My productivity has definitely dropped, and it feels like my brain never really fully turns "on". It feels a lot like those times in university I decided to study for exams from home instead of going to campus. I can't explain it, but 9 out of 10 times it just feels bad, like the way your brain feels if you've spent the day watching TV or something (when, in fact, I haven't). This doesn't even begin to consider the social punctuations of work that are essential to my psychological well-being.
Does anyone feel the same? I'm a little bit worried that I just have a personality type that isn't well-suited for the remote work culture that is likely to become more prevalent after this crisis is over. I'm in my early thirties, but I've felt this way for as long as I can remember, independently of whether I was in a relationship, whether I was working or studying, etc.
You're clearly more towards the extrovert part of the spectrum. Please try to have empathy for people on the introverted part of the spectrum who cannot fathom being forced into an office with tons of people distracting them all day every day. Heretofore they (save for a lucky few like me) have been forced to not just fathom it, but live it.
The "half" of Americans mentioned in the article probably has heavy overlap with those introverts.
Honestly, your post reads pretty heavily to me of "status quo privilege bias". You fit the current status quo very well, and are expressing worry that a change to that status quo would hurt you, with out extending empathy to those the current status quo hurts badly.
The world is not going to flip to fully remote work. It's likely going to inch towards remote work being more prevalent or available. What you are expressing is a case of "When you're accustomed to privilege (your way of working being privileged in this case), then equality (remote work being equally available) feels like oppression."
Not saying that makes you evil or any thing, just pointing out that this is a pretty standard human bias that gets expressed and winds up working to defend harmful status quos all the time. Worth being self aware of.
That's the thing: I don't consider myself very extroverted! Probably on the extrovert side of the scale, but very moderately so!
> Please try to have empathy for people on the introverted part of the spectrum who cannot fathom being forced into an office with tons of people distracting them all day every day. Heretofore they (save for a lucky few like me) have been forced to not just fathom it, but live it.
Oh I do, I really do. I guess I'm just a bit (selfishly) scared of what awaits people like me in the future.
If we allow ourselves a lot of optimism, workplaces will see the need to accommodate both kinds of people to a great extent :-)
> Honestly, your post reads pretty heavily to me of "status quo privilege bias". You fit the current status quo very well, and are expressing worry that a change to that status quo would hurt you, with out extending empathy to those the current status quo hurts badly.
You may be right, but to defend myself on this point I think it is in part fueled by the overwhelmingly positive press WFH seems to be getting in this crisis. Nobody is writing articles exhalting the virtues of regular offices (rightly so), and I guess I have all this praising of WFH a bit stuck in my throat at this point - it leaves me thinking "is it me there's something wrong with?"
> The world is not going to flip to fully remote work. It's likely going to inch towards remote work being more prevalent or available.
I guess I'm just afraid it'll be a reinforcing cycle driven by potential real-estate savings on the part of both employers and employees, and infrastructure savings on the part of society.
For whatever reason, I need a physical change of scene to click my brain over into "work-mode". In college I couldn't comprehend how people could ever get any work done at home, but I had no problem studying in a library, or a coffee shop, or a classroom, and it's been the same after I entered the workforce.
As much as I enjoy derping at my home in comfy clothes on the weekends and evenings, I'm one of the people who actually appreciates the ritual of putting on nicer clothes, moving to a separate physical location, doing work there, and leaving my work there once I walk out of the building. Once I'm home and I kick off my shoes, I've entered a pure, work-free place where I can fully relax.
I suspect most people are in the same boat, and I'm curious: do you think you'd have the same frustrations if you had an office at work with a door you could close? To me, your post reads more like a criticism of modern cubicle-hell (or open-floorplan-hell), which everyone hates, extroverts included.
I think what you are calling "privilege" is an advantage, but it seems to me that because there is a consensus that "privilege" is bad, that's what everything is called whether it really is or not.
Have you seen the cartoon (there are many variations) comparing equality with equity? Where there are three people of different heights, and equality is where they each have the same height crate to stand on to see over a fence, whereas equity is where the shorter ones have more of a boost.
The thing that I noticed about that, is that it seems implicitly to be saying that advantage, if uncompensated for, is bad and shameful, while appropriate privilege is the remedy.
Isn't it reasonable to call it privilege when people are held to different standards, and advantage when people have different difficulty with the same standards?
A gross generalization, but definitely a common interaction I'm seeing/feeling.
One thing that makes a huge difference is having a dedicated room for work. I'm fortunate to be able to afford an extra room just for myself and I set up a mini office in there. It's so much better than an open office environment, I can't even compare. I really get "in the zone" there and instead of getting interrupted every minute in my sad FAANG open office environment, I can actually get stuff done.
So I’ve gone from having meetings all day, every day, to having half that amount.
When we do have meetings, I’m also able to attend without having to do as many context switches as before. I’m not having to leave my desk, put down my work and move somewhere else. I can work through the meeting without distracting anyone else.
I’d say my productivity is at least 2-3x what it was before this.
At the same time, I’ll also fully admit that this is entirely subjective to myself and everyone has different ways of working. I thrive with lots of simultaneous communication and parallel tasks, so having everyone talking in slack and email and meetings at once is my ideal situation because the information now actively makes it way to me, and my time spent having to wrangle things is very much reduced.
