How often this point comes up:
"shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive."
If you can't determine an employee is productive without seeing them in the office, then I don't think you ever had a way to measure productivity. These types of managers have deluded themselves into believing that butts in seats correlates to productivity.
It’s possible the folks saying this phrase are genuinely clueless. It’s also possible that some of the folks saying this are just trying to be politically correct and not saying what I see as the real problem: some work same whether they’re remote or in office, some work better when they’re remote, but some, they work so much less when they’re remote. You can divide the last group into two again, with one actively taking advantage of the lack of oversight and slacking off, while another is where the lack of structure makes them slack off or go in circles around tasks.
I’m not gonna try to attribute numbers but it’s clear to many that the junior members are more prone to not adapting to remote work easily. It’s a problem, for which we need to find a solution. Not necessarily going back to office tho.
People hate it when I say this, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter why you aren’t producing results. If you need help, ask and I’ll be happy to help. If you don’t ask, I’m gonna be very annoyed when the thing you said you’d do isn’t done and i was relying on you to get it done.
Conversely I don’t much care how you get the results. As long as they’re there when you said they would be. If you can do 10h of Netflix followed by 1h of frantic work, respect. You do you.
> I'm not gonna try to attribute numbers but it's clear to many that the junior members are more prone to not adapting to remote work easily. It's a problem, for which we need to find a solution. Not necessarily going back to office tho.
The issue is with hiring. When hiring remote junior, you need to look out for above average communication skills and debugging abilities. That's often not present for a lot of new grads entering the market because of a lack of experience or relevant work. Think of three month bootcamp grads where each week's assignment was spoon fed by the instructors who themselves are students who couldn't get a real job.
Some places that hired from that pipeline are finding out it's simply impossible to bring these programmers up to speed, but places hiring real engineers have way less issues (because a serious program will include challenging work and select for people capable of debugging and reasoning independently).
My personal opinion, after over a decade of remote work, is that the tools we have available to us to accomplish remote work are low-fidelity solutions to a high-fidelity problem.
I think juniors and, to some extent all technical new hires, are really vulnerable to the problems presented by remote work and these shitty tools we use like Slack, Confluence, Zoom, or God help you if you're in an org using Teams.
You need mentors and folks to on-board you who have a high EQ and can empathize with the position of the mentee/new-hire. That's hard.
> I’m not gonna try to attribute numbers but it’s clear to many that the junior members are more prone to not adapting to remote work easily. It’s a problem, for which we need to find a solution. Not necessarily going back to office tho.
It's also "clear to many" this is not the case.
Perhaps not all "junior members" are fungible. Perhaps this is a characteristic of their employer.
Yes. I've never been a manager, but when working as technical lead productivity was the one thing I've never bothered trying to measure, as a metric or even an informal impression. Estimating how long something is going to take is really difficult, and as a developer I constantly run into something I thought would take a few hours, and then hit a snag that took a week to rundown and fix. That is despite being a programmer myself, and being very familiar with the codebase and program area. If I can't set a reasonable bar for my own productivity, how can I do so for my team mates, let alone how could a manager removed from the day-to-day work do so? I've felt like the people who thought they could measure productivity were the ones where were fooling themselves.
Instead, I looked at a number of things. Are you making progress? Are you getting help quickly when you stop making progress? Does your code have lots of bugs later on? Do you take constructive criticism well? Do you give constructive criticism well? Do you help out your team mates? But how fast you got work done is not something I considered at all, as long as you were showing up, not wasting exorbitant amounts of time, and not putting in extra hours if there wasn't an emergency, I figure it will get done when it gets done.
Eg, I cared about work ethic instead of productivity, and that is much harder to gauge with work from home. Without it, I feel like I have to start judging based on perceived productivity and I hate that.
That said, I personally love WFH and so do my team mates, and I know them and trust them so it isn't an issue, but I wonder about how new people will work out.
Not necessarily :) I was thinking of a different example, but this is the first one I could find:
He began working in-person as principal of Providence's E Cubed Academy on July 22, 2020. Meanwhile, he remained employed virtually as the assistant principal of Kramer Middle School in Washington D.C., a role he held since 2019.
I know someone who used to come in, put his coat on a chair, then go off fixing problems with desktops all over the campus. Eventually they found he was popping back to his car and doing 6 hours driving for a minicab firm.
