A new study is out that compares the amount of work completed in a day by office workers vs. home workers. It's based on random assignment to either home or office of data-entry workers in India, so the measure of "work" is pretty objective. The study has two basic conclusions:
- Your best workers are the ones who want to work at home.
- They are also the ones who lose the most productivity when they transition from the office to home.
On average, home workers are 18% less productive than office workers. Those who actively prefer working from home are 27% less productive:
Most of this difference is simply because home workers don't work as hard, but some of it is because home workers also don't learn as fast as office workers.
Roughly speaking, this result is consistent with time use studies in the US, which find that home workers put in about 25% fewer hours than office workers. It's also consistent with other studies and with anecdotal evidence.
The last time I wrote about working from home I got back this comment: Hard workers will work hard no matter where they are. Goof-offs will goof off no matter where they are. This is probably true. Certain occupations—like engineering—probably attract a lot of hard workers who do fine at home. Other occupations don't, and they make up the vast majority of the workforce. For those folks, the evidence is pretty strong that they just don't get as much done at home as they do in the office, and the reason is simply that they take more time off during the day because there's no one around to keep an eye on them.
So first of all, are you just going to ignore Saturday and Sunday? Because it sure looks like the total work completed (area under the curve) is HIGHER for remote workers.
Second, is there something about employment in India that might explain a difference? Something structural about the nature of the work, for example?
This anti-remote work narrative by Kevin, the decades-long remote worker, is beyond tiresome.
Oh, the paternalism!
So you're just going to deny a constant stream of facts because they don't accord with the way you wish the world behaves?
Like I keep saying - denying reality, choosing your own facts, belief bubbles, conspiracy theories - these are all pathologies just as prevalent, and just as strong, on the left as on the right. The people who actually care about truth, and who occasionally change their opinions based on data, represent maybe 2% of society.
Troll, troll, troll your post...
I think this is a case where it's unusually easy to track the amount of work completed. With most other "home vs office" jobs, there's probably a lot of unproductive screwing around or "look at stuff when the boss isn't nearby" going on while in the office.
Putting in hours doesn't mean work doesn't get done.
Your graph even shows that over a week, the home office crowd puts in more completed projects.
I worked from home a little as a state government employee when I was working.
I had to have a set up with specific internet capabilities. (Spectrum was good enough). I used a state issued laptop. I used a state vehicle but ONLY for work purposes. (We kept detailed car logs). Finally as part of the WFH program I had to sign an agreement stating:
! -the state could terminate the WFH program at any time
2 - I had to PAY for internet since I could use it for my own computing equipment
3 - I agreed that I could be monitored remotely with or without my knowledge to make sure I was working on state related business while using state equipment.
I agreed to all of the above plus other restrictions just to see how this program worked. It was "OK' but nothing to write home about. I did find that I tended to put in more hours than I needed to because if I had one or two little things to finish I would stay "at work" to get it done which I didn't do in the office.
I did miss the camaraderie
I missed being able to lean back in my chair and looked down the hallway and say "does anyone have a clue as to which is the more precise standard to use for this violation?" Then getting into a short debate with 2 or three other offices who offered their opinions.
I voluntarily gave up WFH and returned to the office after 8 months. I found the "aloneness" to be tedious. I needed the interaction with others. I had no problems with being closely monitored while WFH. But I did see where at the end of the day I would start something that I couldn't get finished before 5 whereas in the WFH situation I'd start it and finish it even if it meant working until 5:15pm or 5:30
A quick read appears to show that WFH employees were required to travel to the office on Mondays to upload their past work and receive new work assignments before returning home to begin the work week.
The results also appear to show that WFH employees were significantly less productive on Mondays. Given the first point, this seems important...but it appears to be ignored in the analysis.
The analysis also appears to ignore the differences in attrition and higher compensation required to entice people to work from the office.
Requiring WFH employees to travel to the office once a week for administrative burdens seems like a terrible study design. Imagine if the study required Office employees to be locked in a dungeon and barred from working for half a day each week....i bet this would show up in the data.
"A quick read appears to show that WFH employees were required to travel to the office on Mondays to upload their past work and receive new work assignments before returning home to begin the work week."
Well, that would explain the anomalous Monday.
But Kevin can't let that get in the way of the narrative he's so intent on pushing for... who knows what reason.
tl;dr: Kevin hates you
Kevin has been working from home for what, 20 years? (humblebrag I know this since I’ve been reading his stuff since just after he started CalPundit!)
