More work gets done when you're tired from being up early for your commute, then the commute itself, and surrounded by distracting coworkers? Not for me, not ever again if I can help it.
In a modern tech company with all the wfh and productivity bells and whistles I now watch as my productive days vanish into 6 hours of meetings.
All coffee and smoke breaks actually are aimed at taking a step back and gain some small extra energy to keep going.
I agree. And its value and time commitment needed does not change if you work from office or home.
I worked from home before the pandemic hit and been doing it on and off for 15 years, but I took the habit of going out for a walk before starting to work, it actually wakes me up for real and sharpens my thoughts.
It also forces me to dress and take care of my hygiene.
A thing that many home workers I know, adults like me, don't do everyday. Which is, IMO, a set back.
Now that due to the pandemic I am confined at home, I feel tired all day and my productivity has gone down, to the point that I have to work 7 or 8 hours a day, while 5 were enough before.
Suffering for waking up early for a commute is only a symptom of not being a morning person, I negotiate comfortable starting work hours in all my contracts and never had to wake up early in the past 10 years.
And you know the main reason the employer accepted it as a reasonable argument?
because out of the rush hour commuting is easier (which is actually true)
they never heard from me "I am late because the bus/subway/train/whatever was full"
In my experience distracting coworkers are a lot worse when you are online all day remotely: you can close the door, but can't block them on teams.
Finally: consider that the majority of people all over the World have much better work spaces than home offices.
Usually home offices for regular people suck and/or people live in small homes.
Especially in Japan or Europe.
one last bit: WFH workers that are less experienced have harder times getting a promotion than in presence.
IMO working from home can even further destroy your work-life balance -- but only if you let it, which is sadly easy in these conditions. So I agree with you there, we have to get out of our way -- literally and figuratively -- to compensate for some negative WFH traits.
It's sad thinking about a state of affairs where I would be biased towards the person in my team I see most often - either through better guidance/collaboration (affecting promotability over time) or mere water-cooler familiarity.
And, it's true that commuting and working in badly designed open office spaces are extremely bad for productivity.
On the other hand working in a group can be a lot more productive than alone in the home office even connected electronically because we are humans and need social stimulation, but this is not true for everybody.
We should not forget these points when commenting.
(If you are one of those poor souls with a 90 minute commute, I understand your pain, but you shouldn't try to generalize your experience)
Now I have a 60-75 minute commute over underground, and I'm not looking forward to the return to the office. There's definitely aspects of working where I long for the office, but others where I'm glad for the solitude.
If we have to return 5 days a week I'll probably have to move and pay much more or have a tiny living space.
I value my time more than my comfort so am accepting of this, but it still frustrates me after living the afore mentioned dream.
I'd also note that I regularly start work an hour or two early since working from home - with >2hrs of commuting slashed from my day, if I get a good thought at breakfast why not bash it out?
When you're facing 12hrs as a baseline for your working day it's much less appealing to contribute outside that time.
Also, the less time you spend commuting by automobile, the less likely you are to be involved in an expensive, injurious or deadly accident, especially if you're commuting while while you or others are tired in the morning, or are tired after working all day.
I can also now take a quick shower in the middle of the day when I need to get away from the screen to think.
Or I can make a granola bowl while I'm in a meeting. Or walk the dog, or do any number of low cognitive load things (especially for meetings that I'm expected to attend even when they are only tangential to my work).
Even if the commute was 30 minutes (a good day), I'd usually need to buffer time to plan for being late due to traffic accidents and construction (frequent).
Switching to remote work gave me back at least an hour every morning, and at least 1.5 hours in the evening. Anecdotally this has led to massive performance and quality of life increases.
But how many of the people making up this average leave home an hour earlier than most of us just to beat traffic?
How much buffer time is then also factored in, and wasted?
No even taking into account the cognitive and emotional cost of the commute.
i.e. the subway in Paris is full of stressed out people, stinks, is more or less reliable and makes an awful lot of stressful loud noises.
