Remote workers work longer, not more efficiently

This is the same study that was on HN a day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27467764

Economist's distillation is borderline disinformative, especially since it runs with overgeneralizations without qualifying what the "work" in question was. This study was based on a single IT services company in Asia.

As a rule of thumb, when someone makes generalizations about "remote work" the first thing to ask should be "what is the work", because there is a complex, non-linear interaction between the remoteness and the job description. This is important because I think there is some effort to subsidize remote productivity losses in certain ladders *cough* managers *cough* by lumping all remote work together and setting policies based on averages.

I find the discussion around "remote work" mostly uninformative. What kind of work? The idea that remote work either is, or is not, productive has a hidden assumption that this is independent of the kind of work. I don't mean just that some kinds of work are impossible to do remotely (at present, anyway); I'm talking about differences among those jobs that can be done remotely.

It's also so clearly dependent on things like the person's situation at home. Are they part of a two-adult, three-kid young family living in a 1,000 sq. ft home during the summer vacation when everyone is at home all day? Or is it a bachelor(ette) living alone? Is it a veteran who has been doing this kind of work for a decade or three, or someone just starting their career? All of these things matter, a lot.

Which would suggest that the best person to be able to predict whether or not working remotely is a good idea, would be that person, and also that the boss should be measuring productivity for that person, and judging accordingly. Some will choose to come in to an office, and others will not, and when layoffs come (and they always come eventually) the person who was working from home had better have been one of the more productive, or they will discover that laying off someone who works remotely is just easier for the boss to do than laying off someone who is in the office every day. That's not nice, but it's the way the real world is, and these studies of productivity of remote work (taken as a large mostly undifferentiated mass) are not very informative about that.

Doesn't seem that way to me, but when I work longer hours at home I feel happier, less stressed and my day fits better.

Ever since I had to go back to 3 days a week I'm getting less done, I'm more stressed and I dread the days of commuting and having to sit on my tiny desk with sub par peripherals and all the distractions.

So it's anecdotal, but chalk one up for longer hours at home being a preference, even if I don't think it's true.

To generalize in a simplistic way: upper management wants to go back, everyone below doesn't. So publications targeted at the former will support office work while others targeted at the latter will support WFH.

Does the original study attempt to account for the once-a-century pandemic occurring at the same time?

Seems like one should be careful drawing conclusions about remote work from the last year's data.

I'm sorry, it hard to trust the Economist. Upper management wants everyone to go back to work. The Economist writes to/for that audience.

Most IC's I know, do not want to go back to the office.

I've been working from home since March 2020. The moment I started I followed the work schedule to the minute. I work 8:30 to 16:00, with a 30 minute lunch-break. I don't work extra time. The work laptop gets closed at the end of the work session and that's it. If work somehow leaks into my brain outside of those hours, I make a note in a notebook I have and forget about that idea.

A few weeks back I received the good news that I can keep working from home indefinitely. It mustn't have been that bad for whatever fashionable metrics pass as "productivity" nowadays.

Edit: typos.

“It’s best for you AND the company” sorry but every time I’ve heard this exact phrasing, it was only good for the manager voicing it, not for me NOR the company.

This barrage of anti-wfh rhetoric from the economist is getting tiring

Here are what I'd call the two money quotes:

"Although they saved commuting time, this did not offset the extra hours spent in meetings."

"[T]he research shows that employees were able to achieve as much output with slightly less “focus time” than they had at the office. The real source of inefficiency ... was the time spent in meetings."

The study found no rise in productivity, neither did it mention anything about fall. So likely these employees are taking care of stuff at home during work hours and making up for it by working a little longer. I don’t see any issue with mixing some personal tasks with office work as long as the productivity stays the same.

So they studied ONE company. 10,000 people, but effectively a sample size of 1 since everyone would be affected in a similar way by that ONE company's policies and experience (plus it's an Asian big company, and they tend to be the most conservative bum-in-seat kinds).

They used the enforced remote work period caused by COVID in a company with little-to-no experience in remote work, then took the results of the company's quickly devised approach to remote working policy and used that to draw conclusions.