On the other hand if you measure presenteeism in the chair I had a colleague that would sit down browsing various websites all day taking calls for some business he ran doing scaffolding or cars or something (right dodgy dealer).
That’s some weird jealousy thing right? Paranoia that your employees might possibly be working for someone else? Like that’s some jealous boyfriend “I don’t let my girl go out and party because she might be flirting with other guys” level of controlling behavior. Why would you want to date / work for someone who treated you like that in the first place, gross.
Someone could totally work in an office while doing work for a different job. It's not even that difficult, or all that much more likely they would get caught than if they were to work multiple jobs from home.
I have not yet seen a measurement of SWE productivity that's more accurate or objective than a good manager's subjective judgement. I have also never seen companies able to consistently hire managers with good judgment. Objective performance measurement seems like a myth to me.
The first company I worked at was small and the owner/big boss had an office with glass doors that could see a lot.
As the company started to go down he got real insistent on productivity. If you weren’t doing something you were causing the company’s downfall.
Our manager (a great guy) had to have a talk with us telling us to basically look busy to avoid the pointless heat.
That owner was not the only person I’ve seen with such an attitude. Physically doing something = productivity. Even if they can’t see you and you’re playing minesweeper.
One of my early jobs was being the most junior "mechanic" in an repair shop, basically the guy that did all the low-skill things that nobody else wanted to do.
Our shop foreman was very keen that everyone looked busy if you were clocked in, you were getting paid to work so you should be working. I was trained by my seniors in the two key activities to do to avoid standing around: spraying things with a hose, and sweeping the floor. It didn't matter if you were going over what you did five minutes ago, it just had to look like you were doing something useful.
Personally I try to avoid perpetuating a culture where looking busy is important because people will find ways to look busy.
Monitoring butts-in-seats is a good metric for solving one kind of productivity loss. Eg - not doing job at all, the problem is that it doesn’t address the core issue of measuring what actually needs to be done.
Depends on the kind of work. If your "job" is pure data entry or smashing out code without any thought, then this might be a way to measure. It's still not necessary, though, since in that case it's a stupid job and you can therefore just measure something stupid like lines of code or data entries completed to get a sense of how well the job is being done.
As soon as your job involves thought work, there is rarely any connection whatsoever between where the job is done and productivity. For example, in software development it's common that NOT writing code right now is the best choice if you haven't done the other steps. For jobs like this, productivity is a cycle that involves first learning, then planning, then finally maybe writing some code. Or maybe learning some more first and then continuing to plan.
Planning is by far the most important piece, and it can be done literally anywhere and even while performing another task as long as it isn't a mentally-demanding one. So, at least in my experience you literally cannot plan while coding. Not anymore than you could write a novel. But you can do it while lifting weights, going for a jog, eating lunch, sleeping, taking a shower etc. etc.
Where's the most comfortable place to plan? It's okay for that to be answered differently by different people. For some people that's the office. For many more people it's sitting at home in pajamas or whatever.
There are certainly some folks whose only motivation is a boss lurking over their shoulder.
As a manager it would be your job to identify those folks and treat them accordingly. Arguing that "I can't manage remotely" is mainly an admission that you can't manage at all.
What's sad/amusing about this is that these ideas where explored in the 80's and we seem to have forgotten.
For sure '9 to 5' covers this territory (eg, daycare at work for working moms), and if memory serves so do two Michael Keaton movies (Gung Ho and Mr Mom).
The old joke about Alzheimer's, "I get to meet new people every day" seems somewhat appropriate here. Forgetting things we already knew gives us lots of things to talk about.
It happens in most contexts where generational change occurs within a group. We tend to treat the current environment as though it's been around forever, and often, as a group, remain unaware of what happened in the past. As more turnover occurs, more forgetting occurs.
Often, the source of the forgetting is, in fact, the assumptions made by the earlier generation that 'everyone knows' something - when the truth is that new generations were never taught those things.
This is an issue that many large companies face. There is a vast amount of work that is not core work, so the metrics get skewed into ancillary work instead of something like # of checkins, lines of code, tickets resolved, etc. In many large orgs there is often much "meta work" in order to produce justifications, forecasts or historical data for higher ups to make strategic decisions.