If your meetings aren't productive there's definitely a problem in your org. I suspect meetings are being driven by those without a clear goal and intend to fill a whole hour talking. Just a hunch, thats some good ole internet armchair analysis for ya.
Long meetings are a symptom of a lack of planning imho.
Working from home is great if you have autonomy and can build a chunk of software with minimal oversight. But if your dev process revolves solely around collaboration in an open plan office then it's not going to translate well to WFH at all. You simply can't have 3 non-tech people for every dev that all need to be kept in the loop and are continuously making decisions when you're not physically there to keep the conversation grounded. Every big business job I've had has tons of these people that go out of their way to keep everything from the devs until the very last moment because "they're too busy" (with the last huge chunk of pointless work their decisions generated that could have been prevented with a 20 second conversation instead of 18 hours of bikeshedding meetings).
And devs are as guilty of this as everyone else. Right now things like code reviews and unit tests are the shit hot trend. "Agile" and "scrum" and whatever else are also red hot. The combination of both means the "default" way to build software is to break everything down into chunks that take hours, and run all the trendy processes on that time scale. If you're breaking every 45 minutes to do a code review, you're going to lose a huge part of the benefit of WFH, whereas in a hotdesking office environment you probably weren't going to build much momentum anyway so it's a much smaller sacrifice. The reason people are losing so much productivity is because before they probably palmed those tasks off to their in-office days so the 1 or 2 WFH days a week were highly productive (at least I know mine were). With 5 WFH days a week that's not an option.
The way to run a dev team remote is to give people more autonomy and bigger chunks of work, and tear down communication channels. Start measuring in weeks or months, let the engineers make the decisions and use their judgement on when to loop someone into a conversation. Teams need to be smaller, with 2/3rds devs and roles like product owner and BA providing support, instead of running the show. These roles need to be domain experts with a thorough understanding of what the business requires and an understanding of how software can meet that need. They should be a fountain of knowledge for the devs to access at their own pace, not just mindless machines that shit out JIRA cards with too much boilerplate. And devs need to take on more responsibility, broaden their non-technical skillset, and focus their tech capabilities more on the fundamentals (quality code that produces for the business), and less on setting up elaborate structures that require constant upkeep and communication within the team (huge test suites, elaborate cross-project CI/CD setups, ridiculous webpack configs, constant code reviews, endless NPM dependencies and convoluted patterns that restrict creativity and increase mental load).
If you want to be productive from home, you need to create an environment where you can just sit down for a few hours, get in the rythym, and produce quality software. If I think of any great software from the past, or the engineers that produced it, none of them were doing it in anything that looked remotely like the dev environments we have today. Shit, most of them did it from home, or from offices that were so cozy and personal they may as well have been home.
I think we've spent the last decade trying to distill software development down into some finely tuned machine that any old cog can drive, and counterintuitively, the further it goes the shittier the software becomes. When I flip through older books like Peopleware, it makes me cringe at how many of the lessons in there still aren't followed, and the amount of problems that were pointed out in the 80s and 90s that aren't only unresolved today, but have seen negative progress.
I see covid-19 as a chance to try something different. Most companies are going to continue to make the same mistakes, and mass WFH will never see adoption as long as they do. So you can pretty much put that dream to rest. But I'm going to be working from home a lot in the future, and try doing things another way for a change.
Everyone’s productivity is down when we’re preoccupied with if loved ones or ourselves might get into a dangerous health situation.
I’ve worked from home for nearly a decade, and I also feel my productivity is down. I’m choosing not to beat myself up over it, and trying to check in mentally with myself throughout the day to see if I’m spending my time the best way possible, even more than I usually do.
So if you feel your productivity is unacceptably down now, consider waiting until the pandemic is over - which could be a very long time - and then try again. For now, stay safe and healthy.
The study headline is that half of Americans prefer work from home. The other half either prefer working from an office or haven't made their minds up yet.
In my experience managing remote teams, including some people who are new to WFH, many people struggle with the isolation of WFH. For others, the honeymoon phase is short-lived as cabin fever sets in.
During normal times, the solution is to make an effort to get out of the house every day. Go to the gym, meet friends for lunch or dinner, and otherwise fill your in-person social needs somehow. The struggle with Coronavirus quarantine is that in-person social events are not allowed, so the typical solutions are much more difficult to apply.
> My productivity has definitely dropped, and it feels like my brain never really fully turns "on".
Now would be a great time to try a new morning exercise routine. Getting out of the house for even a 10-minute morning walk can make all the difference in the trajectory of your day. You can build up to a 30-minute run over time, but it's easier to engrain the habit if you start with a very low bar. Just get dressed, prepare a to-go coffee if you like, and go for a walk around your block. You might be surprised at how this sets a different tone for your day.
Long commutes aren't great, obviously, but they do serve a functional purpose of partitioning your day between home and office. Try to find a replacement activity that performs the same partitioning step at home.
It sounds like I'm about to quibble with you; that is not my intention, but: I have tried. I know how incredibly effective exercise can be to kick me out of a ditch in normal situations, but it's having next to no effect currently. It still makes me feel better, but it doesn't turn my brain on. I strongly suspect I need the human interaction :-/
For example, I have a room I go into and close the door. When I am in there I am working. When I am out of there I'm not. It's like a mental switch. I also use some tricks to keep be from being distracted like a pomodoro timer.
