I’d push back on this claim with another piece of relevant data: employee mental health has plunged [1][2]. While it’s true that productivity has increased, it’s not obvious that this is sustainable.
[1] https://www.hibob.com/blog/covid-19-employee-wellness-survey...
[2] https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/both-remote-and-on-site-wor...
WFH is great for someone with a big house where they can convert some part of a room into a study. It’s less great for someone living in a studio or apartment with limited space.
Moreover, some people like being in the heart of the city and as such, can only afford a studio.
People have different preferences on where they want to live. I don't really see how shaming one choice is supposed to be better than shaming another.
If you live in a rural place and commute into a suburb your commute is probably like an hour of forced meditation. If you like driving it might actually be good for you.
If, on the other hand, either end of the commute is in a city/you don't like driving it probably wears on you every day.
I'm sure that for any drudgery out there, you can find someone to extoll their positive aspects. In my case my commute was rather pleasant, a comfortable 30 min bicycle ride. However most of my colleagues had to endure crowded public transport.
I wonder how much of that is due to Working from Home, and how much of that is due to Covid-19 with hundreds of thousands of people dying, weddings, funerals, churches, celebrations, etc being closed.
In an alternative world of working from home, but you are free to go the coffee shop to work, meet with extended family, and now have to worry about catching a potentially deadly disease, I would bet mental health would be much better.
I can only speak for myself, but not being to work out at the gym or do anything outside of my home is the problem, not the god damn office.
I miss pre-pandemic WFH, and want to get back that ASAP.
Personally, my mental health has gone worse for non-COVID reasons. I live in an apartment and the limited real estate means that it’s hard to dissociate work space from living space. I’m not the only person who lives in an apartment.
My favourite way to solve that dilemma used to be going to a cafe for a few hours. Guess what I haven't been doing since the pandemic started?
At the moment I'm blessed with plenty of space, and the office is the office. But still fewer social outlets than I would like. Summer can't get here soon enough.
I don't really like cafes either. I tried it during a brief period when full lockdowns hadn't started yet but we were allowed to work from home.
- Cafes are noisy. If you need to have a conversation, it's hard to hear the other person, and it can be hard to hear you, and you have to be mindful to not disturb you.
- You have to pay your way at a coffee shop, and I enjoy supporting local business, but I don't need to consume all the calories and caffeine of a new drink every 1-2 hours.
- Cafe seating isn't office seating, and if you sit too long in it you can tell. An aesthetically pleasing cafe chair isn't necessarily good for the back.
Any company that (pre-COVID) had a proclivity to sacrifice short-term profits by providing free food and other generous onsite perks is probably also a company that might choose to scrap plans to cut back on offices if doing so has a positive impact on their employees’ mental health.
Just an anecdote of this one guy, but I really would love to go back to office right now. WFH has killed my enthusiasm and I really don't think my overall productivity has gone up.
You can levy a dozen counterfactuals at the use of BLS data like this to support permanent WFH. The analysis needs to be way more holistic and BLS figures aren't nuanced enough.
CEO's want all the little people back in the office so they can have their minions back.
This. Written communication makes it obvious that some people have nothing meaningful to say it have trouble with reading comprehension.
Management have no idea as noted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547499
According to them it was just a fad that would soon die.
Companies that were quick to embrace open concept office space and cubicles to save expenses are surely going to take advantage of this new paradigm.
Even on the smallest scale of sample size, I thrived during the work from home year, yet my SO can't wait to get back to office work where they can socialize with coworkers face to face.
Any call for either OR are dramatically overweightted.
Longer. Guy I know was perfectly happily WFH running X11 over dual-bonded ISDN a decade before that!
What will be interesting is if WFH (I like to say Freedom of Work) continues to take hold, will companies like Google have to adjust or be ok missing out on employees?
I started WFH the moment DSL became available in my area in 2003. Was switching to WFH at every work place over commute became unbearable.
I've been expecting that certain groups (people who own commercial real estate, for example), were going to want to us all back in our cubicles.
Not sure I'm right, of course, but it'll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple of years.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nonfarm business labor productivity rose by over 10% over the course of 2020, despite the fact that most of us are working from home. (Source: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/prod2.pdf)
Companies that want to waste huge sums of money on offices are going to have to compete with companies that don't abuse their employees, doing the same thing for less. We're obviously not going back to how things were before.