Ask HN: Who is using WFH to work fewer hours? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who is using WFH to work fewer hours?

15 pointsthn-gap16 comments

The current Working From Home situation means that there is less control on whether someone is working or not at a given time, other than for meetings and chats.

While I try to keep my working hours at 40 per week (as my contract says), I have the feeling that some coworkers are using (or abusing maybe) the WFH to actually put in significantly fewer hours than the expected ones, while still getting all the salary, and has become their new norm.

What are people's experiences, both own and from their coworkers? For those putting fewer hours, how do you manage to go unnoticed?

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Here is what I have learned as a founder/manager who has built a team of 20 people so far (mix b/w remote and in-person, and hired and fired/lost a few along the way):

1. People who care about their work, get shit done and if their jobs are not time bound (e.g. Support), it doesn't matter whether they work from home or not. Even for roles where time sometimes is important (SLA etc), people with good ethics wouldn't be an issue remotely.

2. People who care but require a lot of guidance/supervision (may be entry level etc) are usually a little better off working in person closely with their peers and seniors so they can learn faster. They could transition to WFH/remote once they are up to speed. But early days, they are better off with their team in person. My 2 cents.

3. People who care BUT are doing the wrong job in the team/company. They are better off doing something else. They will fail whether working from home or in person. But they try and give it a shot genuinely. Still doesn't matter. Remote or in person.

4. People who don't care much, just want a job etc wouldn't matter whether are in person or remote. I have hired someone recently who just didn't give a shit (my fault for not seeing that during the hiring). he worked from office. didn't get shit done. Multiple rounds of feedback. He worked from home. Didn't get shit done. Didn't matter. He lasted 2 months which was a stretch.

> While I try to keep my working hours at 40 per week (as my contract says), I have the feeling that some coworkers are using (or abusing maybe) the WFH to actually put in significantly fewer hours than the expected ones, while still getting all the salary, and has become their new norm.

Why you care what other coworkers do?

As per your question: I have never worked exactly 40 hours (even if my contract says so). Reason: I can't do 8h/day of productive outcome. When I was working at the office I usually did around 4h of focused work + 1h of non-focused work + 1h meetings + 2h 'wasted' (e.g., chatting with colleagues, breaks, lunch, unofficial chats about work).

Since I'm WFH, I work 4h of focused work + 1h meetings (if any). That's it. The wasted time is no longer wasted. So, yeah I do work 'fewer' hours in theory. In practice, my productiviy has never been so good.

Do you tell your company that and do you have to "appear online" (e.g., active on teams) throughout the day?

I didn't tell my company back then when I was working at the office that due to our open space offices, I was wasting around 3h/day due to difficulties to focus (and, well, mainly because I can't actually get 8h straight of focused time).

So, no, I haven't changed my mind: I'm still not telling my company that I don't get 8h/day of focused work.

Regarding appearing online: I couldn't care less (so no, I don't appear to be online).

Work is - or rather should be - about value created rather than time wasted.

For most jobs, that is where time spent doesn’t immediately translate into customer value, work being measured in terms of hours is the greatest fallacy that came with scientific management.

Your customers probably don’t care about the hours you put in. So, why should you?

More often than not, hours worked is a metric that mostly serves the requirements of managers, which in turn often aren’t aligned with the company’s goals.

That said, it’s best to address this and make it an explicit agreement in order to avoid misunderstanding, resentment, and office politics. There are frameworks for doing so such as “Results Only Work Environment” (ROWE).

> Work is - or rather should be - about value created rather than time wasted.

Unless you have the number of hours in your contract. If you committed to deliver 8 hours a day but you deliver 4, then the other side of the contract may feel wrong about that.

While technically that's true, in most cases that's a flaw with employment contracts because such a stipulation creates wrong incentives: If an employee engages in pointless pretend work such as continuously checking emails all day long technically the time requirement of that contract has been met but the employer gets only very little value from that, if at all.

Sadly, to some extent this is - or used to be, since remote work might change that kind of culture, too - the reality in many corporate jobs, where the hours put in matter more than the results.

For the team I used to manage, I told them that I was not going control the hours they put in as long as the job was done, and the emergencies were handled. Turned out that I had to restrict them to work for too long and I constantly had to remind them to take breaks and to turn off slack on evenings. For myself (I used to be a manager) I concentrated on having my most strategic tasks done. Meetings were shorter, and I could skip the less interesting ones by turning on mute and doing something else instead, so all in all WFH resulted in less working hours. However the full remote set up turned out to be exhausting : due to the loss of physical interactions, I spent a lot of time solving conflicts and misunderstandings in my team that would have been easily sorted out by seing each other. My advice for you would be not to concentrate on the number of hours you put in, but rather on the fact that your job is done (in a 4-hours-workweek style). If it results in less hours worked, then enjoy it !

someone does all their work in 4 hours instead of contracted 8? shouldn't that mean their workload is wrongly managed and estimated to be too low? middle management should be on their toes!

We actually had some remote crunch time last year, and it's clear that some of the colleagues who were working 12 hours/day last year are working 0 hours/day now, because it takes them days just to fix a typo.

I don't think most people try to abuse it. A lot of people are reciprocal. If you trust them, they try not to abuse that trust. But most business relationships are simply take as much as you can from each other. These are also the same ones that don't trust their employees to work remote. You hear a lot of anonymous stories from HN about employees who slack off, and it always starts with hating their work environment.

I don't care if someone is working fewer hours so long as their work gets done. Heck, if someone on my team automated their job so they worked no hours at all I'd only be impressed.

I'd also prefer someone who is working from home to put fewer hours in than pretend to work. That benefits no one.

I am sadly working more hours as my home office is now my workplace and it’s harder to compartmentalize my life when I get an “ah hah!” moment for some tough problem at work.

Don’t get me wrong. I like my job a lot, but even so, life balance is important especially with a family.

I found out I work more when working from home. Mainly because during the day there are many moments I have to stand up from my desk and do something else. 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there and so in the evening I add extra 3-4 hours to compensate what I feel I lost during the day. I end up putting more.

Sometimes I put in a lot more, sometimes I put in a lot less. I used to try to keep balance, but I hate WFH so much that I've just given up. I suspect some of your colleagues may be feeling this way too (not necessarily "abusing the system").

I do pretty much the same. The only thing I worry about is that the expected amount of work planned gets done right and is completed on time. If I do that while working one day for 4 hours and the next for 12 or a bit less I don't really mind and as far as I can tell my employer doesn't mind it either as they understad that the WFH situation isn't really ideal for some poeple.

My managers are all abusing WFH, I'm probably putting more hours in than they are. Still, it's hard to stay at it when you have a blocker and it takes 3 hours to get a response.

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