Doesn't work for everyone. But, I learned from training my dog that situational training can be important. If we are training ourselves we might need to train ourselves to be productive at home.
If it stick to those I tend to automatically start making other patterns to make those times work.
That would be awesome to have, unfortunately, I live in a small 1 bedroom apartment. So I either work on the living room, were the TV and my wife are, or on the bedroom :(
I've noticed the same tends to happen in the office if others are not around (if, say, I swap a holiday for a work day or something and am alone when I go in).
Yes. Just as starting a new job/office has its own set of learned behaviors, practices, and norms - so does WFH.
I'm guessing you don't have a cat, then.
We’ve spent our lives making work the center (US probably more so than EU). What you are describing can read as “I can’t bare WFH” or it can be “the pandemic severed me from my social circle, that happened to be at work”.
For me, at some point I realized that work friends replaced most of my social circle, but when I changed companies, I lost touch with most of them. This felt disturbing when I realized that and I have since made the effort to cultivate the friendships and keep in touch better. This had the side-effect of no longer relying on the office for friendship/social contact outside of family/SO.
I really don’t think we are talking about adapting to WFH, as much as we are seeing the effects of social structures that have emerged from concentrating people in offices. These have some overlap with work (promotion politics in most places?), but are largely orthogonal to the actual work at hand.
"Work friends" have some special properties: they share the good and the bad of this work thing you're currently enjoying or stressing about. They're both trapped at work, which hopefully is an interesting enough place, yet it's hopefully not the center of anyone's lives. I think there's some value to this shared experience, even though it of course doesn't "outrank" "real friendship".
This seems reasonable. It's a shame it's a bit hard to try out these days ;-)
If I might ask - what was your approach for increasing outside of work activities. I recently moved to a new city, so I'm still figuring this part out.
As for the long commutes, I'm from a big european city and I still have almost a one hour commute to work. Granted, it's public transit so I can use the time somewhat (netflix on my phone, ebooks or whatever) but it's still two hours that I could otherwise use at the gym, having beers with friends or watching a movie.
Yeah true. I was thinking more of the American-style car commute. While I agree that time spent commuting is time lost, also on public transit, the American car commute seems like an absolute nightmare to me, far worse than WFH ;-)
It seems to be people related: I've noticed the same tends to happen in the office if others are not around (if, say, I swap a holiday for a work day or something and am alone when I go in).
I would also definitely recommend that if you work from home, you get a separate office room. But I also struggle with bouts of not feeling motivated to work. The office is no miracle cure for that.
Now, I do have an office to work in and my mom comes out to help with our son and my in laws live a few blocks away (we're luckier than most). So our set up makes it so I have a foundation to succeed with work from home, but if things were "normal" and school were in session I'd love to do this 3 or 4 days a week and go into the office for weekly meetings. Even though, we're doing those over ZOOM right now.
EDIT: formatting
My productivity has gone up measurably. In normal times, I get plenty of social stimulation outside work so I don't need any from work.
While I think many organizations will retain remote work for some percentage of their workforce when the crisis is over I don't think we're about to have a revolution. The generations in charge came of age with face-to-face being the way people got things done. They aren't going to change.
Maybe we realize now that technology allows us to move a huge portion of office work back to where people live. Not necessarily a bad thing if you ask me!
And as a subway commuter, there's also definitely a "getting yourself mentally prepared to go out into the world and endure the subway" period that I'm quite glad to skip.
The commute was also mentally and emotionally exhausting: making sure I caught the subway on time, cramming into a packed train so I wouldn't miss it and have to wait another 20 minutes, listening to make sure the train didn't suddenly go express and skip my stop, being alert for people that pickpocket you or might get confrontational...
I don't miss the social aspect of work at all, but that might be more specific to my workplace (an investment bank). The people are nice enough, but there's little socializing and coworkers are often out traveling. I spent most of the time on the phone with people in other states anyway, even before this crisis. I think I've actually been more productive.
That said, working remotely has been a difficult adjustment. I am working a lot - basically nonstop 8am to 8pm, with a few very late nights recently - and haven't found a way to disconnect in the evenings yet. My wife and I are very anxious, but it's tough to disentangle the WFH experience with the anxiety we feel about family and friends getting sick, the heightened risk of being laid off, our upset clients dealing with shuttering their businesses, the dire headlines, and the broader uncertainty of how society will emerge from this crisis.
Start by figuring out a routine for you and try to stick to it.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/reel/playlist/coronavirus-covid19?vpid=p...
I can't say that my parents differ on this topic. I'll note that your comment was not the easiest to parse, so perhaps I misunderstand you.
>
>Does anyone feel the same?
I can't believe no one mentioned it yet: Mental compartmentalization based on where you are is a very real thing. Everyone experiences it, some more than others, and if you want to be productive working from home, learning how to work with it is of key importance.
For good work from home hygiene it's required that you isolate a physical space dedicated for work only tasks, like a home office.
Some people can get away with having a separate computer or seperate user to separate their space while using the same desk. Having a work account that blockes reddit, ycombinator, youtube, and the like helps, but as a general rule of thumb the easier it is to switch spaces, the smaller the isolation between them. ie, if switching users takes 10 seconds the isolation is small, but if you need to walk two minutes across the house, it's going to be a much stronger isolation. This is one of the tricks the rich use, by having an office far away from their bedroom in their house.
