Every time this comes up i tell my personal and data driven experience as a middle manager in a company, and every time people trash me, but i keep saying it.
IT FUCKING DEPENDS!
From purely data point of view (note: this is from my place of work) workers whose work is purely executing more or less the same duties every day had their productivity have a nose dive when working long stretches from home. Also their works quality got worse. Its easy to reinforce bad habits whitout even noticing it, if the feedback comes from email and and not straight from the supervisor.
BUT with jobs like coders or artists where the job is more open ended instead of monotous labor there was no ill effects.
Then on the other side communication has gotten much slower with the people working from outside office. Where i used to just walk to the other room and ask something from my collegue i now need to message them in our internal and hope they notice it. Getting answers for questions have turned from 5 minute thing to 10-40 minute things.
Also from the point of more inventive things on my work we have lost a lot of changes to brainstorm ideas. No more throwing ideas around during lunch or coffee breaks
Where i used to just walk to the other room and ask something from my collegue i now need to message them in our internal and hope they notice it. Getting answers for questions have turned from 5 minute thing to 10-40 minute things.
Those rude shoulder-tap interruptions may have only taken you 5 minutes, but they ruined half an hour of productivity to the person you were interrupting. This is the whole reason people can be more productive at home without annoying bosses blathering at them.
Nah. Coders get slack messages. Only exception is if something is truly fucked and it needs to be fixed asap and for some strange reason i notice it before they do. Mosty happens when they push from test to production.
We have biweekly check ins with code team and thats enough.
I have WfH for about twenty five years now and I will say the same thing I always say when this type of comment pops up, if people do not want to talk to you for some reason they will not respond as its a lot easier to hide on email/IM than an office situation. If you finding that people are hiding from you, then that’s as much a you problem as anything else for not directly addressing it.
I actually find it considerably easier to get hold of someone via IM than any other method short of direct dialing them as I can reach them in meetings or away from their desk or even in another country entirely, its only if they are intentionally ignoring you it does not work. If the person is presenting in a meeting or otherwise legitimately incommunicado then they aren’t going to respond F2F or IM anyway.
Not measuring output volume or quality consistently is a widespread problem for businesses, regardless of location of the employee. Consistent and accurate measurement is the only way to be sure you are getting the results you are expecting, for coding that means code reviews not commit counts, 360 feedback, and so on. If you are feeding back, and someones ignoring that, guess what, its also a you problem for not building in consequences and follow ups. It also applies just as much in an office situation as it does remote.
“Context still matters. Job type, home setting, and leadership quality vary. Yet the direction remains positive. Even with modest differences by role, the health and satisfaction curves point upward. Inside those curves, remote work behaves as a flexible option that organizations can calibrate rather than a rigid rule.”
Though I will say your argument is still centered around being productive and effective for the company (make money for the company), the article specifically centers around an individual’s well-being (sleep, family life etc.). So not the same metrics.
Other articles and research I’ve seen that did center on productivity did conclude that yes, it depends.
Whatever it was the people doing it deserve a more brain-stimulating job. If things are repetetive in a desk job, chances are that a lot can be automated.
Customer service and sales support.
The work is on the basic channels. Phone, email and chat and its pretty much allways some variation of few same questions or complaints.
Both customer satisfaction and work effiency started to get worse the longer the lockdown went.
By the way we dont have mandatory office days. Everybody can work from home if they want. The split is now pretty much 60/40 with bigger part working from the office. (I think big part is because it has kindergarden and its in place with good public transport) During summer when parents want to stay at home looking after the kids or when bank holidays make broken week most of the people stay home.
Getting answers for questions have turned from 5 minute thing to 10-40 minute things.
That’s an administration problem. Sure people are busy, in meetings or at lunch. But if someone is always 40m away from answering a work slack/chat they’re a candidate for replacement.
I message somebody --> they take ten minutes to answer, with question --> im doing something else, it takes me few minutes to finish or risking losing my tough then i answer --> maybe with good luck they answer right back, but most likely it takes few minutes again.
In the office i could have talked to the person and resolve the thing faster.
In the field of organizational psychology (which research like this is typically done by), the phrase “it depends” is used so often among scientists that it’s a running gag at this point
Every time this comes up i tell my personal and data driven experience as a middle manager in a company, and every time people trash me, but i keep saying it.