Basically, this study is worthless.

... Except that someone at the Economist figured (correctly) that this would be a good way to get traffic.

When your company culture is authoritarian to the point of installing tracking software on all employees' laptops and monitoring all their activity you might not be the best-suited organization for remote work.

The big quality of life thing I received from the Pandemic is that instead of procrastinating, I simply take a nap. No bullshitting. I know the elite companies have nap chambers, but WFH provided this for me - a regular ass joe the plumber developer.

No commute, rest when stressed by a problem, a deep dark secret that’s helped me just do the work or sleep. The simple rest has solved entire features for me. The humanity of it all is remarkable, but of course, a dirty little secret in this absurd world.

I’m human - come at me bro.

Edit: To deny the stress of the alarm clock, the commute, the theatrics of looking busy, like, I just can’t. We’re mentally healthier and I will absolutely not put up the bullshitters that say it isn’t true.

The economist article is primarily based on this study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3846680

> In order to better understand this decline in productivity, we examined data on employee time use from the analytics software. During WFH, employees spent more time engaged in various types of formal and informal meetings, especially video conferences. As a consequence they were able to spend substantially less time working without interruption. They also spent less time networking (both within the firm and with clients), and less time receiving coaching or 1:1 meetings with supervisors.These findings suggest that increased coordination costs during WFH at least partially explain the drop in productivity

Let's looks at this: More time in conferences - maybe but if one is looking closely there is a lot people get done in conferences when not watched - stuff in their household, talking a walk or real other work. Networking being measured as time with boss is ridiculous. The remote working setup in fact allows one to network fairly efficiently and the network structure changes. Instead of getting information from the boss one may now just get a pointer from the boss and gets the information from the horses mouth in a 1:1 call.

Interruptions in a shared/open floor plan office can not be silenced easily. Now one can just go offline and get things done - provided the company is sane and does not mechanically measure productivity.

And on the other hand one can indicate to be reachable while doing one's homework - allows for a small break and is a win/win for both sides but will blow up time logged into the system.

> In this paper we provide an analysis of the effects of the switch from WFO to WFH in a largeAsian IT services company.

Ok, let's parse this. There is "a" == "one" company and then it is Asian which covers a lot of countries but quite a number of them have a long working hour mindset. Not the best basis to extrapolate...

> 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.

Right. The problem is that my coffee machine and my shower are not wired up to be monitored and a lot of great work has been done there.

I work longer, more efficiently, and have more free time. It really is a win-win. There's just not much I miss about the office at all. Initially I said the only thing I miss is whiteboard sessions, but even that I've now found tools which work well (excalidraw).

Efficiency is for robots. I deliver value to my company on a continuous basis and if taking a nap in the afternoon means I work an hour or two in the evening then I don't see what worries The Economist should hold about the situation.

I believe I work longer. However, I'm also avoiding up to two hours of commute. Before the pandemic, commuting was the most draining part of my day. I'd gladly exchange the commute for extra working hours.

Very much YMMV.12 year remote engineer here, and I absolutely work less on the whole, versus my past in-office gigs, due to far more focused and efficient stints of development, etc.

Perhaps some folks just aren't the type that should/can work remotely. As all things in life, we're not made from the same mold.

You have to count the time in traffic in the efficiency calculation.

I think I agree in principle, but there are too many confounding factors. My teammates are online more of the day, true. Our productivity is no better, no worse than it was when everyone went to the office. But a major confounding factor is that we don't know how employees structure their time during the day.

Personally, I've found that in a pinch I can get a very 'successful' amount of work done in about an hour a day, if I choose to. The only person driving me to spend more hours per day is me.

If companies really believe that they are tracking productivity with automated metric collection, then they should tie compensation directly to the metrics.

If, on the other hand, they believe that the metrics are only reliable when done in a secretive/clandestine manner then they must, by definition, not correlate very well to actual productivity. If this is the case, the "trackers" have some explaining to do in terms of the actual value that they are adding to the organization.

That's exactly what happened to me. Found myself working at the kitchen table from 5am till 9pm. I am just not the work from home kind of person, I become self abusive.

