The Wall Street Journal concedes that remote work is down since 2020, as are job listings that advertise remote options. But remote work is "sticking" anyway:
Many lower-wage office and call-center jobs went remote at the onset of the pandemic. Business executives viewed the shift as a temporary emergency measure, said Julia Pollak, chief economist at jobs site ZipRecruiter....“Many employers were surprised to discover that remote customer support agents and freight dispatchers, for example, were often just as effective and productive working from home, if not more so,” Pollak said.
Thanks to those productivity gains, as well as improved recruitment and retention, reduced absenteeism and lower real-estate costs, companies decided to keep offering remote options for some lower-wage staff long after offices reopened, she said.
Oh please. This article is based heavily on data from the American Time Use Survey, so let's see what ATUS says about remote work. I've put this up before more generally, but here it is for different professions:
On average, across every profession, people who work at home put in way fewer hours than people who work in an office. The average difference is nearly three hours, and this is true for every other type of measurement too. Full-time vs. part-time. Men vs. women. High school grads vs. PhDs.
These figures are not averages for everybody. They are solely for employed people who "worked at their workplace on an average day" or "worked at home on an average day." And if these numbers are even in the ballpark of being correct, they mean that workers at home spend a ton of time goofing off just because they can. There's no other conclusion to draw. Is it any wonder they love working at home?
More productivity plus more goofing off sounds like a win for everybody (I assume Mr. Drum will reiterate that there aren't in fact productivity gains).
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I own a small business (about 12 employees, from London to New York to San Francisco to Hong Kong). All of my people work from home, and did so before the pandemic.
I couldn't care less how many hours they work or how much they "goof off" during the day. They all take time to (for example) pick up their kids from school, take care of older relatives, whatever else fills their lives.
I do care about productivity, but I have found that they are most productive when they set their own hours and choose their own work schedule. Maybe I've been lucky in my choice of people, but my experience has definitely been that I don't have to control every (or any) aspect of their lives in order to get the best out of them.
And one more thing: I am much more productive because I don't spend any of my time micromanaging how my people spend their hours. I am personally more responsible as a result.
I have time to goof off because the workload at present allows it. When I’m at the plant, I must change clothes twice to enter the production area and then change back when I leave. The place is huge so it takes a while to go from one place to another.
None of this is required in my WFM role now. Later this year I’ll be onsite again and quite busy doing work with actual equipment instead of thinking about it. Manufacturing Process under construction.
Just cause people are “at work” doesn’t mean they’re productive for the whole time there.
Perhaps the hours “goofing off” make them more productive during the hours they’re putting in
Kevin is determined to use this chart to confirm his priors, no matter what!
7.6 to 8.0 hours worked per day at the office in white collar jobs. Sure, thats accurate!
Also, the survey says: "Working at home includes any time persons did work at home and is not restricted to persons whose usual workplace is their home."
This piece of info gives the work from home value a whole different appearance. But those priors arent going to confirm themselves!
Yea, because when you're in the office, you're still in the office as you get coffee, go to the restroom, often when you have your meals... and if there's an hour or three break before another task, you don't have time to go home.
Duh, you spend time goofing off in an office, you just count that as work hours because you can't just 'be at home' instantly.
Are many employers of WFH staff using keyboard tracking for those not doing primarily phone work? If so, are they not replacing employees they find not consistently busy because there really is better productivity?
For the sake of statistical accuracy how exactly does one measure goofing off at work? IOW, i don’t see how one can compare both without more robust data. Being at the office and reading jabberwocking would be goofing off but how do we know when this is happening.
I worked in outside sales on straight commission for many years. I worked 5-6 hours a day and was ALWAYS in the top 10% of a large sales force in terms of earnings, sales, & productivity. Other sales reps who worked longer hours produced less and earned less than I did. Working smart & strategically doesn't require more time. It requires skill & intelligence.
Good looking Kitty!
Thank you!
The conclusion to draw is that the goofing off is at the office, not at home, and/or people are being paid too little for having to get dressed, shave and drive there and sit all day among a bunch of idiots.
But my question is, how many construction workers are actually working at home?
And farming? If you live on a farm, you're already there, and if you're a farm worker and you don't live on a farm --what are you doing at home?
Apparently this is for office workers only in all the industries. "Working at home" makes no sense for actual construction or manufacturing line workers.
Kevin, come on. If you can do the same amount of work in 6 hours at home as opposed to 7 hours in the office, so what?
