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Comment by dml2135 | Hacker News Reader

I'd question how conclusions are being drawn here. I think the key takeaway is that output did not change.

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?

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I'm with you. I mix personal tasks and work tasks throughout the day. My work output is the same or better, but the stuff I'm getting done around the house - SKYROCKET! My quality of life has improved dramatically.

Honestly, I think the study sort of damns itself with this line:

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Or maybe people need to have more formal meetings because they can’t have informal conversations like they would in the office.

The study also damns itself because they chose the absolute worst possible timing for their “research” and measuring wfh productivity. It’s like they don’t understand how much the pandemic changes everything.

Sort of? The largest outlier is child care time. Under non-pandemic conditions, where the children are not in the house, WFH is a decidedly different beast. As a WFH employee, even pre-pandemic, I firmly believe it is not the same style of social interaction; it has a much stronger "contractor" feel. If you are comfortable and familiar with a standard work environment, the transition can be difficult. That said, the numbers here are very bad: it looks like most things just devolved into meetings.

Big if there, Dan. You sound a bit bitter about meetings, that's not the case everywhere.

What are you even getting at? Are you saying that people misreported "uninterrupted work time" while in the office? Because I know if a coworker asks me a question in the middle of the day, it definitely isn't uninterrupted work time.

I’d put money on it being the case everywhere.

I mean not really. I have 2 one hour meetings per week. One is a 1on1 with my boss and one is with my team. That is about perfect

That just means you already managed to not have those meetings that the average company is apparently wasting time on, not that those meetings you already don't have are beneficial.

I have meetings with my research group and I look forward to them!

They go into this in the paper; it sounds like they have a quite granular level of detail here:

> 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".

This is unethical research, full stop.

Why? Did they not get consent? Getting that sort of information isn't terribly difficult. Even basic network monitoring and log parsing would provide a lot of insights into how someone is interacting with a computer.

Among other reasons, in any IRB-approved study people need to be able to withdraw consent with no adverse consequence. It is likewise practically forbidden to experiment on prisoners, which this has more in common with than a normal study.

That's an interesting twist. I like the positive aspect of it given I've mostly felt guilty for being able to flexibly take on more household tasks while taking breaks from work.

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.

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