the fact that most of us are working from home.

I’d push back on this claim with another piece of relevant data: employee mental health has plunged [1][2]. While it’s true that productivity has increased, it’s not obvious that this is sustainable.

[1] https://www.hibob.com/blog/covid-19-employee-wellness-survey...

[2] https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/both-remote-and-on-site-wor...

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I think not being able to look forward to doing anything new on a weekend is the reason mental health is plunging...not the fact that the commutes have been eliminated.

It's nuanced and different for everyone. The isolation has been brutal for a couple of my single friends in tech. Being able to mingle at the office was a big portion of their social interactions pre-covid.

Also not everyone has a living setup that works for WFH.

WFH is great for someone with a big house where they can convert some part of a room into a study. It’s less great for someone living in a studio or apartment with limited space.

Why a studio? If you WFH you can choose anywhere in the world with the space.

I re-upped my lease just after WFH and they didn't raise the rent. So I'm not going anywhere and it seems like we'll be back to normal-er by the time it comes up again.

Lots of people have rent terms or leases, which can’t be changed amidst corona. Especially without knowing what post COVID life will look like.

Moreover, some people like being in the heart of the city and as such, can only afford a studio.

Why do people live far from big cities or in rural areas? With a cushy enough job you could downsize to a studio right by work.

People have different preferences on where they want to live. I don't really see how shaming one choice is supposed to be better than shaming another.

I've heard people say commutes are helpful for their mental health.

If you live in a rural place and commute into a suburb your commute is probably like an hour of forced meditation. If you like driving it might actually be good for you.

If, on the other hand, either end of the commute is in a city/you don't like driving it probably wears on you every day.

> I've heard people say commutes are helpful for their mental health.

I'm sure that for any drudgery out there, you can find someone to extoll their positive aspects. In my case my commute was rather pleasant, a comfortable 30 min bicycle ride. However most of my colleagues had to endure crowded public transport.

>employee mental health has plunged [1][2].

I wonder how much of that is due to Working from Home, and how much of that is due to Covid-19 with hundreds of thousands of people dying, weddings, funerals, churches, celebrations, etc being closed.

In an alternative world of working from home, but you are free to go the coffee shop to work, meet with extended family, and now have to worry about catching a potentially deadly disease, I would bet mental health would be much better.

Also, it is possible that employees were putting in extra effort so that they won't be one getting laid off in case their company decides to do a layoff. It was a scary environment in the beginning with a layoff being announced almost every day.

> employee mental health has plunged

I can only speak for myself, but not being to work out at the gym or do anything outside of my home is the problem, not the god damn office.

Yeah, it's weird how the narrative is that mental health has plunged because people can't sit in traffic and go to the office while completely ignoring we've been in a pandemic for over a year.

I miss pre-pandemic WFH, and want to get back that ASAP.

Mental health has plunged despite people being freed from forced commute working conditions, not because of. This is easily explained by the pandemic.

This is too broad of a stroke to be brushing with.

Personally, my mental health has gone worse for non-COVID reasons. I live in an apartment and the limited real estate means that it’s hard to dissociate work space from living space. I’m not the only person who lives in an apartment.

I've been remote for three years.

My favourite way to solve that dilemma used to be going to a cafe for a few hours. Guess what I haven't been doing since the pandemic started?

At the moment I'm blessed with plenty of space, and the office is the office. But still fewer social outlets than I would like. Summer can't get here soon enough.

Different strokes for different folks.

I don't really like cafes either. I tried it during a brief period when full lockdowns hadn't started yet but we were allowed to work from home.

- Cafes are noisy. If you need to have a conversation, it's hard to hear the other person, and it can be hard to hear you, and you have to be mindful to not disturb you.

- You have to pay your way at a coffee shop, and I enjoy supporting local business, but I don't need to consume all the calories and caffeine of a new drink every 1-2 hours.

- Cafe seating isn't office seating, and if you sit too long in it you can tell. An aesthetically pleasing cafe chair isn't necessarily good for the back.

I can attribute my mental state change (to the worse) to the stress caused by stupidity of the COVID-19 mitigation measures.

So employers get a productivity boost and cost savings if they sacrifice their employee's mental health? I'd love to believe we live in a world where that would stop them.

I mean, the technology industry (especially FAANG) aren’t exactly known for sacrificing long-term growth for the sake of short-term penny-pinching in the context of employee happiness.

Any company that (pre-COVID) had a proclivity to sacrifice short-term profits by providing free food and other generous onsite perks is probably also a company that might choose to scrap plans to cut back on offices if doing so has a positive impact on their employees’ mental health.

it's very possible that mental health is dropping due to the rest of society being closed down as well. if everything other than "office life" opened up, i imagine mental health would go up too.

> employee mental health has plunged

Just an anecdote of this one guy, but I really would love to go back to office right now. WFH has killed my enthusiasm and I really don't think my overall productivity has gone up.

Anecdote of a second one guy: you're not alone to feel like that.

Why the hell is this downvoted?

Because WHO/WFH has become a zero-sum political game rather than an actual debate.

I'm not sure that I'd correlate remote work with that during a year like this last one.

Covid Lockdown - and almost complete absence of ability to visit relatives, travel (especially internationally), go to restaurants, participate in group activities - has been much harder than simply WFH.

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