The 2022 edition of the American Time Use Survey is out, which means we can check out more recent data on what people are doing these days. Nothing has changed much over the course of a single year, but there's at least one good table about remote work that confirms something I wrote about a few weeks ago:
Among full-time workers, those who work at work put in a little over eight hours per days. Those who work at home put in a little less than six hours. The difference is nearly 2½ hours per day. That's a huge disparity in what managers can expect from remote workers compared to those who come into the office.
You can invent all sorts of excuses for this. Maybe office workers spend lots of time gossiping around the water cooler but count that as work. Maybe home workers put in fewer hours but work more intensely during those hours. Maybe remote workers are just astonishingly honest about accounting for work when they're keeping track of it in an anonymous diary.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. But the most obvious interpretation here is that home workers spend a lot of time running errands and texting with friends, and as a result they simply work less than office workers.
On another subject that I just happened to run into the other day, here are the latest numbers for attendance at religious services:
Attendance at religious services has been slowly declining for the past two decades and then fell off a cliff during the pandemic. However, attendance rebounded a bit in 2022 for both men and women.
Here's an out-of-the-blue comment about this. The share of people who attend religious services is very close to the share of workers who belong to a union. The decline in both has been very similar too. But which group has more political clout: churches or unions?
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Religious attendance --is it a dead cat bounce, like the seeming, but small, increase in conservatism among the younger cohort?
I'd say the 2021 data looks off trend. Still pandemic related maybe?
My experience working in the office was that more than 2.5 hours per day on average were wasted. That doesn't even mention the commuting time (where does that fall in here, anyway?).
Please stop with the "what managers can expect" bullshit, at least when it comes to measuring it by time. If managers aren't managing by results, then they're shit managers. That's not the employees' problem. That's a management problem.
Stop with the baseless pro-management drivel. If you're going to be pro-management, at least have valid evidence for it.
"But the most obvious interpretation here is that home workers spend a lot of time running errands and texting with friends, and as a result they simply work less than office workers."
My eyes rolled out of my head at this. Remote workers spend more time on productive things instead of wasting time at the office on stupid not-work-related bullshit that only exists to appease some manager's ego? Shocker!
100% this. Kevin's take on this is infuriating.
1000% this.
I'm completing all the same tasks that I've always completed for the last 10 years. For 7 of those years, I was in the office every day. For the last 3, I've been working from home. For all 10, I spend about 5-6 hours actually doing work and 2-3 hours doing something else (reading the news, shopping online, planning vacations, etc.). The only difference between now and then is that - at home - I can do other things like the laundry or running errands instead of desperately trying to fill time solely sitting at a desk until 5pm every day.
If I deliver everything my boss asks for in the time frame he wants it, and I'm more cheerful than I ever was (probably because I don't have to suffer an unpaid commute each way as well as avoiding the chore of "looking busy"), what really is the problem here for my employer?
Yeah, in the office everyone puts in the time whether they are producing anything or not because they have watchers. They're actually only doing 6 hours of work, but stretching it out because the penalty for finishing early is more work.
Home based workers have higher incentives to get work done early, they can run to the grocery store and do other things. They have no reason to stretch 6 hours of work out into 8.
People at work will count all the time between the morning commute and the evening commute as time spent working even if they spend that time doom scrolling, running errands, gossiping at the water cooler or otherwise pissing it off. In fact, one of the big reasons given for RTO is all the non-work stuff: awkward socializing, pointless meetings and patronizing business district businesses.
People working at home will only count the time actually spent working.
We all know that it's just about control, not productivity. The bosses have to demonstrate that they are actually doing *something*.
Thank you cmayo, it IS infuriating. I'm working MORE at home because I don't have to waste time in transit to my old office location, driving around the parking garage to find an empty space, then going through security and on to my miserable cube farm. And yes in the office there's a ton of time wasters like longer distance to the bathroom, longer time to get and eat lunch especially if you eat out. Kev is a dino who last worked in a traditional office setting about the time that NCRP was the norm for office forms and far more things were on paper. The times changed but Kevin doesn't know this.
Frankly, I just don't care what the stats say and I have no sympathy for employers with double digit growth over the past few years. Employees have been expoited for decades, with decreasing wages when indexed for inflation, despite increasing productivity. It is about time workers have some leverage to negotiate. The best employees will continue to demand WFH jobs.
I agree with you that many good employees will demand to work at home or at least to have the flexibility to do so a few days a week. As long as the job market stays strong managers and CEOs can complain all they want but they will have trouble retaining good workers and attracting new ones.
No one is talking about the benefits of people working from home, only the downside. My city’s rush hour traffic is significantly reduced from pre-pandemic. Now there is a move to convert office buildings to apartments to attract more people to downtown living. One big negative is that the light rail system we fought so hard for has lost a lot of passengers.
Enforcing RTO is a way of flushing out effective workers and retaining the deadwood. People who are good enough to get another job are more likely to do so in the face of RTO. People who aren't will RTO to save their job. RTO is a way of cutting productivity.
The managers find they have a lot less to manage and are reasonably worried their managers are starting to notice.