(I actually work at a VA call center. I go in to the main campus because I only live 10 minutes away, but almost all of my co-workers work from home. Because we handle incoming calls, it's the same amount of work at either place, except those at home don't have to worry about gas and the hassle of a commute. The program is set up so our supervisor--who is working remotely from Kentucky--can monitor whether we are logged in and receiving calls. Therefore, there is no point in the at-home workers coming in to the office.)
All that goofing off on company time must explain why corporate profits have cratered … oh, wait …
Footnotes on the linked site:
Additionally, there is no statement that the data is taken only from full-time employed persons. There is a Note that “Data refer to persons 15 years and over.”
I don’t think Kevin is correctly interpreting this data. I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from it before seeing extensive documentation of the research protocol and the exact text of survey questions. Especially given the odd results for construction and farm workers.
Totally thinking the same thing. i am assuming that if I work 50 hours at the office and 2 hours at home for me it would count as averaging 10 hours per day at the office and averaging 0.4 hours per day working at home. Does that mean I am goofing off at home?
I am also noting this includes wage workers. So if I work 5 hours at home and get paid for 5 hours, I don't see what the problem is.
Regardless I don't think the data is presented in such a way to make any such conclusions as Kevin has made, nor do I think they were designed to.
That's not going to stop the usual suspects (which at this points includes Kevin) from making sweeping anti-WFH statements.
Which is ironic since I'm pretty sure Kevin was WFH for literally decades.
All of the above rings true to me. When my previous employer closed the local plant some years ago, I negotiated a deal with a new employer where I work much less than 40 hrs/week. The office is 2 hours away and I've only rarely gone there.
The heart of the job is design work, and I'm more productive at that without the stream of interruptions that came with sitting in a cube.
I know of other people working a lot fewer hours at home by agreement with their employer. Sometimes these are people who would just retire completely if the only choice was to put in 40 hrs a week.
If people like us are pulling the US towards a Western European level of work, all I can say is I'm sorry if we end up with the hellish economic conditions of Norway or the Netherlands.
I'm game: Just give me an office where I can focus.
After 25 years in the workplace, I am still at a loss as to how to minimize workplace socializing while being friendly and approachable - mandatory qualities in our happy-warrior model of the ideal worker.
At most 10% of workers can take a vacation without talking about it upon their office return. Ditto vegans, crossfitters and the gluten-sensitive.
Noise-cancelling headphones cancel noise, not voices.
Ear plugs? Nah - you're expected to remove them when a sociable colleague drops in.
What kind of weirdo works in an empty conference room? Why weren't you at your desk, in an atmosphere completely inhospitable to concentration?
So much of office interaction is talking with people about their kids, plus sitting through the daily morning meeting which breaks your flow of concentration, such as can be achieved in the office setting.
Office socializing enhances productivity, but only up to a point. Can I have an office with a 45-minute socialization limit?
My most productive days are when I get home and can work in quiet for 90 minutes in my home office.
No love for remote work, Kevin?
I never wanted to "work from home" because I figured my home was a sanctuary from the outside world (which included work). If I regularly worked from home, it could/would become like "being in the office" (or in my case the cube farm). I really didn't want that.
Since I retired in 2015 I didn't/don't have to deal with any of this. The guy my boss reported to while I was last working saw remote working as the devil's workshop and refused to allow anyone to do it.
I'm skeptical, not of whether the home numbers are accurate, but of whether the office numbers can be compared to them. Or, rather, I suspect that "I am in the office" is being counted as "work" uncritically regardless of whether you're really doing work, whereas the home work figure is *actually* counting literal time-spent-working.
Speaking as someone who has worked in an office, I certainly spent a chunk of my time there not focused on work (socializing, snacks, checking the news, whatever), but if you'd asked me I'd have counted the whole time as "at work". ????????
The ATUS uses an unusual survey method called a "conversational interview", in which participants tell the interviewer how they spent their day and the interviewer decides how to categorise activities in different periods of time using the ATUS taxonomy. I'm not convinced this is a valid, reliable research method, and it would be a mistake to give the findings much credibility. The definition of "work" means that any time spent at the employer's workplace is included, no matter what the respondent was actually doing. Thus the figures in the chart, which correspond closely to the normal 8 hour working day in most establishments.
People working from home, however, will only report as "work" the time they spent doing work-related tasks, and they may well omit small tasks such as answering a phone call or reading an email. My tentative conclusion is quite different to Kevin's: the findings reveal how much unproductive time is wasted by employees at a fixed workplace. For Kevin to be right about the "goofing off" would require employers to be incapable of evaluating the output of their employees, which is implausible.
