The title here is confusingly worded, makes it sound like just remote work = no excess productivity. But the article makes it clear it goes in both directions, remote work simply doesn't have an effect on productivity one way or another:
> Analyzing the relationship between GDP per hour growth and the ability to telework across industries shows that industries that are more adaptable to remote work did not experience a bigger decline or boost in productivity growth since 2020 than less adaptable industries. Thus, teleworking most likely has neither substantially held back nor boosted productivity growth.
The savings in time, money, and energy from remote work are investible. Resources will be reallocated from commercial office space, commuting, etc…to other more productive endeavors. We won’t see some of that play out for another 5-10 years (e.g. when mass divestment from commercial real estate happens).
Indeed. If capitalism is meant to find the most efficient ways of doing things, WFH is a natural result. It is cheaper for the employers AND employees, and solves some current pains (e.g. urban house prices).
A lot of the feet-dragging concerns can be summed up as: We ruined suburban areas because everyone had to commute centrally (e.g. closure of community spaces, shops, restaurants) and it will take a while to adjust.
I do find it interesting that when individuals take risks and lose, there is near zero sympathy from society but when big commercial real-estate firms do so, suddenly we have to adjust our way of life around them.
A lot of the smaller downtown businesses will be absolutely fine, they'll just move suburban where the workers now are.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. I changed jobs this year directly citing my company’s forced RTO policy, and my manager said I wasn’t the only one doing so.
I think the companies that are trying to force RTO will start changing tune pretty quickly when studies like this show there’s really no downside in terms of productivity.
CEOs seem to be forcing RTO based mainly on vibes, "spontaneous collaboration", or "organic creative breakthroughs", or "watercooler synergy" or some other corporate gibberish. Data won't make a dent in that.
but doing this means they can force you out, and replace you with someone in Alabama, or India, who will do the job for less. Often much less.
An awful lot of tech bro Big4 consulting CEO types are also betting a lot on AI -- cut bodies and let Copilot or GPT do the work. If that doesn't work they can always scrounge up another body or two from Tata or Cap Gemini.
Remote work doesn't have an effect on productivity _at work_.
There's a huge benefit to the personal life of the employee. When you take a break you can run laundry, run to the bank, vacuum, etc. The 30-90 minutes you don't spend sitting in traffic each day becomes productive time.
With no negative impact to the employer, and only benefits to the employee, WFH represents a Pareto optimization: there's no reason not to do it.
To the company you work for. In terms of societal impact, I can't imagine it's anything other than hugely impactful. I used to spend close to 2 hours a day driving around. That's time I now spend exercising, with family, volunteering, and not wasting gas.
> Analyzing the relationship between GDP per hour growth
I cannot think of a more contrived metric than "GDP per hour growth" this reeks of someone who already had an opinion and wanted to prove it and the best they could come up with is to prove it doesn't for sure help productivity.
I believe the depiction here is inaccurate as it does not account for commute time. If I have to spend 1.5 hours commuting to the office, it should be considered as 9.5 hours for the same task that I can accomplish in 8 hours at home.
Another thing they don't capture is that I can afford a better, more comfortable and ergonomic setup at home than my company is willing to spend on office equipment, as well as access to healthier food and drink than my company is willing to stock the office pantries with.
Not to mention the number of meetings I need to take from my uncomfortable car seat on office days because there aren't enough meeting rooms and phone booths in the office.
Title a bit misleading. The study says it had not substantially held back not boosted productivity. It basically says “no measurable effect”.
What you’re missing is the economists’ definition of productivity which is amount of goods/services produced over the inputs used to produce them. It is unrelated concept to personal “feeling” of being productive.
> Does Working from Home Boost Productivity Growth?
Does it have to?
Remote work is great because it reduces carbon emissions, reduces noise pollution, reduces traffic, increases residential rent revenues, increases work satisfaction, increases hobby engagement, improves child rearing, and generally gives people their time back.
If we can get all that and maintain the same productivity, working from home feels very worth it.
Really difficult to comprehend why this is so difficult for people to understand. I recently started sharing a small office on the lake with a friend. I have about 180sf of it to myself. There are boats that cruise by, views are incredible, the environment is fun an inviting -- and I still have my privacy. It's like WFH but 5 feet from the water.
I've been a WFH advocate for 22 years, having spend 20 of those working in my own home. I still refuse to go downtown, but I don't mind going to a place like this. I still work about 70% from my house, and 30% from the office. I work from the office when it suits me.
Perhaps if they weren't trying to shove us into a singular zip code from a radius 50 miles away, distract and annoy us, force us to deal with traffic, not to mention the personal and monetary expense of it all -- I'd be willing to entertain the idea that an office is "better."
There is one thing the companies might not get but i got: I know now how it is to work remote and no i will not go back to the old.
