Remote work doesn't seem to affect productivity, Fed study finds (opens in new tab)

Unfortunately a lot of things conflate over time as you become more senior to generally make your commute worse.

For me - my last 2 roles have earlier required start time, with a hard start (morning meeting / standup / L3 support presence), company office locations got a little further, and trains got a little less reliable.

Fortunately I am remote since COVID, but when I was going in / or have to go in now.. I need to bake in 45-60min depending on how much I'm willing to risk being late that day.

For me I'd rather work 11-12 hours/day at home then go into office for 10 hours & spend 1.5-2 hours on the commute. Company is getting 10-20% more time out of me, and I at least save the money & "commute prep time".

In the end I ended up working remote, which is what I preferred, which wasn't surprising given how much the commuting time was worth to me.

Employers reimbursing your travel expenses if they need you to travel to a conference on the other side of the country is already the norm so why shouldn't they reimburse your travel expenses if they want you to travel somewhere in the same geographic area?

The problem becomes now my home is tied to my work place. If the company moves or I change companies, I have move or stress at a new commute. I did move once during a job change, and it didn't last long.

Another compounding issue is that I like to stay at companies for a long time, 10 years. This is frequently becoming difficult for a number of reasons not entirely in my control.

I wonder if others are in the same situation.

That said, time is important to me and I have a 5min commute, 20min if I walk. For that reason I do prefer the office. Better meals and better coffee and nice colleagues.

If employers want to force people into offices, maybe pay them a bonus.

The transition time of arrival and departure is easily 30-45m daily, on my employers dime.

I do 50% and it works for me. End of the day most of the problems associated with this issue are workplace and cultural issues that come to a head with remote/hybrid. The only novel dysfunctions with employees that I see (and I’m an exec with about 900) are people doing things like secretly moving away and abusing medical accommodation. There’s also an issue where people build their life around remote and are disappointed when they miss opportunities, but are unwilling to meet in the middle.

End of the day. The lazy idiots are just as lazy, grinders grind, and smart people continue to be smart.

So basically, waste of time.

Getting your head down and coding on your personal goal is easy remotely.

I think some ICs like that it's harder for people to say to them that they are driving in the wrong direction, even if it's still true.

Managing people is really really hard, but we seem to have a managerial class who seem to be getting away with doing it very poorly.

It also adds an extra hurdle for those who aren't particularly skilled at management.

Finding this many self-motivated conscientious employees is uncommon. Consider yourself lucky. This has never been a winning strategy that I've seen anywhere.

I worked at way too many startups where the CEO was far too involved with day to day minutiae.

Work requires effective communication. Global teams place a premium on that and nurture it if they're successful. The remote work dilemma is non-global teams discovering this well-trodden ground and attempting to reinvent the wheel, with a sprinkling of terrible commercial real estate decisions on top.

(Nothing in this response addresses specific team types that benefit from in person work or the entirely valid in-office preferences of individual workers.)

The friction we're seeing now is that we're still recovering from a pandemic that forced everyone remote whether it works for them or not. So this idea of remote vs. office being a core strategic decision as a company grows is fairly new. We are all still learning how to navigate the options.

As Einstein said, you should make every problem as simple as possible, but no more simple.

The problem we're describing cannot be reduced to few simple statistics, it's exactly making the problem simpler than it is.

Not only just the task of measuring productivity of knowledge workers is extremely difficult if not impossible, but getting any statistic across a wide variety of different factors makes it even more pointless.

In fact, the problem shouldn't be approached from a macro, but microscopic level. Start from the basics.

There's knowledge workers that don't do anything from home. There's knowledge workers that won't achieve anything at the office. There's gargantuan projects like operating systems or databases developed fully remotely and asynchronously. There's projects that barely move without lots of synchronous, meaningful in-person interactions and there's environments like early stage startups that desperately need this kind of situation (albeit I'm sure there's many exceptions).

In professional sports it is very well understood that slightly different formulas work differently for different teams and players. Some needs to be fast and lean to be effective. Some need to put up muscle and weight. Many need both. Some need lots of cardio, some need more skills training. And all of that has to interact and mesh together and face different challenges.