I’ve switched to cycling 2 years ago, and even when I get home drenched by the rain and frozen by the wind do I still not miss the "métro". At all.
And I’d bet driving can be quite stressful too.
Also consider overuse of cars is a big issue environmentally, while use of public transport tends to increase one's commute (bad schedules, detours).
[1]: https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans...
10 minutes in a car is far less pleasant (to me) than a 25 minute walk.
Also 25 minute commute means 50 minutes out of the day, every workday. That adds up.
Yes, that sums up to over 4 hours per week, i.e. half a working day.
Coworkers and bosses ambling over to my desk for a "quick" interruption? Meetings that only make the meeting makers feel like they've accomplished something? No thanks.
I create a space of discipline at home with discipline. If the only thing keeping you from indulging in whatever Clubhouse-flavor-of-the-week distraction is the enforcement of order from above, you need to take a strong look at what is motivating you to work your job in the first place. I specifically exempt parents: my condolences for the chaos that must be to your peace.
We need to stop treating employees like automatons to be filled by the directives of middle management and start trusting them to produce.
There is a strong truth in looking at what motivates you though, for me it is just as much the interaction with colleagues working towards a common goal that is key. That goal is so much harder to accomplish in a WFH setting.
Other than that i very much agree that too many meetings is one of the biggest productivity killers.
But IMO working from home did outline some inefficiencies in the office work that finally started getting more closely inspected (like the needless meetings).
I have significantly less wasted time working from home. At work, if I have 2 or 3 meetings in a day, that day is practically wasted for other work between walking to the meeting (I work on a large multi-building site), waiting for everyone to arrive, etc. Then it seems like people never want to end a meeting until its scheduled stop time even if we're done after 20 minutes. Then I have to get back to my office... Zoom has changed all of that. Zero time wasted at the beginning or end, and people don't seem to have as much of a problem saying "all right that's all we have, see you later" and ending a meeting early.
I can also get a bit more sleep in the mornings because I don't have to get ready to leave the house, commute, park, get to my office, etc. When the end of the day comes, I'm already home, giving me an automatic hour of extra time each day. You can do a lot with 5 more hours of free time each week. I get to see my kids for more time, especially my youngest, who I watch, as my wife oversees distance learning for the other two.
Even with the added distractions of working with at home with kids present, This past year has been one of the most productive in my entire career.
I'm sure that mine is neither a unique experience, but also not how it works for everyone else. But the mindset that says it's mostly more productive to work on-site is why some places ban WFH, as mine did before the pandemic.
I do, however, agree that WFH is least likely to result in the same or higher level of productivity for junior staff.
*We* are not going back.
Not going back to long commutes. Open office plans and office politics.
Not going back to cheap lunch in a plastic/cardboard box that costs a lot.
Not going back to paying high rent in bad cities without any quality.
Not going back to frivolous meeting.
Now after almost 2 years we have proved that yes the company can be run remotely, several things that were "not possible" are and the ultimate thing:
We can choose where we want to live and with whom.
We are not going back as same we are not going back to cable anymore.
Then Covid-22
Then ... ...
People who have little choice will do as their employer commands. The rest will move on.
I also think that being watched produces a certain level of anxiety that is counter-productive.
I know this isn't a problem for most people, but this is such a huge issue for me. If you are talking in my vicinity, my brain locks on to your speech and prevents me from thinking about anything else. Unless I am listening to someone else speaking that is closer to me / louder there is no way to mentally block this out. If I'm trying to program and someone is talking near me, my productivity drops by maybe 80%. I either put on noise cancelling headphones, ask people to talk elsewhere (which irritates people who don't understand), or get nothing done.
I think this is the big one for me, at least with the experience of WFH for Covid, it is so much harder for people to ramp up and learn in a WFH situation, you can't just ask your neighbor about a weird compile issue, or why the IDE isn't able to run your tests and be helped promptly with them just showing you right away. Instead you ask in a Slack, get a slow churn of reponse, nothing helpful enough, so you then schedule an actual short meeting with someone else to walk you over it, etc. And this support doesn't naturally distribute like it would at the office, it seems it's always the same more senior person remotely who has to now help new members in these more formal ways.
