The fundamental issue I see in this debate is a lack of sensibility and nuance in human nature.
The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.
I could write a long post but I'll cut it short to this paragraph stating that humans differ.
For some commuting is stressful, the offices are noisy and full of distractions and those individuals may thrive in a remote setup. There's people that work in the opposite way. Their house offer many distractions from laundry to videogames. Some people require micro management and constant oversight some tilt in such environments.
Some teams require a lot of meaningful in-person interactions, brainstorming sessions or work chats around the coffee machine. Some teams thrive with good central top/down planning and workload splitting where syncing isn't very important.
At the end of the day the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects is not remote vs non-remote and apply blindly rather in forming teams with people that by their own nature or preferences will thrive in the setup that's decided.
I would add one major change that the work from home experiment has achieved - its made the opportunity cost of the work commute clear. This is a time cost paid for by the worker.
As you stated, this is variable.
If you have a short commute, or you like it, or you get some exercise - office is great.
If you hate your commute, if its 3 hours in pollution and traffic - not so much.
Earlier the position was that WFH was not possible. Now we know it is, and I hazard that this change isn't factored in job postings.
Considering what an hour of time means in this era, its not a trivial cost. This means an hour which could be spent just unwinding, studying, on hobbies, procrastinating, whatever.
If you have any drive, or strong interests, thats time you would want to spend on something other than a commute.
I've generally had a 30-40min commute most of my career, but also generally had a flexible enough start time that exact to the minute arrival at my desk was not performance impacting.
Unfortunately a lot of things conflate over time as you become more senior to generally make your commute worse.
For me - my last 2 roles have earlier required start time, with a hard start (morning meeting / standup / L3 support presence), company office locations got a little further, and trains got a little less reliable.
Fortunately I am remote since COVID, but when I was going in / or have to go in now.. I need to bake in 45-60min depending on how much I'm willing to risk being late that day.
For me I'd rather work 11-12 hours/day at home then go into office for 10 hours & spend 1.5-2 hours on the commute. Company is getting 10-20% more time out of me, and I at least save the money & "commute prep time".
BTW this is where commute by public transport shines. My 30 minutes to the office are my dedicated reading time, an hour a day. If instead I had to drive, that would be lost time, because paying enough attention to the book distracts enough from driving to add unnecessary risk.
The solution to that problem is to count the travel time and any required breaks as part of work hours while also reimbursing all travel expenses. That would require employers to pay the full cost of unnecessary in-person work on both ends and would strongly disincentivize them from doing it.
Employers reimbursing your travel expenses if they need you to travel to a conference on the other side of the country is already the norm so why shouldn't they reimburse your travel expenses if they want you to travel somewhere in the same geographic area?
Not just time cost, but also monetary cost. At least in tech, most jobs exist in a small set of metro areas where housing prices are incredibly high. Pushing for more remote work enables more flexibility in where people live / can ease some of the housing pressure on these congested metros.
I definitely agree here. For most of my career I was fortunate enough to not have a "real" commute. at most a 20 min walk to the office. The worse commute is when it was raining or snowing.
The problem becomes now my home is tied to my work place. If the company moves or I change companies, I have move or stress at a new commute. I did move once during a job change, and it didn't last long.
Another compounding issue is that I like to stay at companies for a long time, 10 years. This is frequently becoming difficult for a number of reasons not entirely in my control.
I absolutely let my employer pay for my commute. Indirectly of course, but my income requirements are dependent on how much hours I have to put into work, which includes my overall time investment. Same with all other costs I have because of work.
That said, time is important to me and I have a 5min commute, 20min if I walk. For that reason I do prefer the office. Better meals and better coffee and nice colleagues.
If employers want to force people into offices, maybe pay them a bonus.
It’s really more than that. I live in the city, my office is 7 minutes away most mornings.
The transition time of arrival and departure is easily 30-45m daily, on my employers dime.
I do 50% and it works for me. End of the day most of the problems associated with this issue are workplace and cultural issues that come to a head with remote/hybrid. The only novel dysfunctions with employees that I see (and I’m an exec with about 900) are people doing things like secretly moving away and abusing medical accommodation. There’s also an issue where people build their life around remote and are disappointed when they miss opportunities, but are unwilling to meet in the middle.
End of the day. The lazy idiots are just as lazy, grinders grind, and smart people continue to be smart.
Not only the commute, but also lunch breaks. In US and Canada, lunch breaks are short, but back in Brazil I had a 1:30h lunch break, and then at another job, 1:12. But I'm at the office, can't go to bed, I'm at the company's computer so can't do anything I want, also it's in the office, so if watching some TV show or anime that has more graphic content, that might also be a no.
I get calls for jobs that would increase my TC by 100k, jobs I’m confident I could land, and I won’t interview for any of them. That’s how much WFH means to me.
This is my experience. My productivity on coding is a lot hire remote. On many leadership / management-style tasks, it's a lot lower.
Come to think of it, I'm wondering if that's where the split comes in. Upper management sees their productivity go down -- on what's fundamentally an interpersonal endeavour -- while individual contributors see theirs go up -- on what's primarily solitary ones. As a result, there is friction with top-down work-from-office mandates.
It's the point where you're no longer an individual contributor. Running a team and keeping people on target is difficult remotely. Consensus is difficult remotely. Feedback is difficult remotely.
Getting your head down and coding on your personal goal is easy remotely.
I think some ICs like that it's harder for people to say to them that they are driving in the wrong direction, even if it's still true.
This is it. Add to the fact that poor managers don't really understand or know what their staff are doing, it gives them anxiety. If the same poor manager is in an office with them and can see them at their desk then it alleviates that somewhat.
Managing people is really really hard, but we seem to have a managerial class who seem to be getting away with doing it very poorly.
I think this is largely it - the whole maker vs. manager thing... when your job relies on focus, being in a situation where you can control distractions is a benefit. But when your job relies on getting others' attention it can clearly be a negative, esp. if the culture is not thoroughly supportive.
It also adds an extra hurdle for those who aren't particularly skilled at management.
I have a lot of interpersonal work, with people all around the world. Going into the office just to talk on these people on Teams doesn't give a productivity boost. Being able to do this or not is a skill, just like coding is a skill. I try not to bog down my team if I'm deficient in some skill, instead, I work to improve it.
I’ve seen team managers blame design work being poor or unproductive on having remote workers when most of the team isn’t. And then when everyone is flown in they claim a great victory when the output is the same or worse. I think many managers with poor performing teams are using the opportunity to blame poor performance on remote with zero data to back that up. It’s simply a useful group to blame for all your problems often due to hiring a team of less experienced people so you can pay them less.
Pretty much agree, but ultimately the onus on hiring the right people is on the hiring manager. The pattern here is management blaming their own incompetence on anything that doesn't lead back to themselves, such as WFH. Then you have higher level leadership eating this up because of their own laziness and incompetence. Incompetence all the way up.