Yet you want to complex systems like business projects/teams built around few statistics? Ignoring the wide variety of factors and humans that will end up there?

I'm not saying that building teams like that is an easy task, sometimes you just need to make work whatever team you're given, and you will have to decide a setup and give the right structure incentives to everyone to make it work.

But even if tomorrow a stat told us that there's proof that statistically remote is better for 60% of the teams (or the opposite) that really won't help much.

It is not realistic to fire people who don't align with someone's preferred management style.

I work VERY remote (my employer is in Austin, I live in Michigan), so public transit isn't really an option for that arrangement, but if I'm honest the only real reason I'm doing it is because of Austin housing prices -- I'd much rather live in an urban core within walking distance of work, but that lifestyle is unimaginably expensive in all the places where jobs exist. Instead, I have an aging 1940s tract home in a city 2k miles from work.

The housing crisis is also a transit crisis. We built most of our homes and businesses around the cheap automobile and infinite petro-energy, with the predictable result that we can barely afford to live near the places we work.

It made me a bad manager to not have that in my tool kit. There are a lot of people who just want you to tell them exactly what to do.

It’s a preference to not execute two different skill sets when you lack one of them. That’s stressful.

You might be a good developer, but not great at talking to users and figuring out the priority and the solution and executing on that independently.

Or you might not be good at delivering eloquent speeches. Or whatever. Everyone lacks some skillset which they’d prefer someone more qualified handle for them.

This isn't an "oh it's 4:30 and I'm not going to start something new", it's "It's 11am, and everyone else is busy, I will play solitaire until my manager explicitly tells me which of the 45 tasks they want me to complete".

If you say "go into room X and fetch the Y to do Z", if Y isn't in the right place they will await further instruction. If challenged, they will say they need training on how to handle the situation, or that it's the managers job to ensure the process is right. If you give them the explicit instruciton to tell you when their task is complete, they will come to you and stand next to you until you give them something else to do.

However, if you give them a task like do X at 9:30 every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, it will be done, to spec, every time. People like me will occasionally miss it due to other asks, prioritisation,a perceived lack of value of the task, or an "I-know-that-this-isn't-important" mindset.

Part of management is identifying these behavioural differences, and utilising them effectively.

If you have a full team of people who need explicit instruction, your job will be shuffling tickets around. If you have a full team of people who look for improvements, and are constantly thinking ahead, your job will be trying to reign them in and keep them working on the right things. Neither is good, you want a mix of both.

I think in such cases it might be better to get rid of such staff, for your own sake and theirs.

Most companies do this by using a cost of labor index for areas. NYC/SF/Seattle being the highest, and then smaller reductions outside.

Basically you don't want to be in a HCOL (High Cost of Living) remote area with a LCOL (Low cost of Labor)

B. Language issues, cultural issues, and time zone issues all have negative effects.

C. Or it could mean labour is more productive because it has more free time and is less stressed. There's no pointless commute and some chores can be done in the background. Getting slightly distracted by laundry is far less of a loss to productivity than being constantly distracted by conversations, office noise, pointless meetings, and so on.

Your arguments are all MBA-level arguments, which means they look superficially convincing but they lack systemic insight.

There's plenty of evidence that happier workers are more productive. Treating workers like people instead of machinery has comprehensive business benefits. The only real cost is a reduction in the self-perceived relative status of the C-suite.

Essentially this is an argument about hierarchy and loss of face, and not so much about measurable business costs/benefits.

In reality there is an opportunity to hire wider pool of full time applicants in US because now you can offer even 1 day a week in the office instead of 5 or doing 1 day a month.

If I have to consider company that is 2h driving away - one way - and be there 5 days a week, that is a deal breaker.

Doing that once a week is still much more manageable and opens up opportunities for employees and employers as well. Especially if someone can't just move to next big city on a whim but can drive there once a week.

CS is the running joke, but server management, manual data processing, moderation etc. have been prime candidates for outsourcing for a long time.

The reason one's job is/was not outsourced has I think little to do about whether general remote work was an option or not.

