In simplistic terms, Group A experienced "pandemic + effect from changing to WFH" while Group B experienced only "pandemic". Therefore, B-A = "effect from changing to WFH" alone.
It's a nice idea but I'm not sure it's entirely convincing. It seems like you'd have to assume a couple things: (1) the pandemic affected both groups in the same way, so that taking the difference between the two groups cancels out the pandemic effect; (2) new WFHers are interchangeable with veteran WFHers.
As a veteran WFHer, Assumption 2 seems especially suspect to me. People who self-selected into WFH and have been doing it for a while are going to be a very different group than the general population forced into it by a pandemic.
That said, I am a fan of econometrists and the crazy stunts they do with data to obtain so-called "natural experiments". So I'm open to changing my mind here. These kinds of papers are rarely convincing but never boring. Perhaps they managed to prove the somewhat uninteresting proposition that people thrust into WFH by a pandemic aren't very good at it.
i think this is a significantly flawed assumption. in my experience, the people that had been working from home previously are much better equipped to deal with the pandemic (e.g. likely have a home office set up vs. working from makeshift workspace like a kitchen table).
It takes a while to adjust to the changes.
And then, unrelated to that, I eventually switched teams, and had a much more difficult time finding my place on the new team
For me, I'd rather work on building the skill with a higher sum value ver time (integration of value rate), even if their is a learning/adaption curve.
Taking someone who has worked in an office for 10 years and expecting them to be more productive in the first 6 months of work from home is failing to treat it as a skill that develops over time.
For instance, in the office, what is the single best way to collaborate on something? Why, you get people together and chat, likely informally, in a free ranging discussion.
Remote, what's the single best way to collaborate? Why, you write up a document with your initial thoughts and send it out for everyone else to weigh in on; you have a fully asynchronous, documented communication.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, but, tellingly, the people who are best with one of them are likely not the people who are best with the other. And trying to impose one in the other's context will lead to poorer results; written docs in the office when a conversation will do feel heavyhanded and process heavy, but zoom meetings, especially if the hours don't all line up, in a remote workplace feel unnecessary, and reduces participation.
A LOT of companies have treated the pandemic as "figure out how to carry in person practices to remote", rather than a new beast worthy of learning new ways of working.
This is because deliberate knowledge sharing is so ad-hoc and inconsistent. How often do new hires have to turn to someone to figure out how to get the project to build locally as the instructions suck? Quite often.
Ostensibly Google/Amazon put a lot of thought and work into formalizing institutional practice and knowledge, and it likely helps that most competent engineers are gunning for a long-term role at those kinds of firms, but I've yet to see anything resembling such where I've worked.
Confluence docs tend to be written as the result of timed events, for each project or sprint or meeting or whatever, rather than organized by topic. And most are write-only and never looked at again.
What a Confluence (or any documentation) repository really needs is continuous refactoring, to be organized by functionality rather than time implemented. Just like code, if you never do that, what you get is documentation debt and a big ball of documud.
The other think I like it for is lists of 'learning' links Our team has a nice page with suggested books or lectures or tutorials that they think others will find useful.
Everything else is stale within a week or so. If I need to document something it goes into a Readme which can also go stale but is still a bit more in your face.
I've also seen what someone points out below - the engineers who think Confluence documentation counts as task completion.
> "Did you figure out how to do X?"
> "Yes, here is a confluence page."
> "Did you install it? Did you run it? Did you validate the results?"
> "... here is a confluence page"
Onboarding docs need to be iterative. They need 'user studies' with some of the new employees. If I go through the onboarding docs with a new employee, and they get stuck, either I'm the one who knows how to fix it or I know the person who does, so we can get it fixed. Once that becomes opaque the docs are more of a sick joke than anything.
It’s very weird how adverse people are to spontaneous phone calls. Especially the younger generation. Everything has to be scheduled and confirmed back and forth.
I understand that an unexpected phone call can disturb someone, but so can an unexpected tap on the shoulder.
I'd rather use e-mail or some chat system when remote and working on something else until I get an answer, unless of course, something is on fire.
Surprised Nature picked this up with such big holes.
Turns out humans are social animals, people with social bonds work together more effectively, and you don't build those via Zoom and Slack. And I'm not talking about "partying together every night, living at the office", just "being around each other and talking outside of the rigid confines of scheduled meetings".
No, scheduled socials aren't the same.
Sure, there was internal communication with smaller factories and with customers, but with much migher latency and information content than whats possible now.
Communications separated by time and space is a familiar problem. We adapted, more or less.
With the apocalypse came the forever meetings (zoom calls), which are same time and same virtual space.