IT FUCKING DEPENDS!
From purely data point of view (note: this is from my place of work) workers whose work is purely executing more or less the same duties every day had their productivity have a nose dive when working long stretches from home. Also their works quality got worse. Its easy to reinforce bad habits whitout even noticing it, if the feedback comes from email and and not straight from the supervisor.
BUT with jobs like coders or artists where the job is more open ended instead of monotous labor there was no ill effects.
Then on the other side communication has gotten much slower with the people working from outside office. Where i used to just walk to the other room and ask something from my collegue i now need to message them in our internal and hope they notice it. Getting answers for questions have turned from 5 minute thing to 10-40 minute things.
Also from the point of more inventive things on my work we have lost a lot of changes to brainstorm ideas. No more throwing ideas around during lunch or coffee breaks
Those rude shoulder-tap interruptions may have only taken you 5 minutes, but they ruined half an hour of productivity to the person you were interrupting. This is the whole reason people can be more productive at home without annoying bosses blathering at them.
Thanks for typing out my thought about this. /a SW dev.
Yeah every programmer I know loves not being exposed to the manager who just “has a question” or just want to “check in”.
Nah. Coders get slack messages. Only exception is if something is truly fucked and it needs to be fixed asap and for some strange reason i notice it before they do. Mosty happens when they push from test to production.
We have biweekly check ins with code team and thats enough.
The immediate interruption is good for management, but bad for the company overall.
That’s why we still have Jira/email.
Critical importance: slack/in person
Can wait but important: high importance email, P1 Jira
Not important: Low impotance email, P2 Jira
I have WfH for about twenty five years now and I will say the same thing I always say when this type of comment pops up, if people do not want to talk to you for some reason they will not respond as its a lot easier to hide on email/IM than an office situation. If you finding that people are hiding from you, then that’s as much a you problem as anything else for not directly addressing it.
I actually find it considerably easier to get hold of someone via IM than any other method short of direct dialing them as I can reach them in meetings or away from their desk or even in another country entirely, its only if they are intentionally ignoring you it does not work. If the person is presenting in a meeting or otherwise legitimately incommunicado then they aren’t going to respond F2F or IM anyway.
Not measuring output volume or quality consistently is a widespread problem for businesses, regardless of location of the employee. Consistent and accurate measurement is the only way to be sure you are getting the results you are expecting, for coding that means code reviews not commit counts, 360 feedback, and so on. If you are feeding back, and someones ignoring that, guess what, its also a you problem for not building in consequences and follow ups. It also applies just as much in an office situation as it does remote.
The article does have this caveat.
Though I will say your argument is still centered around being productive and effective for the company (make money for the company), the article specifically centers around an individual’s well-being (sleep, family life etc.). So not the same metrics.
Other articles and research I’ve seen that did center on productivity did conclude that yes, it depends.
Out of curiosity, can you describe, with a bit more detail, the kind of work that was repetitive and became worse?
Whatever it was the people doing it deserve a more brain-stimulating job. If things are repetetive in a desk job, chances are that a lot can be automated.
Customer service and sales support. The work is on the basic channels. Phone, email and chat and its pretty much allways some variation of few same questions or complaints.
Both customer satisfaction and work effiency started to get worse the longer the lockdown went.
By the way we dont have mandatory office days. Everybody can work from home if they want. The split is now pretty much 60/40 with bigger part working from the office. (I think big part is because it has kindergarden and its in place with good public transport) During summer when parents want to stay at home looking after the kids or when bank holidays make broken week most of the people stay home.
How about the workers’ wellbeing? Is that ever considered?
That’s an administration problem. Sure people are busy, in meetings or at lunch. But if someone is always 40m away from answering a work slack/chat they’re a candidate for replacement.
You understand wrong.
I message somebody --> they take ten minutes to answer, with question --> im doing something else, it takes me few minutes to finish or risking losing my tough then i answer --> maybe with good luck they answer right back, but most likely it takes few minutes again.
In the office i could have talked to the person and resolve the thing faster.
For us, we use slack huddles when there will be too much back and forth. 30 second audio call, supports screen sharing.
Yeah we use huddles too. But its not like it always clear when this things is going to be involved or not.
In the field of organizational psychology (which research like this is typically done by), the phrase “it depends” is used so often among scientists that it’s a running gag at this point
middle managers are useless anyway