I've seen a lot of stories like this lately:
Tech companies that led the way in embracing remote work early in the pandemic are increasingly leading their workers right back to the office—whether they like it or not.
Alphabet-owned Google, Lyft, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Salesforce have all recently walked back remote-work policies they originally set forth, or gotten serious about enforcing existing policies, after deciding that working in the office is more efficient and cost-effective.
I admit that for a short while it began to look like remote work really was going to be a permanent change caused by the pandemic. But everything always takes longer than you think, and companies that put up with it for a long time are finally getting sick and tired of remote work—which simply isn't as productive as office work no matter what remote workers say. Too much evidence has piled up to credibly deny this any longer.¹
This doesn't mean that all remote work will go away, of course. There was remote work before the pandemic and there will be a little more after the pandemic. But it's going to be measured in a small handful of percentage points, not as a revolution in work.
¹To summarize: (a) remote work is bad for new hires and junior employees, (b) even workers think remote work causes more problems than in-person work, (c) remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared to in-person workers, and (d) anecdotally, Bambee's CEO says production drops 30% on days when everyone is working remotely.
Just a data point...
Son and daughter-in-law work in pharma (as a data analyst and biologist, both team leads).
Biologist is in the office 3 of 5 days, probably full time soon. Data analyst maybe 1 of 5 days - his team is international and not in his local office. But he's worked from home even before the pandemic.
I can make $200 an hour working on my home computer. {h42 I never thought it was possible, but my closest friend made $25,000 in just five weeks working on this historic project. convinced me to take part. For more information,
Click on the link below... https://GetDreamJobs1.blogspot.com
Unmentioned by Kevin is the fact that during the Pandemic companies took advantage of the situation to hire people in parts distant without having to require (and pay for) relocation -- and some of those people would not relocate anyway. So any rigid return to in-office work will either require relocation benefits to be paid out, with the loss of people who aren't willing to pack up and move.
Managers always kind of hated it, and now they've got the leverage to reverse it with the lay-offs and weakening economy.
They don't need as many managers, in the old sense. It is a job threat for them.
This piece is another in a long line of anti-remote propaganda.
(a) prove to me that it's any worse than in-person onboarding, and that it being "bad" isn't actually a problem with the organization being bad at managing their resources.
(b) no they don't - and those that do have bought in to the "office culture" flavor-ade.
(c) so what? This is not an argument against remote work. If anything, it's an argument FOR remote work no matter which way you slice it.
(d) Bambee's CEO is a fucking idiot, then. How do they even know this? How are they even measuring productivity on various days? Knowledge work doesn't happen on an instantaneous basis - it often requires days if not weeks of thinking about a solution before implementing it. And if it's not knowledge work (i.e., is task-based work) and is still being done remotely, then by definition the office is superfluous to the task.
Bambee is an HR contracting company. Of course they're going to be anti-remote work. They're motivated to contribute to the anti-remote narrative.
FFS.
Did you want to respond to any of the actual evidence or were you just going to handwave it out? I especially like the “well, they may think that, but they’re just pro office cultists” false consciousness approach, comrade.
If they had evidence, I would.
They do have evidence (in the links!) so fire away.
Kevin’s sentence containing links suggest that the linked items present evidence of lower productivity for WFH. They do not.
For the kinds of work* that are easily remoted, productivity measurement is extremely difficult. I would be skeptical of any report that lacks detail about measurement instruments and methods.
*in a modern service-dominated economy…
Sure they do! You just don’t like it
Give examples.
Ding ding ding!
Well, I've looked at those links and I didn't see any of that evidence you say is there. So why don't you help out poor old dull me what with my reading comprehension problems and post the actual text right here. Also, could you explain the hard bits to me so I can get it? Thanks!
Oh god, you’re still here?
No all we have is CEO argle-bargle. Argle-bargle is not evidence.
So you're attacking others but it's clear you didn't read the "evidence" either. Cause there isn't any. All of those links go to Kevin's own articles, none of which provides evidence that remote work is bad for companies.