Remote works makes me more lazy.

Half of the work is fighting your laziness.

I asked one of my relative in the middle-east how working from home is for her. She said it was really tiresome and she was very unhappy. She works in the airline industry that has been the worst hit during this pandemic. A lot of people have been fired. So everyone else is expected to do more work now. One way they are exploiting work from home employees is to not fix any timing (in the name of flexible working hours) - so instructions are sent at any time of the day with the expectation that they need to be acted upon immediately or the same day, and the work pile is so much that you have to spend long hours - sometime way past midnight to complete it. She is now actually so relieved to work again at the office, as her work is now confined to the "normal" 9 AM to 6 PM. That was an interesting insight for me. And I now understand better why France and Germany have passed legislation (or are considering) on not calling or emailing employees beyond work hours (unless they are willing to pay over time pay).

At my company this is for-sure true, broadly across teams.

Management has explicitly taken advantage of this by booking a lot of recurring meetings that start 8/8:15/8:30am in the morning when in the "before times" it was generally a 9am start. Management also feels comfortable sending Slack DMs at 6-7pm as well, knowing people aren't commuting so they can get an answer.

Regardless of setting boundaries, the noise just starts earlier and ends later.

That said it's a tough trade off for me because I do greatly prefer WFH and find I am handling a much higher workload stress only because I am at home.

I've told my manager multiple times over the last year that the level of meetings/work we are taking on is only sustainable because we are at home and everyones social lives evaporated for a year, to which he largely agrees.

What they expect when people return to office shall be interesting. Unless they are ready to accept the 20% reduction in task completion as we revert to in-office norms, I'll be moving on to a new firm after bonus time.

IMHO some types of work are better suited to WFH. And some are better suited to the work office. So how efficiently you perform maybe depends more on how well you marry your work tasks to your environment and tools.

For example, If I need to read a 1000 page report or maybe code a tricky PoC/spike free of distractions I'd say it's better for me to do that at home. The isolation helps. You can turn off messaging tools and email programs but someone will always find a way to find you physically if you go "off-grid" at work.

However the flip side may be that in the office it might be easier to brain-storm around a whiteboard in a more organic/ad-hoc way or maybe overhear a conversation from one team to another (if you're in an open plan layout) that you are able to contribute some value to.

Define efficiency and then I may agree. I not only work more efficiently from home, but work least inefficiently in an office setting. I don't have kids and my daily meditation helps me from being distracted. I personally think most information workers can work more efficiently from home.

Maybe not longer, but spread out their day to their liking. Like take a break where at the office is hard.

Why is this presented as a problem? If one works 1-2 hours more daily and still gets more personal/family time, for eliminating of unproductive commuting time, is this not good? is this not in fact more efficient?

Both times I've done work at home jobs (one 3 year stint and one 6 year stint), I loved it at first. And both times, as time went on, I found that I worked "half time" all day long, and grew to hate it. Oh the things I tried to combat the decay.

I'm really quite happy with my current situation. I spend most of my time in the office/lab working with peers, but at my choosing, I take my laptop home for a few days and do focused work. This happens when I have a pretty good idea of something I want to do that is primarily one type of work.

Is "productivity at home is same as at office, but work at home has more micro interruptions that researchers couldn't track" a viable theory? Would explain longer hours and seemingly lower productivity. (Workers are just taking care of little domestic things here at there throughout the day.) They don't say many details about how they determined when people were working.

I’ve found remote work is hardest with time management, specifically when I have lulls in the day where I don’t feel particularly focused.

At the office I would have gone to the cafe or for a walk outside the building (downtown), had a short break, and gotten back to work.

When I try that from home it doesn’t work well. I’m fortunate to have a home office with a door I can close. But if I leave that room I’m immediately in my home space, full of distractions. If I walk outside it’s a neighborhood, and unfortunately as part of the pandemic I moved to a more suburban locale so the walking is abysmal. More often than not I end up giving up on work for several hours, which leaves me with work I now need to do in the evenings or on weekends.