If you don't have things in your room to play with, like a tv or something, then the digital space separation works well, but if you find yourself fiddling with a tv all day while on your work account, it may cause problems. Alternatively, having background noise can help and turning on a ratio or tv in the background while working can accelerate productivity. It depends on your mental frame and how you think of it. In your situation it may be better to set up an ad hawk work space in your kitchen or living room.
This space separation is recommended in just about every work from home guide you will find, and it is a well studied phenomena, going back to the vietnam (or korean I forget) war where they were able to get 98% of solders off of heroin using the same tricks: the addiction was tied to physical cues like a physical room, or a friend. Get rid of those physical cues and the mental part of the addiction would vanish for all but those using drugs to avoid their problems. Same mental process, but studied in a drastically different subject.
I am not sure about the productivity aspect. Since I am client facing and most of my clients are on furlough my main work source has dried up. I'm doing other stuff for the team but none of it has KPIs.
Now I'm really depressed and have terrible productivity.
Not being able to go socialise with friends, see bands in concert and hang around in coffee shops has had an enormous impact on my wellbeing - it's entirely possible your productivity woes are due to the social impact.
I really don't... could spend a year without seeing anyone in person. I am married and absolutely enjoy my wife's company, but looking back at my life I've often enjoyed just being alone. It's so peaceful, I can't understand why people dislike it so much.
I definitely miss some people – mostly my parents. But I don't really need my coworkers in my life, even if they are great people
We don't see much of each other during the day, as we're busy with our jobs. Not commuting frees up time for social stuff like meeting up with neighbors, going for walks or cycling, meetups, practical pistol practice/competition, etc. The stuff involving larger groups is on temporary hiatus, but stuff with another pal or two are still happening.
Several of my friends live in different states and we don't see each other IRL that often. I have a couple one-on-one and group Telegram chats going with them where we discuss a variety of topics, which is a surprisingly good social outlet.
As WFH for over a decade:
- overall social interaction is fixed by hobby groups, going out with friends and/or SO (either post-hours or for lunch) etc
- in office social interaction can be fixed by working out of coworking space. Not my cup of tea and I do enjoy silence, but it works for those who want it. Podcast over headphones may be good enough for some too.
- interaction with coworkers over online is fine IMO. Especially if you get to see them IRL once in a while. It may feel weird at first to just talk crap for 10 or 20 minutes before/after conference call. Random calls just to talk both work and life might feel out of place at first. But on the other hand that's what people do at office, eh?
Probably more than I need.
- An office, with a door I can close
This was going to be a big list, but I actually think that just about sums it up. The cube environment at Google was utterly intolerable, and made it hard to concentrate. It didn't help that the guys in another group next to us had a game where they flew rc drones around for fun, or the folks on the other side of my group that were always discussing food, or the loud door to a lab behind my desk that was constantly slamming, etc, or just the constant stream of people walking by my cube.
At home I have a door that I can close. I can think. So I get a lot more done.
I'm not saying all office environments were terrible. Before 2001, I worked doing research at a University and I had a fantastic office with a door. I think I was just as productive there as I was at home. Because, again, distractions were minimal.
Honestly IMHO having office rooms with ~4 (in exceptions 5 or 6) people is the bottom line for allowing productive work for any job needing concentration (and it's healthier either way).
I never understood how some companies promoted the mass offices as a good solution for the employee, sure it's maybe cheaper for the employer but that normally the wrong end to save money.
I've worked in a large loft with ~10 people, a 4 person room a 5 person room and a pseudo single room (it didn't had doors and was ineffective 3 person room).
My experience:
- The more people in the room the less the productivity even if it's a large loft.
- But if having to share a room with someone who is chatting all the time is even worse even if its a 2 person room.
I had an end spot, and I had a portable whiteboard shoved between me and my neighbor to separate us, and I built a wall of empty Hint bottles around my desk to isolate me from the aisle. That removed a lot of visual distractions, but it was still quite noisy.
Speaking of this, one guy in a building across the street basically built himself a hut out of cardboard boxes glued together. It was amazing.
The bad thing is that, almost 5 years later, my sleep schedule is still screwed up because of this. I have a really hard time sleeping past 5:30am, and I'm afraid its damaged my health.
Then there are meetings scheduled for 3-6pm....
The problem is, many companies are more hip about WFH than hour shifting. It's not a thing. If you start coming into work early to get more done, you will get the looks if you don't stay in the office until 6:00PM, just like everyone. That is not sustainable.
However, if you are a European or Indian offshore, then hour shifting is built in. Onshore, night owls are hard-working, and early birds are slackers - because no one can see them work.
What I am saying is, a lot of office work is optics. Being there and within line of sight of everyone counts more than being productive and in the zone. It's dumb as fuck.
I've been working remotely since 2015 and have already decided to settle in a perhaps less attractive, but definitely cheaper neighbourhood so that I could have some office space in the house.
In the long run it's probably going to cost as much as the sum total of fuel and vehicles used over the years, but the main benefit is not having to go over this stressful routine of negotiating my place in a stream of cars.
But I read somewhere that the misery of commuting is strangely resistance to the hedonic treadmill.
See eg https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/may/01/change-...
