People really want to push remote work as being great for businesses. The sad reality is that it’s not (at least for knowledge workers)… it kills productivity and the output is always lower quality.
So no, remote work doesn't "kill productivity." It's a different way of working. There's a skillset and a set of attitudes and habits that successful remote working requires, and you have to start building that in new hires almost immediately if you want them to be successful. Like any transition in business you have to have a roadmap. And you need to think about the work your team does and how you're going to provide organizational supports without having everyone in the same room.
I _might_ have a bit more space working at an office, but rarely have I had better access to tools.
Is this actually a fact that you can prove, or simply a belief?
We found an average 20-30% productivity improvement and nearly 40% morale improvement with remote work.
When our elderly CEO decided enough was enough and forced everyone back into the human hamster wheels we saw a reversion to the pre-remote work performance across the board basically immediately and employee satisfaction dropped considerably below pre-pandemic levels. Interestingly the people who refused to comply with the mandate saw their performance improve even more, which made the employee review consequence for non compliance stick.
This is a statistical average so there are outliers, and the population was bimodal. Some people genuinely did better in the office and saw performance improve when they returned. But that definitely was not the mode.
So, I feel for the folks who aren’t part of the general group that does better at home, and they are the ones who say things like this. Remote work is great for business not because it improves morale and productivity (which it definitively does) even if it doesn’t for you). It’s because warehousing bags of mostly water to sit all day on zoom commuting to telecommute with their teams scattered all over the world is economically inefficient.
We saved like $5m/y with bring your own device by ceasing the corporate subsidy for blackberries. We could save hundreds of millions by ceasing corporate subsidies for your chair with bring your own office.
The fact a board can improve EPS by a significant amount, improve morale and productivity, by not making industrial human chicken coop seating available is a no brainer, but it’ll require passions to cool and the elderly CEOs to retire.
Edit: I had a preexisting remote work agreement with this company. As the RTO lockdowns and roundups became more severe (we had a less than 20% compliance rate with the mandate for at least a year), they claimed my RTO agreement hadn’t been properly approved and wasn’t valid. Suddenly I had to come into an office where I didn’t work with anyone locally, everyone I worked with was in Europe or NYC and I was on the west coast so had to go into the office at 4am to start my zoom meetings (I usually started at 5am at home, rolling out of bed and logging in), etc. I did the only honorable thing and write a widely distributed screed about the absurdity of RTO (more impactful when a senior dude does that), and quit immediately. I got a much better job at a late stage startup with no RTO policy, pays better better work, and the people I work with are happy and productivity.
If you don't want to be productive, you can make that happen anywhere.
Gonna need a source on that.
> The report shows that the three-year industry-adjusted revenue growth rate of companies that have what Scoop calls a “fully flexible” policy—meaning they allow employees or teams to choose when or whether they come to the office, or are fully remote—is 21%. Companies in the data set with more restrictive policies—say, those that have corporate mandates for a couple days per week or those that require full-time work in the office—had only a 5% industry-adjusted revenue growth rate, the analysis found. When excluding the tech industry over the same period, public companies that were “fully flexible” outperformed by 13 percentage points.
You should offer office-optional, if you're tech you should really offer office-optional. I'm genuinely shocked how people didn't see these results coming, companies are simply unwilling to invest the money to give every employee a nice office tailored to their own productivity but guess what -- employees will do that on their own if you let them, for free.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenamcgregor/2023/11/14/compani...