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Comment by kcplate | Hacker News Reader

It’s my opinion that people feel like they are more productive at WFH, but it’s a bit of a hard metric to actually measure. I get the sense that the freedom and flexibility might create a feeling of personal productivity to accomplish many things (not just career related) they couldn’t before WFH, but as for job productivity…I bet it’s probably a wash overall.

I say this as a remote worker who wouldn’t want to RTO—because I feel like I am more productive at work from home. However, I wouldn’t bet the farm on that if there was a reliable way to measure it.

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I have been WFH since the pandemic, and I have grown used to it. My company doesn’t even have offices anymore.

However, last week we had a happy hour to all meet in person, and I had a 20 minute conversation with someone about a work topic, and it was amazing how much productive information we were able to share with each other in such a short time. It was just easier to work through things in person than on slack or zoom.

But this is not a universal thing.

I have absolutely no problem shooting the shit over text, voice, or video chat, and since I went mostly-remote, I have had a number of highly productive conversations over Zoom that looked a lot like a typical casual interaction resulting in good brainstorming. In fact, some of those times, it was even easier to communicate what we needed because one or another of us could share our screens (which is fine in person when you happen to be at someone's desk, or carrying your laptop with you, but if you just run into each other at the water cooler, it often requires a "hey, I'll send you that thing when I get back to my desk and we can continue this over email" or whatever).

I think the biggest thing that far too many RTO proponents fail to understand is that different people work differently, have different experiences, and need different environments to be most effective. This has been hidden to a large extent by the fact that (nearly) everyone has been required to work in an office, but now that we've all experienced something different, many of us have seen firsthand that we can do just as well or even so much better if we're not forced into a particular box.

The problem with that argument is that WFH has a short history with a unmeasurable productivity benefit to the organization vs a long history with in office work productivity measurements.

The other problem is that people advocating WFH over RTO tend to focus on the individual benefit to them rather than the holistic benefit to the organization.

The benefit is only unmeasurable if you've been doing no data collection over the past 3 years.

And frankly, there's been way too much prioritization of "benefit to the organization" across all sectors these past few decades, very much at the expense of the individuals who do the actual work.

The really dumb thing is there's also a lot of evidence that doing things that make individuals happier, healthier, and more comfortable is a net benefit to the organization. This leaves the logical conclusion, given the fact that we still do all these things that hurt regular people, being either that a) the people making the decisions actively want to hurt us, or b) they are doing these things to benefit themselves over the organization (in short-term profit, in feelings of control, in feelings of superiority over others, etc).

> This leaves the logical conclusion, given the fact that we still do all these things that hurt regular people, being either that a) the people making the decisions actively want to hurt us, or b) they are doing these things to benefit themselves over the organization (in short-term profit, in feelings of control, in feelings of superiority over others, etc)

That may be a logical conclusion given the perspective of a certain set of knowledge workers but how about the employees who are pissed that their roles don’t get that WFH option? Does their unhappiness get a voice with the organization? As an organization how do you reconcile that disparity? Just belaying their fairness concerns with a “learn to code” kind of answer seems a bit more evil than just resetting knowledge workers back to 2019 work environments in my opinion.

So it’s not always a decision to actively hurt, it’s possible that the decision is one of a more holistic fairness for the organization’s employees…which benefits everyone to a degree including the organization.

I certainly haven't been saying "learn to code" or anything like it.

The idea that no one should be allowed to work from home because some people can't has nothing to do with "fairness". It's the same mentality that says "you kids should have to suffer the same things I did when I was your age", despite the fact that conditions have changed.

I am genuinely sympathetic to people who work jobs that cannot be made remote, but want to work from home. I hope that they will be able to find a way to achieve that desire. But no one gains anything when they force other people to stop working from home just to prevent a "disparity" like that.

There have always been, and will always be, differences in the conditions that different jobs require. As some others have commented, some people have to work shifts; some people have to work outside in bad weather—yet we don't see a clamoring to make everyone work shifts, outside, in bad weather. This is just a very unusual time when some of those differences are changing in a very visible and very widespread way.

> It's the same mentality that says "you kids should have to suffer the same things I did when I was your age", despite the fact that conditions have changed.