I've also seen so much more just confusion around like, what to do, who's doing what, when to do it, etc. Getting everyone aligned and in-sync is much harder. And that adds a lot of overhead and creates a lot more churn I feel to projects.
On the flip side, when you have a clear task to do and you know what needs to be done and it doesn't depend on others, you can really crush through it. And you save a lot of time from commute, launches are faster, etc.
I've also found, appart from Covid, remote work is pretty nice in terms of work/life balance. You can make laundry while you work for example, saving you time in your day.
So I'm still a bit mixed feelings about WFH, I like some aspect of it, mostly no commute, convenience of being at home so I can easily cook my launches at launch time, do some laundry or have the oven repair person show up and manage them while I work and all that. But I also feel doing the actual day to day work is harder, the coordination overhead is pretty high, and everyone is more siloed, so anything that involves collaboration has more friction.
I don't think that first part ("dedicated space for work") is so significant.
In my experience working remotely answering bug bounty reports, what most helped with working was the presence of a chat channel containing the rest of the team. It was used, in part, to discuss or ask for help with difficult reports, but primarily for making fun of stupid reports. (One of my favorites in this category being "If I zoom in too far on your mobile app, the text starts to become blurry.")
That might not sound especially productive, but you can't do it if you're not looking at the reports. You could view the channel more abstractly as providing irregular notifications of the form "I just did some work" -- participating requires you to do some work, and that helps you keep working.
Always be careful about shipping your org chart.
I've always had the ability to work out from home, and during the pandemic I've pretty much had to, but I greatly prefer going to the gym. I'm really not social at all, but I just feel like I can get much more "in the zone" at a gym than my house.
Plus many acquaintances of mine reported that they had to resort to making a small room in their apartment a dedicated home office which they had to lock in order to prevent distractions from their kids.
For some people like the two us, having a dedicated recreational space is motivating you to do the recreational activity. Trying to do it at home invokes thoughts like "What's the point? I'll inhale so much dust and smog, what's the healthy aspect of that?".
So for us it boiled down to a psychological lock which seems mostly bound to proper air and temperature conditioning at the gym.
To be fair, I too could use some more socialization but not sure that work is the ideal vector for me. I'd rather have a less stressful job on my terms (in my home office) and/or with less hours and then just proceed and make my free time more pleasant around other people.
No. We have gyms for exercise because there is an economy of scale. Who wants to buy a rowing machine, weight machines, stair machines, etc.
Yoga studios are because people go there to have a class led by an instructor. And most artists don’t “go” to a studio, they have a place in their house.
For typing on a computer, there’s really not much requirement for an external place unless your house is such that you don’t have a desk in which to work.
We only have so much time in a day, and I’m not sure that the balance of productivity factors will continue to weigh obviously in the direction of in-office work.
Not to mention the constant "we lock / we don't lock", "kids go to school / kids don't go to school".
I tend to think this is likely true. I also tend to think that WFH productivity is improving as people adjust to it. A lot of people who found themselves suddenly WFH had to setup a workspace, buy a decent chair,desk, etc. There were also mental adjustments. Now people are pretty used to it and it's become the new normal. Going back to an office (if we do that) is also going to mean a performance hit as well because people will have to adjust to that change. Any kind of major change is going to lead to a performance hit for a period of time as people adjust to it.
Nonetheless, and I say this as someone who is by no means opposed to WFH (I have often done it, depending on the contract), the results are not surprising. More work gets done in a dedicated space for work, surrounded by other people engaged in related work, and this is especially true if some of the team members are young and inexperienced. It's the same reason we have gyms for exercise, yoga studios for yoga, art studios for painting, and so on. I'm glad that these researchers tried to measure it, but the results are not at all surprising.