To wit:
One is a small study in a single profession that suggests that remote work is bad for junior workers, especially women. Commenters destroyed the research and Kevin's writeup of it.
Another is a round up of research on remote work. But none of those speak to productivity or other critical issues.
Third one says that remote work is falling out of favor. It's completely irrelevant to the discussion. Only reason to link to it was to fool suckers like you (which clearly worked).
Last one says remote workers "reduced their total working time by a whopping 3.5 hours per day, replaced mostly with leisure and sleep. Their productivity might have remained strong, but they simply weren't putting in the hours."
That might seem like a "smoking gun" but even Kevin admits that it's all about face time, not productivity.
I just skimmed that last one, but a think the ‘whopping 3.5 hrs/day’ may be a misinterpretation. I read the study as focused only on the blocks of time which had previously been spent commuting.
It was 3.5 hours per week, not per day. That's less than an hour a day, which is hardly a major loss-- and was probably just unproductive facetime, chat-with-coworkers time, internet browsing time etc.
I did read the evidence and I’m impressed by the level of hand waving you managed around it.*
*Narrator: he was not
I notice you have said nothing of substance …
What evidence?
Couldn’t have said it any better myself.
Thank you CMayo. Kevin brought into the Flavor-aide himself. My experiences with working from home have been 180 degrees different than what the CEOs have been wining about.
My guess is that companies that oppose remote work with respect to jobs that can efficiently be done remotely will not get the best people. Those who are good enough to have a choice will go where the employer treats them with respect.
The result is that even if remote work is a little less efficient in principle, the companies permitting remote work will get more production simply because they will have better people.
My company isn’t forcing employees into the office, indeed, we hired around the country before the pandemic.
In my view, it’s about whether leadership sees employees as liabilities or assets. Also, it’s easy for me to believe that leadership is driven by their egos, and NEED employees around them to satisfy a lust for satisfaction from “riffing on ideas in a meeting” (i.e. Andy Jassy).
Absolutely correct. It is an example of bad managers, not remote employees.
Exactly. WFH productivity is a measurement of management.
Bad management will get less productivity from WFH employees.
Good management will get more productivity from WFH employees.
I base that on 20 years of WFH, including managing teams in a WFH environment.
"Tech companies ... are increasingly leading their workers right back to the office—whether they like it or not."
Sounds to me like management has an attitude problem. Following orders is good for the military, but for a flexible, modern-day economy, it's a bad management model. Tech companies are known for paying well, but they're generally sucky places to work. I wouldn't be surprised they get slightly less productivity from WFH workers. But that's an outlier. Tech has gone through workforce cuts while most other places have been hiring. With near-record low unemployment and near-record high workforce participation (prime age), employees today have more leverage than since at least the late '90s. Workers like WFM, and if companies force RTO, workers have other options.
I had fourteen jobs before starting my first company, and of those fourteen jobs, I had exactly two managers whom I liked and respected. The rest were either ignorant, stupid, evil, incompetent, self-important, out for themselves, destructive, and/or just plain mean.
I had one boss who had a meeting every week, in which everyone around the table was expected to take turns telling the boss what a genius he was.
I had another boss who announced that he was looking for employee input, and when I made some recommendations, he told me "Don't tell me how to run my business." Fine. He was out of business two years later.
I've read that 80% of bosses believe that people don't want to work, and that statistic agrees with my informal study of bosses, but not of employees. I actually do not know anyone who wants to do a bad job. Of course, these bosses believe that they, themselves, want to work. Of course, of course. It's everyone ELSE who is lazy and incompetent.
In many respects, allowing a guy to run a company solely because he owns it is like letting the guy who owns a football team be the quarterback. You are not going to encounter much natural talent this way.
Twenty percent might be overstating it.
Endless meetings are the bane of office existence, especially those where it's a game of pass the hot potato. But they can be moved to Zoom--oh joy!!!
