> Mass WFH started in 2020 - I don't think you can link a Q2 2022 productivity decrease to WFH, considering the previous quarter will have had even more WFH. In fact, it's easier to link it to the return to the office.

I would honestly be impressed if a initial WFH productivity decline wasn't found. A lot of people were not prepared for WFH. They didn't have the home to accommodate it. I expect some decline for anyone who was not prepared.

I purposefully bought a home with 2 extra bedrooms just for offices because i've always enjoyed a dedicated office setup. So it's quite natural for me to WFH. However this is clearly a luxury and not what many people have. Closing the door to distractions is huge, to me at least.

At home i can usually address the issue more quickly (quick nap, a walk, an extended break, etc - often fully detatching from work) and end up back to actually working far more quickly. For me these blockers would often just stall the whole day in office.

Tbh i wish office work was more similar in that regard. They expect everyone to work like robots, but in doing so they ignore the human element of overcoming all our quirks. We have no roads to get back to productivity in most offices, and in doing so my belief is that it ends up a net negative. People learn how to appear to work, while not working.

Though i mostly say this in the context of creative work (development).

This right here - when I didn't want to work I still didn't work, but I hid it in ways that ended up meaning it too me longer to get to a place I COULD be productive. I couldn't just disappear and recharge for a half hour.

Having said that, if you are in an environment where interactions not related to your personal responsibility is mostly negative interaction, then it is understandable that work from home is better. So, in short, I would like to say that, if a company has a healthy interaction between different departments, then work from office is better for the company without much loss of time to the employees. However, in other cases, employees might prefer work from home.

This of course can change from employee to employee. Some employees might prefer work from office because they have positive interactions with rest of office colleagues and other will prefer work from home.

*EDIT*: I should have led with this. In my office, we have 2 people per office room. So, we have enough privacy if needed.

That wasn't my experience working in the office. Unless you were a manager or PM (someone whose job it was to facilitate cross-team communications), most people tended to just have lunch and coffee with either their own team or their personal friends. All of my experience has been at companies with over 1k employees though, I imagine at a smaller shop there's a bit more closeness.

That. The one medium-sized (several hundred employees) open-floor office I've worked in, I left in a matter of months in part because it was intensely stressful and difficult to actually do work. Loud, motion everywhere, people walking behind me constantly. Even the goddamn floor (so, also my monitor) shook when people walked on it, which was never not happening because there were so many people.

Go fucking figure, the managers had offices. And, HR got their own walled-off room just for them. Gee, I wonder why. Maybe because the experience for everyone else was basically hell and they knew it.

I could see good offices experiencing a decline in productivity with WFH, but I'm not sure that's the kind of office most people work in, and the bad kind would almost have to be more productive with WFH.

This is a key point. I know I'm less productive working from home than I was in person, but my office was sane. I can easily believe that WFH is as or more productive than open plan abominations.