I'm now also willing to accept less money for remote only than before and i also thinking of taking my current money and doing an exit faster if the industry doesn't like that and i will just accept a 'lost' of luxury but i do want to look at nature when i have to work (like your lake side office).
Many things like this remind me of Robert Kennedy's speech at the University of Kansas:
>Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
> Remote work is great because it reduces carbon emissions, reduces noise pollution, reduces traffic, increases residential rent revenues, increases work satisfaction, increases hobby engagement, improves child rearing, and generally gives people their time back.
All reasons corporations will crush it. They don't want happy workers, they want fearful ones.
To be fair they acknowledge in conclusion that it has other positive effects, but their analysis was focused on productivity.
But I agree, title of this analysis is weird, as it assumes that it should impact productivity positively and comes as negative since it doesn't.
I am glad they conclude its neutral though. If we were starting to see analysis showing it reduces productivity, you'd bet we'd be back in office in no time
reduces carbon emissions/reduces noise pollution/reduces traffic - These are related. There is absolutely no evidence for this. In the U.S. traffic in 2021 was higher than in 2019 despite significant remote work and has only been going higher since. Electricity consumption has been higher as well (which is obvious…heating or cooling an office space with tens or hundreds of people is almost certainly more efficient than heating tens or hundreds of different spaces with 1-2 people in them).
increases residential rent revenues - I’m not sure what you mean but if you mean higher rent, I think most would agree that high rent is a massive problem in the U.S. and high rents aren’t a good thing.
increases work satisfaction - Yes, the evidence shows that this appears to be the case for a decent majority of people. But the satisfaction numbers may drop with distance with COVID so we need to see if this holds up.
increases hobby engagement - I’m not sure there’s any evidence for this.
improves child - there is a correlation here but it’s not clear how much of it is a result of the large percentage of women who’ve dropped out of the workforce to care for children since COVID.
and generally gives people their time back - The evidence points in the opposite direction. Since the massive increase in WFH people are very clearly stating that work has taken over all hours in their life. Once again, this may be due to the lack of establishment of norms due to the limited time, so it may improve, but the evidence isn’t clear in either direction.
Another point is that most of these benefits are a result of avoiding (although it isn’t clear that this is even the case) bad commutes. Which is largely driven by bad infrastructure design which may not be the case in places which don’t have the bad infrastructure design, which would contain a lot of major population centers outside USA/Canada.
Bingo, came here to say this. The goal of our society should not be to make everyone as "productive" as possible, but to make everyone's lives as good as possible.
This seems like the worst possible way of answering the question. I'd be much more interested in looking at this company by company within a vertical. Knowing that the teleworkability of software engineering is 80% and that software engineering as an industry adds a lot of value per hour from a productivity perspective doesn't seem causal to me. You could for instance just be measuring that physical presence is more correlated with low value work rather than measuring any notion of productivity.
Knowing whether the companies within software that allow remote work add more or less value than the companies within software that don't would be far more informative.
So if it has no measurable effect, and some workers need/want to work remotely for whatever reason, why do some orgs not want to give them that option, especially for desk work in software, insurance, law, etc. that require little to no face-to-face interaction?
Could it be that it’s not about productivity or even “culture”, but actually all about control and/or trying to justify the org’s sunk costs in office space purchases/leases?
For the record, I would prefer a hybrid arrangement if I could have one that didn’t require a long commute (more than 15-20 minutes). But what works for me might not work for everyone else in the org.
> Could it be that it’s not about productivity or even “culture”, but actually all about control and/or trying to justify the org’s office space costs?
It's 100% about this. I know several people who were forced back to work after being able to do their entire job at full productivity remotely for years, and they were happier and saving money. They were just as able to "brainstorm" with people. It's all about control and justifying office space cost.
>Could it be that it’s not about productivity or even “culture”, but actually all about control and/or trying to justify the org’s sunk costs in office space purchases/leases?
It could be for those reasons, or it could be for a variety of other reasons. One thing that we know that humans are really good at rationalizing irrational choices.
Anecdotally, my experience seems to show that there are many relatively low-productivity people who are fooled into thinking they are being productive by scheduling meetings, having face time, overanalyzing problems without necessarily addressing them, etc. Those people also seem to be the ones who favor RTO policies. My suspicion is that RTO helps them enable those meetings, which makes them "feel" productive.
I'm expecting/hoping that eventually the right to WFH for a job that can be done entirely WFH will be recognized as a necessary accommodation for various disabilities, so that these petty flexes can be halted.
Yeah, they passed that already in the Netherlands.
I think the Netherlands doesn’t stipulates a disability. And honestly, there are reasons other than disabilities and neurodivergence; some people are caregivers, or have young kids, or have a nice home office setup (which a lot of the same companies “flexing” as you put it will never match in the office), or they just don’t want to waste money and time commuting.