But you do miss bumping into people in the hallway, and then bouncing ideas off them. Sometimes you just need a sounding board. And sometimes the sounding board speaks. If there is a good culture in the company, those interactions knocks what would become a mountain back down to a mole hill. That's harder to do effectively online, and makes online harder for new hires.
There should be flex time and work from home. Cutting back a bit from pandemic times to find the right mix for everyone makes since. Cutting it out does not. And it will vary wildly depending on the type of work.
Meetings, especially ones about idea generation or refinement, are best conducted in person. Meetings about task management are probably better conducted remotely. And when people are doing heads-down work, being at home is clearly better.
Last week my mostly remote company all got together for the first time in years. It was great. Lots of ideas, lots of planning, lots of meetings, lots of interesting conversations. No "work" (as in heads down implementation of things) got done though.
I never worked anywhere where people "bounced ideas off one another:" just because they passed someone in the hallway. Usually it's been a deliberate "You free any time soon? We need to discus..." Random employee conversations in the lunch room, parking lot etc., are almost always about anything but work.
You can multi-task during an online meeting getting actual work done while the boss drones on in the background.
I bounce ideas off co-workers all the time, I just use Teams and Skype.
That's an impressively convoluted (and desperate) way to justify a position you just WANT to be true.
I have been remotely managing a team for 10 years. I have developers around the world on my team. I can tell how much work people are doing because I am paying attention. I don't need to see a butt in a seat to know someone is at work. Whether people work from home or from the office, in my experience, makes little difference. For some things home is better because they are actually fewer distractions than at the office.
Uh huh
The only person demonstrating motivated reasoning in these threads is you, buddy.
"My guess is that companies that oppose remote work with respect to jobs that can efficiently be done remotely will not get the best people. Those who are good enough to have a choice will go where the employer treats them with respect. "
Which is exactly why they're banging so hard on the REMOTE WORK BAD drum. If they do that enough, they believe (and are probably correct) that they can get more employers to join them, and therefore the threat to their business (that they'll lose workers to companies that allow or even encourage remote work) will be less.
Before I retired, I usually worked remotely on Fridays. It was mostly "don't ask, don't tell", as long as I answered emails and texts promptly no one knew I wasn't in my office. My boss was probably aware, but I had saved his ass a few times so he mostly ignored it. The main issue was a long commute, and on Friday afternoons during the summer the stampede to get out of the city, including people driving RV's and pulling boats driving routes they weren't familiar with, meant my normal hourish commute doubled or tripled.
You're presenting anecdotal evidence. The CPS data suggests otherwise.
Here's a quick table compiling the 12 months of CPS data:
Period | % WFH | %WFH 5+ Days
2023-05 26.94% 13.72%
2023-04 27.01% 13.59%
2023-03 27.14% 13.82%
2023-02 27.75% 14.44%
2023-01 27.68% 14.29%
2022-12 27.16% 14.58%
2022-11 26.66% 14.27%
2022-10 26.61% 14.32%
2022-09 26.11% 14.08%
2022-08 26.50% 14.44%
2022-07 26.92% 15.07%
2022-06 27.59% 15.56%
Over the course of 12 months, the number of people who have worked 5+ days from home has gone down just under two percentage points, and the number of people who have worked from home at least one day a week has gone down less than one percentage point.
This suggests very gradual movement in WFH.
Anecdotal, I know, but I live basically in the Financial District in SF (across the street from Google's SF office and a few blocks from the Salesforce Tower (which is the tallest building in the city for those not familiar with SF) and it is still a ghost town most days of the week (was always pretty deserted on weekends).
I'd like Kevin to be right about this because I very much miss the vibrancy when people are commuting in to the city, but so far that is not the case as far as I can tell.
Also, for what it's worth I've been working (mostly) from home for many years preceding COVID because my teams are have been spread throughout the world and think it is great, especially compared to 2-3 hour commutes every day.