I was in the Bay Area, and one of the big reasons I left was the 3-4 hour commute. For a while, it was manageable, as the train provides some ability to work, but towards the end CalTrain was just falling over from lack of capacity. Packed to the gills trains, trains breaking down, hell, even derailments.
Moved, and cut the commute in half; it's only two hours now, and it feels wonderful. Somewhat hilariously, biking is the same speed as public transit. Sadly, my public transit still no longer really supports a working; too packed.
I'd love to have a 20 minute low stress commute. But I also don't equate "low stress" with driving, regardless of podcasts.
(Unless you have a 20 minute commute on public transit. I must spend ~30-40 minutes of my commute simply getting to public transit.)
Personally, even though my commute sucks, there is something to be said for having 8+ hours around adults. I've also noticed I am less eager to interact with my 4-year-old now because she's always around, always needs something, always loud (even with the office door closed), and I feel guilty that she's not getting the attention she needs. Schools re-opening would totally change this.
That probably suggests there's an urban / suburban divide, too, where the people with enough real estate to set up a full-on home office are much happier with the results. I don't even know where I'd stick a 27" monitor if I ordered one.
It’s worth remembering that these are not your standard work from home conditions - you’re being kept in due to an emergency, and trying to also get some work done.
So, anyway, here's my vote in favour of remote working!
I've worked from home for the last 10 years straight, and two years in the decade before that. Working from home has always been best for me.
Historically, colleagues have always been amazed I get anything done, and wondered about how teams can possibly function etc etc. Lots of people have been skeptical.
And now so many of my colleagues are working from home, and all the awful destruction hasn't happened, and in fact many people are saying they've never been more productive...
Yay to remote working, long may it continue!
On the contrary, this seems like the most honest take on the topic of remote work preferences.
The headline says that 50% of Americans prefer working from home. That suggests that 50% prefer working from the office or aren't sure yet.
In other words: Some people like to work from home. Some people don't. That's the point that many of us have been trying to make all along.
When quarantining started, a lot of the WFH advocates came out of the woodwork and declared an early victory for WFH. There was an influx of hot takes that office spaces would be closed forever once people saw the benefits of WFH. They all ignored half of the population who really does not benefit from working from home.
In a broader context, it opens up lots of questions about tangentially related questions. Things like climate change, or urban planning. In my area, sprawl is a problem. Lots of people live in the suburbs and commute. This combined with the harsh winters mean the roads are constantly getting chewed up, and there is always a struggle to find the tax dollars for proper maintenance. Growth is up, and so there are debates between those who want to expand highways and those who want to use tax dollars for something else. The desire to eliminate a commute is leading to gentrification and people being priced out of their communities.
Additionally, requiring a physical presence limits career opportunities. My field has a lot of jobs concentrated in a few hubs like SF and Boston. But there are lots of reasons to not want to live in those areas, and for those who don't wish to, career prospects are severely limited.
We also make lots of concessions to our quality of life in order to be able to work in the same physical space. Lots of Americans spend hours commuting to and from work. At the same time, we don't exercise enough, we eat poorly, and we work too much. All of these are at least somewhat related to not having enough time in the day, and working from home would at the very least give back people the hours of the day they spend traveling between work and home.
I think the honest take on remote work preferences is that there is no one size fits all solution. But up until a month ago, we were largely forcing a single solution on everyone. There's always been excuses: worries about decreases in productivity, claims that we don't have the internet infrastructure, insistence that real work is done face to face. But the reality is that in many cases those simply aren't true, and we are making lots of sacrifices by propping those excuses up.
If you even glance at the article that's just not true. The remaining vote is split between 'Prefers the Office' and 'Unsure'.
If you were to split the 'Unsure' based on the current ratio of 'Prefers Home':'Prefers the office' between the 2, you're looking at closer to 42% 'prefer the office'.
It's nice to be able to work from home as an option but don't assume it's a panacea for everyone either.
That's the problem with using anecdotes to make sweeping decisions for entire companies: It doesn't acknowledge the differences between people.
Ideally, we'll end up with a mix of remote companies and in-office companies, and the people who prefer each style have plenty of options to choose from.
however we also need consider that some corporations are way too proud of their headquarters or other buildings and having them fully staffed is part of that pride. something that also needs to be addressed.
now work from home can also means it can end up in a situation where you need to compete more on a world stage for employment. once some companies adapt to having remote workers does it really matter where they are? this can lead to wage erosion and even at times cultural conflicts.
I wont be going back to the office for a number of reasons, however, and I think everyone should boycott the office as well. Weather you want to work in the office or not should ultimately be the employees choice.
1. Commuting pollutes.
2. Commuting is lost time. Almost a month of lost time every year.
3. Office spaces are expensive. Without them, companies would have lots of extra cash. Ideally that extra cash goes to wages or hiring.
4. VR workplaces can be and will be a sufficient substitute. You can get about the same quality of social interaction + more in VR as you can in meat space. Its a different experience and until you try it you aren't really entitled to an opinion.
5. You can go to the gym whenever you want (assuming businesses open up again).
I'm sure there are other benefits that I'm missing.
That is adorable!
1. I walk to work. 2. It's a 25 minute walk each way. I don't consider it lost time, Agree with 3 and 4. 5. I can and do go to the gym whenever I want. Typically at 2 or 3pm to avoid the lunch crowd.