He knows exactly how great it is, but he can’t stand the rest of us enjoying this level of happiness.
Unnecessarily vindictive.
William of Ockham suggests: KD knows how much *he* goofs off while working at home (though has likely never actually measured his real productivity over a week or month), and is convinced that everyone else does this too.
I'd agree, a little sharp on the snark scale. Like fabric, I've been following since the Calpundit days myself, and if memory serves, KD's pre-blogging stint involved some office management. So maybe Ockham could consider deploying a double-edged Gillette in this case.
I manage a mid size team, some of which prefer to work from home, some at the office, and others mixing a bit of both.
To me, a worker who gets the job done in 5-6 hrs working from home without the need of someone looking over their shoulder, while still enjoying family time, and thus being happier overall, is far better than someone who is 8hrs glued to the office chair, feeling miserable (and sharing the misery), and who still needs to waste someone else's time to look after them.
Time warming a chair is a terrible measure of a worker's real productivity. If the job requires constant interaction with others, or be front facing to clients, etc., it is hard to goof off, if it is work that can be done alone, odds are it is a job that requires certain level of skill, and usually learning that skill means a certain level of responsibility that doesn't require constant monitoring.
Well said!
Um, India... When I was last in computers, I had to deal with software creation and support outsourced to India. The prior American counterparts would make sure that things worked, end to end; if they realized there was a FUBAR in the making, even if it wasn't in the work specification and their job description , they would at least raise a red flag and make sure the disaster didn't happen. Not so in India: they worked to spec and that was that. If the spec had a flaw, didn't matter, their work was done.
So you might also consider the Indian work ethic, where IMHO getting the job done doesn't necessarily include something that works.
I think the issues you describe probably have more to do with poor project management or working with an outsource provider who is getting paid by the hour and also probably time zone and language comprehension issues. My company maintains an office in India and a slate of Indian developers who are full-time employees of our company. (FYI I am in software engineering.) My experience working with them is terrific. About 10 years ago I worked with an offshoring body shop who provided us with a number of contractors working in India and that experience was not great.
I've experience the same thing, but I don't think it reflects a poor cultural work ethic in india. In my opinion it was due to several factors:
1) Poor integration of the offshore devs into the company/project. The Indian devs simply didn't know the product well, or the business in general so they don't have the insight to see issues that in on-shore dev working more directly with the rest of staff would see. They also usually don't have the direct connections to discuss the issues with anyone on staff.
2) Poor communications due to language barriers
3) Lack of authority. In my experience the offshore devs did not feel or explicitly were not allowed, to bring up issues to anyone outside their consulting company and the company management seemed incentivized to not care, because so long as they met the spec they got paid. In fact, if they met the spec but it didn't actually do what we needed they got paid more to redo it.
Just a language issue. FUBAR stands for "Fouled" Up Beyond All Repair. By definition, a FUBAR can not be fixed; it's "beyond all repair".
I thought it was "...Beyond All Recognition."
Does the work get done? If so, who cares how much 'time' they spend? Even though as a law clerk, I could do my work in 4 hours usually, my boss insisted I sit there for four more hours.
He as a jerk- like almost all bosses.
An 8 hour day is a law?
The key to understanding anything that any business says or does is the universal emotional obsession of businessmen that all of their employees and customers are thieves. It would be difficult enough to isolate this factor even if it were acknowledged, but it isn't, so it is impossible.
All that matters is measuring outputs, and professionals will be productive in either scenario. It boils down, as always, to leadership.
If remote workers are not productive, it’s a leadership issue to find workers that are, or figuring out why they’re not. It’s an employee issue when they get fired. Why do people seem to think that dragging bad remote workers to an office will make them into good workers?
In a way, it’s about mutual respect between employees and management.
There may be something to the claim that engineering and similar high-skill work attracts self-motivated people.
It may also be that startups (what I'm most familiar with, although I'm now part of a much larger company) are more open to alternate arrangements for various reasons. Or it could be a culture thing - a lot of tech firms, even outside of the Bay Area, have insurgent outlooks, or at least like them as affectations.
