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.

Exactly. I work for a global company, so the way I communicate with the people I work with everyday is via zoom. What’s the point of commuting to an office just to get on zoom anyway to talk to people?

Thank you for the summary! This is the investigation I was looking for.

Disallowing remote with when it’s possible is anti-worker.

This really isn’t a study, so much as a lit review. Sort of. Anyway, in the fully remote section they cite three studies that argue show a fall in productivity. The first (Emmanuel and Harrington (2023)) found an 8% drop in call volume as a call center shifted to fully remote work at the onset of the pandemic. But their comparison group was a group of call center employees who were always remote. So even if you buy the argument that the change call volume is solely attributable to a drop in productivity, you cannot conclude that the productivity shift was caused by working from home, the group that shifted from on-location to remote work did 8% worse than the group than the always remote work!

The second study (Gibbs, Mengel and Siemroth (2022)) is, again, an analysis of call-center employees (this time in India) who shifted to remote work at the onset of the pandemic. They find no change in productivity, but that employees are working longer hours at home, which they argue means a real 8-19% drop in productivity.

The final study (Atkin, Schoar, and Shinde (2023)) is another firm from India which involved a randomized controlled study which finds an 18% drop in productivity for data entry work.

So, just taking their lit review at face value, one of their studies directly contradicts their argument, yet they somehow present it as if it is evidence of a causal relationship between working from home and productivity. Another study shows no effect, so they break out some razamataz math to try to turn no effect into a negative effect. Only one of the three studies shows a plausible effect.

Since these are the only three papers they cite to support their argument that fully remote work causes a drop in firm productivity, let’s look at them in more depth.

If you go to their references section, you find that there is not a Emmanuel and Harrington (2023) cited. Hey, that a bad sign. There is an Emmanuel and Harrington 2021, but its an unpublished paper. Maybe it got published and they just forgot to update the cite? I plugged the title into google scholar, and find one result, with no copy of the working paper, and no evidence of any sort of publication record from any journal. Plugging the title into regular google returns a “Staff Report” of the federal reserve bank of NY. So not a peer reviewed article. They employ whats known as a difference-in-difference design to compare employees who shifted from fully in person to fully remote. They report a 4% reduction in productivity for these workers, not the 8% reported in the original article. I just skimmed the article, so maybe they get their 8% figure someplace else. What is interesting to me though is that their DID models seem to show there is not any difference between the different groups for most of the periods of observation. IDK. I’d have to read more in-depth to make up my mind.

It seems like these conclusions, whatever you make of them should really only be applied to call-center work during the pandemic.

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?

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I recognise that I’m probably a minority here, but I have a much harder time staying focused at home. At my office I share a room with a couple others, on a floor with a couple dozen more. Pretty much everything I do (outside 1-3 meetings a week) is individual work.

For me, something about physically “going to work” helps me “switch on” much more. Taking breaks with other people, rather than alone, also helps me structure the breaks, and it’s not uncommon that we get good ideas or resolve something that’s been bugging someone during a break. Lastly, I really appreciate the option of “just dropping by” when I want to ask someone about something, and the fact that they can do the same to me. In my experience it’s never gotten to the point that it happens more than maybe once or twice a day, so it’s not really that disturbing either.

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.

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.

Dude, same. I’ve never been more productive than working from home specifically because people have to engage with me via teams or email instead of barging into the office and disrupting my work flow.

Shit… Did I commit that router config before Becky needed my help fixing her user error? Oh no, I did but I forgot to change the DNS on the DHCP pool so now I can’t hit the domain for remote authentication because they’re still using public DNS.

Fuck! I’ll just do it tomorrow when I have my coffee in hand and my cat buzzing happily, with lo Fi beats to overhaul WAN circuits to blaring.

Im the same way, i just catchup with the coworkers and we spend most of the day chatting about various things and then a long lunch and at least two hours of meetings is basically my days in the office…at home no distractions, get shit done in the morning, make lunch, deal with any issues in the afternoon…can at least take a shit without smelling other peoples shit…

Im the exact opposite. At home there are way too many distractions and temptations than in an office environment.

I’m like this too, but also social. I screw around with my coworkers so much in the office. I have to be home for my own good!

Awesome! Eat the rich!

Yup. Offices business is massive. Let them rot!

