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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Studies have found that employees thrive when they spend 23-40% of their time in the office.[1]

This also is a very personal thing dependong on living conditions (also on personality type like introvert/extrovert, ADHD etc.). People with kids, small homes etc. will probably enjoy returning to the office.

I valued my office workplace very much as long as we lived in a single-bedroom apartment but started hating going to the office as soon as we moved to a bigger apartment with a separate office room where I have put a big desk, a similarly big monitor (a 4K I use in 100% scale so it does the job of 4 monitors in terms of usable area and even better).

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90845555/its-time-to-embrace-the...

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The study[1] was based on starting from 100% Office randomizing the amount of days people worked from home and was measured by email quantity, quality, and manager performance reviews. A better wording would be "employees send more and better emails when working from home 60-77% of the time". To fully understand the problem you need to study going from WFH to RTO and productivity. Multiple studies have shown the benefits of 100% WFH[2]. Hybrid and RTO is being pushed primarily by management not employees.

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4068741 [2] https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivi...

If a significant number of people you work with are in the office regularly, then you have to be in the same office as them to thrive. If you want an environment where full remote work is possible then you need to ensure at least 80% of the people do not go to the office at all in any given month. If you get above 20% of the people going to the office on anything approaching a regular basis, those people will start talking to each other, and since face to face conversations are so much easier they will leave other people out of the decision process.

With extra effort you can work anyway, but it needs special effort. I know of teams that have team meetings with everyone at their desk, headphones on all called into the same call. Those in the office get annoyed by the weirdness of hearing their neighbor speak and then a moment later hearing the same in their headset, but they have learned to tune that out and only listen to the headset because that is the only way for the one remote person to stay involved.

> Those in the office get annoyed by the weirdness of hearing their neighbor speak and then a moment later hearing the same in their headset

which is only a problem due to open office plans, which study after study have shown to be bad.

I think it's a classic case of designing for the average being terrible for the plurality. People are different. If someone like yourself prefers an office environment it's great if the employer can provide one, costs permitting. I'm sure I wouldn't 'thrive' any number of days in an office no matter what my manager says after nine weeks.

I'm probably one of those weirdos. Although my home office is awesome now I enjoy coming into the office. Unfortunately in the last 10 years at my company they have done everything to remove any incentive to come into the office (you no longer have your own cube you can setup the way you need it to be, you have shared "open space" style office, and reduction of seating capacity by 30% presumably to reduce tax burden. They've really created an environment hostile to productivity.

> your own cube

I stopped enjoying "going to the office" when I no longer had my own office: a room with a door and a large window to see the PNW gloom that kept me inside, working.

I don't want a shared office, a cube farm, or an open office, thanks.

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