Not a method I would use. Besides the conscious and unconscious tendencies to present oneself as having been more diligent than one actually was, there are mistakes and failures of memory.
In my final job as a worker bee, I worked 40 hours a week for my employer.
I decided to quit and become a consultant, with my first client being my former employer.
As a consultant, I did exactly the same tasks that I did as an employee, but I completed them in about 27-30 hours, not 40.
This difference absolutely floored me. I think of myself as a hard worker, and not as a goof-off, but obviously, I was spending a lot of time doing unproductive things when I was forced to be at work 8 hours a day, five days a week.
This data doesn’t even pass the smell test, at least in the context Kevin is trying to use it. The average construction worker works 8.2 hours per day on-site, and 3.1 hours remotely? What does that even mean?
I think it should be self evident that there are not whole industries where people are doing 3 hour days in full time jobs, so I’m surprised Kevin is presenting these data like this.
So you think people sit at their computers in the office and work basically non-stop except to eat lunch? You are either being deliberately obtuse about this whole issue or you’re totally clueless. Most workers waste hours every day in the office, taking breaks, surfing the internet, staring at the screen, etc. Seriously, you’re losing more credibility on this topic than you are with inflation.
Where’s the data on how long they are in the office? If you’re getting 8 actual hours of work, you’ve probably been there for 10-11 hours.
Kevin is still interpreting the ATUS incorrectly. Once again the time worked from home averages include all time that anyone worked from home and not just home based workers. E.g. Kevin works 8 hours from home while I work 8 hours in the office and the work 2 hours at night from home. Using the ATUS methodology the average office hours of this small sample is 8 while the average home hours worked is 5. Kevin just needs to give this one up.
For a guy who spent close to the two decades doing WFH, Kevin sure is skeptical about its benefits!
How much "overhead", i.e. time needed to maintain work relationships/office space/kitchen area/etc., is needed in your job?
I agree with those here who suspect these data mostly reflect categorization artifacts rather than actual time spent doing work (or goofing off) in each location.
Ages ago, Joel Spolsky (of Stack Overflow fame) wrote that, when doing estimates for software projects, you should figure on about 6 hours of productive work per day from the average engineer. That roughly accords with my personal experience both writing code and managing other people who do--regardless of location.
It obviously doesn't accord with the in-office "hours worked" numbers given in this study, which seems to portray a world in which workers are productive, uninterruptedly, virtually from the moment their butts hit the chair until they head out for the day.
I mean, come on...
Let's put it this way: If you are responsible for doing capacity planning for a scrum team, I strongly advise against writing down 8 hours/day of capacity for each engineer who is working in the office--unless you're a fan of explaining to business why you keep having to move out a raft of incomplete user stories every couple of weeks!
Incidentally, Spolsky also strongly advised software shops to provide their engineers with offices with doors that close. As others have pointed out here, much of productive "knowledge" work involves getting into, and staying in, a zone of concentration, that is all too easily shattered in typical "cubicle city" (or, worse, "open") office environments, that often license a constant flow of interruptions.
There is absolutely a case for the superiority of in-person work for certain purposes--especially mentorship of new team members and highly collaborative work (i.e., JAD sessions). If I could easily get together with my full team more often, I definitely would, and I'm quite sure most of them would welcome it too. But the constraint here is distance, not WFH policy.
But for day-in-day-out productivity? Someone is going to have to make a much more empirically buttoned up and compelling case to show me that we gain more than we lose by going into the office.
Being repetitive does not make you correct. It just demonstrates your level of insecurity with your position on the topic. Lord forbid the working man get a few hours back from the ownership class by "slacking off". I'm finding it very hard to give any f#cks for their plight. I will only work from home for the rest of my career, I hope to never see the inside of a cubicle again.
If I am physically in the office, I will list every minute as "work" (including meaningless meetings and listening to droning stories from cube mates about their weekend plans). When working at home, I list "work" as the time when I'm actually getting sh*t done. I produce the same number of widgets whether I get interrupted by Marge's TikTok video of her grandson or whether I am doing a load of laundry while at home. Working at home, I do it without the unpaid commute.
You're off the mark on this one, Kevin.
I manage software engineers for a living. I spend a good chunk of my day in meetings, which happen over Zoom whether I'm home or in our office. So I'm just as "productive" either way.
I suspect that the time at home I spend doing laundry or whatever during the work day even out with the amount of time I used to spend in idle jibber-jabber with co-workers in the office.
What, people at the office don't goof off? Hahahahaha!