The article: "Data proves it: Remote work boosts productivity." "This groundbreaking study, involving 16,000 participants, was conducted by Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom"
Of course different people work better in different modes. But since there's no reason to believe that we are uniformly distributed through those modes, one mode could be net more productive by objective absolute measures even if lots of people are in a suboptimal mode.
I clicked through to the study and it is 16,000 call center employees. This simply doesn't translate to a lot of other jobs.
If you are a call center employee, you're probably not doing a lot of collaborative work. Moreover, it's easy to track your time on the phone, so being at home doesn't necessarily make it easier for you to slack off.
Also, of note, the participants all volunteered for it. It's a strong assumption to assume that people who want to work from home being more productive will mean that everyone working from home will improve productivity.
In short, this article makes a lot of assumptions about how the data would generalize. A more accurate, but less click-baity title would be "Remote Work Can (And Does) Boost Employee Productivity For Certain Types of Workers".
Hybrid-remote environments are tough if you don't have leadership on the office side of the equation implementing remote-first practices, such that everything is optimized for remote-first. Otherwise, your remote staff are always a second tier and at a disadvantage. https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/how-to-w...
It's possible that you're operating in Phase 1 of remote adaptation, which is imitating the design, structure, norms, ebbs and flows of an office environment. This is passable but not optimal. https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/phases-o...
Many office norms become slower when you try to copy/paste into a virtual world, which sheds light on the reality that those norms aren't the ideal way to accomplish the work. Instead of looking through the lens of "why doesn't this process transfer well to the virtual world?," look through the lens of "how could we be a more transparent and efficient team if we didn't have the burdens of the office?" In a way, it's scarcity vs. abundance mindset. https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/what-not...
Remote isn't for everything, and it isn't for everyone. It needs to be implemented well with intentional leaders, just the same as a colocated team needs intentional leadership to thrive. The conversation is often framed as us vs. them because that's the recipe for clicks, but it's a weak argument. Remote can work, colocated can work. You need great leadership, documented processes and culture, and company-wide trust in both instances.
You can't take a self-selected group of people and make broad generalizations about the entire population.
In other words, companies may misinterpret this study as "everyone working from home" is the optimal solution.
But the optimal solution is some people working from home and some people not.
It's interesting that the net productivity of the on-site workers did not go up despite the removal of the self-selected WFH-curious population.
The study: https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/...
I have worked from home for a while now. I have a home office that is just for work. I work from home to be more flexible, remove my commute and remove physical office interruptions. And because I just generally prefer being on my own when I work.
Even with a dedicated home office I find working from home very difficult when others are around such as weekends.
What kind of work do you do? What type of person are you? What's your work space, both at the office and at home? Who's your boss and which are the work dynamics at your workplace? How many distractions do you have there vs at home? How long do you have to commute if you go to the office? And how annoying is it?
I feel we are still pretty new at all this and really suck at it. There are many ideas very unexplored, like making pairs or small groups from time to time to let employees that are geographically close work together in some projects, and have flexibility to organize their work inside their own group. Who knows, maybe in 100 years, for the types of jobs that allow it, we won't have such strict employee - company relationships, and we will focus more on projects, with spaces and teammates being something more flexible, where we have a say in the way we want to organize. That might be interesting.
Additionally, some people like me hate working from home. I don't feel part of a team at home. It feels more like a hated chore at the house. I've bought co-working memberships to help separate work life from home life. It helps some people create and maintain healthy balance. Time together in person builds relationships in a way you can't over the phone. This happens today at larger companies that have several "work from office" locations. It creates a very us vs them mentality. People don't get the benefit of the doubt and (bad) assumptions are made.
Yeah, I wish this was more normal to aim for, "It depends". Everyone is always trying to come up with a silver bullet that works for everything, and once they find something that works for them, they try to shove it down everyone's throat.
Same happened when "open floor offices" gained popularity, the cargo culting began and now you're a bad company unless you have a open floor office. Same is happening with remote work.
As someone who mostly does frontend, I need to be able to work tightly with product and design teams, to communicate and ask questions during implementation.
But back when I did backend work, I could mostly just receive requirements from product and frontend team, spend time in isolation to fulfill those requirements and my work was done (most of the time at least, not always).
The reality though is that if employees are less productive, any savings in rent will be small compared to the costs associated with lower worker productivity (assuming you have expensive employees like engineers etc).
Everyone will have to figure out what works best for their particular situation. For some that'll be remote, for some office and for others a mix of the two.
I think the important thing is for companies to consider the options in a thoughtful, big picture way. Also not assume that current remote productivity is indicative of remote work during non-pandemic times, heh.
So, this is a counterpoint to the current absolute-statement circulating online.
1. In office but not surrounded by co-workers i.e. can focus for long hours without distractions.
2. At Home and not distracted by family members or other "temptations/errands" at home.
3. Office with co-workers
4. Home with family members/errands to take care of, which there can be plenty of during these Covid days.
Some people don't like to be alone and for them Option (1) isn't going to work. They like to be surrounded by other working people to have that sense of group work which helps power them through. For them Option (3) will clearly be the best.
Beyond that it also comes down to individual habits. Do you have a system to work at home? Without that one can be pretty ineffective. What's your "sustained focus" mechanism or algorithm? It can be a mix of:
- Micro goals system that works intra-day not just inter-day.
- Shutting off distractions by keeping the phone in a separate room (if the job allows, since computer can still relay most of the information)
- Clever use of headphones with the right kind of music or background noise that works for you.
- Some notion and measure of self-accountability.
- many others
The current environment is a pretty good time (and test) to strengthen any of the productivity habits. It takes practice but I don't see what the alternative is.