So, it can be difficult for a manager to really know when their reports are working at home as much as at the office. I doubt anyone will ever be able to fully verify another without some metric, even if that's just seeing them at a desk - despite none of those methods really saying work getting done.
The other problem, correlated with this, is that when everyone is remote there will be more meetings.
It's six of one or half a dozen of an other. [1] The employees and managers all do what they can, which is never enough. In the next few years I suspect a culture will settle down around this and it will not be as suspect for people to work remote. The companies will see who works, and the remote workers will see what they need to do and not do.
I agree with everything here. Just one thing I want to correct. I hope you mean "HR, Leadership, VPs, Directors, Execs and front line managers" when you used a common "manager" term. As a manager (and several others like me) I have never cared where folks worked from and I have a very strong sense of measuring work through deliverables (and I like others have also gotten it wrong at times). Where I get triggered when I see the blanket "M" word used - is every other part of the machinery that is demanding this setup is being absolved and the Ms are demonized. Yes there are inexperienced managers but most of the malice I have noticed came from either lack of coaching, or an environment created by those much higher on the pay pole! Why is the L word (leadership) only used when things are positive and not when things like this come up?
It's a game of numbers. Some employees can't look you in the eye and lie about how much work they did today. You fire those and hire more people. But you don't catch the good liars, and each hire might be another liar.
I'm sure there's a Market for Lemons in here that explains why some companies fail, "gradually at first and then all at once".
This article seems obvious to me. Happier workers care more about their job, especially retaining their job. What is unsaid in that article is why there is so much actual pushback from managers.
Managers, especially has you become further abstracted from providing real value, depend on "face time". It's their currency. Remote work really hampers that. A big meeting with the boss on Teams is going to have less chit chat and really no opportunity have side conversations or get 'face time' before and after the meeting.
I think remote work is also hard for bad managers and good for good managers. Bad managers care about time rather than value and rarely understand what's actually going on. If they don't understand the value their team is creating and they don't know how much time their team is spending sitting on a computer, they really don't know anything.
Good managers on the other hand understand the value the team produces and don't really care how people spend their 40 hours, so I doubt they sweat it as much.
Pretty much all the concern from management is veiled ways of saying 'this will make it harder for me to rise in the organization as I can't build personal relationships as effectively'
“ Managers, especially has you become further abstracted from providing real value, depend on "face time". It's their currency. Remote work really hampers that. A big meeting with the boss on Teams is going to have less chit chat and really no opportunity have side conversations or get 'face time' before and after the meeting”
A more generous take is that managers used to derive a great deal of value & information from quick/frequent/informal check-ins with a lot of different people throughout the day, and that is much harder/impossible in a remote first work environment where all interactions must be explicitly planned/scoped.
In another context: it’s the difference between an educator walking around and monitoring their students progress all the time via conversation/q&a vs sitting behind their desk and only getting progress data via weekly assessments. The former is supplemental to the later and provides a great deal (perhaps most) of the educator’s understanding of their student’s progress. (The relationship between workers/managers and teachers/students is not analogous in many other ways, of course)
>A more generous take is that managers used to derive a great deal of value & information from quick/frequent/informal check-ins with a lot of different people throughout the day, and that is much harder/impossible in a remote first work environment where all interactions must be explicitly planned/scoped.
I'm not sure that's true. My manager messages and asks if I'm free to talk and if I am, she gives me a call on Teams right then. Asking if someone is busy doesn't seem like a high bar.
Now, I do think its harder for them to do their daily ramble around the office to chat with everybody and interrupt their work. I agree its much harder for them to get information on office politics and relationship dynamics, which is really valuable if you are a corporate climber.
Some bad managers also want to be able to walk over to your desk, ask what you are working on, and tell you to work on something else.
When things are remote this kind of sloppy management doesn't work anymore, which makes bad managers hate remote work rather than work on improving how they manage.
Why don’t employers take seriously that for knowledge workers, brain health is brain performance? It’s like we never moved on from manual labor and factories with long grueling days. Professional athletes know they can’t train or perform for more than a few hours a day. Employers don’t recognize that learning, memory, and attention are finite biological resources.
Learning, memory, and attention are finite biological resources on the individual level. As long as there's a fresh crop of college grads each year, companies can afford to burn out a few older people.