I think that's the primary issue here.
I agree that Kevin is off base, but managing remote employees is still management. I've been doing it for years.
I admit I was thinking more of the appearance, where once the office was full now there's hardly anyone there, and the manager worries that others will worry, what are we doing with all this empty space?
As someone who has done both for a number of years and someone whose job is tracked by very precise metrics I have some thoughts on the matter. Office time does involve a ridiculous amount of wasted time in so many ways. That said, it is definitely easier to be collaborative in certain endeavors. However, working from home allows one to work more during the day and night (meaning one goes in and out of a system for longer times like 9-12, 3-5, 7-9). I think it is true that an experienced worker can handle work at-home better as that person needs less collaboration. As to the aforementioned metrics, it is the same.
Re: Those who work at home put in a little less than six hours. The difference is nearly 2½ hours per day
Assuming we're talking about people who were hired for full time positions and as such are expected to log 40 hours a week, or use PTO to make up any discrepancy, how do they get away with this? I've worked from home for several years. I have to log time in and time out, and time away for lunch or the like-- all of which can be verified by network data. If I logged time when I wasn't actually-- and actively-- on the system I would be fired for falsifying my time reporting
Many professionals are not monitored to that degree. Personally, I would not put up with a job that micromanaged my time like that.
Presumably, they do what I've done - both in the office and at home. You log in at your designated start time, then do some work, then do something else that isn't work but fills the time, then log back out at your designated end time. I used to surf the internet mindlessly until 5pm. Now I do chores like house cleaning or laundry until 5pm.
As for the whole "what about your boss possibly checking to make sure you're doing 'legit' stuff on your computer?" concern... you have to ask yourself, relative to what? If all your coworkers are also not doing 'legit' stuff for all 8 hours, you won't stand out when your boss runs the "Who's Goofing Off?" software. Very few people in the Before Days spent 100% of their clocked-in time doing Legit Business Stuff. And most employers can't afford to fire or discipline everyone goofing off.
Goofing off on the job is like speeding on a highway... you can do it as long as you don't stand out from everyone else doing it.
Well my job is to be available right away to solve things though yes there are slower times that I typically fill with either data reconciliation to identify bad data that needs fixing or when I've done all that I chill and glance at my personal laptop. I only step away to take the dogs outside for quick breaks, have a human quick break & lunch. Sure you could be a slacker but with my team a slacker wouldn't be resolving as many tickets so it'd be painfully apparent. This is why my agency decided to allow our team to be full time work from home but required to live within 50 miles of HQ.
When working onsite pre-pandemic, I was there 7 am to 4 pm at a minimum then took support calls 24/7 as needed. I checked for shift report messages before I went to bed and upon waking. My work phone was on my nightstand. My manager doesn’t get more “work” out of me when I’m onsite. He gets what’s needed. No one “works” for the whole time we’re onsite. Not in my kind of job anyway. (Manufacturing engineer in production).
Silly.
Subjective time estimates aside, I'll reiterate that it's about productivity, not hours, for any professional level job. If managers cannot measure outcomes and results delivered, and manage appropriately, then they should be fired.
I think this is mostly some combination of Fear, Greed, and Egos. Fear in that managers can't measure outcomes, so they want RTO. Greed in that if those remote workers really have that extra time, then managers want the benefit from that. It's like the employees can't keep the benefits of their efficiencies to themselves for once. Don't think for a minute that if that benefit was accruing to the company that the employee would ever see a bit of it.
Egos come in when companies build/lease large office buildings. I can't shake the idea that executives are proud when companies acquire large amounts of office space ("Look at me! Look what I did!), and the office space becomes part of their self-identity. Rejecting the office means you reject them.
They can't survey the entirety of their feifdom on the daily.
I'll add to the chorus here...
People might sit at their desk for 8+ hours in an office, but the vast majority of them are not doing actual work even close to that much time. I don't understand how you're not getting that.
There are also a lot of interruptions that greatly reduce time spent working.
Indeed. If most people spent 100% of their on-the-clock time working, workplace TV shows like The Office or Superstore would never have been a hit with so many viewers. Those shows are funny precisely because they acknowledge that employees do a LOT of stuff besides work at work.
Once again Kevin’s anti work from home bias leads him to an improper conclusion. If you look at the data the work from home numbers include “Working at home includes any time persons did work at home and is not restricted to persons whose usual workplace is their home.” So if I work 8 hours in the office and the work 2 hours at night at home I’m dragging down the average work from home hours. Example: I work 8 hours at my office while Kevin works 8 hours at home, but when I add those 2 extra hours I worked at home the average hours worked from home drops to 5, while the average at the office remains 8.
It’s amusing that Kevin exhibits such a marked anti-WFH bias, when he [checks notes] worked from home himself for many years.
It seems obvious that the work at homers in the survey reported actual time working whereas the office workers reported time in the office as their time working.
Everybody wasting time at the office still considers themselves working because they are forced to be in the office by your employer.
Edit - i see the work from home data also includes unscheduled work from home which is going to drag down the averages. Kevins take is embarassingly uninformed. Arguing your priors with charts without bothering to look at the data is embarassing.