As a data point, here is a current "who's hiring" page for Hacker News, which is a watering hole for a certain slice of startup types. Search the page for "remote".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36956867
You know, way back in the dim dark days before capital-intensive manufacturing, working at home was very common-- farmers farmed at their homes, merchants worked out of their counting rooms, shopkeepers sold stuff from their front rooms, innkeepers lived upstairs, etc. Even more common was working in *a* home-- hired hands on farms, craftspeople working in a master's home-based premises.
Before modern mass transit everything had to be in walking distance so stevedores and shipwrights lived near the docks, meaning homes and workplaces were interspersed with each other even if you did work at distinct job premises. There were also remote or purpose-built worksites like iron furnaces, mines, or Whitney's settlement near water power; that's why we started setting up company towns with company housing. Of course there were some itinerant lines of work like stonemasons or traveling merchants, but in general, for most people through most of human history, work was done at home or nearby.
In other words the current expectation that work happens in a purpose-built premises that people routinely commute to is the anomaly. It made a lot of sense for capital-intensive manufacturing, couldn't be done any other way-- it's needed if you want to do things at scale. Manufacturing used to involve a lot of associated white-collar work and it made sense to do that on the premises too, especially if it was directly related to the manufacturing process. But that model might not make sense for all "office work," just have been widely adopted to use the available technologies and keep up with the management Joneses.
And now we've been spending the past 40 years or so massively decoupling manufacturing and white-collar work. So the office model might not be the most effective or cost-effective approach for all things.
It has a lot of advantages for human contact and job/task coordination, both of which are essential (thanks, Vog46). It has more advantages-- is close to indispensable-- if intrusive (overbearing?) active management and oversight are the goals (thanks Solar, elboku, and frankwillhoit).
But it isn't the order of nature, and maybe we're long overdue for a ground-up evaluation of how a lot of white-collar work should get done, consonant with a firm's institutional interest in coordination and continuity.
"For those folks, the evidence is pretty strong that they just don't get as much done at home as they do in the office, and the reason is simply that they take more time off during the day because there's no one around to keep an eye on them."
And I'm fine with that. Americans work too hard as it is.
Curious in all this effort to quantify productivity, how the workers in question feel about their job.
Total conjecture, but being chained to a desk in an office (which is what it is) and having to commute on my time and dollar would make me resent my job much more than WFH. In one case my tolerance for management BS would be paper thin and in the other, I'd be willing to give them some grace.
For myself, being project oriented in IT means I'm evaluated by my work completed....not how many words I typed per day. Being in the office with teammates globally spread means I don't gain any value from "in face" collaboration and am more likely to waste time water-cooling about non-work related topics with non-teammates. Or worse office gossip, which is inherently a drag on work.
These measures feel more like Laverne & Shirley work where the workers are graded on how many bottles get capped. Even if it's "tech" work.
...Adding, here's an interesting article on how forcing people back to the office has gone:
https://fortune.com/2023/08/01/research-damaging-results-mandated-return-to-office-worse-than-we-thought-rto-remote-work-careers-leadership-gleb-tsipursky/
Here's what physical oversight costs:
I wonder what productivity looks like at the firm level at these places, and if that would change any minds that are currently staring at individual-level productivity measures and saying return-to-office is a no-brainer decision.
Actually, I don't wonder about that second question.
Ultimately, the talent drives this conversation. The most productive and highest quality workers aren't putting up with non-flexible work arrangements. As a company, you have to decide if you want the top talent or if you want every last minute you are paying for. Or the third option, you stop focusing on work time and focus on work output.
Talented works are done putting up with commutes and having to pay a premium to live near job centers.
Re: Roughly speaking, this result is consistent with time use studies in the US, which find that home workers put in about 25% fewer hours than office workers.
Most people have a set working day-- eight hours, whatever-- and they can't put in overtime without permission and they put in fewer than 40 hours a week without permission they will also be in some degree of trouble for it. So how are people putting in 25% fewer hours?
Re: they take more time off during the day because there's no one around to keep an eye on them.
It is certainly possible to track whether people are active and online or not. So, yes, remote workers can be "watched".
At this point I have to believe Kevin is trolling everyone. First he points back the US study that everybody knows he misread about home workers putting in 25% less hours and then he points to this Indian study. Everyone go to the study and scroll down to page 42 and you will see a 100% explanation for the disparity and it has nothing to do with goofing off. I wish to god I could just post a screen here because in two weeks Kevin will be posting some more of this nonsense.
Yeah this is getting ridiculous.