> It’s like we never moved on from manual labor and factories with long grueling days
The corporate culture didnt. The existing corporate culture descends from mid 20th century corporate culture, that descends from late 19th century Victorian corporate culture, and that in turn descends from the late medieval feudal culture in which the commoners had to be 'hardworking & honest folk' who would come dutifully to the farm field every morning, work hard for the sake of their feudal lord, and be honest enough not to steal from him.
Hence, butts in seats and the expectation that you should devote your life to a company owned by your contemporary feudal lord without you having any shares or say in it...
Not sure if that athlete comparison works here - it’s substantially more than you think especially in big leagues and they basically work around the clock bc when they’re not training they are actively recovering so it’s like being oncall the entire season.
Pro athletes are maintaining their physical health just like knowledge workers; it's not like they can step onto the field to work our or compete, and it's not like they can just sit at any keyboard, and achieve optimal performance immediately. Resting well, eating good foods, stress management, and other factors that happen away from the actual event are critical for both athletes and employees!
Because chasing those quarterly returns will always trend toward taking money out of the comfort of the workers. Certain individual companies at certain individual times might get a temporary advantage by actually investing in themselves, but eventually they will all either start financializing that away for share buybacks, or get bought out by the company that did.
This is a classic issue of delusional management class that adds no value to the company trying to exert control over its workers because it can. Workers know what makes them productive and most workers will actually do a good job if they are treated respectfully.
The fundamental fact is this: if you are a manager/company that gives your worker the flexibility and freedom they need to take care of their life outside work, they will work hard, do great work and try to retain the jobs, even at a lower pay. But if you treat workers as lazy people who will while away time if you don’t constantly monitor them, then that’s what you’ll get: people doing the bare minimum and not work any moment they can get away with it. Because if you’re going to treat me like a lazy slob, I might as just be that.
100% guaranteed to make me more productive per hour worked. On average, with 8 hours fewer of work per week I would still get the same amount of work done, but would be tremendously happier with my life and with my job.
Totally agree. I can't make more time, and I zealously protect my personal time. I want more of it.
I stopped doing side jobs years ago, when I realized that the money wasn't enough to get my mind in that groove, let alone go somewhere and do something for someone. Now I'm getting to the point where I question if my FAANG salary is enough to justify 40 hours/week.
I work a four day work-week (30 hours) and anecdotally my total output is just fine. I generally spread the work over five days, but I often work so few hours in a day that I'm excited to get back to work the next day. It's nice to have that feeling day-in day-out
My observation is a fair number of people are doing this informally.
Spend Friday morning wrapping up the week, making to-dos for the next week, no meetings, minimal email, and generally shutdown for the day by lunchtime.
My wife used to work at a company who offered it and there was a lottery to get into the daycare because it was so popular. The company ran it at a slight profit so there was no cost involved to the company. People arrived on time since they didn't need to make a side trip to a third location, and could visit their kid at lunch or if they were sick or whatever. Huge, huge bonus as a parent.
So about WFH, the conspiracy theory is that all of these leaders across all of these businesses across the country are either incapable of measuring productivity, or they measured it and see that people are more productive when WFH and yet for reasons unknown want to bring them back into the office so they're less productive again, and make the business worse? They have years of data from before WFH, and years of data of WFH, and with all of that data, all of these companies across the country think what's best for their business is to bring workers back in. It just seems so outrageous to claim all of these companies have no idea or no data that justifies what they're doing.
If there's data supporting RTO then why do they justify it with vague appeals to "company culture" and "watercooler moments" rather than just explaining the data?
Probably because saying "some employees in WFH are playing videogames all day instead of doing any work" is not a politically correct answer so then corpo-speak about culture and values it is.
The data is in the attrition reports they run - more often than not, it's a soft layoff, while still justifying the rent cost and investments they've put into their office space.
For most office roles, employers have almost no data on productivity. The limited data they do have is very noisy.
Consider a developer: what data does an employer have? Number of lines of code committed? Number Commits? Maybe if they are very diligent in collecting data the bugs found son after those commits? You know nothing about quality of code, nothing about speed, nothing about complexity, nothing about bugs avoided, nothing about value added, nothing about mentoring others or managing tasks.
