They can all fuck right off. Here’s the article if anyone’s interested: https://www.forbes.com/sites/benjaminlaker/2023/08/02/working-from-home-leads-to-decreased-productivity-research-reveals/
Here is a link to the actual study (PDF via GDrive)
One of the authors of this paper is from the Chicago School and the Hoover Institution. Both are pro-business, anti-worker think-tanks that have been this way for decades. They also don’t do any research of their own, but cite other papers that show the 5-20% reduction.
However, the methodology mentioned in the papers is suspect. First, they show that remote workers have the same productivity, but work longer hours. So the net output doesn’t go down, they just spend more time working. Which raises the question: How many more breaks were they taking throughout the day? Being remote means a much more flexible schedule, so it’s not uncommon to take longer breaks if you’re a salaried worker.
Another study was IT professionals shifting to remote work at one company at the start of the pandemic. This one showed an 18% reduction in productivity. But considering the timing of this and that company culture and procedures can contribute to this, it doesn’t seem to be a valid data point.
Then they bring up some common criticisms of WFH, which I’ve seen and refuted since I started working from home 2009: People can’t communicate, working in groups is harder, and people can’t control themselves. Yawn.
Honestly, the fact that they cherry picked hybrid work as being equally productive shows me this isn’t about productivity, it’s about keeping offices open. Which makes sense considering one of the authors is affiliated with groups that want to prop up the commercial rental business.
Thank you for the summary! This is the investigation I was looking for.
Disallowing remote with when it’s possible is anti-worker.
If the source of the article is suspect, where is the research by tech firms with a vested interest in cloud and communication platforms publishing counter studies?
Also, with both studies cited, the best argument is that workers are happy to work more than 8 hours a day. Does that mean you should expect workers to be on call for longer than an 8 hour day because they are working remote?
If the source of the article is suspect, where is the research by tech firms with a vested interest in cloud and communication platforms publishing counter studies?
Pick one. Otherwise you aren’t better than alt-right people on Facebook that say to “do your own research”.
Right, but you’re no better than alt-right people on Facebook ignoring the research that’s literally one click away because you’re afraid it will disagree with you
I’ve provided sources from reputable sources of journalism, you haven’t.
FYI, none of your posts in this thread have any links
And because jfc you’re lazy: Here is a study by the Harvard Business Review showing increased productivity.
It took three clicks from Google so I can see why you’d have trouble getting to it.
I’ve been posting the Economist link in several comments. I left it as presented to show where the link came from in case people argued with the source.
This source just states that there is a disagreement over whether work from home is more or less productive and provides survey information to show the difference in opinion.
That isn’t making the argument that remote work is productive, just that workers view it as more productive and the study isn’t conclusive. The closest this study gets to saying if productivity increases is “In theory, both sides could be right[.]”
Science. Is not about winning. Fuckface.
You and people like you are literally inhibiting the progress of the human race for personal gain. Congratulations.
So there is no scientific evidence that remote work leads to more productivity?
Ignores salient points made, what-about-isms to reassert bad point, doubles down on the science is a competition thing while illustrating complete lack of knowledge of scientific process
At least you are consistent.
Ignores salient points made
I’ve responded to them, not ignored them.
what-about-isms to reassert bad point
I’ve said that, if you want to argue the studies presented, present other studies. The only one presented I had comments on and quoted the text.
doubles down on the science is a competition thing while illustrating complete lack of knowledge of scientific process
Science is about presenting data in a way that can be reviewed and verified. I’ve asked for studies that back up the assertions made while providing references to my assertions. Where is the data to back up the claim that remote work is more productive?
I swear, when I’m called into the office I get fuck all nothing done. Like once in a while there’s a reason for me to be on site, and I do that thing and nothing else all day.
Distractions, interruptions, noise, general discomfort. Seems every time I actually start making progress on something, a person stops by my desk and that basically erases whatever I did. So it always ends with “I’ll do it tomorrow when I’m at home”.
I must be in like some weird alternate reality because my boss recognises that the office is a distraction, and doesn’t go there often himself. We go there very seldomly, primarily to catch up with colleagues, but not to work on our tasks.
I get maybe 15-20% of my normal work done at the office.
Granted this might increase over time if I came in regularly but it’d never touch how productive I am at home. This rhetoric about losing productivity working from home is dangerous and bullshit.
Im the exact opposite. At home there are way too many distractions and temptations than in an office environment.
That’s me too. Sure it’s useful once a week to sit down with my team but the rest of our work is solo or on an ad hoc debugging call where sharing screens actually makes things easier.
Even worse my office doesn’t even have enough desks for everyone, and even fewer of them are properly setup with a monitor from this decade. Each of I ur 3 mandatory office days is a complete crapshoot on whether you’ll actually get a proper workstation or will you be stuck at a table with your laptop all day.