Totally agree, since the individual's situation varies so much (both intra-team, in their personal life, and across time) the only conclusion that can be said at a c-suite level is that nothing should be broadly mandated and that teams should have the option to decide on their own about office vs remote.
I hypothesize, however, that a lot of these decisions at a c-suite level have more to do with other considerations, like property investments, headcount, salaries, or (worst of all) egos.
Right, I think the important nuance is that "it depends" and therefore, top-down C-level suite dictates on Remote/Hybrid/In-office requirements are generally more punitive than useful.
If your team level management org cannot organically work out the right mix on a team/role basis, then you probably should look at what else they are doing poorly.
I think you’re touching on an important point though, mix of in person and in office is really challenging, because some people see each other all day while others are literally more disconnected. It creates a heterogeneous mix of work relationships, and I’m not so sure that handling mix WFH WFO is purely evident of poor team management, it’s just difficult to have a cohesive team when some are physically there and some arent
IMHO, each team does something poorly, and it doesn't mean you go on a fishing expedition to find everything else they're doing poorly. Rather, you focus on what they're doing great, and incentivize/reward them for that. As a manager this has what has worked for me over the years, but YMMV.
> the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects
> in the setup that's decided
I'd argue this shouldn't be a top-down decision - you can just let teams and individuals decide what works best for them, then that can be communicated upwards so the company can plan office space/resource allocation
>you can just let teams and individuals decide what works best for them, then that can be communicated upwards so the company can plan office space/resource allocation
Finding this many self-motivated conscientious employees is uncommon. Consider yourself lucky. This has never been a winning strategy that I've seen anywhere.
'place of work' is usually (here in Czechia) defined in a labor contract. So that cannot change because 'team decided'. I have contract with my employer, not with my team.
> workload splitting where syncing isn't very important
I'm not convinced that remote means syncing is harder. There is a case to be made that: it's easier because it compels teams to have a structure for syncing, and structured syncing may be more efficient than ad hoc. Put another way, you potentially lose the crutch and end up stronger as a result.
This isn't a whimsical theory either- structured business processes are often missing and causing hidden costs and inefficiencies.
It doesn't make syncing harder. I've worked for high-performing global teams for DECADES, so this debate is amusing to me. It shows me which companies absolutely cannot scale past a certain point, and which perpetuate terrible communication and management practices papered over with in person smokescreens.
Work requires effective communication. Global teams place a premium on that and nurture it if they're successful. The remote work dilemma is non-global teams discovering this well-trodden ground and attempting to reinvent the wheel, with a sprinkling of terrible commercial real estate decisions on top.
(Nothing in this response addresses specific team types that benefit from in person work or the entirely valid in-office preferences of individual workers.)
This kind of nuance is also brought up in sister comments, but you probably explained it best. With the caveat that C-suite mandates should not be the only determinant; let teams have some degree of autonomy and self-organization, and be able to advocate for what works best for them.
It’s unfortunate that there’s now very little nuance in American discourse especially, whether that’s in business, politics, economics, or society. Everything is an ideological “cause” worth fighting for, with an inverted bell curve showing lots of people at the extremes, and precious few in the middle.
It doesn’t bode well. I fear America is devolving toward a 1980s Lebanon-style civil war, with everyone fighting against everyone at least at one point or another. The military could step in, but then we’d essentially have martial law which isn’t much better. It may seem silly to bring this up in a thread about remote work, but it’s really a microcosm for how polarized we’ve become.
I hope it's OK to dissent here since all the other comments agree with you anyway. Regarding this:
> The fundamental issue I see in this debate is a lack of sensibility and nuance in human nature.
> The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.
If statistics is invalid, then how do you propose companies decide, based on a reasonable and empirical estimate of reality, on what work arrangement to implement? Do you believe that it is not expensive and disruptive to introduce as many variations of work setups as there are people in a company? What if the people deciding company policy simply prefer and believe in the advantages of onsite, which they have the freedom and right to believe---so why do people who prefer remote force themselves in such places?
I am 100% in the remote work camp, but I agree with you. Every company has the right to make the choice that works for them... whether empirically driven or not, it is their prerogative to choose. But they do then need to hire the people for whom that choice works. And as people looking for work, we need to accept that some companies are non-viable for us because of the choices they make.
The friction we're seeing now is that we're still recovering from a pandemic that forced everyone remote whether it works for them or not. So this idea of remote vs. office being a core strategic decision as a company grows is fairly new. We are all still learning how to navigate the options.
> If statistics is invalid, then how do you propose companies decide, based on a reasonable and empirical estimate of reality, on what work arrangement to implement?
As Einstein said, you should make every problem as simple as possible, but no more simple.
The problem we're describing cannot be reduced to few simple statistics, it's exactly making the problem simpler than it is.
Not only just the task of measuring productivity of knowledge workers is extremely difficult if not impossible, but getting any statistic across a wide variety of different factors makes it even more pointless.
In fact, the problem shouldn't be approached from a macro, but microscopic level. Start from the basics.
There's knowledge workers that don't do anything from home. There's knowledge workers that won't achieve anything at the office. There's gargantuan projects like operating systems or databases developed fully remotely and asynchronously. There's projects that barely move without lots of synchronous, meaningful in-person interactions and there's environments like early stage startups that desperately need this kind of situation (albeit I'm sure there's many exceptions).
In professional sports it is very well understood that slightly different formulas work differently for different teams and players. Some needs to be fast and lean to be effective. Some need to put up muscle and weight. Many need both. Some need lots of cardio, some need more skills training. And all of that has to interact and mesh together and face different challenges.
Yet you want to complex systems like business projects/teams built around few statistics? Ignoring the wide variety of factors and humans that will end up there?
I'm not saying that building teams like that is an easy task, sometimes you just need to make work whatever team you're given, and you will have to decide a setup and give the right structure incentives to everyone to make it work.
But even if tomorrow a stat told us that there's proof that statistically remote is better for 60% of the teams (or the opposite) that really won't help much.
Also, people's circumstances change over time, but their work not so much.
As a new grad, hell yeah I want to be in the office to interrupt and be interrupted for the learning, interact to know other, hope for serendipitous encounters, have a good time after work, meet a potential partner, yada yada.
As a family person with decade of work history, I see it as losing my balance, a hindrance the interruptions, the banter, the random assignments because you ran into someone in the cafe, having to deny after hours stuff again and again for the kids or appointments, having to take the whole day off for a 2 hour appointment at lunch, blah blah blah.
Not all new grads are the same, neither all seniors. Let people pick. The illusion of loss of productivity has been shattered and there's no going back.
There was a point in time when all you could buy was a black ford model-T. Ford would love to do that. But it can't anymore. Times have changed. Took Ford a long time and many executive shifts to move on and get along with reality.
> The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.
Is it though? My last employer (a FAANG) did publish (questionable) numbers suggesting WFH being more efficient when the lockdowns started. When RTO started they flatly refused to back it up with any numbers whatsoever.