It would be nice if the rich assholes making these decisions realized that allowing people to take care of life stuff during work hours actually does make them more productive. But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.

For (B) to become commonplace, a government would be allowing a job function or industry to decline or disappear domestically, as has happened to Western manufacturing. I can't think of many industries and job functions suitable for remote work that a country in 2024 would want to cause the decline of. Western countries in particular have been pushing "critical infrastructure" regulations and supply chain regulations that generally oppose offshoring and domestic decline of a wide range of industries--energy, healthcare, food distribution, etc. For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support.

Because outsourcing is nothing new. Hiring people in cheaper markets is something companies have been doing for many decades already, with varying degrees of success, long before remote work was even a thing.

There are many other issues with outsourcing - for example: time zones, language, work culture, exchange rates - that go beyond the hot topic of "butts in seats".

Because the outsourcing threat was a thing before remote working, remote working changes nothing to that.

Employers love to bring this up on the subject of remote working but if they could outsource your work to an Indian paid 10x less, they would have done it already. Those employers are deluded if they think remote work is changing anything here.

If anything it makes outsourcing of global talent even harder for them since now companies are competing globally for the best talent.

The biggest drive for overseas recruitment will be ai. Extracting knowledge for western workers and transferring it to cheaper workers overseas will be the new manufacturing outsourcing. A workers without the high quality training the west provides will suddenly be able to compensate using tools trained against the knowledge produced by their western counterpart.

Because my company is remote, we have people in every US timezone, which opens up outsourcing to Brazil. A team member in Brazil is indistinguishable from someone in Florida.

Adoption can be gradual instead of all at once. We don't have to spin up a whole team in a remote location, we can go 1-by-1.

C. We can probably get away with paying remote workers less because they get other benefits from working remotely.

Communication counts for something. You might not know much about that because you see businesses as interchangeable balance sheets rather than a living breathing thing. Your loss. Expect your end.

I really do wish you sad lost puppies find a place to park your increasingly worthless "privilege". Your retro career is melting. What you can coast through: running a business from a high-level perspective. What you can't coast through: actually running your business and digging into the implementation details that directly hit your bottom line and keep your worthless ass afloat. All tech companies are pure implementation details. You'd know this if you bothered to and everyone more successful than you actually has because they can take it and aren't as clueless. Growth by absorbing the old ways of doing things doesn't come from nowhere.

Expect the next wave of more literate employees to push you out. Doesn't matter where they come from. They will. It's already happened at the places bigger than you. Prepare.

It's a buggy whip. The internet is still relatively young, it hasn't fully dispatched with last centuries ideas just yet. As has been noted, the investor class failed to predict the consequence of cheap and wide pipes in homes as a matter of course.

Or put the other way: Remote work let's the employee pay for the office space.

For sure - singing in choir and making music remotely is from what I know mainly impossible because of the latency.

Distractions happen. They come from lots of sources.

So if I'm distracted I can't be clocked in, generating time deficit, which will motivate me to not be distracted.

And on the other hand I'm free to distribute the work any way I want.

Needs honesty and trust of course, but I'd wager that's not an issue for most.

(Same disclaimer as parent - everyone works differently)

I can control my focus at home because I am in full control.

In an open floor plan office environment, I have the added challenge of needing to shield my attention from others. For me the open floorpan office is like trying to do work in the middle of an airport terminal (not the lounge, sorry).

In some cases, some companies rent an office for 2-3+ years. So let's say, they renewed from 2020-2023.

They were "forced" at first (to do WFH) and money got literally "burned", because the offices were empty, but insurances and all that had to be paid.

Now they had a chance at using more alternative approaches (rent spaces, or smaller offices), yet they want many to come back. There was almost never a saving, because contracts were still running (for many companies, I believe).

I will say - moving from fully onsite to fully remote was a bit of a shock for me, and initially I felt the same. Overtime I replaced the in office "social" time with out of the office social time (going rock climbing with friends, joining a sports league, etc).

Also if you are a begginer, I would recommend to search for work in office if it works for you.

I dislike commuting more than half an hour, however I would like the team to be together if it's something challenging.