For me the current tech is sufficient for office style social interactions, but maybe not suitable for everyone just yet.
But there's no way I'd be able to be as productive as expected under normal circumstances. I'm lucky if I get 4 hours in.
Additionally, 25-34 age range tend to play with internet and games, as opposed to the older ones who go outside more.
Did they? The only question I see broken down by age range is not about wanting to work from home, but "are you more productive working from home?".
The ratio is much stronger pro work-from-home in the 45-64 age ranges.
But my initial guess would be that the older survey participants were more IT affine, but it's hard to judge with the sparse details.
Some stats on % of women without children by age range: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241535/percentage-of-chi...
That is a VERY rough (actually false) sentance, considering they have only surveyed ~500 Americans out of 205'950'000+ population at working age.
> We surveyed over 500 Americans...
That being said, working from home is not for everyone. Not everybody has a good working environment. Some people get distracted, feel lonely, or are unable to maintain good work/life balance.
It really has pros and cons. What I hope at least is that it will be less taboo in the future and more employers will be open to that option.
Actually, even work (in any particular set of circumstances) is not for everyone. And still, people do manage.
For example, open offices are not for everyone. Yet they do happen.
Imagine, if at your future employer, you could simply decide whether you want to WfH or not. And they would plan the office accordingly. They would rent less space. Why not give people the freedom?
Happens to me in an absurdly trivial way: pre-antiviral-WFH I was taking my main meal of the day as lunch at the office, now it's dinner at home. After lunch it was easy for office life (and caffeine) to get me back to speed. But evening side projects don't stand a chance against the digestion passivity of a full dinner. A full lunch at home isn't possible for me because at that time of the day I'm just not hungry enough unless the food is prepared for me.
The survey was conducted using mechanical turk for American workers with full-time jobs. We didn't control for age, as you can see in the age breakdown of "are you more productive working from home," so had some age groups more represented than others. The margin of error is 4%.
So that raises some red flags, because turkers are WAY more likely to be favorable towards WFH conditions. They already do that!
What I don't miss is waking up early and getting ready, picking out clothes, combing my hair, and all that nonsense every single morning. I even had 8 of the same exact outfit when I worked in an office, and it was still such a drain.
For those who hate their commute, being forced into the office every day doesn't offer the same latitude for adjustments to their personal lives. And many of those things you enjoyed are only possible via public transportation. Given the woeful state of public transportation in much of the US, many commuting are doing so in cars, which don't afford the same opportunities for peaceful self-reflection and unwinding.
Working remotely got old. In 2016 I worked on a project at Google so we lived in Mountain View for a while. I really enjoyed the change of working in an office (and the food was good). After we returned home, I accepted a gig to work for an AI company in Singapore and after that worked onsite managing a deep learning team at Capital One (an excellent company to work for, BTW).
We are back home now, and I am retired except for writing and working on a commercial software product (in Common Lisp) in the semantic web/linked data space. Frankly, as much as I love my day to day life, to be honest I really miss working in a team with face to face brainstorming, etc.
I'm sorta serious but not sure I'd be allowed to. We were already allowed 2 days per week of remote working but 5 seems like a stretch.
FWIW I have a dedicated office at home and no kids. Commute is not a factor - I live ~7 miles from the office, it takes 10-15 minutes to get there or get home. There's also an alternative ~7 mile route that is almost entirely bike path I can ride to work on.
If you're that close to the office then you can easily argue that you can drive in for important meetings and such.
Prior to that there was something called the "putting-out" system, where you'd sew some clothes or whatever and put it outside for someone to collect. And they'd leave you some raw materials.
I'm also of the WFH persuasion, but I'm unsure whether it's great for people who are starting their career.
For experienced people, they already know what the business is about, they are more likely to have kids and need a longer commute from the suburbs.
For people on their first job there's a lot of informal learning that happens in the workplace. You run into more people randomly at a traditional office, and you learn more about what exactly your role is.
What would probably make sense is for businesses to get more relaxed about whether you actually come into the office. If there's no meetings or requirements to get immediate feedback on a given day, why make people sit on a train for an hour?
Something similar to this exists in rural Germany, at least in Brandenburg, mostly for fresh or preserved produce where you leave a donation in return.
For people who just started WFH they may combine WFH with virus, kids screaming, lockdown, isolation, etc.
Circumstances are not BAU right now, for 99.9% of us. Once this blows over, and the infrastructure remains in place, and business start making their typical revenue, it will be interesting to run the same survey and compare it with 12 months ago.
sorry for the Metallica reference, I couldn't help myself.If you live in a city right now, just peer out at all of those sky scrapers. A huge amount of that is currently empty office space that costs a fortune. For many companies the idea that this space was truly optional was absurd, but right now companies everywhere are seeing that they have to be able to do 100% remote to survive.
Within a month an office space has gone from essential to being more and more of a luxury, way more expensive per employee than a automatic espresso machine.
I suspect a small but non-trivial number of companies will break their leases in the coming months. But far more companies will emerge from this crisis no longer believing that every employee needs a desk in an office.
More like a liability. Any company with office space is currently paying rent with no utilization.
Some of them are openly "against" work from home.
Edit: Another commenter claims the author sampled workers through Mechanical Turk. WTH.