> At the end of the day the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects is not remote vs non-remote and apply blindly rather in forming teams with people that by their own nature or preferences will thrive in the setup that's decided.
I think at the end of the day the C-suite has no idea whether WFH is better or worse. Middle management will come out and blame any lack of progress/productivity on literally anything that's not directly related to their own performance, so WFH is a natural scapegoat for incompetent management.
The debate is dramatically simplified when you take into account the gargantuan environmental impact of maintaining massive 24/7 climate-controlled office spaces that are vacant other than 40 hours a week (vacant for 75% of the week) and having people commute 15 minutes to 1.5 hours a day to and from these office spaces in motor vehicles, versus simply not leaving your house and re-purposing these sky-scrapers for societal goods like cheap/free high quality public housing, etc.
You can't justify the environmental destruction of working in an office just because you like the aesthetic or it makes you feel better. These are not apples and oranges that can be compared like two sides of an equally unproblematic coin, and it makes me sick that people equivocate and make it seem otherwise.
You used "some" in a lot of your sentences and that sums it up perfectly. Some people work better at home, some people work better in an office. Some jobs require more collaboration than others. I am the first to admit that meetings are usually a tad more productive in person but arbitrary "two days at office" policies make no sense, especially if there is not a policy where everybody has to go in on the same day(s).
Office mandates are dumb and it should be left up to individual team leaders.
What the comments also show is that people willingly bring themselves in a situation of 3h of commute and then complain. That's not something you'd ever widely see in Europe imho. 3h is insane. I have < 20 minutes and love the reading time, as I travel by public transport. If I'd have a farther commute I would just move. Baffles me that someone would accept this. Maybe your public transport/zoning is fucked up, not your remote/not remote thing?
Yep very much this. Why on earth would you choose to live somewhere that is a 3 hour commute. DOn't do that to yourself. Move. If your commute is that bad, either you're choosing a stupid place to live, or your town planning is terrible. That's the problem, not working in the office. Everyone should be able to do a few days hybrid comfortably. If you can't, you should have a job in a city closer to you.
It's absolutely true that the real problem in the US is our public transit (and by extension basically all post-WW2 buildings and infrastructure) situation, but if I'm just a guy running a software company, there doesn't seem to be much I can do about that. Hence all the hand-wringing about remote work.
I work VERY remote (my employer is in Austin, I live in Michigan), so public transit isn't really an option for that arrangement, but if I'm honest the only real reason I'm doing it is because of Austin housing prices -- I'd much rather live in an urban core within walking distance of work, but that lifestyle is unimaginably expensive in all the places where jobs exist. Instead, I have an aging 1940s tract home in a city 2k miles from work.
The housing crisis is also a transit crisis. We built most of our homes and businesses around the cheap automobile and infinite petro-energy, with the predictable result that we can barely afford to live near the places we work.
Unfortunately, it's really difficult to run HR for any company of significant size, that accounts for individual differences.
My personal management style was about treating each employee as an individual, but I was also fortunate to have a small team of high-performing, mature, dedicated professionals. My technique would not work on many of the teams that I see out there, these days.
It’s a preference to not execute two different skill sets when you lack one of them. That’s stressful.
You might be a good developer, but not great at talking to users and figuring out the priority and the solution and executing on that independently.
Or you might not be good at delivering eloquent speeches. Or whatever. Everyone lacks some skillset which they’d prefer someone more qualified handle for them.
I have worked with people who needed explicit instructions for every step to perform, and if they complete what is assigned to them they will quietly sit and pass the time until they are explicitly told to do something.
This isn't an "oh it's 4:30 and I'm not going to start something new", it's "It's 11am, and everyone else is busy, I will play solitaire until my manager explicitly tells me which of the 45 tasks they want me to complete".
If you say "go into room X and fetch the Y to do Z", if Y isn't in the right place they will await further instruction. If challenged, they will say they need training on how to handle the situation, or that it's the managers job to ensure the process is right. If you give them the explicit instruciton to tell you when their task is complete, they will come to you and stand next to you until you give them something else to do.
However, if you give them a task like do X at 9:30 every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, it will be done, to spec, every time. People like me will occasionally miss it due to other asks, prioritisation,a perceived lack of value of the task, or an "I-know-that-this-isn't-important" mindset.
Part of management is identifying these behavioural differences, and utilising them effectively.
If you have a full team of people who need explicit instruction, your job will be shuffling tickets around. If you have a full team of people who look for improvements, and are constantly thinking ahead, your job will be trying to reign them in and keep them working on the right things. Neither is good, you want a mix of both.
I dont think this is about workers preference.
People without oversight can get unsure about how to execute task and need validation, but when directly asked nobody will tell you they like micromanaged (seen this).
Other thing I've seen is people without supervision producing less/lower quality results.
Seems if you have staff that needs constant oversight and micromanagement, it's a waste of your own time. Do you really want to check someone 8 hours a day, 5 days per week to make sure they do what they are supposed to do?
I think in such cases it might be better to get rid of such staff, for your own sake and theirs.
> If remote work boosts productivity in a substantial way, then it should improve productivity performance
Not necessarily given the methodology. For example, if remote work allows a worker to do their laundry in parallel where they would be otherwise unable to in an office, their productivity has increased, but the gains would not show up in the study. It observes industry productivity, not work productivity.
Sure, but then we're discussing remote work as an employee benefit, which is a different discussion driven by a different part of the company etc. Not as a thing which improves the company's bottom line which is where C suite and shareholders spend the vast majority of their attention.
If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work.
A. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we don't need to pay for as much office space and whatever other expenses are incurred by the employee's physical presence
B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...)
I personally love remote work and believe in the benefits but I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B, they may even downvote me for bringing it up, but I guarantee that is one of the main conversations that will come up in the board room as remote work is normalized. Not "oh hey great, now labor can do laundry on company time!"
A. This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments.
B. Language issues, cultural issues, and time zone issues all have negative effects.
C. Or it could mean labour is more productive because it has more free time and is less stressed. There's no pointless commute and some chores can be done in the background. Getting slightly distracted by laundry is far less of a loss to productivity than being constantly distracted by conversations, office noise, pointless meetings, and so on.
Your arguments are all MBA-level arguments, which means they look superficially convincing but they lack systemic insight.
There's plenty of evidence that happier workers are more productive. Treating workers like people instead of machinery has comprehensive business benefits. The only real cost is a reduction in the self-perceived relative status of the C-suite.
Essentially this is an argument about hierarchy and loss of face, and not so much about measurable business costs/benefits.
Reducing costs by hiring in other countries is not as easy as it seems.
In reality there is an opportunity to hire wider pool of full time applicants in US because now you can offer even 1 day a week in the office instead of 5 or doing 1 day a month.
If I have to consider company that is 2h driving away - one way - and be there 5 days a week, that is a deal breaker.
