Work from Home and Productivity
bfi.uchicago.edu
bfi.uchicago.edu
The authors then go on to say that since hours worked increased, productivity decreased. But how do we define what an "hour worked" really means? I know that I definitely spend more time "working" during WFH in the sense that I am either being responsive to colleagues or actively working on my own work. However during that time I am also doing way more household tasks than I would be working in an office.
You may call that a loss of productivity, but I'd call it an increase in flexibility, freedom, and job satisfaction. And to reiterate, output stayed the same, so what's the problem?
I do think things would trend even more positively had this not been a pandemic. Folks would have more flexibility in work location and could "pick their spots" better in the sense that they'd have more control over their environment and could tailor it to specific tasks.
> Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably.
You can easily translate this as:
> Without workers in the office, middle management was left to spend additional time on pointless meetings, inhibiting their workers from spending their time on work tasks.
If that is true, let's consider the facts:
1. Workers worked longer hours. 2. Workers spent more time in meetings than before. 3. Workers achieved roughly the same output.
Now, if we stare at these three things really hard, I think the conclusion is that additional meetings do not play the supplemental role that many managers seem to believe it does, and in fact minimizing meetings will increase productivity.
You're just drawing meaningless conclusions based on nothing but your hatred of management lol.
>I think the conclusion is that additional meetings do not play the supplemental role that many managers seem to believe it does, and in fact minimizing meetings will increase productivity.
I think the actualy conclusion is that people are less productive at home because many people can't work properly due to an unfavorable working environment. Meanwhile since there's no office hour anymore (no commute to divide personal time from working time) people work from breakfast until dinner. In the end you get the same amount of work done but the timeslot that was dedicated to work during the day was 2-3 hours longer than when working from the office.
> The data also include information on hours worked, our primary input measure. This is measured in a sophisticated way, as the analytics software takes into account whether an employee actually engages in a relevant task (which counts as work time) or merely procrastinates at their desk (not counted), by monitoring which software tools the employee uses. Our key outcome measure is Productivity, output divided by hours worked. Thus, in contrast to studies of productivity during WFH based on surveys, our outcome variables are based on relatively objective analytics and monitoring data.
> Moreover, our data include (for a subset of employees) how time was allocated to various activities. That includes meetings, collaboration, and time focused on performing work without distractions. It also includes information on networking activities (contacts) with colleagues inside and outside the firm. Finally, we have data on employee characteristics such as age, experience, tenure at the company, gender, whether or not there is a child in the home, and an estimate of commute time during WFO
This sounds overall quite invasive, so at least from the description, they claim to be able to tell the difference between "an hour logged into slack doing household tasks" and "an hour working with 100% focus on a task".
Read the instructions here to learn how to read >
We do daily 30 minute standups - which we intentionally run inefficiently at this point. It's a great time for watercooler talk, catching up, and generally building rapport that's hard to build at remote companies.
We also do twice weekly hang-out sessions. It takes some time to develop the habit. It's probably not for everyone but it's been incredibly positive for our team.
I have daily stand-ups with my team. I've never made it explicitly clear but kind of driven it towards a routine of "get the work out of the way, then we have until X time to chat and bullshit".
I have a weekly planning meeting with a few members of the team. Same deal. Get the planning out of the way, then the remainder is for general chit-chat, talking about personal projects, etc.
Every week I have three hours blocked off where I do a "check-in" with a bunch of other team leads. It's dual-purpose: There's a lot of things they might be dealing with that they'd never feel rose to the level of scheduling a meeting to discuss (whether problems or just wanting input, etc; this was previously a lot of the water cooler talk), but when the time's already there then they'll find all sorts of productive ways to fill it. And chit-chat once that's all out of the way.
I do an hour once a week with my boss one on one.
The entire office does a monthly-ish hour to play some silly online games and hang out as well.
We've been hiring like crazy so at this point a lot of these people are people I've never met in person but I've built a pretty good rapport and relationship purely over video chat and Slack.
All-in, I spend like 6 hours a week on this. And most of it's scheduled around the beginning/very end of the day where most people aren't as interrupted or super productive to begin with. Truth be told, this is barely more (if any) than the amount of time that we were spending previously on socialization at work. If we account for the _lost_ productivity of being distracted in the office, then I've definitely gained time.
