It largely depends on if you can afford to have a room dedicated as your home office.
Working/relaxing cannot happen in the same space. Our brains are not wired to do such a dramatic difference in mental activity in the same location. That’s also why bedrooms should be used for sleeping and fucking ONLY. Once you start reading/scrolling in bed, your brain makes that connection, “Oh, I’m in bed, I should doomscroll for the next 3 hours” instead of “Oh, I’m in bed. I should sleep.”
i will take sleep and work in the same room every single day, in every single occasion over an office.
I liked working from home at first, but after so long it becomes harder and harder to leave your work at “work” when your workplace is also your home. Now I am back in the office and actually prefer it that way. I have the flexibility to work from home on weekends or when I need to be home for some reason, which is good enough for me.
You mean we had a worldwide event that proved to us that an incredible technology that allows us to work remotely could actually be used to work remotely, then our overlords chose to ignore that and now studies are proving what we already knew was true, is true?
Neat.
Of course. Saving an hour of meaningless commute every day is a huge positive change.
God I’d love it if my commute were only an hour.
It’s 90-minutes each way if traffic cooperates. I put about 30k miles on my car in a given year.
My back was injured so they let me work from home yesterday, and other than the pain it was magical. I also got SOOO much done.
This is the wild thing, most people work better at home but no no, must be in office and have performance reviews…
Sleep. Precious beautiful sleep. I can roll out of bed, rip a huge wet fart, log into Teams, pretend to care for 5 minutes, go right back to sleep (and still be able to smell that fart, thankfully), take a long nap, get up to take a big smooth dump, then put in the same 3 hours of actual work I’d do at the office, then play Sokoban all afternoon. All the while reducing resource usage.
This is the UBI/leisure society I was promised as a kid.
If you spend most of your day getting to and from work, then pretending to be busy at the office, you don’t have time to think or be a threat to the billionaires by starting your own competing company/product.
Is this linked wrong? The article is about swimming for health not WFH.
oddly, the link goes to the right article, then the site redirects to the swimming article,
here it is on another site
https://evidencenetwork.ca/remote-work-increases-happiness-4-year-study-findings/
edit: it’s someone elses take, looking for original
edit2: OK, the original article is from 2020, there are updartes in 2024.
This page does a better job covering the the couple of gallup polls and some of the criteria listed
though the site is sus to me :)
Did the web site swap in a completely unrelated story about how swimming is good exercise for people over 55?
It’s probably just another clone of this clone of a clone of a …
LOLWTF it also swapped it for me
Which is why the ruling class has decided we can’t have it…
Every time this comes up i tell my personal and data driven experience as a middle manager in a company, and every time people trash me, but i keep saying it.
IT FUCKING DEPENDS!
From purely data point of view (note: this is from my place of work) workers whose work is purely executing more or less the same duties every day had their productivity have a nose dive when working long stretches from home. Also their works quality got worse. Its easy to reinforce bad habits whitout even noticing it, if the feedback comes from email and and not straight from the supervisor.
BUT with jobs like coders or artists where the job is more open ended instead of monotous labor there was no ill effects.
Then on the other side communication has gotten much slower with the people working from outside office. Where i used to just walk to the other room and ask something from my collegue i now need to message them in our internal and hope they notice it. Getting answers for questions have turned from 5 minute thing to 10-40 minute things.
Also from the point of more inventive things on my work we have lost a lot of changes to brainstorm ideas. No more throwing ideas around during lunch or coffee breaks
Where i used to just walk to the other room and ask something from my collegue i now need to message them in our internal and hope they notice it. Getting answers for questions have turned from 5 minute thing to 10-40 minute things.
Those rude shoulder-tap interruptions may have only taken you 5 minutes, but they ruined half an hour of productivity to the person you were interrupting. This is the whole reason people can be more productive at home without annoying bosses blathering at them.
The immediate interruption is good for management, but bad for the company overall.
That’s why we still have Jira/email.
Critical importance: slack/in person
Can wait but important: high importance email, P1 Jira
Not important: Low impotance email, P2 Jira
Yeah every programmer I know loves not being exposed to the manager who just “has a question” or just want to “check in”.
Nah. Coders get slack messages. Only exception is if something is truly fucked and it needs to be fixed asap and for some strange reason i notice it before they do. Mosty happens when they push from test to production.
We have biweekly check ins with code team and thats enough.
I have WfH for about twenty five years now and I will say the same thing I always say when this type of comment pops up, if people do not want to talk to you for some reason they will not respond as its a lot easier to hide on email/IM than an office situation. If you finding that people are hiding from you, then that’s as much a you problem as anything else for not directly addressing it.
