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Comment by tetrep | Hacker News Reader

The beautfiul thing about these situations is that if the company demanding no WFH is doing it for productivity reasons, they could much more simply demand employees reach a minimal productivity threshold or be let go. No need to mandate what methods an employee uses to be productive, be it working from the home or office, if productivity is the goal, productivity should be the target.

When there is a mandate to return to the office, it really makes me wonder if the employer can even tell if their employees are productive at all, much less know that they are more productive in the office. If they could tell, they would simply use that measure directly.

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That's the dilemma with modern work, it's almost impossible to measure. That feature you added this morning in four hours and 100 lines of code. Who is to know whether it could have been done in half the time and ten lines or whether most programmers would have taken twice as long.

Okay so in this case, companies are complaining that they’re noticing “lower productivity.” What are they noticing exactly?

One accusation is that they’ve noticed nothing and are demanding changes on entirely false pretenses.

Sort of, yeah. When GP says "it's almost impossible to measure", that does not mean that upper management does not in fact have some sort of metric that says "productivity" on the label. But what they're measuring is most likely going to have a tenuous relation to actual productivity.

A common problem is that they’ve noticed something real but are misattributing the cause. Sales are down - is it because the salespeople are slacking or because the mid-pandemic buying spike wasn’t the new normal? A big project is behind schedule - is that because people are working from home or because you have some senior managers playing politics?

In this case, the commercial real estate industry has been making a huge PR push trying to keep the value of their portfolios up so senior managers at most companies are regularly hearing that WFH causes problems - and anyone distrustful and/or looking for an excuse to shift blame is likely to seize on it.

This assumes that RTO strictly only affects one's own productivity, but it's really the network effects that matter, so some Happy Hermit may be perfectly productive on their own objectives when exclusively working from home, but may be reducing other people's productivity through their absence.

Do you want stack ranking? Because this is how you get stack ranking. If you don't have a standard for productivity, then all you can do is say who is more "productive" than whom.

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