Productivity is output per hour, so its also possible for output to fall and productivity to rise. This will be the usual case with fewer hours.
factories would disagree. there are diminishing returns as people get tired and productivity dips, but there is still a direct, linear relationship.
however its very different from knowledge- or social-based (e.g. sales) workers. there is often no direct 1-to-1
But are they actually more productive, or are they just spending additional hours "looking busy"?
When I worked in office I "worked" 40 hours/week because I had to. Most of that wasn't actually work, maybe about 20-30 hours of actual work, sometimes less. Working from home I have no pressure to pretend to work, there's no "butt-in-chair" requirements. I get slightly more done from home, and exchange I don't have to waste 10-15 hours/week at my desk for no reason other than to make some manager feel good about having butts in chairs.
No, not work, just hey how ya doin, and then someone brings coffee, then there’s a quick gab about the game, then a half baked question before a little catchup about that show. 2-4x salaries and minutes being burnt in small untracked chunks.
Hours clocked and hours worked are not the same.
What you are talking about is people being people and should already be accounted for. If you need to track untracked chunks and minutes something is very wrong, and it is either your management of your people or that you work at a zombie company that can't afford enough workers and is only surviving on unrealistic labor expectations.
This obviously depends on what the work is. People whose job is to focus on building things for hours at a time have very different optimal work environment from people who meet with and coordinate other people in short bursts. So no one-size-fits-all top-down policy can be effective; local flexibility is required.
How do you think Google grows? They invented PageRank and have been on a set trajectory since?
Google didn't catch up to and surpass OpenAI by doing nothing.
I work from home quite a bit, but I'm expected to be available and working during business hours. So other than not commuting to the office, it's not a huge difference.
For most professionals, attendance shouldn't really matter. You're not creating value by merely being present. There are exceptions - customer service for example - but even in those cases being just logged into Slack/Teams is perfectly cromulent.
It’s rather useless to just look at the clocked hours.