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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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I know I'm an outlier here, but the evidence is mounting that fully WFH is the least productive, and hybrid seems to be the most productive.
For perspective, I was 100% WFH for about 10 years. A couple of years ago I got a new job (huge compensation boost, and massive perks boost).
Lucky for me, which was one of the reasons I looked into it, my work is a 15 minute bike from where I live, they offer free breakfast and lunch every day, and a gym. So there are plenty of personal incentives for me to go into the office.
But what I find so surprising is that virtually everyone in my office thinks that hybrid is the best for productivity. Literally every person I've talked to about this agrees (quietly, of course, they don't want to lose it) that the spontaneous meetings, the overhearing what other people are talking about (and jumping in with your own knowledge), the ability to quickly turn around and chat with another person, makes collaboration, and by extension productivity, way higher.
My biggest thing is that, as a senior software dev, the junior devs come to me for help quite frequently. When we're in the office, I would say the average is about 3 times a day. When one or both of us is WFH, it probably doesn't even average to one. There is something about sending a message or an email or requesting a zoom meeting that seems to be enough of a hurdle to ask what is a simple question. So they end up spinning their wheels a lot longer.
Now, don't get me wrong, I get that WFH is a huge benefit to the employee. Which is why I did it for so long, with two young kids it was a god send to be home all the time if they needed to come because they were sick or if I needed to run out to the doctors with them. And, of course, commuting just absolutely blows (I think that's the biggest drawback of any non-FWFH schedule). So I do support it.
However, I think we need to be realistic about its benefits. Companies want people back in the office because, generally speaking, people are more productive.
You realize that you're experiencing massive selection bias right?
A) it's not very socially acceptable to talk about how much you'd rather be at home with your cat than here talking with this colleague.
B) everyone you work with chose a hybrid job.
i.e. "People who choose to work a hybrid job think hybrid is better"
Or in your case, "people who get to go into a big tech office with free meals and gyms and laundry think it's better to go into the office".
Try working a hybrid job where you commute 45min each way, and still have to cook yourself three meals a day and then come back and tell us whether you think hybrid is really more productive. I spent a year at a MAANG firm as a contractor and got to go to their head campus near SF and thought 'damn, if this was what working was like, I could more easily see myself going into the office', then I returned to my home city and went to their office their and saw the stale muffins that were breakfast and remembered the whole rest of my career and what companies are like and returned to the real world.
Yes, I understand the hurdle in asking people questions, but quite frankly that is addressable through numerous ways from zoom office hours, to better team rituals and culture, to slack bots, occasional meetups, or just plain old fashioned pair programming... all methods that cost far less and cause far less disruption to people's lives then forcing in them into an office 3 days a week.
And you know what else is more productive for a company? Having everyone working 60 hour weeks in the office all the time. Who. the. fuck. cares. We live in a world with literal billionaires. Working more doesn't make the world a better place it enriches assholes who never learned how to share or be happy with what they have.
Honestly the productivity argument isn't hitting and probably never will. It's just not easy to measure, especially in software where it makes sense to be remote in most cases.
Rather pro-wfh should argue about employee well being. Its horrible PR to go against employee well-being.
Make no mistake about it, most have said they would rather be WFH. It's just that most of them also accept that office work is more productive.
Or, more accurately, didn't leave a FWFH job when it went back hybrid. But, sure, this definitely biases the sample. Which is why I provided a link that studied this, and just gave my personal experience that seemingly further confirms the studied.
But also, keep in mind that while this sample is far from perfect, it's many times better than people posting on lemmy claiming that they work better from home.
You're missing my point. I get that it's better for the individual to be full WFH. I don't deny this. But we're talking about productivity here in the office.
Can you point me to some study that confirms that this would replace it? If so, I would happily change my tune. But I think most people work kind of asynchronously, and this is forcing them to sync these moments (when, IME, they happen kind of spontaneously, and I don't see how it would replace the times when I'm talking to one person, a third overhears it and says "I have something useful to add."), which isn't natural.
Again, I support FWFH because I think the flexibility is important for the individual. That doesn't require me to be under the delusion that it's equally productive. It's not, and I think going forward that's going to be more and more obvious.
No, it's literally just as biased, but in the other direction.
But here's the thing, it's not more productive to go to the office.
Have you read the actual "studies" being cited in that Forbes article?