The hardest part was just accepting that I was going to have to let some relationships go. As much as I really enjoyed talking to that one frontend engineer and it _occasionally_ resulted in some sort of productive action, the trade-off just isn't there so I need to rely more on the team leads to solve and communicate those issues.
The problem is that "office" in today's world generally means an open office layout designed to waste your time and distract you. If "office" meant an actual office with a door you can close so that you can do focused work, the situation would be different.
I dont want to sound rude, but most people here seem to focus more on actual work output.
> discussions, small talking, sharing music, joking around.
This doesnt sound like work at all, only busywork; what negatively affects those around.
Most people prefer to do get shit done and go home (when you work from home, you remove the commute part) and then spend time with real friends, since people at work very often are not your real friends.
Jamie is forcing ppl to come into work and making up stupid anecdotes about how ppl are unproductive at home. Him being "fed up" means i have to risk my life. [1]
I don't understand how he is getting away with this.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/jamie-dimon-fed-up-with-zoom...
https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/kroger-blasted-for-endi....
> Employee rotations at JPMorgan will be subject to a 50% occupancy cap until U.S. authorities revise their social-distancing guidelines, according to Tuesday’s memo. The bank advised workers that “with this time frame in mind you should start making any needed arrangements to help with your successful return.”
Why are you trying to make it seem like they told you to come in every day starting this week, whether you're vaccinated or not?
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/jpmorgan-...
We have roughly about same announcement. It is confounding to hear "You all did great working from home. Now be back asap to work and meet face to face." Apparently working via slack/webex from office is vastly more productive than doing same from home.
where did you get "every day starting this week" , pulled it out of your ass?
I'll send you my managers email address you can ask him personally if you are so curious. Maybe you'd have better luck finding out than me.
A useful natural experiment is when something changes in a way that can only (or at least almost entirely) affect your outcome by way of the cause you're interested in. In the cause and effect chain of A -> B -> C, if A affects B, but not C, then you can exploit wild things in A to learn about how B affects C. But if A affects C outside of B, you can't tell the effects apart.
COVID does not constitute a natural experiment!
It's a mantra that apparently needs repeating. The pandemic changed work from home. Work from home presumable changes productivity. The pandemic also changes productivity, so you can't tell where the pandemic-driven productivity changes are from more granularly. Learning anything that generalizes requires tremendous care.
Let's keep in mind here too that "hours between commute to/from office" != "hours working." Coffee shop runs, lunches, snack breaks, chatting, walking around...
One of my issues early on into the pandemic is that I was fearful of taking walks and my productivity actually dropped as my physical exercise decreased. When I realized this and started emphasizing active movement while working (dancing to techno) and taking walks to get in bursts of fresh air I found that things more than reversed.
I would note that I have to deal with ADD and physical activity has a long history of positive impacts on folks with such - so that advice might not go for everyone.
The irony is optimizing for productivity in one while optimizing for billing in the other.
If you are WFH, then you are not only doing your main job, but you are also working in the facilities department. If you go to the office, there are people who clean the office, take out the garbage, maintain equipment, clean the bathroom, etc.
At home you have to do all of that.
There's also the very real question of division of usage - most of us are likely working in spaces that intersect heavily with our private spaces (since we didn't move to our current residences with having a dedicated home office in mind) and that creates a pretty complex process to actually assign responsibility - it shouldn't be 100% in either direction, but it's hard to figure out how much of that time was legitimately caused by you working from home.
Few, if any, "natural experiments" are actually experiments in a rigorous sense. But they are a thing that happens: you have an uncontrolled happenstance that allows you to infer, but not prove, something you want to learn more about.
When the surface meaning of a term has no referents, it will often be co-opted to refer to something people need a term for (assuming it's compact and convenient). Another example that comes to mind is "homophobia", which doesn't refer to actual "fear of homosexuals" but rather to a dislike for them -- a thing which is very common but doesn't have a convenient, short expression. (The term actually comes from being the opposite of "homophilia", a reasonably straightforward but outdated term for homosexuality.)
So it's true that we don't really have a good control and will have difficulty separating out real causes and effects. But a thing definitely happened and we can definitely try to learn something from it -- a notion that happens often enough to merit a name. If you've got a better one we can try to make it catch on.
> Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%
> Employees also spent less time networking, and received less coaching and 1:1 meetings with supervisors
> Employees with children living at home increased hours worked more than those without children at home, and suffered a bigger decline in productivity than those without children
I would say these results have more to do with COVID effects and forced, sudden WFH than inherent characteristics of WFH.