The office is where I work. Home is where I don't work. I have a 30-40 minute subway ride between the two for changing gears. Home-no-work. Office-yes-work. Sudoku and Kindle in between. It's a pattern I hadn't realized I'd so strongly driven into my mind.
The first two weeks of this pandemic? I accomplished nothing. I sat down and tried to work at my desk (I even have a dock and a KVM switch so I could use my dual-monitors, keyboard, and mouse) and I did almost nothing for two weeks. I just could not change gears. It was agony.
I finally was able to get working again by moving from my desk to a chair beside it, with just my laptop. I have no pattern for this place- it's a chair usually covered in stuff I need to put somewhere so I have no really deep patterns for what I do when I sit here (is my own self-psycho-analysis). I'm still not as productive as before, but at least I'm getting some things done.
Even then, I miss running into people in the kitchen that I haven't talked to in a while. I miss grabbing lunch with friends from other departments. I miss that first 15 minutes of the day where we're all waiting for the caffeine to kick in, asking what the weekend plans are. The social aspects keep me sane.
And right now I'm trying to train new guys. One guy, we started him during the lockdown by just mailing him a laptop with instructions for how to get on the VPN. Training people remotely is hard. Even mostly-remote companies often start new people in the office for a week or two, then send them back home. There's video calls and screen sharing- it's not the same. I find it very difficult.
I have many criticisms of modern offices, but I still want mine back.
WFH is okay. It beats an office. But it blurs the lines between work and not-work life further than they already are unless you’re highly skilled in setting boundaries, and if you have kids or other dependents it’s a fresh challenge to stay focused every day.
Working remotely, in non-pandemic times, opens up real possibilities. The young and the restless can try the nomadic worker thing; that looks like it’s be fun for a while. Coworking (in the small community sense, not WeWork) gets you the separation of work and home on your own terms and can be a fabulous balance for the extroverts (and also introverts) among us. And WFH gets rolled in there as well.
At present moment, as the world suddenly is all doing this at once, while confined at home—of course these concepts will be conflated. But let’s be deliberate to ensure we aren’t setting ourselves up for a world where managers get suspicious of you for leaving the house during work hours. That sounds worse than the situation we started with.
So while I like remote work a lot I think it's best "in general" to only have it just part of the week.
Honestly best is still to not work remote but have a way to work of 10-15min walking or similar (e.g. cycling, reliable public transmute). Enough time to clearly separate work from home and think a bit.
Naturally this is very unlikely to happen.
But worst is if cities are seperated in "residential" and "office" areas as this will make transmute times spike. Having a nice intermixing it much much better. Sure it doesn't guarantee short travel times (or else you would need to potentially move every time you change the job). But it allows them.
since working from home, my anger and anxiety level are at a lifetime low. i don't have bleeding ulcers and i actually get a 4 mile walk in in the morning since i'm not rushed to fight traffic. my life is so serene now.
I hope this lasts forever.
I suspect the reason is that my wife and kids are at home right now. So I can close the door and they will leave me alone, but I still have a sense of them being around. So I am comfortable. But during normal times, the kids would be at school all day and my wife would be at her office. So then the house would be empty except for me, and then I get a little stir crazy after a couple days.
We will find out eventually, when offices reopen. I am secretly hoping that I will be able to continue working from home while maintaining my sanity.
The reality is that environment more than makes up for all of it. At home, I completely control my work environment. Sure, there are elements to communication you have to change - amongst other things, but working from home is fantastic if you WORK from home.
I find those days at home are significantly more effective - and the clients, partners, and employees I've worked with have always agreed. There's also a lot to be said for face-to-face time though.
Have a dedicated office. Yeah you aren't going to be as productive on your kitchen table or your couch on a laptop as you would be in a quiet dedicated room with a desk, multiple monitors and clear delineation between work and play time.
Get the kids/dog/whatever distraction dealt with. You don't have kids at your office, why would you think your productivity wouldn't take a hit if you have them around at home while you are trying to work? Not now obviously because Covid, but under normal circumstances, send them to day care or whatever arrangement you gotta make to have quite during your business hours.
Figure out your coms! If your team/company isn't built around remote work, obviously there are going to be issues. You have to have a strategy for communication that's designed for remote. Both to keep you from feeling like an island or second class citizen and also because remote communication requires a totally different regiment than the random water cooler check in.
If you are doing all of these things and remote work still isn't your cup of tea I'd love to hear about it. If you aren't doing most or all of these things, It's probably not remote work that is the problem, it's how you are treating it.
I loved it.
Now with my wife and kids home ... working form home is horrible.
COVID-19 has ruined work from home for me ;)
I want some alternate bandwagon "work from home sucks" articles.
It's the sort of epiphany you get after you retire ("oh crap, I worked too much and now my healthy years are gone"), except this time a lot of people will realize it when they are still young.
- on site for a non-tech company
- on site for 2-3 small tech companies (10-100 employees) between 20 and 60 minutes away (depending on traffic)
- fully remote for a tech company 5 hours drive away (with on-site visits 2-3 times per year)
- a blend of on-site and remote at my own discretion for a tech company 20-45 minutes away
- fully remote as a contractor with occasional (monthly-ish) on-site visits
What I have learned through the years is that my needs change with the growth of my family and the dynamics of my work. I have by far enjoyed working the remote/on-site blend because it allows me the freedom to make a mature decision about my own work needs each day.