I know it is hard to commute long time, especially if you have other responsibilities, but that does't change my opinion on what is the best for the team.

Basically, some companies own buildings that need to be leased out and some companies have long leases which would mean money "down the drain" if they're not utilised. That's wrapped up to equate being told to come into the office as a profit driven thing, rather than a productivity driven thing. As a blanket statement it's not true as not all companies care about it, and when we're talking just about productivity, it's irrelevant as it's not actually a consideration.

If we're talking about motivations for coming back into the office, then sure, it's a very relevant topic there.

The investor class is furious about remote work, because it affects their real estate pyramid scheme.

I started working in a hybrid setting and found remote so much better for learning compared to in-person where there's 30 people talking and distracting me from getting familiar with the work, how much hand holding do Juniors even need anyway? If anything having it be async is so much better since you'll have everything written down so you can reference it later whenever you need it, rather than listening to some senior blab off for half an hour about unimportant crap that just confuses you more.

If Juniors don't know to ask questions, that problem isn't solved by forcing them into the office and having someone peeking over their shoulder constantly (which can be daunting and detract heavily from any potential learning there could be had), you need to foster an environment where they're not afraid to reach out for help when they need it.

Also who wastes their lunch break talking about work? On whatever rare occasion I'm forced to go into the office, literally no one wants to discuss anything work-related (myself included) during lunch. People are talking about anything other than work, because duh. I've also never even seen these mythical watercoolers where people are apparently discussing life-altering breakthroughs all day every day that you hear about constantly, we do have a sink where people will chitchat about, again, literally anything other than work with others procrastinating though. This might be a US-specific thing I guess, but I've never in my life encountered anything even remotely like it in either Asia or the EU.

> ...and there is nothing to compensate for this.

I mean if you do literally nothing and just throw up your hands and say "welp, nothing can be done here, guess we all have to be sardines in a miserable can!" (aka the office) then sure, I guess there's nothing you can do. On the other hand you could invest time into properly documenting the project and the processes surrounding the project while setting up proper asynchronous channels and methods which ultimately benefits everyone, regardless if they're remote or not.

Your comment feels like the comment a person might make if they thought building a cohesive team was a paint-by-the-numbers exercise.

I think meaningful work often leads to very interesting discussions because people always imagine stuff like humanitarian aid, etc as meaningful. While certainly true, it’s not limited to jobs like those.

In my experience work can be meaningful for something as simple as being a positive change in someone’s job, customer experience or whatever. I personally spent quite a while in a job where a lot of project have been cancelled midway through or were objectively useless to begin with (busywork). This feeling of spending substantial time in my life to work on something that nobody will ever see or perceive as something positive burned me out terribly. And no amount of work life balance and good pay could make that up.

I now have a different job (Fullstack Developer) at the same company. I work more focused and it is more challenging, my salary hasn’t changed substantially beyond inflation. But customers use our product and are satisfied with it, plus it brings revenue to the company. This job is so much more meaningful in a practical sense than the one before.

And there is quite a lot of jobs like my first one. And if you actually believe in a market working as intended, this begs the question: why?

If you're willing to take a salary cut, lots.

For me work avoidance is a symptom of not having enough interruption free time. And in-person is actually substantially worse than remote.

Most of the problems I’m working on you can’t bang out in 10 minutes. Reality is that for some problems you need a highly skilled engineer to spend 4-8 continuous, highly focused hours producing iterations or trying to troubleshoot a broken build in a 20,000 line log file across 100 interconnected dependencies. So if you’re going to be productive it requires a time commitment and a certain working style.

It would be wonderful for employers and employees alike if computer work was always interesting. But it just isn’t. Amazon Turk workers are in front of computer out of necessity and probably would like to commit the least amount of work for the maximal possible reward. I happen to be of slightly better means but share their sentiment exactly.

I'd rather write a new feature with clean code and improve the existing code base in the meantime.

The real game changer is axing all scheduled internal meetings. No standups, no weekly grooming, no syncs. Scrap these time-wasters and you'll be surprised at the productivity spike. If not, then you likely don't have the right people working for you.