I believe if the job can be done remotely, it should be a worker’s right. No hassle, no questions asked, and no retaliation or discrimination.
However, I’m not sure where you’re located, but I’m not holding my breath for meaningful workers’ rights legislation in the US any time soon.
In the charts there are some very notable outliers of negative productivity. I wish the author would have labeled which industries are notably underperforming.
A very simple small note: the article observe some "issues" like "inferior equipment at home, distraction, difficult communication etc who actually exists BUT they are not a part of remote working but a part of being unprepared to do so.
Once established that WFH meaning having a closed room, well equipped, well connected etc, such issues disappear; once people understand how to relate with others from remote another issue is gone.
So to say: so far they have not observed nor boost nor degradation in productivity BECAUSE there are some issues about WFH organization and habits, resolving them will likely boost productivity as well.
Beside that: the push against WFH have two reasons:
- at small sale remote workers are easy to fire, but ALSO have from a whole country to the whole world of potential job market, not just the market in a close proximity of facing relocations costs. So to say, remote workers are LESS EASIER exploited beyond their signed contracts than in person workers;
- al large scale working from remote en mass means a population that start to spread, this means many modern services going down. We have no reasons to Uber when we live in a spread place where parking is never an issue and all have their own cars. We have no reasons to JustEat if we have few restaurants nearby and we normally eat at our home. We have no room for drone delivery of small packages since there are no long-range drones. We have no room for keep visiting shopping malls buying small things that sum up to a significant amount of money for the shop since we live in a large and calm place. Essentially at large scale remote work help small and medium enterprises cutting market slice to the modern giants, avoiding the "sharing economy" and the "not owning anything, use services instead" scenarios.
Readit News
> Analyzing the relationship between GDP per hour growth and the ability to telework across industries shows that industries that are more adaptable to remote work did not experience a bigger decline or boost in productivity growth since 2020 than less adaptable industries. Thus, teleworking most likely has neither substantially held back nor boosted productivity growth.
A lot of the feet-dragging concerns can be summed up as: We ruined suburban areas because everyone had to commute centrally (e.g. closure of community spaces, shops, restaurants) and it will take a while to adjust.
I do find it interesting that when individuals take risks and lose, there is near zero sympathy from society but when big commercial real-estate firms do so, suddenly we have to adjust our way of life around them.
A lot of the smaller downtown businesses will be absolutely fine, they'll just move suburban where the workers now are.
I think the companies that are trying to force RTO will start changing tune pretty quickly when studies like this show there’s really no downside in terms of productivity.
but doing this means they can force you out, and replace you with someone in Alabama, or India, who will do the job for less. Often much less.
An awful lot of tech bro Big4 consulting CEO types are also betting a lot on AI -- cut bodies and let Copilot or GPT do the work. If that doesn't work they can always scrounge up another body or two from Tata or Cap Gemini.
There's a huge benefit to the personal life of the employee. When you take a break you can run laundry, run to the bank, vacuum, etc. The 30-90 minutes you don't spend sitting in traffic each day becomes productive time.
With no negative impact to the employer, and only benefits to the employee, WFH represents a Pareto optimization: there's no reason not to do it.
To the company you work for. In terms of societal impact, I can't imagine it's anything other than hugely impactful. I used to spend close to 2 hours a day driving around. That's time I now spend exercising, with family, volunteering, and not wasting gas.
I cannot think of a more contrived metric than "GDP per hour growth" this reeks of someone who already had an opinion and wanted to prove it and the best they could come up with is to prove it doesn't for sure help productivity.
It differs from the colloquial sense of the word.
Not to mention the number of meetings I need to take from my uncomfortable car seat on office days because there aren't enough meeting rooms and phone booths in the office.
What you’re missing is the economists’ definition of productivity which is amount of goods/services produced over the inputs used to produce them. It is unrelated concept to personal “feeling” of being productive.
Does it have to?
Remote work is great because it reduces carbon emissions, reduces noise pollution, reduces traffic, increases residential rent revenues, increases work satisfaction, increases hobby engagement, improves child rearing, and generally gives people their time back.
If we can get all that and maintain the same productivity, working from home feels very worth it.
I've been a WFH advocate for 22 years, having spend 20 of those working in my own home. I still refuse to go downtown, but I don't mind going to a place like this. I still work about 70% from my house, and 30% from the office. I work from the office when it suits me.
Perhaps if they weren't trying to shove us into a singular zip code from a radius 50 miles away, distract and annoy us, force us to deal with traffic, not to mention the personal and monetary expense of it all -- I'd be willing to entertain the idea that an office is "better."
I'm now also willing to accept less money for remote only than before and i also thinking of taking my current money and doing an exit faster if the industry doesn't like that and i will just accept a 'lost' of luxury but i do want to look at nature when i have to work (like your lake side office).
>Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-famil...
All reasons corporations will crush it. They don't want happy workers, they want fearful ones.
To be fair they acknowledge in conclusion that it has other positive effects, but their analysis was focused on productivity.
But I agree, title of this analysis is weird, as it assumes that it should impact productivity positively and comes as negative since it doesn't.
I am glad they conclude its neutral though. If we were starting to see analysis showing it reduces productivity, you'd bet we'd be back in office in no time
reduces carbon emissions/reduces noise pollution/reduces traffic - These are related. There is absolutely no evidence for this. In the U.S. traffic in 2021 was higher than in 2019 despite significant remote work and has only been going higher since. Electricity consumption has been higher as well (which is obvious…heating or cooling an office space with tens or hundreds of people is almost certainly more efficient than heating tens or hundreds of different spaces with 1-2 people in them).
increases residential rent revenues - I’m not sure what you mean but if you mean higher rent, I think most would agree that high rent is a massive problem in the U.S. and high rents aren’t a good thing.
increases work satisfaction - Yes, the evidence shows that this appears to be the case for a decent majority of people. But the satisfaction numbers may drop with distance with COVID so we need to see if this holds up.
increases hobby engagement - I’m not sure there’s any evidence for this.
improves child - there is a correlation here but it’s not clear how much of it is a result of the large percentage of women who’ve dropped out of the workforce to care for children since COVID.
and generally gives people their time back - The evidence points in the opposite direction. Since the massive increase in WFH people are very clearly stating that work has taken over all hours in their life. Once again, this may be due to the lack of establishment of norms due to the limited time, so it may improve, but the evidence isn’t clear in either direction.
Another point is that most of these benefits are a result of avoiding (although it isn’t clear that this is even the case) bad commutes. Which is largely driven by bad infrastructure design which may not be the case in places which don’t have the bad infrastructure design, which would contain a lot of major population centers outside USA/Canada.
Increases in productivity have not necessarily led society to greater prosperity, so I think we've been looking at the wrong indicator all this time.
Deleted Comment
Knowing whether the companies within software that allow remote work add more or less value than the companies within software that don't would be far more informative.
Could it be that it’s not about productivity or even “culture”, but actually all about control and/or trying to justify the org’s sunk costs in office space purchases/leases?
For the record, I would prefer a hybrid arrangement if I could have one that didn’t require a long commute (more than 15-20 minutes). But what works for me might not work for everyone else in the org.
It's 100% about this. I know several people who were forced back to work after being able to do their entire job at full productivity remotely for years, and they were happier and saving money. They were just as able to "brainstorm" with people. It's all about control and justifying office space cost.
It could be for those reasons, or it could be for a variety of other reasons. One thing that we know that humans are really good at rationalizing irrational choices.
Anecdotally, my experience seems to show that there are many relatively low-productivity people who are fooled into thinking they are being productive by scheduling meetings, having face time, overanalyzing problems without necessarily addressing them, etc. Those people also seem to be the ones who favor RTO policies. My suspicion is that RTO helps them enable those meetings, which makes them "feel" productive.
I think the Netherlands doesn’t stipulates a disability. And honestly, there are reasons other than disabilities and neurodivergence; some people are caregivers, or have young kids, or have a nice home office setup (which a lot of the same companies “flexing” as you put it will never match in the office), or they just don’t want to waste money and time commuting.
I believe if the job can be done remotely, it should be a worker’s right. No hassle, no questions asked, and no retaliation or discrimination.
However, I’m not sure where you’re located, but I’m not holding my breath for meaningful workers’ rights legislation in the US any time soon.
Dead Comment
Once established that WFH meaning having a closed room, well equipped, well connected etc, such issues disappear; once people understand how to relate with others from remote another issue is gone.
So to say: so far they have not observed nor boost nor degradation in productivity BECAUSE there are some issues about WFH organization and habits, resolving them will likely boost productivity as well.
Beside that: the push against WFH have two reasons:
- at small sale remote workers are easy to fire, but ALSO have from a whole country to the whole world of potential job market, not just the market in a close proximity of facing relocations costs. So to say, remote workers are LESS EASIER exploited beyond their signed contracts than in person workers;
- al large scale working from remote en mass means a population that start to spread, this means many modern services going down. We have no reasons to Uber when we live in a spread place where parking is never an issue and all have their own cars. We have no reasons to JustEat if we have few restaurants nearby and we normally eat at our home. We have no room for drone delivery of small packages since there are no long-range drones. We have no room for keep visiting shopping malls buying small things that sum up to a significant amount of money for the shop since we live in a large and calm place. Essentially at large scale remote work help small and medium enterprises cutting market slice to the modern giants, avoiding the "sharing economy" and the "not owning anything, use services instead" scenarios.