This is a fork in the road: Do we chase the policy of encouraging a return to the office, or do we pursue the revitalization of empty structures by changing the building and zoning codes to be more permissive of mixed use within existing B occupancies and Employment zones to be more accommodating of I and R type occupancies and mixed use zones?
Do you push demand to fill vacancies or do you shift supply to fulfill demand in housing?
I've got a weird job as a university professor. After vaccines ended Zoom teaching, we've settled into something that you might call a hybrid environment. Most classes are in person, but we offer some remote classes. Office hours are mostly in person, but I'm taking a lot of appointments and meetings on Zoom. Lots of symposiums and workshops are on Zoom. We now have enough rooms set up for hybrid events that we'll do a research talk with 6-8 people in the room and 10-15 on Zoom. I do a lot of Zoom interviews. I spend a lot of time collaborating on Zoom.
It all adds up to a little less commuting and a little more convenience. I like being in the office and seeing people occasionally. I'm a hell of a lot more productive when writing, preparing courses or researching at home. "Hybrid" has made me happier.
That said, my job is unusually individualistic: I don't have a supervisor or team, and my collaborators have always been scattered across the country.
So, yeah, at Google we got a letter saying part of our perf evaluation would be graded on our coming into the office because coming into the office is important so you can talk face-to-face with the people you develop products with. Except that
my office is in Sunnyvale, and most of the people I develop products with are in Seattle, Pittsburgh, and Bangalore. Maybe Google should be commuting me to these places and putting me up in a hotel for a week so we can have more face-to-face meetings.
Can you find collaborators in nicer places?
😉
Commuting to an office to do video meetings with remote people is really the perfect storm of stupid. I did that for a time but then finally convinced my manager that me wasting 2-3 hours a day and a good deal of money (it isn't cheap to commute in the SF Bay Area) to do video calls with people from around the country didn't make a lot of sense.
"Productive".
Uh-huh. Except there's no evidence it isn't. That's the problem.
Let's see what happens in the next recession. Will the people who come in to work get laid off or those who rarely show up?
Can managers actually judge individual productivity? Unless someone has done some specific thing that helps or harms the company - or maybe the manager - the judgement may be made on more personal criteria.
But skeptonomist bad bosses have always made judgements based on personal criteria. Remote work simply lays bare that Bad Bosses are extraneous and not needed.
I've spent the last 9 years fully remote, and was hybrid for about 5 years before that. It is hard to make fully remote teams work well - it's easy for people to feel isolated, which discourages people from asking questions or giving feedback (things that typically require some personal rapport to go over well). We finally convinced management that small groups working together on short projects was a good idea (those zoom meetings end up more casual, and people get to know each other better, and lots of useful info gets shared).
The big zoom meetings where management talks all the time are painful. The ones that require each employee to share a personal bit of info, one after another, are excruciating!
I'll be back to hybrid work soon. I'm looking forward to it, since it'll be easier to get and give constructive feedback on our projects. And this time we can coordinate so the whole department is in the office at the same time! A decade ago management was afraid of big areas of empty cubes, so we had to have no more than 2 people in a work group out on any given day...which meant no days with everyone together. That was completely stupid.
I would disagree with c): Time spent at work is not time worked for almost anyone. There are chats with colleagues, coffee breaks and other ways to waste time.
It is quite conceivable that an in home worker is more productive than one in the office.
I needed a lab in my job when I was still working, so my job was never a candidate fro working at home. But In have seen time wasted at work and I have wasted time myself. So I recommend to disregard c).
It is quite conceivable that an in home worker is more productive than one in the office.
If that's the case, significant numbers of employers should be seeing drops in productivity as WFH lessens, and, while corporate America can be clueless at times, we'd expect at least some of them to notice this decline (they're usually pretty zealous about protecting profits). Also office space isn't free.*
If WFH is truly the productivity enhancer many claim it's not going anywhere. I think what we're seeing seems logical: the shrinkage of WFH opportunities that were driven solely or mainly be covid.