Doing that once a week is still much more manageable and opens up opportunities for employees and employers as well. Especially if someone can't just move to next big city on a whim but can drive there once a week.
In most companies option B has been on the table for a very long time and they most probably partially took it while asking their workers to keep coming to the office up until recently.
CS is the running joke, but server management, manual data processing, moderation etc. have been prime candidates for outsourcing for a long time.
The reason one's job is/was not outsourced has I think little to do about whether general remote work was an option or not.
>If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work.
It would be nice if the rich assholes making these decisions realized that allowing people to take care of life stuff during work hours actually does make them more productive. But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.
Amongst the numerous reasons why (B) may not be preferred is governments in looking at macroeconomics will generally want to disincentivise buying services overseas, something which would reduce domestic GDP and strengthen the economies of other countries instead. Governments have tools such as security regulations, migration policies, taxes which act as those disincentives.
For (B) to become commonplace, a government would be allowing a job function or industry to decline or disappear domestically, as has happened to Western manufacturing. I can't think of many industries and job functions suitable for remote work that a country in 2024 would want to cause the decline of. Western countries in particular have been pushing "critical infrastructure" regulations and supply chain regulations that generally oppose offshoring and domestic decline of a wide range of industries--energy, healthcare, food distribution, etc. For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support.
> just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B
Because outsourcing is nothing new. Hiring people in cheaper markets is something companies have been doing for many decades already, with varying degrees of success, long before remote work was even a thing.
There are many other issues with outsourcing - for example: time zones, language, work culture, exchange rates - that go beyond the hot topic of "butts in seats".
> I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B
Because the outsourcing threat was a thing before remote working, remote working changes nothing to that.
Employers love to bring this up on the subject of remote working but if they could outsource your work to an Indian paid 10x less, they would have done it already. Those employers are deluded if they think remote work is changing anything here.
If anything it makes outsourcing of global talent even harder for them since now companies are competing globally for the best talent.
> B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...)
The biggest drive for overseas recruitment will be ai. Extracting knowledge for western workers and transferring it to cheaper workers overseas will be the new manufacturing outsourcing. A workers without the high quality training the west provides will suddenly be able to compensate using tools trained against the knowledge produced by their western counterpart.
People saying "outsourcing has always existed" are missing the point entirely. The amount of friction to outsource when your whole team is remote is significantly lower.
Because my company is remote, we have people in every US timezone, which opens up outsourcing to Brazil. A team member in Brazil is indistinguishable from someone in Florida.
Adoption can be gradual instead of all at once. We don't have to spin up a whole team in a remote location, we can go 1-by-1.
B... y'all are massively out of touch of how your business actually works and I hope you all pay dearly for that. You will. I promise. Count your days but I know you'll just go somewhere else and ruin it there too.
Communication counts for something. You might not know much about that because you see businesses as interchangeable balance sheets rather than a living breathing thing. Your loss. Expect your end.
I really do wish you sad lost puppies find a place to park your increasingly worthless "privilege". Your retro career is melting. What you can coast through: running a business from a high-level perspective. What you can't coast through: actually running your business and digging into the implementation details that directly hit your bottom line and keep your worthless ass afloat. All tech companies are pure implementation details. You'd know this if you bothered to and everyone more successful than you actually has because they can take it and aren't as clueless. Growth by absorbing the old ways of doing things doesn't come from nowhere.
Expect the next wave of more literate employees to push you out. Doesn't matter where they come from. They will. It's already happened at the places bigger than you. Prepare.
It's a buggy whip. The internet is still relatively young, it hasn't fully dispatched with last centuries ideas just yet. As has been noted, the investor class failed to predict the consequence of cheap and wide pipes in homes as a matter of course.
You forget that the same 'investors' that own the companies, also own the buildings and all the companies that finance, build and service the buildings as well as the whole 'economy' fueled by employees commuting and lunching etc.
I think it's going to be both different for different people and different for different types of jobs. maybe making web apps is not affected at all by work from home where as some other jobs, say game dev, where you'd like to tweak something and hand the controller to your partner to test immediately "does it feel better than the last tweak from 15 seconds ago?" is more affected by work from home? In an extreme example, I suspect people practicing to put on a live play together can't each do their role at home over video chat. Or back to games, I suspect adjust local-multiplayer gameplay is not something you can do without actually having multiple people in the same physical location.
As for different people, I'm way more productive around others than by myself. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being most productive, I'd give being around my teammates to be 9-10, being at a cafe with people I don't know around a 7. Being at home by myself varies from 3 to 10. Their are certainly spurts of productivity at home for me but there's also zero feeling of camaraderie which is something that gives me energy.
Maybe it's related to the similar feeling of watching a movie at a full theater on opening night vs watching at home on my large TV. There's an energy at the theater that's missing from the home viewing. Similarly, for me, there's an energy at work with teammates that missing from working at home. By that's just my experience with my jobs.
How is industry productivity not relevant to the point being made? It’s quite possible for there to be a direct correlation between work productivity and industry productivity.
You are also discounting many other benefits of remote work. While yes someone may be doing laundry when they should be filling out expense reports, they are also not spending time on a lengthy commute. As a result they are also spending less time at the gas station and for car maintenance bills. I’ll admit I do personal chores on the company’s dime, but the time and resources I save by working remote make up for it at the very least.
I guess your boss doesn't really care if you managed to do laundry during work hours. You personally might care since you saved yourself some time, but that is a very personal thing. OTOH, if family is at home, it is also very easy for them to grab you for something seemingly important. With the "right" demanding wife, your boss always looses.
With the wrong demanding coworker or (especially) midwit middle manager who wants to talk about sportsball or politics, your entire company loses, not sure what your (rather sexist) point is tbh.
Distractions happen. They come from lots of sources.
How could remote work not be more productive? Most of my friends/colleagues get back at least an hour of their lives each day they don't commute, and they all use the "extra" time to do more work. People wanna work. They just don't wanna sit in traffic, walk through parking lots and ride elevators for an hour every day.
I think regardless of where you work there is an upper limit in time you actually are productive during a day and it is way way below 8 hours. Usually I do more in the first 2 hours of my shift than I do during the remaining 6 hours. Others might be more productive at different time of day depending on their own internal clock. We just can't be 100% focused on hour work and uninterrupted for so many hours.
Also since commute time is not accounted for in your work time, this is a moot point. You don't work more because you don't commute. You just have more free time to do stuff out of work.
No I don't want to work if i never see human beings, i have no connection to my team and I'm deeply depressed because I am a young single person who doesn't have a family waiting for me at home
Your coworkers are not your friends and your company is not your family, and if your job is keeping you from having friends and family outside of work then you need to find a new job or place to live.