Reminds me of the headlines trend a few years ago when Millenials were killing everything.

That’s a pay site

That’s obviously all due to the hard work and visionary leadership of upper management

just so I can talk to your face in real

Just so we can keep the value of our office buildings high

I probably do the same if not more work at home as I did in the office, but only “work” about 2/3 of the time.

I don’t have a boss lecture me on blockchain for an hour because they were near my desk, I don’t need to listen to Carla’s story about her flat tyre, I don’t need to get constantly distracted when I’m deep in an analysis hole because someone on maternity leave has walked in with their new baby.

The time spent caught up in boring distractions is used to put on some washing, set the roomba going, or put a pot roast in the oven freeing up more time to just chill out later on and I still get everything done.

Never mind the 2 hours a day of commuting time I get back.

I was in the office 3 days this week. Got almost nothing done. Probably got more done half of today than the last 2 days

Meetings and distractions while in person

Same. We go into the office whenever the big bosses go in… so once every couple months. We get almost no work done on those days.

Something I’ve just realised going into the office is how much more unproductive I make everyone else.

If I’m not working at home, everyone else is free to keep working. But if I’m not working in the office I’m going to drag everyone in my team down to my level.

You also most likely don’t get paid more for being more productive.

Personally, I dissappear a lot during work from home just from pooping more because I’m not stressed out due to being around people all day

But how do you define “productive”?

I work from home and I get the same amount of work done. However if you define it as, “Doing X amount of work in Y amount of time,” then yeah I’m less productive because nowadays instead of getting that work done in an 8-hour shift I take about 10–12 hours to do it.

Same work, same day, so my productivity hasn’t changed. I just take longer to do it by taking breaks, going out to long lunches with friends, and my stress level is almost non-existent!

I find that to be a very equitable trade-off: Almost no job-related stress for a slightly longer working day.

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.

The few people I know who are against remote working are the type of persons that don’t have any non-family social life outside workplace and are freeking out, because their coffee break chit-chats disappeared.

They still base their view on the idea that people are spineless and sooner or later start slacking off.

All the studies show literally the opposite. Maybe you’re less productive, but that makes you the outlier.

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.

Long term burnout also kills productivity.

Edit: As u/Semi-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 on the Wiki 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.

Because showering, eating, driving are productive vs get up and get started?

My team was more productive at home, no open space telephoning, discussing, interruptions etc etc etc. no hours on a car or public transport, etc etc and it seems it’s the norm (or about the same productivity).

What are you smoking :-D

That needs to be backed up by data and not just what people think. And reliable data needs scientific study, with proper time and people for the answer to be minimally reliable. Working from home is different from the office, we can establish that - all the rest are just thoughts or delusions from both sides.

Having said that, I agree 100% with the conclusion. We don’t need more productivity to make more money for profit only. We need investment for our personal lives too.

But people are definitely less productive working from home

How so? I personally think it’s a somewhat personal matter, but people who are less productive are home seem to be people who can’t focus in general. I am far more productive working from home, mostly because I don’t get distracted by others. I have colleagues who spend hours bantering only to then stay in the company until later to compensate for the banter - I’d rather get my work done so I can end my day on time and go home do the fun stuff. But I do have colleagues who say they get distracted easily when working at home and they’d rather work at the office.

Overall though, my company used to be very against working from home, but after the period of mandatory work from home, management admitted overall productivity had increased. They still insist people should come to the office every now and then to maintain the “friendly” environment the company is supposed to have, though, which is fair I guess.

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.

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There are peer reviewed studies saying otherwise

A lot of my colleagues want for everyone to be in office. Their justification is “well, when everyone is in office, I can just walk to a person and ask them for help”. Which is why it’s a bit annoying to work there as a knowledgeable person, everyone always asking you to help them, constantly.
Guess where are all the knowledgeable people going.

Sure, some people work better when surrounded by colleagues. Those people usually know that and will seek out on-site work, because it probably also makes them happier.

Bingo, some of us actually do like to get out of the house and physically go to work. It seems like everybody except corporate shills think that the whole world wants to work from home, but it would honestly drive me crazy.

But as you said, people like me are going to seek out jobs where that’s the expectation at the outset. It’s shitty to pull a bait and switch and force everybody to come in when they are used to working from home.

Yeah but they are also the ones who are gonna get promoted