In the first, they randomly assign employees to work from home scenarios, meaning that random employees here and there are working remotely while everyone else is in office. This is not a study of whether a company can work effectively remotely it's a study of what happens when you take an in-office company and tell someone to work at home at random once in a while.
In the second working paper from Stanford, if you actually dig into how they're measuring productivity, every single study they bring up is one that measures the effects when a fully in-office company, like an Indian call-center, suddenly shift to remote work because of a global pandemic, not one studying how fully remote companies or teams compare to their in office or hybrid counterparts.
No, but I can point you to many high functioning fully remote teams and companies... As mentioned above there's not a lot of actual good research on this.
Regular rituals like stand-ups, retros, demos etc give people some opportunities to ask questions like this, and like I mentioned, pair programming gives constant opportunity for this. When I was at a MAANG company our team also had "in-office zoom hours" where we'd all get on a zoom call for 2 hours, 3 times a week, and it was an opportunity for people to openly discuss things and ask questions as if we were all sitting at desks in the office. One team I was on used gather.town to replicate an office experience for this.
Remote work doesn't just magically happen, you do need some culture and rituals and effort, and companies that aren't setup for that aren't going to thrive like that, but that doesn't mean they can't.
In the past year I spent half my time with a team that was entirely in-office with just us contractors being remote, and it was awful. Documentation was terrible, they constantly did conference room zoom meetings where you couldn't tell who was talking, and critical information was communicated by tapping people on the shoulder. Did it work for them? Sure. But it was a nightmare to try and take their system and suddenly do it remote.
I then spent the second half of the year with a completely remote team, and it was amazing. Even for those of us coming in as relatively green backend devs, we excelled. We were talking with the team on slack and zoom constantly, and pair programming with multiple people on a daily basis and we learned a ton and got a ton done.
High functioning teams get stuff done, if you can put together a high functioning team just using the people who happen to live within biking distance of your office that's great, but in the long run I have no doubt that company's that can accept talent from anywhere will come out ahead.
Honestly, that was a lot of words to say you don't really have anything but personal experience. No offense to you, but your claims and opinions don't hold any water for me because I don't know you.
As I said, if you actually have anything that can demonstrate that it's better, or even equivalent, I would love to see it and would absolutely reconsider my position. But "everyone's just doing it wrong" rings hollow to me because I just don't see how it can actually replace what I see happen when everyone is together. Especially if we consider the context where people are saying hybrid is the worst, when evidence seems to be that hybrid hits the sweet spot.
That was a lot of words to give you examples of practices that make remote work productive.
And it was in response to you typing a lot of words to say absolute jack shit but bring up a Forbes article that found that when companies that weren't ready for it suddenly shifted to remote work because of COVID, productivity dropped a little. Congratulations genius, that doesnt show that hybrid work is more productive, it shows that you don't know how to read studies but will take a pro business rags' trash at face value. No offense but show me a study that shows that hybrid or in-office work is more productive than remote, because you have yet to do that.
The reason you feel the need to attack me is probably because, on some level, you realize I have the stronger position as mine is actually based on the evidence. You want to believe yourself objective and evidence based, but at the same time you really want WFH to be equivalent of even better. So instead of actually being objective and evidence based, and simply accepting the reality of the situation - your position is based on nothing more than gut feeling - it's best to try and make me not intelligent so you can disregard my position.
What evidence? As I pointed out, the Forbes article linked above does not say that hybrid work is more productive, it says that when in-office companies who aren't prepared for remote work suddenly have to switch, they do better with hybrid than fully remote.
No, that would be you. I don't think there is good evidence one way or another because it's a) a brand new en masse practice that's still evolving, b) people don't tend to study those things in huge detail because companies aren't huge fans of their workers being researched rather than working, and c) at it's best "productivity" is a nebulous concept that is extremely difficult to measure objectively for most jobs that actually matter.
Again, I've already pointed out that the previous evidence you presented does not say that hybrid work is more productive, it merely examines the impact of the pandemic on companies.
So do you have any other studies to cite, or are you willing to accept that there isn't good evidence one way or another and your anecdotal opinions from colleagues who chose to be in office are just as valid as my anecdotal opinions from colleagues who chose to work remotely?
Literally posted an article of a bunch of experts pointing to and discussing the evidence that hybrid works seems to hit the sweet spot. And you're claiming I've provided nothing. The article even notes that Zoom is bringing people back to the office. And you're suggestion is that Zoom is part of the answer. I'm cracking up over here.