They’re write offs where fuck all gets done. Some of my colleagues who are in meetings all day seem to be okay with the office but if you actually need to do work there’s little point in being there.
It’s both decreasing productivity AND saving the economy!!! https://fortune.com/2023/08/01/remote-work-preventing-economy-from-recession/
It’s funny how these kinds of articles always read exactly the same. I honestly want to know what offices they are using for these supposed metrics because it seems like people are doing everything they can to just endure and waste time while in actual offices.
Clearly they’re analyzing offices with fat commercial real estate bills going unpaid month after month. Think anyone at Forbes magazine is invested in that stuff?
They looked at the stats of two companies. That’s the extent of their “research”.
It’s a garbage article from the type of people that are responsible for 85% of what is wrong with the planet.
Look I work from home, I think everyone who can (and wants to) work from home should work from home most of the time. But people are definitely less productive working from home, and I think the people who say that most people are more productive are delusional.
There are more important things than just raw productivity numbers, western workers have been working far too hard and far too long for the last half century, and I think we should return to a more humane approach to working.
Also froma purely selfish capitalist perspective I don’t neccesarily think the productivity boost of being in person is worth all the costs of a bigger office, cleaning staff etc.
But people are definitely less productive working from home, and I think the people who say that most people are more productive are delusional
Except pretty much every study done on this has said the exact opposite. I am much more productive when I’m home. My team is much more productive when working from home and hard data backs it up. I literally cannot think of one thing about the office that I miss or made me more productive.
What studies?
As a work from homer who gets twice as much done in half the time, I’m eyeballing your own delusion xD
And this isn’t a self assessment, it comes from my boss, who is fighting tooth and nail to keep us from having to go back into the office with numbers and spreadsheets proving it.
These decisions are top down and have very little to do with what’s actually happening on the front line.
Edit: As u/Semy-Hemi-Demigod pointed out, one of the authors of this paper has his own connections to pro-business/anti-worker groups, which may have biased the conclusions of this review.
I’m definitely no specialist on this topic, but to me it seems questionable to generalize the conclusions of that review to all remote workers. From section 3.a, where they analyze the productivity of fully remote workers:
[…] Emmanuel and Harrington (2023) use data from a Fortune 500 firm which had both in-person and remote call centers pre-pandemic. […] Using the always remote call-centers as the control group they find an 8% reduction in call volumes among employees who shifted from fully in-person to fully remote work.
Extending the results of one call-center to all other companies would be very shortsighted, and the fact that this shift to remote work happened quickly during the COVID pandemic is very likely to affect the results. Still, it could be evidence that for this type of industry specifically fully-remote work may have a negative effect. Nonetheless, the authors of the paper offer a more nuanced analysis, finding that remote work actually increased the productivity of workers who were already in the company:
[…] We find that working remotely increased call-center workers’ productivity. When previously on-site workers took up opportunities to go remote in 2018, their hourly calls rose by 7.5%. Similarly, when COVID-19 closed on-site call centers, a difference-in-difference suggests that the productivity of workers who switched to remote work rose by 7.6% relative to their already remote peers.
What their results suggest instead is that people who are overall less productive are more likely to seek remote work:
Despite these positive productivity effects, remote workers were 12pp less likely to be promoted. If better workers are more concerned about being overlooked in remote jobs, remote workers will be adversely selected. Consistent with this theory, we find evidence that remote work attracted latently less productive workers. When all workers were remote due to COVID-19, those who were hired into remote jobs were 18% less productive than those who were hired into on-site jobs.
Going back to the main review, the next study they cite didn’t actually find a decrease in productivity, only finding that workers spent more hours working to do the same job:
Gibbs, Mengel and Siemroth (2022) examine IT professionals in a large Indian technology company who shifted to fully remote work at the onset of the pandemic. Measured performance among these workers remained constant while remote but they worked longer hours, implying a drop in employee productivity of 8% to 19%.
Indeed, working more hours doesn’t mean productivity will increase, but to frame this as a drop in productivity because workers can simply do their jobs at a more calm pace seems rather disingenuous to me.
Atkin, Schoar, and Shinde (2023) run a randomized control trial of data-entry workers in India, randomizing between working fully in the office and fully at home. They find home-workers are 18% less productive.
Similar to the first study they found that the workers who prefer to work from home are less productive when doing so, which partially explained the lower productivity:
[…] We find negative selection effects for office-based work: workers who prefer home-based work are 12% faster and more accurate at baseline. We also find a negative selection on treatment: workers who prefer home work are much less productive at home than at the office (27% less compared to 13% less for workers who prefer the office).
Still, because this study focused specifically on one data-entry company and only included 234 workers in their final sample, we should be careful with generalizing their findings.