You can do the same analysis for almost any role, from Sales to SecOps.
Developers get assigned tasks. A guesstimate is made by the dev over the time/effort required, which is approved as plausible by a senior dev/manager. Then the task is done or not done on time. If done, good, next task. If not, the explanation ought to be reasonable.
> the conspiracy theory is that all of these leaders across all of these businesses across the country are either incapable of measuring productivity, or they measured it and see that people are more productive when WFH and yet for reasons unknown want to bring them back into the office
I would argue that the real conspiracy theory is that those leaders have a conflict of interest - they have a stake in the real estate game either: by directly holding interest in real estate that will plummet in value if it goes unused, or by receiving kickbacks or other incentives for leasing certain office space.
It makes perfect sense for business leaders, as agents of the owner class, to continue doing as much as possible to minimize and undermine labor power.
X% less productivity is more palatable to such creatures than the risk of workers gaining a real seat at the table.
It should be noted that when Amazon's CEO published his note about return to office, increasing productivity was not listed as one of the reasons.
Company culture, ad hoc meetings, serendipity, were the listed reasons.
So it sounds like companies are not optimizing for productivity, they are optimizing for innovation.
Whether these things contribute to innovation is still up in the air. I personally think happier employees will be more innovative, but have no data to back that up.
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If you can't determine an employee is productive without seeing them in the office, then I don't think you ever had a way to measure productivity. These types of managers have deluded themselves into believing that butts in seats correlates to productivity.
I’m not gonna try to attribute numbers but it’s clear to many that the junior members are more prone to not adapting to remote work easily. It’s a problem, for which we need to find a solution. Not necessarily going back to office tho.
Conversely I don’t much care how you get the results. As long as they’re there when you said they would be. If you can do 10h of Netflix followed by 1h of frantic work, respect. You do you.
The issue is with hiring. When hiring remote junior, you need to look out for above average communication skills and debugging abilities. That's often not present for a lot of new grads entering the market because of a lack of experience or relevant work. Think of three month bootcamp grads where each week's assignment was spoon fed by the instructors who themselves are students who couldn't get a real job.
Some places that hired from that pipeline are finding out it's simply impossible to bring these programmers up to speed, but places hiring real engineers have way less issues (because a serious program will include challenging work and select for people capable of debugging and reasoning independently).
I think juniors and, to some extent all technical new hires, are really vulnerable to the problems presented by remote work and these shitty tools we use like Slack, Confluence, Zoom, or God help you if you're in an org using Teams.
You need mentors and folks to on-board you who have a high EQ and can empathize with the position of the mentee/new-hire. That's hard.
It's also "clear to many" this is not the case.
Perhaps not all "junior members" are fungible. Perhaps this is a characteristic of their employer.
It definitely correlates! Not 100%, but a lot better than nothing.
You can at least be sure they're not working another job!
Instead, I looked at a number of things. Are you making progress? Are you getting help quickly when you stop making progress? Does your code have lots of bugs later on? Do you take constructive criticism well? Do you give constructive criticism well? Do you help out your team mates? But how fast you got work done is not something I considered at all, as long as you were showing up, not wasting exorbitant amounts of time, and not putting in extra hours if there wasn't an emergency, I figure it will get done when it gets done.
Eg, I cared about work ethic instead of productivity, and that is much harder to gauge with work from home. Without it, I feel like I have to start judging based on perceived productivity and I hate that.
That said, I personally love WFH and so do my team mates, and I know them and trust them so it isn't an issue, but I wonder about how new people will work out.
He began working in-person as principal of Providence's E Cubed Academy on July 22, 2020. Meanwhile, he remained employed virtually as the assistant principal of Kramer Middle School in Washington D.C., a role he held since 2019.
https://www.newsweek.com/man-accused-simultaneously-working-...
I know someone who used to come in, put his coat on a chair, then go off fixing problems with desktops all over the campus. Eventually they found he was popping back to his car and doing 6 hours driving for a minicab firm.
On the other hand if you measure presenteeism in the chair I had a colleague that would sit down browsing various websites all day taking calls for some business he ran doing scaffolding or cars or something (right dodgy dealer).
As the company started to go down he got real insistent on productivity. If you weren’t doing something you were causing the company’s downfall.