When I had to WFH for a year during COVID, my productivity completely plummeted, almost to zero. It was very hard for me to be actually productive for more than 60-120 minutes each day. I could be playing video games or guitar, or watching videos, or petting my cats, or doing dishes, or cooking, or going for a walk. Instead I have to sit at this desk and do work? Ehh... no one will notice if I bug out for an hour... six times per day. I hated it, the guilt of being paid to do nothing stacked up like crazy. I went back to the office on the very first day that my state allowed me to. I wore a mask at the office every day for months in 2021, because the alternative was to WFH. Having to work remote was one of the worst periods of my life, and I think this experience soured my feelings about the work so much that it was a significant factor in my decision to eventually leave that job.
(This is not a statement about anything or anyone other than myself. If WFH works for you, great. It doesn't work for me.)
We have a system where we clock in and out. This reduces the situation to "be clocked in when you work and clocked out otherwise" which is easy to handle psychologically.
So if I'm distracted I can't be clocked in, generating time deficit, which will motivate me to not be distracted.
And on the other hand I'm free to distribute the work any way I want.
Needs honesty and trust of course, but I'd wager that's not an issue for most.
This mirrors the issue I had with work from home to a tee. During the pandemic, as soon as it was safe, I went into a ghost town of an office right up until they sold the building and made us all permanently work from home. I was eventually able to find that coffee shops filled a similar function for me, and now spend a majority of my productive workday at one.
(Same disclaimer as parent - everyone works differently)
To me this is almost like internal vs external locus of control stuff.
I can control my focus at home because I am in full control.
In an open floor plan office environment, I have the added challenge of needing to shield my attention from others. For me the open floorpan office is like trying to do work in the middle of an airport terminal (not the lounge, sorry).
Due to concepts like 'trust-based working hours' employees learn to monitor how much time they spend working. So when you get more time as an employee, you don't spend it on the company, which doesn't pay you more. Instead, you spend it somewhere else, like on your family.
I think the productivity gains of remote work depend on personality and type of task. Some things work better, others don't. But as the study shows, the net effect is neutral.
Then your friends should reflect a bit. This study shows that there isn't a positive nor negative effect. If your friends are working additional hours each day when they work from home and they are representative of this study, then they are working more time to be as productive as they used to be.
If they would just use the "extra" time to live their own life, they would probably be just as productive and have additional time to themselves.
I think were at the point in capitalism (late stage corporatism?) that employees are more or less going to capture 'excess productivity' for themselves by doing chores and running errands. Same goes for the office, they will go around and gossip, several long trips to the break room and walks.
Go on TikTok and look at the sheer apathy for corporations. "Think of the share holders" memes as an example.
It's clear for 99% of workers there is going to be zero reward for producing more, so they simply aren't going to produce more, remote or in person.
Exception is startups, which is part of the reason I work for startups.
I'm genuinely surprised that your typical exec isn't looking at things like this thinking: "We're spending this much a month on office space for our 500 staff at this location. Let's knock that down to 100 and push everyone to work from home". Give ourselves a big pat on the back and a nice bonus for saving a few million a year.
If after a few years, it doesn't work, you go back to the market for more office space.
In the UK government orgs sold off their office space and turned to renting. Now the people renting the office space are annoyed that the demand is dropping. Poor them.
Startups DEFINITELY have been looking at it this way for the last decade, to the point where I only know of a few startups that still have physical offices out of the hundreds I interact with in various capacities.
Give it a few more years and FANG / fortune 500 will follow suit, likely crashing the CRE industry which would actually serve a number of societal goods...
In some cases, some companies rent an office for 2-3+ years. So let's say, they renewed from 2020-2023.
They were "forced" at first (to do WFH) and money got literally "burned", because the offices were empty, but insurances and all that had to be paid.
Now they had a chance at using more alternative approaches (rent spaces, or smaller offices), yet they want many to come back. There was almost never a saving, because contracts were still running (for many companies, I believe).
The typical exec's tenure is shorter than the six year office leases so they'd never see any praise or bonus for making that change. As far as they're concerned, the option doesn't exist.
As a Tech PM, I can say,remote work definitely increases productivity. I noticed, employees tend to work more when diligently when they were allowed to work remotely.
In case of complex Troubleshooting, this is definitely an added advantage , as people can focus more and solve these issues comfortably.
This is the problem; for “focus” work, perhaps. But as a TPM, you know that not all work is “focus work”, and the “collaborative work” suffers when done remotely. You also know that even “focus” work doesn’t make up even one whole job that someone can do without any “collaboration”.
The myth of the “guy in a room” is just that — a myth, at best, and a classic antipattern at worst.
I know I am more productive for sure. I started working remotely in 2017, but I wasn't allowed to jump right into it. I had an agreement with my manager and I started doing one day remote a week, then two, and eventually built up to fully remote, and eventually even working remotely from all over the world. But it wasn't overnight, I had to build that trust.
I honestly got a little nervous when everyone started working from home suddenly. I think everyone that can, should have the option, but some people just don't have the discipline or haven't learned it yet. I know this because another person on my team wanted to emulate my success (pre-COVID) and blew it and proved they couldn't get work done outside the office.
WFH is an invention equal to washingmachine + dishwasher where 2h each day is not being lost anymore by unproductive activity. With plenty of externalities on top of the lost time.
If (only as a test excercise) for 5 years we mandated the employer to bare the commute cost we would quickly see if RTO / WFH makes more economical sense.
This is something governments with an interest in protecting employee wellbeing could step in.
The employer pays for the time you're engaged in working AND trying to work by commuting. That 10-15h/week would, as you say, show up pretty quickly in reports.
But incentives are tricky. I can imagine companies would add the requirement that you live 10min from work because they only have budget for that much time spent on transportation costs. Like with RTO, that would backfire but I'm sure companies would insist on that instead of remote work.
Readit News
The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.
I could write a long post but I'll cut it short to this paragraph stating that humans differ.
For some commuting is stressful, the offices are noisy and full of distractions and those individuals may thrive in a remote setup. There's people that work in the opposite way. Their house offer many distractions from laundry to videogames. Some people require micro management and constant oversight some tilt in such environments.
Some teams require a lot of meaningful in-person interactions, brainstorming sessions or work chats around the coffee machine. Some teams thrive with good central top/down planning and workload splitting where syncing isn't very important.
At the end of the day the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects is not remote vs non-remote and apply blindly rather in forming teams with people that by their own nature or preferences will thrive in the setup that's decided.
As you stated, this is variable.
If you have a short commute, or you like it, or you get some exercise - office is great.
If you hate your commute, if its 3 hours in pollution and traffic - not so much.
Earlier the position was that WFH was not possible. Now we know it is, and I hazard that this change isn't factored in job postings.
Considering what an hour of time means in this era, its not a trivial cost. This means an hour which could be spent just unwinding, studying, on hobbies, procrastinating, whatever.
If you have any drive, or strong interests, thats time you would want to spend on something other than a commute.
Unfortunately a lot of things conflate over time as you become more senior to generally make your commute worse.
