Silicon Valley has high salaries and very long commute times. But how does this apply to medium sized cities with low commute times and lower salaries?
How much more productive will employees be if they don’t have a dedicated office and if their commute time was like 15 minutes instead of the 2 hours someone from Silicon Valley may spend?
How productive is it for workers who have to work from home in their bedroom?
I’ve noticed this split in opinion from higher ups who have higher pay and thus have large, finished home offices versus others lower on the totem pole who don’t.
Also, I think WFH tends to isolate and stovepipe employees even more than they already were, which is a problem especially in larger organizations.
And the odds of fortuitous interactions drops dramatically while the latency for some red tape processes increases as well, since you have to fight an email chain with people with more and more disparate work schedules (and less tacit knowledge transfer and trust-building).
I think the narrative of WFH success is in many ways driven by the people for which WFH is a godsend due to really long commute times or having poor office workplaces (like open plan) and who either function well with very little guidance or who don’t but dislike the guidance.
But it’s potentially a lot cheaper up front not to have offices, just like open plan offices were cheaper, so I fear MBAs may discount these drawbacks and make WFH the default in many, many places where it’s a bad idea.
(Still a huge fan of having the option of WFH, but there have been massive productivity losses in my workplace from strict WFH requirements... in part because we do a mix of fundamentally physical lab work, not just sitting in front of a computer.)