What we especially as thought workers ought to be advocating for as an industry is the freedom to CHOOSE where we work each day, not a fully-remote mandate or an on-site mandate. To me, this is a compromise among many concerns, such as infrastructure costs, accountability, collaboration, a quiet work environment, and generally the ability to break up the monotony of doing the same thing every day.
It took me until the late-1990s to get there, but that's when I started working from home full time. Right now I have my office in the basement of our house. It's quiet, and spacious, and cluttered with the stuff I tinker with.
For me, the "shelter in place" thing we're going through hasn't really changed much at all in my routine. I prefer being alone in a quiet space when coding and have spent most of my days doing that for the past 20 years.
Since I could choose anywhere to do it, I chose the Ozark Mountains. I packed up and left Malibu and haven't regretted it for even a moment. I've hardly spent any time at all sitting in traffic since I got here. Before then it was common to spend a couple hours sitting in traffic getting to and from work. And often the same on days off going somewhere to have fun.
But it's not for everyone. My wife is way too social to spend much time alone. Right now she's on the phone or facebook almost all day chatting with friends and family, or watching TV.
I have all kinds of stuff to do aside from coding. We've got a big yard and a few acres of forested land with a menagerie of "critters", a barn, and a big veggie garden. All of them wanting my attention. I spend most all my time at home working on something. Shoot, I have to remember to drive my car now and then to keep the battery charged.
Most of my friends in LA could never live here. My wife struggles with it. She was raised Lake Forest, Il and loves whooping it up "Downtown". For me, all of Los Angeles felt pretty much like a "Downtown". Malibu Canyon St. Park in the Spring is actually a lot like the Ozarks, and I did love it there. But I hated sitting in traffic. I felt like I was wasting my life doing that.
You can't competently work from home full time and also manage children. Even for people without children, they are dealing with co-workers who are juggling a new normal, have not set up dedicated work spaces, are fumbling to learn how to use zoom/meet/hangout etc...
I say all this to point out that, even in non-ideal conditions with little to no preparation or planning, most people would still rather work from home.
Work from home should be the STANDARD, not the exception, for white collar work.
I think there is something to be said about the autonomy we're given while at home. No pretend needed when your interactions with coworkers are purely work-event driven and not social for the sake of "team building" or "Culture".
Give me a paycheck to do work, beyond that transaction I shouldn't owe any more of my mind and body to a job.
I'm excited about the work-from-home revolution that's going on here, and I think it will benefit society and some level of work-from-home will stick for the long term, for many people. However, it's not for everyone. Some people just don't like the remote work lifestyle at all. It's also not for every kind of job or office.
I think we'll see a lot of hybrid arrangements in the post-covid world. Some offices might institute work-from-home only for tuesdays and thursdays. Or just have everyone come into the office on Mondays and cram all the important in-person meetings into that day. Or in some situations it will be an at-will flexibility (come in for specific meetings when it makes sense, or come use the office like you would a co-working space when your home life is a little crazier because the kids are out of school for the summer and/or there's a contractor remodeling the kitchen, etc).
I think most seemingly-virtualizable businesses that had offices before will still have offices for the foreseeable few years, but by implementing various hybrid policies they could see their average headcount onsite per day shrink significantly over time. For many the office will become optional and/or a part-time thing. One way they could react to this is to downsize their commercial real estate the next time contracts are up. Another way they could handle it would be to remodel the space they've got, trading out cube-farm areas for more private offices and private conference rooms that can be reserved ahead, which will draw some employees back for more hours on-site, until they find a balancing point.
The deeper transition for managers is getting away from the control-freak model of tracking "hours worked", and starting to focus instead on the "things done". The reason you hired your employee is not to punch a clock and stare at a wall for a fixed number of hours; you hired them to accomplish goals, and you're actually going to have to focus directly on measuring true work rather than time in a post-office-hours world. Once you break free of the chains of time-tracking, all kinds of efficiencies that benefit both the employer and the employee are unlocked through remote and flexible work arrangements.
- Seventy-nine percent of workers can work from home at least some of the time? Maybe the ones your survey reached, but I'm pretty sure I've read the real fraction is under 30%. - "Do you think your employer will make working remote permanent?" is a bad question because it's easy to interpret it multiple ways.
Also I do much longer hours, because it's much more fun, and I can take a siesta nap when I need it. I'm an extrovert btw.
It suits me-- I'm more of a quiet, research-type worker.
But some of my friends are more 'cubicle hoppers' / social butterflies. I really don't think those folks would do well with it in the long term.
No mention of the study methodology. Given that this was performed by an online job search website, it's not clear that they invested effort into collecting unbiased samples. Visitors looking for new jobs on a somewhat obscure online job search site aren't exactly an unbiased sample.
Regardless, I think the important takeaway is that work from home preferences vary. Not everyone enjoys working in an office. Not everyone enjoys working from home. And not everyone has made up their mind on the topic yet.
They also asked whether or not people thought they were more productive working from home. 44% said yes. When asked if people thought their companies would move to permanent WFH after this, 17% said yes.
They might represent the other half...
Cube farms in America are like adult day care that doubles as a basic income mechanism.
Although of course MY work is very important and useful to civilization...