Our manager (a great guy) had to have a talk with us telling us to basically look busy to avoid the pointless heat.
That owner was not the only person I’ve seen with such an attitude. Physically doing something = productivity. Even if they can’t see you and you’re playing minesweeper.
Our shop foreman was very keen that everyone looked busy if you were clocked in, you were getting paid to work so you should be working. I was trained by my seniors in the two key activities to do to avoid standing around: spraying things with a hose, and sweeping the floor. It didn't matter if you were going over what you did five minutes ago, it just had to look like you were doing something useful.
Personally I try to avoid perpetuating a culture where looking busy is important because people will find ways to look busy.
As soon as your job involves thought work, there is rarely any connection whatsoever between where the job is done and productivity. For example, in software development it's common that NOT writing code right now is the best choice if you haven't done the other steps. For jobs like this, productivity is a cycle that involves first learning, then planning, then finally maybe writing some code. Or maybe learning some more first and then continuing to plan.
Planning is by far the most important piece, and it can be done literally anywhere and even while performing another task as long as it isn't a mentally-demanding one. So, at least in my experience you literally cannot plan while coding. Not anymore than you could write a novel. But you can do it while lifting weights, going for a jog, eating lunch, sleeping, taking a shower etc. etc.
Where's the most comfortable place to plan? It's okay for that to be answered differently by different people. For some people that's the office. For many more people it's sitting at home in pajamas or whatever.
Only if butts-in-seats is your company's output. Anything else, and you still have to quantify productivity by looking at output.
The only thing this might measure is time you are available to do work, but the same can be done remotely.
As a manager it would be your job to identify those folks and treat them accordingly. Arguing that "I can't manage remotely" is mainly an admission that you can't manage at all.
For sure '9 to 5' covers this territory (eg, daycare at work for working moms), and if memory serves so do two Michael Keaton movies (Gung Ho and Mr Mom).
The old joke about Alzheimer's, "I get to meet new people every day" seems somewhat appropriate here. Forgetting things we already knew gives us lots of things to talk about.
Often, the source of the forgetting is, in fact, the assumptions made by the earlier generation that 'everyone knows' something - when the truth is that new generations were never taught those things.
So, it can be difficult for a manager to really know when their reports are working at home as much as at the office. I doubt anyone will ever be able to fully verify another without some metric, even if that's just seeing them at a desk - despite none of those methods really saying work getting done.
The other problem, correlated with this, is that when everyone is remote there will be more meetings.
It's six of one or half a dozen of an other. [1] The employees and managers all do what they can, which is never enough. In the next few years I suspect a culture will settle down around this and it will not be as suspect for people to work remote. The companies will see who works, and the remote workers will see what they need to do and not do.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/six_of_one,_half_a_dozen_of_t...
What managers want here is not to measure productivity, but to FEEL confident about it.
That is the issue here. Feels>Facts. And to be fair, there are few facts.
Deleted Comment
I'm sure there's a Market for Lemons in here that explains why some companies fail, "gradually at first and then all at once".
Managers, especially has you become further abstracted from providing real value, depend on "face time". It's their currency. Remote work really hampers that. A big meeting with the boss on Teams is going to have less chit chat and really no opportunity have side conversations or get 'face time' before and after the meeting.
I think remote work is also hard for bad managers and good for good managers. Bad managers care about time rather than value and rarely understand what's actually going on. If they don't understand the value their team is creating and they don't know how much time their team is spending sitting on a computer, they really don't know anything.
Good managers on the other hand understand the value the team produces and don't really care how people spend their 40 hours, so I doubt they sweat it as much.
Pretty much all the concern from management is veiled ways of saying 'this will make it harder for me to rise in the organization as I can't build personal relationships as effectively'
A more generous take is that managers used to derive a great deal of value & information from quick/frequent/informal check-ins with a lot of different people throughout the day, and that is much harder/impossible in a remote first work environment where all interactions must be explicitly planned/scoped.
In another context: it’s the difference between an educator walking around and monitoring their students progress all the time via conversation/q&a vs sitting behind their desk and only getting progress data via weekly assessments. The former is supplemental to the later and provides a great deal (perhaps most) of the educator’s understanding of their student’s progress. (The relationship between workers/managers and teachers/students is not analogous in many other ways, of course)
I'm not sure that's true. My manager messages and asks if I'm free to talk and if I am, she gives me a call on Teams right then. Asking if someone is busy doesn't seem like a high bar.