For me - my last 2 roles have earlier required start time, with a hard start (morning meeting / standup / L3 support presence), company office locations got a little further, and trains got a little less reliable.
Fortunately I am remote since COVID, but when I was going in / or have to go in now.. I need to bake in 45-60min depending on how much I'm willing to risk being late that day.
For me I'd rather work 11-12 hours/day at home then go into office for 10 hours & spend 1.5-2 hours on the commute. Company is getting 10-20% more time out of me, and I at least save the money & "commute prep time".
In the end I ended up working remote, which is what I preferred, which wasn't surprising given how much the commuting time was worth to me.
Employers reimbursing your travel expenses if they need you to travel to a conference on the other side of the country is already the norm so why shouldn't they reimburse your travel expenses if they want you to travel somewhere in the same geographic area?
The problem becomes now my home is tied to my work place. If the company moves or I change companies, I have move or stress at a new commute. I did move once during a job change, and it didn't last long.
Another compounding issue is that I like to stay at companies for a long time, 10 years. This is frequently becoming difficult for a number of reasons not entirely in my control.
I wonder if others are in the same situation.
That said, time is important to me and I have a 5min commute, 20min if I walk. For that reason I do prefer the office. Better meals and better coffee and nice colleagues.
If employers want to force people into offices, maybe pay them a bonus.
The transition time of arrival and departure is easily 30-45m daily, on my employers dime.
I do 50% and it works for me. End of the day most of the problems associated with this issue are workplace and cultural issues that come to a head with remote/hybrid. The only novel dysfunctions with employees that I see (and I’m an exec with about 900) are people doing things like secretly moving away and abusing medical accommodation. There’s also an issue where people build their life around remote and are disappointed when they miss opportunities, but are unwilling to meet in the middle.
End of the day. The lazy idiots are just as lazy, grinders grind, and smart people continue to be smart.
So basically, waste of time.
Come to think of it, I'm wondering if that's where the split comes in. Upper management sees their productivity go down -- on what's fundamentally an interpersonal endeavour -- while individual contributors see theirs go up -- on what's primarily solitary ones. As a result, there is friction with top-down work-from-office mandates.
Getting your head down and coding on your personal goal is easy remotely.
I think some ICs like that it's harder for people to say to them that they are driving in the wrong direction, even if it's still true.
Managing people is really really hard, but we seem to have a managerial class who seem to be getting away with doing it very poorly.
It also adds an extra hurdle for those who aren't particularly skilled at management.
I hypothesize, however, that a lot of these decisions at a c-suite level have more to do with other considerations, like property investments, headcount, salaries, or (worst of all) egos.
If your team level management org cannot organically work out the right mix on a team/role basis, then you probably should look at what else they are doing poorly.
I'd argue this shouldn't be a top-down decision - you can just let teams and individuals decide what works best for them, then that can be communicated upwards so the company can plan office space/resource allocation
Finding this many self-motivated conscientious employees is uncommon. Consider yourself lucky. This has never been a winning strategy that I've seen anywhere.
I worked at way too many startups where the CEO was far too involved with day to day minutiae.
> workload splitting where syncing isn't very important
I'm not convinced that remote means syncing is harder. There is a case to be made that: it's easier because it compels teams to have a structure for syncing, and structured syncing may be more efficient than ad hoc. Put another way, you potentially lose the crutch and end up stronger as a result.
This isn't a whimsical theory either- structured business processes are often missing and causing hidden costs and inefficiencies.
Work requires effective communication. Global teams place a premium on that and nurture it if they're successful. The remote work dilemma is non-global teams discovering this well-trodden ground and attempting to reinvent the wheel, with a sprinkling of terrible commercial real estate decisions on top.
(Nothing in this response addresses specific team types that benefit from in person work or the entirely valid in-office preferences of individual workers.)
It’s unfortunate that there’s now very little nuance in American discourse especially, whether that’s in business, politics, economics, or society. Everything is an ideological “cause” worth fighting for, with an inverted bell curve showing lots of people at the extremes, and precious few in the middle.
It doesn’t bode well. I fear America is devolving toward a 1980s Lebanon-style civil war, with everyone fighting against everyone at least at one point or another. The military could step in, but then we’d essentially have martial law which isn’t much better. It may seem silly to bring this up in a thread about remote work, but it’s really a microcosm for how polarized we’ve become.
> The fundamental issue I see in this debate is a lack of sensibility and nuance in human nature.
> The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.
If statistics is invalid, then how do you propose companies decide, based on a reasonable and empirical estimate of reality, on what work arrangement to implement? Do you believe that it is not expensive and disruptive to introduce as many variations of work setups as there are people in a company? What if the people deciding company policy simply prefer and believe in the advantages of onsite, which they have the freedom and right to believe---so why do people who prefer remote force themselves in such places?
The friction we're seeing now is that we're still recovering from a pandemic that forced everyone remote whether it works for them or not. So this idea of remote vs. office being a core strategic decision as a company grows is fairly new. We are all still learning how to navigate the options.
As Einstein said, you should make every problem as simple as possible, but no more simple.
The problem we're describing cannot be reduced to few simple statistics, it's exactly making the problem simpler than it is.
Not only just the task of measuring productivity of knowledge workers is extremely difficult if not impossible, but getting any statistic across a wide variety of different factors makes it even more pointless.
In fact, the problem shouldn't be approached from a macro, but microscopic level. Start from the basics.
There's knowledge workers that don't do anything from home. There's knowledge workers that won't achieve anything at the office. There's gargantuan projects like operating systems or databases developed fully remotely and asynchronously. There's projects that barely move without lots of synchronous, meaningful in-person interactions and there's environments like early stage startups that desperately need this kind of situation (albeit I'm sure there's many exceptions).
In professional sports it is very well understood that slightly different formulas work differently for different teams and players. Some needs to be fast and lean to be effective. Some need to put up muscle and weight. Many need both. Some need lots of cardio, some need more skills training. And all of that has to interact and mesh together and face different challenges.
Yet you want to complex systems like business projects/teams built around few statistics? Ignoring the wide variety of factors and humans that will end up there?
I'm not saying that building teams like that is an easy task, sometimes you just need to make work whatever team you're given, and you will have to decide a setup and give the right structure incentives to everyone to make it work.
But even if tomorrow a stat told us that there's proof that statistically remote is better for 60% of the teams (or the opposite) that really won't help much.
As a new grad, hell yeah I want to be in the office to interrupt and be interrupted for the learning, interact to know other, hope for serendipitous encounters, have a good time after work, meet a potential partner, yada yada.
As a family person with decade of work history, I see it as losing my balance, a hindrance the interruptions, the banter, the random assignments because you ran into someone in the cafe, having to deny after hours stuff again and again for the kids or appointments, having to take the whole day off for a 2 hour appointment at lunch, blah blah blah.
Not all new grads are the same, neither all seniors. Let people pick. The illusion of loss of productivity has been shattered and there's no going back.