Ultimately even if we take the conclusions of the review at face value, the authors themselves point out that mixing remote and in-person work doesn’t seem to lower productivity, and remote work can still be an attractive option for companies because it reduces on-site costs:
[…] Fully remote work is associated with about 10% lower productivity than fully in-person work. Challenges with communicating remotely, barriers to mentoring, building culture and issues with self-motivation appear to be factors. But fully remote work can generate even larger cost reductions from space savings and global hiring, making it a popular option for firms. Hybrid working appears to have no impact on productivity but is also popular with firms because it improves employee recruitment and retention. Looking ahead we predict working from home will continue to grow because of the expansion in research and development into new technologies to improve remote working. Hence, the pandemic generated both a one-off jump and a longer-run growth acceleration in working from home.
There are a lot of other studies on remote working with conflicting results, with some finding an increase in worker productivity while others suggest the opposite, and as the section dedicated to COVID-19 states the effects of remote work can vary depending on the earnings and position of the worker.
As some of the previous studies point out the drop in productivity is in part due to less productive workers self-selecting into remote positions, and due to remote training at the start of the job being less adequate. Hence what seems like the most reasonable solution to me is in-person training for the first few weeks, then a mix of in-person and remote work for employees who want it - and even if there is some drop in productivity, I ultimately agree with you that the improved life-work balance and worker satisfaction that remote work gives to some people is worth the cost.
Your analysis is a lot better than mine. Thanks!
Because showering, eating, driving are productive vs get up and get started?
But people are definitely less productive working from home, and I think the people who say that most people are more productive are delusional.
Our productivity went up across the board according to my managers. We are letting our office go & finding a smaller space for our equipment.
Linking the paper “cited” in this article here. It’s almost like the author didn’t even read the executive summary…
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kqbngD8pemqxAkZmWCOQ32Yk6PXK9eVA/view
I skimmed through it real quick, but I didn’t see anything where they defined how they measured productivity. Did I miss that part?
They asked middle managers what they thought about it.
\s
No need for the \s. That is literally how they did this “study”. I’d be interested to see who it was that paid for this bullshit, wouldn’t be surprised to see the money trail leading back to commercial real estate.
The article boasts the headline front and center % productivity loss, as though this was some years long extensive study. The section of the report discussing these results is less than two paragraphs long. I’ve seen high school students put together a more detailed a well researched study.
What bothers me the most is that people will readily reference this article and spread this bullshit everywhere, with basically no one having read the study or put any critical thinking into this at all.
I dig through the paper and the study literally looked at two sectors and job types. So let’s just extrapolate that too all workers right 🙄
“Remote working appears to lower average productivity by around 10% to 20%. Emmanuel and Harrington (2023) use data from a Fortune 500 firm which had both in-person and remote call centers pre-pandemic. The firm shifted all workers to fully remote in April 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the always remote call-centers as the control group they find an 8% reduction in call volumes among employees who shifted from fully in-person to fully remote work. Gibbs, Mengel and Siemroth (2022) examine IT professionals in a large Indian technology company who shifted to fully remote work at the onset of the pandemic. Measured performance among these workers remained constant while remote but they worked longer hours, implying a drop in employee productivity of 8% to 19%. Atkin, Schoar, and Shinde (2023) run a randomized control trial of data-entry workers in India, randomizing between working fully in the office and fully at home. They find home-workers are 18% less productive.”
Yea that’s still not indicating how they measure productivity. It actually does highlight an increase in efficiency though; if there’s an 8% decrease in call volumes, that is a correlation to end users not needing to call in multiple times.
You think thats going to stop the movement…? No one gives a fuck about your company.
B-but they care so much about you!
Productivity has a long way to fall before it gets back in line with wages, so I don’t think workers should be too concerned.
Mid-managers are being given extra allowances for ‘team outings’. Then there’s ‘free breakfast’ and other ‘free’ things. Finally, managers are also being evaluated for the number of people in their team that they can get to come to the office - the more people in their team they can get to come to office, the more pat on the back they get.
It’s no longer a debate of whether you are productive at home or in office. They just want you back in office. Simple as that. The why? I don’t know.
/Friend works in corporate real estate. “Employees in IT companies just don’t want to go back and it’s a HUGE headache for companies…” is what he told me (roughly).
Funny that I’ve seen tons of research saying the opposite. Enough to say, at a minimum, that the verdict is still very much out on the link between productivity and remote work. But I only see the negative ones being published now, whereas during COVID I only saw the positive ones.
If commercial property developers could hurry up and go bust we could be done with this sooner.
The whole “working from home reduces productivity” is non-sense simply because companies can simply put poor performers on a performance improvement plan and if they don’t improve then fire them. But they’re not doing that in droves, so therefore, it’s just not true.
I feel like the only people who read Forbes and take it at face value have never worked a day in their lives.
Productivity skyrocketed when we implemented work from home. Employee retention also improved. Keeping it was a no brainer.