And, in normal times, remote workers often have/should have off-sites/on-sites, in-person team meetings, etc. And I haven't actually had fewer 1:1's. Probably more because I haven't canceled as many due to travel. (Which isn't necessarily a positive thing but still.)
Personally, the biggest change for me in COVID WFH was not the remote meetings -- I already had plenty of those -- but it was the introduction of a second job: part-time Kindergarten teacher.
doesn't sound that sophisticated to me lol. in any case their claim that their output measure (completed tasks) is "rigorous and objective" is questionable to put it mildly: "The company uses a normalized measure of output to make different jobs and roles comparable.For example, for a programmer the output measure might be programming tasks completed divided by tasks assigned, times 100. For other roles, Output might be the number of reviews (e.g., of code) completed relative to the monthly target, or the number of reports delivered relative to the target.". no mention made of the relative effort required for each programming task, or the quality of reports delivered - not to mention no assessment of whether those targets accurately measure anything that's beneficial to the company.
Update Text For Button -- started 5/10, completed 5/11
Update Color Of Button -- started 5/11, completed 5/12
Update Margins Of Button -- started 5/12, completed 5/13
Update Border Radius Of Button -- started 5/13That's genuinely awful. I wonder to what extent employees are aware of the analytics, and how many people just set up macros look busy.
Also, a lot times I just need to think without typing anything. There are days where I only type few lines of code but getting the knowledge to write it takes hours of looking at the business and making sure there is no ill effects somewhere.
I still deliver and my boss doesn't need to hold my hand.
In this industry we all know what this really means. Some of us have dealt with these "skilled professionals". I don't think spending more time in their IDE is going to make them any more productive than they already are...
It seems like a lot of people don't understand that's the default behavior of lots of computer systems (the standard logs in Windows, Linux, macOS desktop operating systems will provide a decent indication of how the computer is being used regardless of installing any special tracking software).
The same thing happens without technology--managers still lurk around watching employees unless there's a high level of trust between the employer and employee (which seems to be rare)
The nuance is how it's used.
But no one seems to even bother disputing that college-from-home is an inefficient way to learn compared to in-person. It is practically a universally accepted fact. Meanwhile, the entire internet seems to rush to find flaws, no matter how minute, in any study that casts the faintest negative light on working-from-home.
When learning in-person, cheating is less easily facilitated, student engagement is more naturally promoted, discussion and interaction is inherently encouraged, distractions are much fewer, and the general atmosphere is fully conducive to the retainment of information and study material.
> The company provided rich data for a large sample of more than 10,000 employees, for 17 months before and during WFH, from its personnel records and workforce analytics systems. It has a highly-developed process for setting goals and tracking progress towards them, culminating in a primary output measure for each employee.
I am skeptical. Why? I've never seen a half-decent way of quantifying output in all my time on the job at 7 companies. Sure, this company complies enough numbers so that clients and upper management feel the performance is quantified, but that's not the same thing. At a minimum this productivity metric needs to be interrogated more closely.
Them: "I finished this over the weekend."
Me: "That's great, but you're to be clear you're not expected to do that. You should feel free to take weekends off to recharge!"
Them: "Yeah but what else am I going to do right now?"
If there hadn't been a pandemic, they would've been doing all of these other things and then more likely to cut back on work when the end of work hours roll around.
Honestly, IMO most of economics "research" is just a random assortment of bullshit viewed through a lens of confirmation bias. Results don't match your priors? Make adjustments to your model assumptions until it does. Disagree with a result? Point out at all the ways in which those assumptions are imperfect. Results match your priors? LGTM.
Should be studied more, but wouldn't you be surprised to know that the pandemic itself (stress, isolation, deferred medical care, etc.) caused an increase?
Honestly, I think if that's the general consensus, then who gives a shit about productivity?
Employees, especially in America already have almost no bargaining power, literally no statute mandated vacation, terrible worker protections like "exempt (from overtime pay) employees" which I'm sure almost everyone on this board falls under. So literally the more hours they make you work, the less per hour you earn. How that one got passed congress without a revolt I'm not sure I'll ever understand.
But I digress....if employees like WFH a lot better then they should have it.
Then, if the actual measured loss is 20% then perhaps it actually went up by 30% (the difference).
One cannot really conclude much from this study due to a lack of control, and I hope this is discussed honestly in the paper.
