This has, pretty much, been my experience, as well.
Overall, I have more time for myself now, as I’m not making a one-hour commute each way to/from the office.
This thread reminded me of a Fortune piece I read a few days ago. While I notice that very few people admit online to goofing off while working from home … it has to statistically be happening to some extent, right? At the same time, I wonder if an article like this is more PR or a society-shaping effort than it is firm news about measurable effects.
I’ll post the key points so that the link can be skipped if desired:
#1: Remote work is bad for new hires and junior employees
As a one-time entry-level product manager, Drum wrote, “I can’t even imagine what it would have been like trying to learn what I needed to know if everyone I had to work with was available only via Zoom or phone or Slack. It’s one thing for existing teams to continue working well from home; it’s quite another to get a new member of a team up and running.”
#2: Workers admit that remote work (sometimes) causes more problems than in-person work
When executed incorrectly, hybrid work plans can create discordant, unproductive teamwork. That’s especially true when teams don’t make an effort to align their in-office days.
… 60% of bosses recently admitted that if they had to make job cuts, they’d come for their remote workers first.
#3: Remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared to in-person workers
… [Economic blogger Kevin Drum, formerly of Mother Jones] sees a 3.5-hour decline in hours worked, and he got the figure from an October 2022 report by Liberty Street Economics, an arm of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Researchers David Dam, Davide Melcangi, Laura Pilossoph, and Aidan Toner-Rodgers made calculations based off the American Time Use Survey, a nationally representative survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that measures both the amount of time people spend on various activities and where the activities occur. In a damning chart, they found that remote workers “decreased time spent working” and instead increased their time spent on “leisure and sleeping.” The chart clearly showed an increase roughly between three and hours in time spent on things that are, well, not work.
#4: Productivity plummets on days when everyone is working remotely (anecdotally)
A piece of hard data in Drum’s favor here is the shocking decline in productivity across five straight quarters, unprecedented in the postwar era. EY-Parthenon’s chief economist Gregory Daco told Fortune that he’s heard similar stories from clients across sectors of “reduced productivity because of the new work environment.” Daco added that remote work is only one piece of the puzzle here. “The difficulty is that there is no magic productivity wand.”
Regarding #1 – that makes intuitive sense, and I’m inclined not to question it too much.
#2 is way too vague. Sometimes causes more problems? Like life happening?
#3 … if we accept the “they work 3.5 hours less!” uncritically … well, in a lot of white-collar jobs I’m familiar with, that wouldn’t be a critical difference, really. 40 vs 36.5? I mean, yeah, 3 hours plus, you can do something with that, sure. In my experience, though, it’s not common for office workers (that I’ve been around) to go full-bore 40 hours. Some amount of daily downtime is the norm. That I’ve seen, in my workplaces. I’m sure this varies.
#4 … what is productivity? And does the rhetorical “you” work in a place where that’s readily measured? Seems fuzzy at first blush.
I’ll admit to goofing off, both at home and in the office.
Anecdotally, that issue (difficulties for new hires and junior employees) has been a very real thing at the ad agency where I work.
We’ve seen that new hires have struggled to integrate with their teammates (many of whom they’ve never met face-to-face), as well as feeling disconnected from the agency as a whole.
It’s been even worse for younger team members, for whom this has been their first full-time job. They feel disconnected, and lack the social connections with their colleagues which can help them to learn and grow. They also feel like they don’t have a good understanding of what their career path within the agency looks like. In the last three years, we’ve lost several talented, promising young members of our strategy team, largely because they didn’t feel like they were being given the support that they needed.
I think that a lot of the push back is coming from people that LOVE to be micro-managers. They have nothing else to do, and in reality, can’t do your job.
I’m very lucky in that my ‘boss’ is someone I trained 10 years ago. She has done well and can do stuff I can’t do. And I do things that she can’t do. There is simply no way every one can do and know it all.
I screw off all the time. I’m on the SDMB right now. But I’m also working, watching a process that I just set up (on a Saturday) and really hoping that it will come out right. I was doing the same until 9pm last night.
Do I count those hours? Sort of. Just not on a time sheet. My job is to do my job. This is what managers need to recognize.
I work slightly more, but it’s mostly due to zero time spent going up and down elevators and waving my security badge and walking down hallways etc etc when I want a snack, or not leaving with deliberate cushion time to make my train connections. Some of the extra worktime I put in is due to not being able to leave an interesting problem alone and continuing to work on it a bit on my own time.
The trade off is that I spend a lot more time “at work” not doing work things because I have five monitor screens and only some are eaten up by the computer I’m VPN’d into, and there’s a lot of downtime no matter whether I’m literally in the office or working from home. So when I’m at home I have more options for what do with the downtime.
I’m a whole lot more efficient working from home. I have, if not quite the ideal tools for the job, at least a much wider set of them than I have when I’m at the office.
I’ve been WFH for over three years now, and it works out to about the same amount of time. But I love the flexibility it provides. If I need to run errands that can only be done in 9 to 5 hours I can just start work early or work late (or just do a short day if I’m not busy; I figure it’ll all balance out).
Or, something I’ll do a lot if I’m medium busy- start an hour early, then knock off at 4 to start making dinner. I will still monitor my work email and texts on my phone though, so it’s like I’m ‘on call’ in case something urgent pops up. It’s the best of both worlds- I get flexibility, work gets my attention for 9 work hours instead of 8.
I think it depends a lot on the type of work I am doing. When I was a phone rep, the time I spent was the same because I was on a specific schedule.
When I did a tech writing job for a company that I was very familiar with, I had a schedule that was half and half. So I did a lot of meetings when I was in the office and a lot of actual, productive work when I was at home. But my work at home could NOT have been as productive as it was, had I not attended the meetings at the office. However, I know I wasn’t as productive when I was in the office full time because of interruptions.
When I worked a tech writing job that was 100% remote, work was slowed because others weren’t available when I needed them so I couldn’t progress on my work without their input.
I wonder how much of that 3.5 hours is really foregone commuting time. I bet most of it.
As far as I’m concerned, work starts when I step out my home’s front door and ends when I get back to that same door. As far as the boss is concerned, work starts when I’m in position to labor & ends when I’m out of position. Big difference in POV.
So I suspect a lot of this difference is one or the other side misunderstanding the question or the answers. If and only if commuting time was explicitly included as a separate category to be filled in by the folks taking the survey could I believe the stated numbers were real.
I sometimes get my best ideas and solutions when I walk away from the computer. Sometimes in the middle of the night. I’m really not that interrupted at work neither on site or at home. But it helps to just walk away sometimes. Banging your head is not a solution to a problem that is difficult to solve.
Clearing your head can be.
I make sure to not run ideas by others outside of the normal M-F 8-5. But I know we are always thinking about stuff.
It is, though, very important to let yourself have a vacation from work every day.