There was a point in time when all you could buy was a black ford model-T. Ford would love to do that. But it can't anymore. Times have changed. Took Ford a long time and many executive shifts to move on and get along with reality.
So will this.
Is it though? My last employer (a FAANG) did publish (questionable) numbers suggesting WFH being more efficient when the lockdowns started. When RTO started they flatly refused to back it up with any numbers whatsoever.
> At the end of the day the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects is not remote vs non-remote and apply blindly rather in forming teams with people that by their own nature or preferences will thrive in the setup that's decided.
I think at the end of the day the C-suite has no idea whether WFH is better or worse. Middle management will come out and blame any lack of progress/productivity on literally anything that's not directly related to their own performance, so WFH is a natural scapegoat for incompetent management.
You can't justify the environmental destruction of working in an office just because you like the aesthetic or it makes you feel better. These are not apples and oranges that can be compared like two sides of an equally unproblematic coin, and it makes me sick that people equivocate and make it seem otherwise.
In my experience these people don't thrive in the office either. For software engineering in particular, these people are not useful employees.
It is not realistic to fire people who don't align with someone's preferred management style.
Office mandates are dumb and it should be left up to individual team leaders.
What the comments also show is that people willingly bring themselves in a situation of 3h of commute and then complain. That's not something you'd ever widely see in Europe imho. 3h is insane. I have < 20 minutes and love the reading time, as I travel by public transport. If I'd have a farther commute I would just move. Baffles me that someone would accept this. Maybe your public transport/zoning is fucked up, not your remote/not remote thing?
I work VERY remote (my employer is in Austin, I live in Michigan), so public transit isn't really an option for that arrangement, but if I'm honest the only real reason I'm doing it is because of Austin housing prices -- I'd much rather live in an urban core within walking distance of work, but that lifestyle is unimaginably expensive in all the places where jobs exist. Instead, I have an aging 1940s tract home in a city 2k miles from work.
The housing crisis is also a transit crisis. We built most of our homes and businesses around the cheap automobile and infinite petro-energy, with the predictable result that we can barely afford to live near the places we work.
Unfortunately, it's really difficult to run HR for any company of significant size, that accounts for individual differences.
My personal management style was about treating each employee as an individual, but I was also fortunate to have a small team of high-performing, mature, dedicated professionals. My technique would not work on many of the teams that I see out there, these days.
Taking an average view isn't useful at all, apart from maybe insinuating more people carry out jobs that are suitable for remote working.
Or in some specific countries and company cultures...
Aside from having an actual assistant, is this just hypothetical or do you know someone that prefers being micromanaged?
It made me a bad manager to not have that in my tool kit. There are a lot of people who just want you to tell them exactly what to do.
It’s a preference to not execute two different skill sets when you lack one of them. That’s stressful.
You might be a good developer, but not great at talking to users and figuring out the priority and the solution and executing on that independently.
Or you might not be good at delivering eloquent speeches. Or whatever. Everyone lacks some skillset which they’d prefer someone more qualified handle for them.
This isn't an "oh it's 4:30 and I'm not going to start something new", it's "It's 11am, and everyone else is busy, I will play solitaire until my manager explicitly tells me which of the 45 tasks they want me to complete".
If you say "go into room X and fetch the Y to do Z", if Y isn't in the right place they will await further instruction. If challenged, they will say they need training on how to handle the situation, or that it's the managers job to ensure the process is right. If you give them the explicit instruciton to tell you when their task is complete, they will come to you and stand next to you until you give them something else to do.
However, if you give them a task like do X at 9:30 every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, it will be done, to spec, every time. People like me will occasionally miss it due to other asks, prioritisation,a perceived lack of value of the task, or an "I-know-that-this-isn't-important" mindset.
Part of management is identifying these behavioural differences, and utilising them effectively.
If you have a full team of people who need explicit instruction, your job will be shuffling tickets around. If you have a full team of people who look for improvements, and are constantly thinking ahead, your job will be trying to reign them in and keep them working on the right things. Neither is good, you want a mix of both.
I think in such cases it might be better to get rid of such staff, for your own sake and theirs.
So offering people remote work for a 20% TC reduction?
Most companies do this by using a cost of labor index for areas. NYC/SF/Seattle being the highest, and then smaller reductions outside.
Basically you don't want to be in a HCOL (High Cost of Living) remote area with a LCOL (Low cost of Labor)
Not necessarily given the methodology. For example, if remote work allows a worker to do their laundry in parallel where they would be otherwise unable to in an office, their productivity has increased, but the gains would not show up in the study. It observes industry productivity, not work productivity.
If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work.
A. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we don't need to pay for as much office space and whatever other expenses are incurred by the employee's physical presence
B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...)
I personally love remote work and believe in the benefits but I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B, they may even downvote me for bringing it up, but I guarantee that is one of the main conversations that will come up in the board room as remote work is normalized. Not "oh hey great, now labor can do laundry on company time!"
B. Language issues, cultural issues, and time zone issues all have negative effects.
C. Or it could mean labour is more productive because it has more free time and is less stressed. There's no pointless commute and some chores can be done in the background. Getting slightly distracted by laundry is far less of a loss to productivity than being constantly distracted by conversations, office noise, pointless meetings, and so on.
Your arguments are all MBA-level arguments, which means they look superficially convincing but they lack systemic insight.
There's plenty of evidence that happier workers are more productive. Treating workers like people instead of machinery has comprehensive business benefits. The only real cost is a reduction in the self-perceived relative status of the C-suite.
Essentially this is an argument about hierarchy and loss of face, and not so much about measurable business costs/benefits.
In reality there is an opportunity to hire wider pool of full time applicants in US because now you can offer even 1 day a week in the office instead of 5 or doing 1 day a month.
If I have to consider company that is 2h driving away - one way - and be there 5 days a week, that is a deal breaker.
Doing that once a week is still much more manageable and opens up opportunities for employees and employers as well. Especially if someone can't just move to next big city on a whim but can drive there once a week.
CS is the running joke, but server management, manual data processing, moderation etc. have been prime candidates for outsourcing for a long time.
The reason one's job is/was not outsourced has I think little to do about whether general remote work was an option or not.
It would be nice if the rich assholes making these decisions realized that allowing people to take care of life stuff during work hours actually does make them more productive. But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.
For (B) to become commonplace, a government would be allowing a job function or industry to decline or disappear domestically, as has happened to Western manufacturing. I can't think of many industries and job functions suitable for remote work that a country in 2024 would want to cause the decline of. Western countries in particular have been pushing "critical infrastructure" regulations and supply chain regulations that generally oppose offshoring and domestic decline of a wide range of industries--energy, healthcare, food distribution, etc. For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support.
Because outsourcing is nothing new. Hiring people in cheaper markets is something companies have been doing for many decades already, with varying degrees of success, long before remote work was even a thing.
There are many other issues with outsourcing - for example: time zones, language, work culture, exchange rates - that go beyond the hot topic of "butts in seats".