(The move to the burbs was done so I could have the office that closes… but losing the walkable neighborhood was a huge hit and I’m not sure it was a net benefit.)

I also miss the motivating effect of seeing my coworkers in the morning. There are plenty of days working from home where I just really don’t feel like getting started, and maybe I won’t start till 10 or 10:30 in the morning. This just means more work that I need to find another time to do. By contrast, knowing I had 9:30 stand up in person, with people I liked, usually with coffee, helped get me moving even on days when I initially didn’t feel like it.

The last drawback for me is the lack of commute. I had carefully arranged my life so that it was a 15 minute bike ride to work. That was perfect for me, and really helped me mentally transition from home to work mode. I’ve tried doing an “out and back” in my new neighborhood, but it doesn’t work, I think because I’m not actually going to a different place. Ie the bike part wasn’t the magic, it was the physical move from home to work. The bike was just a way to make that an enjoyable transition.

All of this adds up to a feeling that I’m always working and always needing to find time to squeeze in the next 3-4 hours of focus since I haven’t fit that all in my 9-5 box as I used to. The only real payoff I get in exchange for this is some increased flexibility scheduling appointments and what not. But, on the whole, it feels like it’s been a bad trade for me.

Finally, lest anyone think this is just because of the pandemic not being “normal WFH,” I worked full remote for an agency for three years (long before the pandemic) and had the same struggles then.

Everyone is different, and I think there has been an under supply of remote and WFH jobs in the past. I know that for some, none of what I’ve said applies, and WFH is a blessing. So I hope (and expect) that post-2020 it will be much easier for anyone who wants full-remote to have lots of good jobs available to pick from.

But as for me, I am really looking forward to getting back to office work - and advocating hard for offices with doors that close, to make that environment even better :)

Anecdotally, I work shorter days. Finish work much earlier than expected. I also set a hard timer to stop, save current work, log any relevant items I need to know tomorrow, do some non-tech items (updating tickets for visibility to PM), and then logoff, usually between 4-430 of each day.

It all depends on the people. For lot of folks who love remote work, it frees up 3-4 hours every day to do things they like and at the same time increasing the productivity. There is no need for 19th century factory style work hours for most people.

I definitely work longer but the intensity is much lower. Its a voluntary choice to work less intensely so I can handle childcare or lunch or take a nap. The total time spent is probably still lower if you include the commute during WFO.

Not commuting saves me about an hour each day. I feel less stressed from not fighting it out in traffic. It's also nice saving a bunch money from not paying for gas, parking and eating out.

I guess it depends on the job and position and person.

All of this recent conversion to work from home has been during a pandemic, which is a huge variable. Seems like none of these conclusions about remote work are totally valid.

Yes, but I get to work through pointless meetings and avoid chit chat. The efficiency comes from getting more hours in the same 8 hour block to do actual work.

The line between at work and “Not at work” has become very blurred at home. Especially with everyone in different time zones. I find that in the Midwest I need to start at least 2 hours early, and stay 2 hours late, to accommodate both coasts. It was easier when people were at the office. They’re either at their desk or not, and if not, then it’s not my job to track them down. Now if someone is not at their desk, I have to wait because they might be taking a break, or something with family.

In short, working from home has reduced productivity and maybe made some folks lazy.

YMMV. My output is higher and I work less: basically the complete opposite. I won't ever go back to working fully on-site, thats for sure

But is the efficacy higher? Efficiency is what the employer wants and a good worker responds with efficacy.

Felt the same. Excited to go office so can leave early, take longer lunch break.

I can be just as unproductive in an office as I can be at home.

I can't read the full article as its behind a paywall, but from looking at this glimpse in the preview it was based on installing some sort of keylogger to track time spent typing and tracking websites visited, which are both really poor indicators of productivity. Just as many workers will visit reddit, facebook whatever in the office as WFH, no metrics were used around the actual output of work.

All in all a poor study.

Yup, expect this propaganda for some time now :)

1 company is a pretty solid data set, looks as absolutely scientific approach, no shit.

Translation: people prefer working to commuting. Back to your regularly scheduled propaganda.