I actually find it considerably easier to get hold of someone via IM than any other method short of direct dialing them as I can reach them in meetings or away from their desk or even in another country entirely, its only if they are intentionally ignoring you it does not work. If the person is presenting in a meeting or otherwise legitimately incommunicado then they aren’t going to respond F2F or IM anyway.
Not measuring output volume or quality consistently is a widespread problem for businesses, regardless of location of the employee. Consistent and accurate measurement is the only way to be sure you are getting the results you are expecting, for coding that means code reviews not commit counts, 360 feedback, and so on. If you are feeding back, and someones ignoring that, guess what, its also a you problem for not building in consequences and follow ups. It also applies just as much in an office situation as it does remote.
How about the workers’ wellbeing? Is that ever considered?
Getting answers for questions have turned from 5 minute thing to 10-40 minute things.
That’s an administration problem. Sure people are busy, in meetings or at lunch. But if someone is always 40m away from answering a work slack/chat they’re a candidate for replacement.
You understand wrong.
I message somebody --> they take ten minutes to answer, with question --> im doing something else, it takes me few minutes to finish or risking losing my tough then i answer --> maybe with good luck they answer right back, but most likely it takes few minutes again.
In the office i could have talked to the person and resolve the thing faster.
For us, we use slack huddles when there will be too much back and forth. 30 second audio call, supports screen sharing.
Out of curiosity, can you describe, with a bit more detail, the kind of work that was repetitive and became worse?
Customer service and sales support. The work is on the basic channels. Phone, email and chat and its pretty much allways some variation of few same questions or complaints.
Both customer satisfaction and work effiency started to get worse the longer the lockdown went.
By the way we dont have mandatory office days. Everybody can work from home if they want. The split is now pretty much 60/40 with bigger part working from the office. (I think big part is because it has kindergarden and its in place with good public transport) During summer when parents want to stay at home looking after the kids or when bank holidays make broken week most of the people stay home.
middle managers are useless anyway
The article does have this caveat.
“Context still matters. Job type, home setting, and leadership quality vary. Yet the direction remains positive. Even with modest differences by role, the health and satisfaction curves point upward. Inside those curves, remote work behaves as a flexible option that organizations can calibrate rather than a rigid rule.”
Though I will say your argument is still centered around being productive and effective for the company (make money for the company), the article specifically centers around an individual’s well-being (sleep, family life etc.). So not the same metrics.
Other articles and research I’ve seen that did center on productivity did conclude that yes, it depends.
In the field of organizational psychology (which research like this is typically done by), the phrase “it depends” is used so often among scientists that it’s a running gag at this point
It is 0850. I start at 0900. I am still in bed.
Working from home is great.
Its amazing but only because the alternative is so horrible, we really, really appreciate working from home.
I think its also having a strong effect om how we are as people. Office culture changes people, into scared little humans who self censor themselves to fit in, and use language they think makes them sound professional.
Its a waste of life. We are originals. We are unique personalities. Not clones, not resources to exploit.
If humanity survives capitalism, and its a big if, we will look back at this and wonder what we were thinking.
If we survive this, it will be because we all gained class consciousness, in which case we won’t have to wonder, we will know what we were thinking, and why.
Working from home sucks. Yeah I said it.
I’m a software engineer, and yes, there are days that working from home really does help with concentration and focus on a particular project, but unless you’re a contractor, tasked with “build this and come back when it’s finished”, building anything is typically a collaborative process. You know what sucks for collaboration? Working from home.
There are no tools that can sufficiently replace what the office offers: interaction, chance conversation, camaraderie and socialising with the people with whom you’re trying to build The Thing. It’s why people still go to actual conferences and no one cares about gigantic Zoom calls masquerading as real interaction. Slack sucks, Jira sucks, Teams suuuuuuucks. They’ll do in a pinch, but they’ll never offer real collaboration. For that, you still have to be in the same building.
That’s not to say that offering remote work isn’t great. There are people who work best in isolation, but that’s not all of us. I’d argue that it isn’t even most of us, and headlines like this “working from home makes us thrive” aren’t helping. They’re objectively bullshit. Having been in software development for 25 years, I can categorically state that the more remote the team I’ve been in, the less organised, the more disjointed and disconnected it is.
And don’t get me started on the whole “overemployment” trend, where people try to hold down two jobs by doing neither well at all. Yet another “perk” of remote work I guess.
Hard disagree. From my experience you can perfectly collaborate from a distance, it’s mostly a matter of organizing around it. Of course it can vary on the type of work, so I would think that the better answer is “it depends”.