It’s pretty clear to me that if you work from home you don’t need to work for as many hours and you still make more than I ever did working in an office. For instance, Eve is making 190 US dollars an hour using her home computer.
LOL. Yeah right, what does Eve do anyway- placed ads in blogs?
Eve is on OnlyFans. She has a huge fan base of people who actually pay to watch her do this.
Nice work if you can get it.
Eve is my hero!
Remote work not only saves me two hours of commuting every day, but I am certainly more productive on those remote days. I am also more rested, healthier, and happier, which I know very clearly makes me more productive and effective. But here’s a forgotten element: it saves my clients from the attendant loss of my effectiveness. This is incredibly important, as I am a public defender. Remote court also allows many of my clients to appear in court, when otherwise that would’ve been impossible for them (consider, Kevin, that I live in Orange County but work in L.A.; my clients live all over L.A. County and many depend on public transportation). My particular situation may be unusual, but this dynamic of productivity loss - not just for myself but for others who depend on my effectiveness - must be common.
Kevin, you’ve asked a thoughtful question about the comparative power of churches and unions.
I’m inclined to say unions have more political power. The political power of churches depends on how many of their members look to them for moral wisdom. Catholics who attend Mass regularly have different perspectives on many topics from those who do not.
I think also that there’s likely a lot of disagreement between churches on certain political questions than there would be among unions. Immigration policy is but one example, and there are plenty others that raise more heat.
The issue with church political power is that there are some denominations that actively try to not wield much political power - think of your typical Mainline Protestant congregation and pastors - while other religious groups are nearly obsessed with their political power - the more conservative Evangelical denominations certainly do this. Especially in the last decade or so the political side of Evangelical religion has started to take precedence over the religious side. The recent ousting of female pastors in Southern Baptist churches, the electioneering from the pulpit, the rise of nationalist churches are all examples of this. In many of these cases the clergy are being pushed aside by the political motives of the congregants.
The Unions are splitting apart politically as well these days. The police/firefighter unions are no very aligned with the other unions anymore.
I think that both the Unions and the Church will have their greatest power on the right. They'll both become pretty irrelevant on the left, though. Churches because both the political left is secular AND the churches themselves do not see partisan politics as their role. Unions will lose power on the left because the working class is so split between the two main parties, it will be hard to pick many political issues that their members will agree on.
In my neck of the woods the firefighter unions/associations are very much Democratic and the Police associations centrist to wingnut.
I was born into the Episcopal Church and spent the better part of my life in it. It is plenty obsessed with power, and its triennial General Convention approves reams of resolutions about all sorts of political issues — and on most of which it has no more insight than the average citizen.
Commenters pointing out the reasons for the discrepancy in reported working hours are not "making excuses". ATUS says
Employees attending the office 8 hours a day will therefore self-report "working" 8 hours a day. Anyone who's worked in an office knows how much unproductive activity takes place within those 8 hours.
People working from home, on the other hand, are unlikely to self-report anything but actual work as time spent working, because they'll report everything else as some other activity.
The part I wonder about is trust: How do WFH people who've never met and have different jobs in the same organization - say scientist and finance guy, or travel clerk - develop enough trust to do more than work to rule?
I'm a scientist in a large organization that formally is up to here with rules and policies. I can't decipher the fine print or figure out which ones are for real and which ones are gray areas. I need the travel clerks and finance people to do that for me, but if they don't know me beyond my job title they have no reason to; they don't want to get in trouble so they'll just cite this or that policy and be done with it.
I don't think an organization works very effectively - certainly not creatively - if there's nothing but rules and policies. Peers can build trust online but different job functions usually have no opportunity to do that if everyone's remote. It's easy to say that chatting and gossiping and wasting time at work isn't productive but that's how humans connect and build trust. Successful organizations are not mechanical.
You build trust via virtual meetings and professional behavior. I have helped many of the scientists, program managers and contracting officers solve problems related to budgeting, contract structure and vendor payments. Word gets around that you're the one who is so helpful and nice, especially if you're not haughty with "I told you so" when they come to you with real messes.
Of course if you're the PM that comes in guns a blazing demanding that I fix something in a manner that the system cannot do because the system slavishly follows all DOD regs - of course I won't appreciate being your scapegoat and I'll treat lightly in our next interaction.
I'll chime in extremely late to the party: Is there a precise definition of work given this survey? Is there a precise definition of what is not work in this survey? If you don't do this, and do it _by_category_, you'll see the evidence heavily abused: C-suite types claiming they work 60-70-80 hours a week for example because they include any time spent golphing as 'networking'.
Yes there is. They use an interesting research method called a "conversational interview", which basically means the researcher asks respondents to tell them what they did yesterday, and uses the category definitions to split the time up into different categories. I didn't delve deeply enough into it to learn whether respondents are encouraged to keep diaries or notes as memory aids. It's a research design that obviously depends heavily on the memories and honesty of the respondents together with the capacity of the interveiwers to interpret the conversations accurately and consistently. I would personally have considerable reservations about the reliability and validity of the findings.