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Comment by TexanFeller | Hacker News Reader

Companies will require RTO because it makes employees more productive. I've worked at one small and one large company during the pandemic involuntary WFH. In both cases productivity was noticeably worse, most especially for new employees onboarding remotely. I think WFH a couple days a week makes me more productive due to focus, but I'm unproductive and miserable now when none of my teammates ever come in. We're laughably disconnected and not functioning like a team. Zoom and Slack are just no substitute.

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>> during the pandemic involuntary WFH

There you go. A lot of companies that were forced to WFH -don't actually want it- and so haven't invested in changing their culture to actually be effective at it. Some companies that -have- embraced it...also haven't changed their culture to actually be effective at it. But some want it, and have, and, oddly, I think they're in the majority, since studies keep showing an increase in productivity and employee happiness https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivi... .

You can't measure productivity during the pandemic and assume it speaks for work from home in general. There were a lot of things about the pandemic that caused a reduction in productivity that had nothing to do with whether or not workers were in an office.

Also consider that productivity might be best with employees choosing their office schedule. Some might be more productive in the office five days a week, others zero... and the majority will probably be somewhere in between, spending some days at home and some days in the office.

Bottom line, though: the pandemic is not a good time to measure productivity for any reason, and consider it representative of the norm.

I work at a big company that is remote only and productivity is high. Might it be that they actually thought about how to implement it and kept improving the tools and processes needed?

How did you measure productivity?

It's a personal view obviously. But teams are shipping way more than some startups I worked at, including things customers really want. We have quarterly meetups and a myriad of events to keep the human connection too. No full-time-open-office-all-in-the-same-room-serendipity I've seen in other companies was actually valuable. It's just that it was the only way people knew to work, until companies were ready to go remote. 10 years ago we didn't have the tools.

my remote only company is way more productive than my previous in-person company, so there’s the counter anecdote to your anecdote

I'll take any IC or low-level employee's productivity claim with a grain of salt.

For a CEO, productivity is at a first order is operating margins. 99% of HNers have no clue how to calculate that (nor have the necessary data).

I mean being Real, most CEOs seem to not know how to do that either… All the “top companies” are cash fires with VC backing.

> 99% of HNers have no clue how to calculate that

This is just plain wrong. In big organizations it's the front line worker and not the CEO that can confidently gauge productivity changes simply because C level bean counters always try to quantify productivity with flawed metrics likes lines of code when most people know it's nonsensical.

I think, being generous to the GP doesn’t matter how “productive” a single person or team works, if the whole thing isn’t working well (usually measured in margin) then it doesn’t matter if the engineers “feel” more productive.

And what’re your qualifications and citations?

How would a C-level person measure my productivity? Go on GitHub and filter for my PRs and count .. merges/week? commits/week? lines/week? lol

I worked in companies where remote worked but the whole structure of collaboration was built to support that. Can't imagine company that worked on site transition easily

Currently working for company where we our team gets together once a week and that part works well, but management is mostly stuck in old ways so sometimes it's weird.

> In both cases productivity was noticeably worse, most especially for new employees onboarding remotely

Then that means your company doesn’t have a proper onboarding procedure. I was hired at $BigTech in June 2020 and didn’t meet any of my coworkers in person until 9/2021. I had a complete organized onboarding experience including all of the prerequisite indoctrination.

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