Yet in your comment you declare that it sucks and mostly does not work as a general rule? I just want to say that your own experience, while relevant, does not necessarily apply to everyone. Maybe it sucks for you, maybe it sucks for most people you work with or talked with about that subject. But one experience, or even a group of experiences, do not make for a universal truth.
As somebody that has worked from home everyday since 2009, nothing beats in person collaboration. Not saying you need to be in the office everyday, but to truly collaborate and get input and open discussions an actual meet session is better.
You can see who is not onboard by body language, you can see who isn’t paying attention and will miss key details, you get free conversation where a random comment provides a solution to something that wasn’t on the agenda. And I say it as somebody that is 150% more productive at home.
Even in our own company employees often work siloed on collaborative projects, in person forces a discussion.
It works better for some people/orgs than others. My company worked in a Google Meet for 6 hours yesterday in a war room, cracking jokes, socializing, with most cameras off, mostly just voice chat and the occasional screen share. We got the job done, we had fun, and people came and went. The cool part was that we had different disciplines together that wouldn’t sit together. Shit, we had people in 4 different time zones, not even all on the same continent.
Now it’s the next day… do I want to do it again today? No. I’m an introvert and I’m all out of spoons. But the next thing? sure!
AND I saved 1.5 hours of commute and 60 miles of gas/tires/oil
Sounds like a ‘you’ problem or a team composition and role disparity issue.
We’ve been widely remote for 5 years now and the data continuously shows the benefits far outweigh the issues.
I personally love remote work and I get that it isn’t ideal for some people. I need to read more studies to understand, but I do wonder if a lot of the benefit (in some cases) comes from enabling people to do time theft. Letting people work at their own pace, take breaks as needed, do some chores, avoid commuting- all leading to better overall quality of life, happiness, health, and therefore productivity. Could we get a lot of the same benefits by moving to a 5 or 6 hour work day?
I don’t think work from home should ever be taken off the table since for myself (and many others, clearly) it helps improve focus, happiness, etc. But I think that if we stand to gain more from working in person with other concessions made them we should explore those.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the phrase “time theft”, but I largely agree. The real benefit of hybrid work is flexibility, and I’d never want to take that away from anyone. I just object to the constant parroting of this lie that remote necessarily means more productive. I’ve never seen it, but I’ve seen many many cases of the opposite.
Personally I take my time in the office and really hustle remotely. Want to make sure the metrics show its better for me to be home. Honestly though I would love to have an office I could walk to.
Time to repeat my topical story.
I worked for a startup that prided itself on being “data driven”. They’d talk about how other startups were doing stupid things because they followed their feelings instead of data.
One day in one of those all hands meetings, the CEO was taking questions. Someone said, “Studies are showing that four day work weeks are more effective on like every metric. Can we look into that?”
The CEO said "No, we’re not doing that ". Didn’t read the linked studies. Didn’t entertain it at all. His mind was made up, and the data was irrelevant.
Because he doesn’t really care about data. He cares about feeling smart and irreverent. He cares about being seen as a cool disruptive startup guy who’s going to grind his way to success.
The dishonesty makes me want to puke.
But you know what also makes me sick? All the sycophantic boot lickers that would gather round and tell him his every idea was great. The people who would work unpaid long hours to “get shit done”. Bunch of fucking wormtongues who would sell out their coworkers for crumbs.
Maybe he was a real person once who really did care about data. But by the time I met him, he was an empty suit
You just reminded me of a similar incident at a company I worked at. Larger than a startup, but still not huge. Same situation where it was a question at an all hands, the response from the CTO was simply that he had not seen that data and immediately moved on.
Funny thing was, the guy that asked the question wasn’t even adding about a 32 hour work week, he just wanted to option to do 4 10s over 5 8s but they moved on from his question so fast they never gave him a chance to clarify.
Lol, did we work at the same place?
“Empty suits” it’s the realest statement.
I resigned my position because I couldn’t take it anymore. I told leadership that I refuse to use my skills and talents for those who I do not respect, and they responded by saying that there was a lot of money on the line.
They can fucking keep it. Fucking ghouls.
maybe we all met. i worked at the same place.
except there wasn’t a lot of money on the table, just money shaped carrots they dangled in front of us to have us overworked to death.
Me with ADHD who can’t do shit from home, hiding in the back corner of the open space.
Isn’t diversity neat? My ADHD pulls a gun on me if I get within 30 meters of an office.
Work mode activated ?
I’ve been studying managers for much longer, and I’ve reached a very clear conclusion: they don’t care.
Managers are playing the game. Rules vary from company to company but are broadly similar.
-
Take credit for your subordinates work as if you did it.
-
Make sure you have enough scapegoats to cover the fuckups.
-