*To state the obvious, this likely in part explains why the priciest central business districts are also the ones that seem to be getting back to normal the most slowly. Such CBDs also tend to be home to the highest concentrations of the most in-demand workers. Such workers, needless to say, are in the strongest position to set their own terms, including WFH privileges.
But you aren't accounting for measuring productivity via bad methods. A bad boss will measure badly. My job has set criteria and metrics so it's easy to measure my productivity and it's off the charts since March 2020. I really do think these CEOs are fooling themselves and throwing money out the window in the process. I mean the dot.com boom happened, there's quite a history of good money being throw after bad.
Exactly. Maybe senior management just didn't realize how much time people were wasting in the office.
And maybe this is an erroneous assumption, but most jobs are project based. You have a task or tasks that you need to finish (obviously there are some exceptions, where maybe the more people you cold call the better, the more words you write, etc.).
Is there evidence that these projects aren't being finished or are being finished overdue? If I spend 5 hours walking my dog at home and still meet the deadline, where's the real loss of productivity?
So yeah, basically I think bosses realize they could have been squeezing more out of people all along, and now that's their plan.
Re: It is quite conceivable that an in home worker is more productive than one in the office.
I would say that's true if one has a dedicated home office (not just a set-up on the coffee or kitchen table) and doesn't have kids, or roommates, at homes during the day.
But everything always takes longer than you think.
This has been a key throughout the pandemic and post-pandemic era. As great apes go, homo sapiens is particularly impatient. Shit takes time!
There is definitely a strong propaganda effort going on over thr last several months to push the ideas that:
- Remote work isnt working very well, here look at this mess of 'anecdata' and opinions.
- Everyone is coming back to the office soon of they havent already, the data doesnt really support this, but trust me.
- Even though we were against it the whole time, we promise that we tried our best to make this effective, but remote work just doesnt work very well.
Its very similar to the on and off waves of anti-remote work messaging that have come out over the last few years, but its better coordinated at this point.
People are motivated by relationships, and good working relationships are hard to foster remotely. Teams even more so. Still, it can be done, and in some instances, you'll get much better talent remotely than you can in person. That may make a difference. I've been studying a musical instrument remotely for over a year and a half, with two different teachers. It was very motivating, and I found an excellent teacher -- about a 6-hour drive away. There's no one local who can touch him for skills. Situations like that will come up in work environments, too, so I expect remote work to continue when it makes the most sense.
I've worked on hybrid teams for years, and it can be done well. But it certainly is not easy. And it is still good to bring in the remote staff for a couple days a year to make sure the personal relationships are more solid.
The one thing that is really hard to do do remotely is cross-team relationships/information transfer. Building the knowledge and relationships needed to do good cross-team collaboration is really tough in an online world. In person you have all sorts of random downtime where it can happen - waiting for elevators, quick chats as you leave big meetings, etc. There are so many times when a 2 minute chat with someone in another department has yielded important info, or created a connection that is useful for a later project. But management is usually afraid of those sorts of connections, because they bypass the bosses. So in-person work is never as productive as it could be.
Yes. I should go into the office so I can have video calls with my teammates who are in different countries. Obviously not something that can be done from home.
I do enjoy going into the office periodically, but it's only to touch base with folks I don't normally work with. I've found going into the office to be less productive, as I'm caught in water cooler talk not specific to ongoing work. I'm also less inclined to touch work outside the "official" hours.
Understandable if you have a local team of developers, support, or engineering who'd benefit from face time and collaboration in one space. There is a dynamic there. Even so, there's a ton of jobs that don't benefit from in person collaboration and fostering team cohesion is really up to having a good manager or not.
2015 or so, company announces new US Software Development Center of Excellence would be 500 miles away, and if your job moved there, you could move down there (with a pretty anemic relocation package), or take the severance package. All workers at the new location must be local. 2020 was the pandemic. By 2021, the requirement to be local had lifted, and I was able to transfer to a position at the new location, but without relocating. The company sold off three buildings at the legacy location, so there's no office to go back to, and my manager isn't there.