Now, I do think its harder for them to do their daily ramble around the office to chat with everybody and interrupt their work. I agree its much harder for them to get information on office politics and relationship dynamics, which is really valuable if you are a corporate climber.
When things are remote this kind of sloppy management doesn't work anymore, which makes bad managers hate remote work rather than work on improving how they manage.
The corporate culture didnt. The existing corporate culture descends from mid 20th century corporate culture, that descends from late 19th century Victorian corporate culture, and that in turn descends from the late medieval feudal culture in which the commoners had to be 'hardworking & honest folk' who would come dutifully to the farm field every morning, work hard for the sake of their feudal lord, and be honest enough not to steal from him.
Hence, butts in seats and the expectation that you should devote your life to a company owned by your contemporary feudal lord without you having any shares or say in it...
Pro athletes are maintaining their physical health just like knowledge workers; it's not like they can step onto the field to work our or compete, and it's not like they can just sit at any keyboard, and achieve optimal performance immediately. Resting well, eating good foods, stress management, and other factors that happen away from the actual event are critical for both athletes and employees!
Then it was "I pay you to sit 8 hours with your hands above your head, what is the problem?"
Now it is "We will make sure that you are stressed and have no time to regroup, we pay you, what is the problem?"
The fundamental fact is this: if you are a manager/company that gives your worker the flexibility and freedom they need to take care of their life outside work, they will work hard, do great work and try to retain the jobs, even at a lower pay. But if you treat workers as lazy people who will while away time if you don’t constantly monitor them, then that’s what you’ll get: people doing the bare minimum and not work any moment they can get away with it. Because if you’re going to treat me like a lazy slob, I might as just be that.
Treat people like children? They will have zero incentive to put in one extra second of work.
Treat them like adults and give them flexibility? That's when they give it all during the work hours.
Maslow would like to have a word with you.
100% guaranteed to make me more productive per hour worked. On average, with 8 hours fewer of work per week I would still get the same amount of work done, but would be tremendously happier with my life and with my job.
This change can't come soon enough.
I stopped doing side jobs years ago, when I realized that the money wasn't enough to get my mind in that groove, let alone go somewhere and do something for someone. Now I'm getting to the point where I question if my FAANG salary is enough to justify 40 hours/week.
Spend Friday morning wrapping up the week, making to-dos for the next week, no meetings, minimal email, and generally shutdown for the day by lunchtime.
My wife used to work at a company who offered it and there was a lottery to get into the daycare because it was so popular. The company ran it at a slight profit so there was no cost involved to the company. People arrived on time since they didn't need to make a side trip to a third location, and could visit their kid at lunch or if they were sick or whatever. Huge, huge bonus as a parent.
Consider a developer: what data does an employer have? Number of lines of code committed? Number Commits? Maybe if they are very diligent in collecting data the bugs found son after those commits? You know nothing about quality of code, nothing about speed, nothing about complexity, nothing about bugs avoided, nothing about value added, nothing about mentoring others or managing tasks.
You can do the same analysis for almost any role, from Sales to SecOps.
And that's without getting into Goodhart's law...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Developers get assigned tasks. A guesstimate is made by the dev over the time/effort required, which is approved as plausible by a senior dev/manager. Then the task is done or not done on time. If done, good, next task. If not, the explanation ought to be reasonable.
That’s all you really need to know.
I would argue that the real conspiracy theory is that those leaders have a conflict of interest - they have a stake in the real estate game either: by directly holding interest in real estate that will plummet in value if it goes unused, or by receiving kickbacks or other incentives for leasing certain office space.
It makes perfect sense for business leaders, as agents of the owner class, to continue doing as much as possible to minimize and undermine labor power.
X% less productivity is more palatable to such creatures than the risk of workers gaining a real seat at the table.
Company culture, ad hoc meetings, serendipity, were the listed reasons.
So it sounds like companies are not optimizing for productivity, they are optimizing for innovation.
Whether these things contribute to innovation is still up in the air. I personally think happier employees will be more innovative, but have no data to back that up.
I still feel that "we" haven't learnt the skills or tools for great remote working, yet.