Because the outsourcing threat was a thing before remote working, remote working changes nothing to that.
Employers love to bring this up on the subject of remote working but if they could outsource your work to an Indian paid 10x less, they would have done it already. Those employers are deluded if they think remote work is changing anything here.
If anything it makes outsourcing of global talent even harder for them since now companies are competing globally for the best talent.
The biggest drive for overseas recruitment will be ai. Extracting knowledge for western workers and transferring it to cheaper workers overseas will be the new manufacturing outsourcing. A workers without the high quality training the west provides will suddenly be able to compensate using tools trained against the knowledge produced by their western counterpart.
Because my company is remote, we have people in every US timezone, which opens up outsourcing to Brazil. A team member in Brazil is indistinguishable from someone in Florida.
Adoption can be gradual instead of all at once. We don't have to spin up a whole team in a remote location, we can go 1-by-1.
C. We can probably get away with paying remote workers less because they get other benefits from working remotely.
Communication counts for something. You might not know much about that because you see businesses as interchangeable balance sheets rather than a living breathing thing. Your loss. Expect your end.
I really do wish you sad lost puppies find a place to park your increasingly worthless "privilege". Your retro career is melting. What you can coast through: running a business from a high-level perspective. What you can't coast through: actually running your business and digging into the implementation details that directly hit your bottom line and keep your worthless ass afloat. All tech companies are pure implementation details. You'd know this if you bothered to and everyone more successful than you actually has because they can take it and aren't as clueless. Growth by absorbing the old ways of doing things doesn't come from nowhere.
Expect the next wave of more literate employees to push you out. Doesn't matter where they come from. They will. It's already happened at the places bigger than you. Prepare.
I like seeing my peers in person. I like hashing things out in person. Apparently that’s a waste of time and money.
It's a buggy whip. The internet is still relatively young, it hasn't fully dispatched with last centuries ideas just yet. As has been noted, the investor class failed to predict the consequence of cheap and wide pipes in homes as a matter of course.
Or put the other way: Remote work let's the employee pay for the office space.
As for different people, I'm way more productive around others than by myself. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being most productive, I'd give being around my teammates to be 9-10, being at a cafe with people I don't know around a 7. Being at home by myself varies from 3 to 10. Their are certainly spurts of productivity at home for me but there's also zero feeling of camaraderie which is something that gives me energy.
Maybe it's related to the similar feeling of watching a movie at a full theater on opening night vs watching at home on my large TV. There's an energy at the theater that's missing from the home viewing. Similarly, for me, there's an energy at work with teammates that missing from working at home. By that's just my experience with my jobs.
For sure - singing in choir and making music remotely is from what I know mainly impossible because of the latency.
Distractions happen. They come from lots of sources.
Also since commute time is not accounted for in your work time, this is a moot point. You don't work more because you don't commute. You just have more free time to do stuff out of work.
When I had to WFH for a year during COVID, my productivity completely plummeted, almost to zero. It was very hard for me to be actually productive for more than 60-120 minutes each day. I could be playing video games or guitar, or watching videos, or petting my cats, or doing dishes, or cooking, or going for a walk. Instead I have to sit at this desk and do work? Ehh... no one will notice if I bug out for an hour... six times per day. I hated it, the guilt of being paid to do nothing stacked up like crazy. I went back to the office on the very first day that my state allowed me to. I wore a mask at the office every day for months in 2021, because the alternative was to WFH. Having to work remote was one of the worst periods of my life, and I think this experience soured my feelings about the work so much that it was a significant factor in my decision to eventually leave that job.
(This is not a statement about anything or anyone other than myself. If WFH works for you, great. It doesn't work for me.)
So if I'm distracted I can't be clocked in, generating time deficit, which will motivate me to not be distracted.
And on the other hand I'm free to distribute the work any way I want.
Needs honesty and trust of course, but I'd wager that's not an issue for most.
(Same disclaimer as parent - everyone works differently)
I live 10 minutes from my office, and there are much, much fewer distractions there. Anecdotal of course, but it's one way to answer your question.
I can control my focus at home because I am in full control.
In an open floor plan office environment, I have the added challenge of needing to shield my attention from others. For me the open floorpan office is like trying to do work in the middle of an airport terminal (not the lounge, sorry).
I think the productivity gains of remote work depend on personality and type of task. Some things work better, others don't. But as the study shows, the net effect is neutral.
If they would just use the "extra" time to live their own life, they would probably be just as productive and have additional time to themselves.
Go on TikTok and look at the sheer apathy for corporations. "Think of the share holders" memes as an example.
It's clear for 99% of workers there is going to be zero reward for producing more, so they simply aren't going to produce more, remote or in person.
Exception is startups, which is part of the reason I work for startups.
Note that when economists are talking about productivity, it's specific. It's units of output per hour worked (quantitative, not qualitative). https://www.bls.gov/k12/productivity-101/content/what-is-pro...
If after a few years, it doesn't work, you go back to the market for more office space.
In the UK government orgs sold off their office space and turned to renting. Now the people renting the office space are annoyed that the demand is dropping. Poor them.
Give it a few more years and FANG / fortune 500 will follow suit, likely crashing the CRE industry which would actually serve a number of societal goods...
Isn't this what they did?
It's been a few years since the big shift to WFH and some execs think it's not working and are pushing for return to office.
Don't get me wrong, I think the reality of WFH is a lot more nuanced than the public debate is making it seem, it works for some and not for others.
But if the typical exec was to do what you are proposing, I feel like the visible affects to us would be exactly what we're already seeing.
In some cases, some companies rent an office for 2-3+ years. So let's say, they renewed from 2020-2023.
They were "forced" at first (to do WFH) and money got literally "burned", because the offices were empty, but insurances and all that had to be paid.
Now they had a chance at using more alternative approaches (rent spaces, or smaller offices), yet they want many to come back. There was almost never a saving, because contracts were still running (for many companies, I believe).
In case of complex Troubleshooting, this is definitely an added advantage , as people can focus more and solve these issues comfortably.
The myth of the “guy in a room” is just that — a myth, at best, and a classic antipattern at worst.
Now that we are forced back into the office, morale is crashing.
I honestly got a little nervous when everyone started working from home suddenly. I think everyone that can, should have the option, but some people just don't have the discipline or haven't learned it yet. I know this because another person on my team wanted to emulate my success (pre-COVID) and blew it and proved they couldn't get work done outside the office.
If (only as a test excercise) for 5 years we mandated the employer to bare the commute cost we would quickly see if RTO / WFH makes more economical sense.
The employer pays for the time you're engaged in working AND trying to work by commuting. That 10-15h/week would, as you say, show up pretty quickly in reports.
But incentives are tricky. I can imagine companies would add the requirement that you live 10min from work because they only have budget for that much time spent on transportation costs. Like with RTO, that would backfire but I'm sure companies would insist on that instead of remote work.