One thing I could observe is that working from home required a lot of people that are not used to it to learn to communicate professionally in writing, which they weren't used to. With the option of clarifying via a quick personal chat on the corridor taken due to an "all remote" forced work mode, poor communicators really do need a lot of overhead in terms of extra Teams/Zoom/Slack... meetings to get their message across.
Another observation was there was suddenly a lot of extra work. Initially I expected to have more time due to less business. In reality, CoVid19 also presented new opportunities, so extra projects were launched that would not have been required without the pandemic. Another variable that can't really be controlled.
Working from home as a planned/rolled out thing for a percentage of people is vastly different from a pandemic improptu shutdown. I was actually surprised how quickly the whole business world adjusted. I've been arguing for years in favour of working from home but was told it can't be done, or people won't do enough work.
Surprising No One.
I doubt it will change, though, unless employees start to organize in unions and demand to be treated in less patronizing way.
Across companies I’m seeing it’s getting increasingly difficult for people who liked a simple 9-5 or 10-6 in the pre-pandemic days. On most days they could just switch-off from work in the early evening by leaving the work place.
That boundary is now constantly stretching. Someone has a kid so they want a different time, someone has daily house chores so they’d rather take that 3-5pm off and then extend to 5-8pm and they’d expect others to adjust around it.
It’s especially bad in my country, India. This place already had a chronic national work-life balance issue and it’s limitless in many ways now. US companies anyway treat this place as offshore software worker colony no matter how you’d want to dress this in words. I recently switched from an Indian startup (quite bad work-life balance) to a US firm and I could never imagine it would have changed for the worse. Anyway I’ve resigned and I’m interviewing only for very large MNCs where I know multiple people personally who can vouch for this part of work culture.
Now of course you can be strict about your time and slowly become “that uncooperative person” in the team. Or you can just bleat about how that’s just company failing to streamline things.
Problem is majority seems fine with not having a work boundary in their lives that used be a hard stop early in the evening and then everybody else is automatically expected be okay with this.
There is no fix of this other than very clearly separating work and home.
> Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company
I suspect companies that already had strong WFH and remote friendly practices in place probably had very different outcomes. Western companies probably also have very different communication styles that would lead to different outcomes as well.
On top of that are kids and wife who drive me crazy and constantly interrupt when you have to focus.
This is not a correct way to measure WFH, during normal WFH situation my kids would be in school and my wife at work..
And coworkers wouldnt be so desperate for interactions with others.
However, I've been super productive when I've been able to get some quiet time outside of meetings.
I joined during covid and obviously working at home I was used to everything being truly 1:1 just between us. (I'm blessed with a great boss)
The few back at office days rattled me a bit in terms of "who is listening/judging" in open plan.
I've spent years in open plan so that aspect isn't new...but somehow the covid contrast rattled me
I book 1:1 with my manager and it was always in a meeting room.
Is it common for you to have 1:1 in your cubicle?
A manager 1:1 in a nonprivate space sounds awful.
A recent properly-conducted randomized controlled trial found that WFH improves productivity: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18871
Also, this surveyed a single "large Asian IT services company". Its an anecdote with significant cultural work biases that may make this inapplicable to eg. American firms.
And these are not cold numbers from an study, it is my reality and it can explain my bad mood of the last times.
How can that happen - kids aside? The best part of WFH uninterrupted time for the more complicated tasks. We used to call with our phones and felt obliged to pick up. Now we call via Teams and you can simply tune out or be in a non-interruptible state and people are less tempted to call when I'm trying to focus.
I don't particularly care either way since I've been work from home for the last 15 years. All I can say is that working from home during the pandemic isn't the same as normal times. Even if you don't have kids at home, there's a huge difference between working from home and staying at home all day long every day, versus going out for lunches (especially with friends), dinners, doing things on weekends, etc.
I'm lucky enough to live in a suburb and have nice walking trails that I could use that were pretty much empty during this whole thing - for much lunch break I regularly eat lunch and take a small walk along a creek. Or take a quick dip in my swimming pool. I've had it a lot better than some of my friends in larger cities that felt like they could go practically nowhere and do almost nothing.
Our management “COVID-paused” lots of projects because of uncertainty.
So, which one? TCS, Wipro, Infosys, IBM, Capgemini?
I want to know so that I can avoid it, not because of the study results, but because they install this "Sapience" tool to spy on their employees.