I miss the feeling of being together on a team, seeing my colleagues every day, and casual interactions, "water cooler" talk. Free coffee.
Maybe senior management just didn't realize how much time people were wasting in the office.
And maybe this is an erroneous assumption, but most jobs are project based. You have a task or tasks that you need to finish (obviously there are some exceptions, where maybe the more people you cold call the better, the more words you write, etc.).
Is there evidence that these projects aren't being finished or are being finished overdue? If I spend 5 hours walking my dog at home and still meet the deadline, where's the real loss of productivity?
So yeah, basically I think bosses realize they could have been squeezing more out of people all along, and now that's their plan.
The actions of companies appear to signal that they believe remote work is less effective. My evidence:
- remote work materially expands a company's worker pool
- remote work saves the company money on rent
- remote work is often seen as a benefit, from the employee point of view
etc
Thus, I believe, companies see the benefit of in person work to out weight its benefits. The market speaks...
You're assuming that "companies" are not just made up of irrational people, though.
It's not that simple.
Remote work is only less productive when performed from 15 miles away from the office, or from a nicer/cheaper place to live within the United States.
When performed from several time zones away, or from Mexico or South America, remote work is every bit as productive, because cultural, language and sleep-schedule mismatches promote stimulating and fruitful bursts of creativity and efficiency.
On target!
Exactly, Dark Brandon. Either they're full of shit now, or they were full of shit for the last 2 decades as work more or more off-shored.
But, actually, they're full of shit both times.
Just before I retired, I was told that I needed to come back into the office in Pittsburgh 3 days a week to promote team interaction. My team members were in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, New York, Boston, and Bangalore, so I could Zoom with them from home....or from the office after I drove in. LOL.
Re: remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared to in-person workers
Mainly because remote work doesn't really allow for useless "face time". And if there's less overtime maybe there never was a real need for it in the first place?
The true test of remote work will only come when the leases are up. How many of the new AI start ups are leasing space? Leases are a lagging indicator. As long as you have the space to bring workers in you will want workers to come in. It costs you nothing to have people work from the office. That calculation will all change when the leases are up. Is the supposed cost of remote work more than the very real cost of leasing office space. We'll see.
I don't understand the big push for people to go back to the office. Our company has been full time WFH since 3/2020. The team I am on (application development) has no problems seeing if people are completing their tasks.
I suppose it can be difficult to measure the productivity of people who have no metrics, but our team is on track to complete our current project and we haven't missed deadlines.
It's almost like the thing making "remote work bad" isn't remote work itself, but management that doesn't know how to (1) support their workers and/or (2) measure productivity. It's glaringly obvious.
I work at a large research org that has a very loose attitude. I tend to do remote collaborations from home, and local ones at the lab. Say half and half, but it varies.
But what is lost by full time WFH is trust, which in some cases can be built online but often not, especially new folks. I'm not talking about with colleagues, but with admin staff: the finance and travel people who can make your life easy or a pain in the butt.
People who do similar work can absolutely build trust online, but between researchers and admin staff, not so much. Without trust and personal acquaintance, I am nothing but my job title, and if I'm trying to bend the rules, or in a gray area, that travel clerk or finance guy has no reason to let me do it unless she knows me and trusts that I'm just trying to do my job, not putting something over. After all, if it blows up they are going to get in trouble too, maybe more than me.
Further, this is a big organization with a lot of rules. Rules I can't read or confidently understand. I depend on the admin staff to know where the gray areas are, what can be pushed and what is really a no-no. They will be motivated to help me figure this out if they trust me, and as far as I see that depends on a personal relationship. A little bit of "unproductive" chitchat, gossip and the like, goes a long way.
I like this summary pretty well. Gift link:
https://wapo.st/3JarqzN
> Alphabet-owned Google, Lyft, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Salesforce...
All of these companies have pretty substantial office buildings they own. I think we should be skeptical of motivated reasoning driving some of their desires
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