Truth is a significant portion of employees, in my experience, advocate for work from home because they want the chance to slack off.
P.S. Someone has to say this.
P.S. Someone has to say this.
Some employees ARE more productive. Some are just as a productive but are happier because they have no commute. Some are LESS productive because they need the team structure. Some are less productive because they can get away with goofing off.
All of these things are true and they might all be true within a single team.
Might even be true for a single person at different times of the week.
Here I am, sitting in the office, getting nothing done because I had a stressful weekend.
Should have stayed at home, cooked something nice for lunch and slept an hour.
Would probably have been better for my productivity, but corporate thinks it's better when people are present.
Who does that well? What should be a good starting point researching this?
I have informal 1-1s to go over problems and promote jumping on a call with another dev if things are going sideways. Often our daily scrums end with some developer telling another: "Ok, I'll call you in 5 to go over that" which is a good sign.
As a manager it's more work, I can't just drop in on someone I know is struggling and ask how things are going and get them to show what that thing they are working on and then just let that conversation evolve ... I need to be more explicit and often more confrontational.
If someone is underdelivering, get rid of them. It’s that simple. The “are they goofing off” part is just speculation in your part.
- Some kind of work is measurable. It can be measured in person as well as from remote.
- With around 12 years of experience working in an office, I can guarantee you that 100% of the staff is not working 100% of the time. Maybe 60-70% ish. Why loom around in the office doing nothing when you can be at home and take care of yourself, your pets, your loved ones or cook a healthy meal, and so on?
- WFH is just taking back the time we devoted to work which is not work related such as commuting.
If someone can remain productive while having a good time during working hours, that's probably because they use that time to recharge and maintain their productivity. One of the biggest sins of managers is to try to over-optimize the team performance by having more control.
P.S. Someone has to say this.
We’ve evolved into brain work, not hand labour, and we’ve kept the same hours. My impression is that at the end of a week at the office in london I was beyond exhausted, and I could just barely recover before coming back Monday.
Now I work shorter hours, yes, and some might consider it slacking off (if they could watch it over a webcam). But I eat much better, feel much better, and don’t feel the need to get trashed over the weekend to recover.
Even in the office I would often take breaks to breathe again because I often felt the environment was a pressure cooker, I would go to the bathroom, go to the shop, find some excuse to eat. In my industry (advertising) overwork and burnout is incredibly common unfortunately.
So I personally don’t see it as slacking off. I know a lot of IT folk who don’t work as hard as most people in my industry and they get paid much better.
You don't need to be WFH to slack off. People have been slacking off in offices since the office was invented.
Whether and how much employees should be given the leniency to slack off is a different question.
Taking regular short breaks during the day to do these things takes about as much time as taking regular short break in the office to go get a snack or take a lap around the building or going to lunch.
"Slacking off" is anything other than being tied to the computer for 8 hours a day?
When I’m at home I find it much easier to create a distraction free environment without the noise and uneasiness of someone looking over my shoulder.
Even when I worked in an office I would take long walks or leave early, because a rested and happy mind is a productive mind.