No, not exactly. RTO efforts now are simply taking things back to the pre-pandemic normal. The pandemic was the excuse to go remote, if it’s no longer the excuse and if you can’t argue the benefits from a position of strength successfully to your organization…it comes off as a selfish benefit only available to a select few.

My first job was 40 hours a week in an office, my current job has been full WFH because of covid, transitioning into 3 days in the office. I can tell you factually that the days I'm actually at home in this hybrid setup that I'm way less productive in terms of getting my actual job done than I am days I'm in the office. I think when I was full WFH my at home productivity was actually much higher. However, the days I'm actually in office are way more productive than the average day at my previous job, and I'm pretty sure it's because of the low job productivity WFH days. I think return to office 5 days a week will lower my average in office productivity, resulting in approximate equal job productivity, and leave me less happy overall.

I've noticed a similar trend in myself. WFH was, averaged out by day, (to the extent I can objectively do that through my own memory) more productive when I was 100% WFH than now, where I am 40-60% WFH. Overall I think it's probably a wash: I think I'm a bit more focused when in the office now than pre-covid, which makes up for the the less focused time at at home.

However there may be less tangible benefits, even if overall productivity is a wash, to having the WFH times. 1) Is the obvious work/life balance. Everything that comes with the convenience of not having to commute, freedom to intersperse everyday household chores during the workday even when it means extending working hours a little later, etc. 2) Is that when I'm WFH I seem to be a little less concerned with the immediate work issues and more likely to drift off into peripheral & speculative projects, things that may yield less results in the short term but might (too soon to really say) yield more in the long term.

Overall I think my general output is about the same, but I'm more content, and perhaps (though not definitively) doing things that will be more productive in the long term.

But there are countless different jobs and responsibilities and personalities that intersect in a way that doesn't lend itself to a single one size fits all rule. But unfortunately, "One rule for all" tends to be the top down approach in most work environments.

The first two years of covid pandemic may not be a typical time though. The non-work demands on most people's time and energy, and most people's psychological state, were pretty different than usual. All things that seem like they could effect "productivity" (and/or your perception of productivity) (and hypothetically in either direction), in addition to the factor of whether you were full-time WFH or not.

There is something to be said about individual productivity (whatever that means in a very innovative/creative environment) vs team/company output, just today I saw this in my feed: https://flocrivello.com/changing-my-mind-on-remote-about-bei... And that's coming from someone who actually tried to build a business out of remote work (TeamFlow was the product).

I can be much more productive at home when it is about my individual contribution (me coding to deliver something unambiguous), but xxx individuals doing this does not necessarily align into a great product: that does not scale.

I while back I was slammed on here for making essentially a statement that my remote team seems to individually claim/feel more productive but the net team productivity I felt decreased as we transitioned from in office to remote.

I think this observation is spot on - and you don't have to look far to understand why individual productivity != systems productivity. 100% individual utilization in a system is a negative - manufacturing companies learned this years ago and is where the principles of the toyota system/kanban/lean manufacturing/etc. rose from. The only resource that should be 100% utilized in a process is the bottleneck - and anytime anyone is interrupted to help the bottleneck, that is a net win for the company output, even if individually it feels annoying.

It's really unfortunate that it seems so many people are in the "you can pry remote work from my cold dead hands" camp that it's hard to even have a conversation that doesn't devolve into "I feel more productive remote, so you shouldn't care where I work".

Definitely seems like it’s a strange hill that people are willing to die on these days.

I’m pragmatic. I’d rather have a job than look for one. So if my company decides to RTO, I am going to RTO.

For some, it's a pay cut, in money and free time. It's a valid reason they'd rather change job.

I have zero problem with that. If your current gig is not a good fit for any reason, change it. I guess I mean it’s strange to me how some folks feel entitlement enough to think that their individual preference should be important enough to demand their employers accommodate them. i.e. they shouldn’t have to find another job.

It’s simply not the same thing as safe working conditions, ADA accommodations, etc… it’s a preference…and one mostly born out of the pandemic.

I have the experience that the quality of the office building makes a difference. We moved to a new building a few months back with more space, fewer people crammed into one room, generally quieter. People that used to work from home now prefer to be in the office as much as possible.

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