Remote employees 'don't work as hard': head of world biggest commercial landlord

theguardian.com

3 points·davidgerard··6 comments

What this man wants is not productivity or progress, it's (pleasure of) control.

The sooner we get this mindset out of the boards of decision (in corporate and governments), the better our societies will fare.

What I mean by that is that it's a choice of society: one doesn't get the best out of people without not only giving them, but supporting their agency.

If working from home works best for them, if there's no genuine organic (that is, not designed/manufactured to coerce) incentive to come to the office, that's on the employer: either the job does not need it, either something in the office is repelling people; that's what needs to be fixed.

What that man wants is in the headline: money.

That's interesting, I wonder if there's a Hawthorne affect with working from home.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

I used to have a job where I always had a feeling of being watched. Pretty much anyone passing by saw my monitor and there were always lots of people passing by. So during (rather frequent) downtimes I just had to “look busy” - always paging through some code, etc. I did browse the web sometimes but I used lynx so it looked more like I was working…

That sounds miserable

I think he just wants office buildings to be valuable. It's his job.

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