False dichotomy. You've already proven that you'll just reject evidence and the opinion of experts when you don't like it. But I will agree that my anecdotal experience is equivalent to yours. The difference I see is that my anecdotal experience seems to line up with the evidence, yours just lines up with what you want to be true.
Bud, go read the above comments again. I read the studies that the Forbes article links to as its sources and tore them apart and pointed out that they do not even say what the Forbes article says they do.
Measuring a drop in the productivity of Indian call centers when they're forced remote / hybrid because of a pandemic does not say that hybrid work is more productive, even if a pro business trash mag like Forbes somehow thinks it does.
No, I've proven that Forbes is a trash magazine that doesn't accurately report or draw conclusions from the studies it cites, and it just so happens that those conclusions line up with the opinions of management.
I did read your comments. It's just pooh-poohing the evidence away. Anyone can do that. And people do it all the time when they don't like what the evidence tells them.
Maybe you should try reading the article with an open mind rather than manufacturing reasons to ignore it.
I had an open mind, but critical thinking occasionally requires criticism. Maybe you should read an article's sources rather than accept claims from a business mag at face value.
But if you want to stop squabbling and talk evidence, let's examine each specific claim on the basis of the evidence supporting it.
The Forbes article makes several specific claims and references:
A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that remote working might not be as productive as once thought. Workers who were randomly assigned to work from home full time were 18% less productive than in-office employees, either taking longer to complete tasks or getting less done.
In another study, Stanford scientists at the Institute for Economic Policy Research found that remote work productivity depends on the mode of remote work. Fully remote work is associated with about 10% lower productivity than fully in-person work.
Do you think the experience of an Indian Call Center suddenly going remote because of the pandemic, and an Indian IT company suddenly going remote because of the pandemic is somehow indicative and generalizable to every company operating in normal times?
Now go and read trough the section on hybrid work and note that it says upfront that studies have found an increase in productivity or no gains in productivity. Then read through and notice how not a single study compares hybrid or in office companies to fully remote companies. All of them deal with studying the jarring transition of an in office company transitioning to partially remote, and none of the studies anywhere listed come close to broad economy wide or even market wide analyses of real world productivity in the long run.
So you want to talk evidence, that is the entirety of the evidence behind your claims that hybrid work is on a broad basis more productive, and it's basically a bunch of pandemic studies on Indian and Bangladeshi call centers. It certainly does not support the Forbes articles' general claim that
Fully remote work is associated with about 10% lower productivity than fully in-person work., that is a gross mischaracterization at best, if not an outright lie, and shows you the journalistic standards of somewhere like Forbes.I get it, you have some criticisms of the studies and they are imperfect. What you've offered up is precisely zero. Even even they have very glaring imperfections, they are still infinitely more useful than absolutely nothing.
No you didn't, because if you had you would realize that they were quoting experts and scientists throughout the article and wouldn't have accused me of just believing what some journalist said. It's not like this was some sneaky part of the piece, it was front and center throughout it.
No, they're not, they are literally nothing because they do not say anything about remote work being less productive or hybrid work being more productive.
I can present you a study on the population levels of minks in North America but that doesn't make it better than nothing because it says nothing about the current topic we're discussing. The studies at the core of their arguments are not even trying to compare hybrid companies to remote ones or in-office ones, they're measuring what happens when you disrupt established patterns.
I accused you of just blindly accepting what an article said at face value like that's abnormal because I was annoyed and being unfair, no one is reading through the sources of every article they read, but that doesn't change the fact that in this case if you look at the evidence the article is based on, it's flimsy, niche, and not actually saying what the article author is saying (I would argue that even the abstract from the Stanford paper is grossly misleading).
The last paragraph is the most important, imo. When I last worked an office job, in the before (Covid) times, the rare occasions when I would work from home due to being sick were my least productive days from the company's perspective. But they were essential for me to mentally recharge or recover from illness (in a civilized society of course we'd have free healthcare and unlimited zero-work sick days).
If I had a similar job with WFH days I would almost certainly be less productive than I would be if I was 100% in the office, but I'd also be less stressed, happier, and healthier. Less likely to need full sick days. Less likely to job hop after a year. Less likely to sneak alcohol in my coffee mug to deal with coworkers and clients. And the world would keep on spinning, no one would die, there would be no measurable impact on the world other than the stock price/CEOs bonus maybe being down a few cents.
I get that being more productive is how we can sell healthier work habits to the capitalists, but let's not drink the koolade. There's an immeasurable number of things more important in life than one's productivity at work.