People really want to push remote work as being great for businesses. The sad reality is that it’s not (at least for knowledge workers)… it kills productivity and the output is always lower quality.
I run a team of embedded systems developers writing software for a kiosk system, and our productivity is about the same as it would be in-office. We've had to make technology decisions at times to avoid doing low-level bring-up but almost all of the work we do doesn't require a shared lab space. My team is very effective at meeting organizational goals. We're more effective than many of the higher-paid "flagship" teams at the organization. We've delivered key strategic projects that the CTO considers very successful.
So no, remote work doesn't "kill productivity." It's a different way of working. There's a skillset and a set of attitudes and habits that successful remote working requires, and you have to start building that in new hires almost immediately if you want them to be successful. Like any transition in business you have to have a roadmap. And you need to think about the work your team does and how you're going to provide organizational supports without having everyone in the same room.
I'm also doing embedded systems work, these days focusing on a lot of low level board bring up that requires a fair bit of hardware test and instrumentation. I ended up fitting out a home HW lab this year because I just couldn't afford to get blocked on hardware issues and I was absolutely shocked at how inexpensive it was. I'm old enough to remember when an oscilloscope weight 50lbs and was a five finger investment. Now, you can get something nicer than I ever had in an office for $350. Complete no brainer if it saves me half a day a year (and oh, man, has it...) Same thing with logic analyzers. You can spend next to nothing for basic functionality or, if you're willing to spend $1K, you have access to very nice kit. Same thing with soldering stations.
I _might_ have a bit more space working at an office, but rarely have I had better access to tools.
This. OP is probably a manager, and managers are often psychopaths who would absolutely steal if they could get away with it. Thus they assume that everyone else would steal if they could get away with it, and so WFH must not be allowed, because everyone will be slacking off and playing CoD.
Why don't you try leaving your laptop on a park bench for a couple of days? Maybe because not all people are like you?
And even more people, most people I would say, are not right-wing absolutists and they in all seriousness believe that it is the employer who robs them when they do the agreed work. So, in their minds, they don't even consider themselves doing anything wrong, they are just taking the opportunity to get a little compensation for what was stolen from them
This isn't any more evidence. But the fact that I'm currently logged in, working, is evidence that you're not on the right track. And yes, I did post on Hacker News when I was working in the office.
I’ve done remote work for years and never done this, and worked with many many people who didn’t either. So I guess maybe some people just want to do a good job and build something successful. I’m sure there are many people who do not but probably they don’t magically become successful if you can wrestle them into a desk chair in an office, either. They probably steal office supplies.
At my prior ultra mega corp we meticulously capture telemetry on everyone’s work habits super big brother like. We had been for 5 years before covid and ramped up considerably with covid. Our sample size was over 300,000 knowledge workers.
We found an average 20-30% productivity improvement and nearly 40% morale improvement with remote work.
When our elderly CEO decided enough was enough and forced everyone back into the human hamster wheels we saw a reversion to the pre-remote work performance across the board basically immediately and employee satisfaction dropped considerably below pre-pandemic levels. Interestingly the people who refused to comply with the mandate saw their performance improve even more, which made the employee review consequence for non compliance stick.
This is a statistical average so there are outliers, and the population was bimodal. Some people genuinely did better in the office and saw performance improve when they returned. But that definitely was not the mode.
So, I feel for the folks who aren’t part of the general group that does better at home, and they are the ones who say things like this. Remote work is great for business not because it improves morale and productivity (which it definitively does) even if it doesn’t for you). It’s because warehousing bags of mostly water to sit all day on zoom commuting to telecommute with their teams scattered all over the world is economically inefficient.
We saved like $5m/y with bring your own device by ceasing the corporate subsidy for blackberries. We could save hundreds of millions by ceasing corporate subsidies for your chair with bring your own office.
The fact a board can improve EPS by a significant amount, improve morale and productivity, by not making industrial human chicken coop seating available is a no brainer, but it’ll require passions to cool and the elderly CEOs to retire.
Edit: I had a preexisting remote work agreement with this company. As the RTO lockdowns and roundups became more severe (we had a less than 20% compliance rate with the mandate for at least a year), they claimed my RTO agreement hadn’t been properly approved and wasn’t valid. Suddenly I had to come into an office where I didn’t work with anyone locally, everyone I worked with was in Europe or NYC and I was on the west coast so had to go into the office at 4am to start my zoom meetings (I usually started at 5am at home, rolling out of bed and logging in), etc. I did the only honorable thing and write a widely distributed screed about the absurdity of RTO (more impactful when a senior dude does that), and quit immediately. I got a much better job at a late stage startup with no RTO policy, pays better better work, and the people I work with are happy and productivity.
Actually, funding every employee to buy a really kick ass ergonomic chair for home office is use is probably dollar for dollar one of the best benefits most companies could offer, and may even make financial sense - less missed days for surgeries, happier healthier employees, etc.
> Companies With Flexible Remote Work Policies Outperform On Revenue Growth
> The report shows that the three-year industry-adjusted revenue growth rate of companies that have what Scoop calls a “fully flexible” policy—meaning they allow employees or teams to choose when or whether they come to the office, or are fully remote—is 21%. Companies in the data set with more restrictive policies—say, those that have corporate mandates for a couple days per week or those that require full-time work in the office—had only a 5% industry-adjusted revenue growth rate, the analysis found. When excluding the tech industry over the same period, public companies that were “fully flexible” outperformed by 13 percentage points.
You should offer office-optional, if you're tech you should really offer office-optional. I'm genuinely shocked how people didn't see these results coming, companies are simply unwilling to invest the money to give every employee a nice office tailored to their own productivity but guess what -- employees will do that on their own if you let them, for free.
