My experience is that in person and remote favors different sorts of tasks. For me I have both so I think hybrid is the most ‘productive’, though I’m much happier with the ‘remote’.
So on pure productivity, I could see some roles favor in-person.
But if you want to more cheaply recruit and retain, favoring remote is certainly going to help.
I really want a new normal of shorter hours, though that might be a trickier discussion so long as we have very highly utilized labor pool.
A dock worker wouldn’t be more productive remote. There’s obviously some responsibilities that cannot be done in person, and a lot of jobs require both.
But let’s say we discard all obviously in-person sorts of work from the “jobs that can move to remote”, the so called “knowledge work”, and we are deep in an area where objective measure of “productivity” has proven elusive. For example, one such study I looked at used “how productive do you feel?” as the basis. Another facet is individual productivity versus group productivity, particularly over time. A pretty middling junior employee spends a lot of time flailing hopelessly because no one knows to get with him and help him become better, both in terms of his job and in terms of communication and confidence (e.g. not trying to hide having difficulty to avoid people thinking he is less competent than he should be, when everyone has those sorts of struggles).
The commute, morale, ability to avoid low value coworker distractions (no, I don’t need the daily reminder that my coworker in fact has a boat…) , and ability to manage the work related distractions better certainly help remote work. However home life distractions and the ability to tune out work related distractions a little too well at the expenese of peer productivity can impact work at home. Different people and situations manipulate this balance and for the best employees, that morale can go a long way to having a good outcome, but I think we have to confess that in-person has some value.
Also worth mentioning from the article,
Well, why not? Covid showed how great this can work … but so many companies went back to 20th century norms as soon as the pandemic ended*
My experience is that in person and remote favors different sorts of tasks. For me I have both so I think hybrid is the most ‘productive’, though I’m much happier with the ‘remote’.
So on pure productivity, I could see some roles favor in-person.
But if you want to more cheaply recruit and retain, favoring remote is certainly going to help.
I really want a new normal of shorter hours, though that might be a trickier discussion so long as we have very highly utilized labor pool.
Productivity has been universally higher on every job that moved to remote, tracks those metrics and makes them public.
A dock worker wouldn’t be more productive remote. There’s obviously some responsibilities that cannot be done in person, and a lot of jobs require both.
But let’s say we discard all obviously in-person sorts of work from the “jobs that can move to remote”, the so called “knowledge work”, and we are deep in an area where objective measure of “productivity” has proven elusive. For example, one such study I looked at used “how productive do you feel?” as the basis. Another facet is individual productivity versus group productivity, particularly over time. A pretty middling junior employee spends a lot of time flailing hopelessly because no one knows to get with him and help him become better, both in terms of his job and in terms of communication and confidence (e.g. not trying to hide having difficulty to avoid people thinking he is less competent than he should be, when everyone has those sorts of struggles).
The commute, morale, ability to avoid low value coworker distractions (no, I don’t need the daily reminder that my coworker in fact has a boat…) , and ability to manage the work related distractions better certainly help remote work. However home life distractions and the ability to tune out work related distractions a little too well at the expenese of peer productivity can impact work at home. Different people and situations manipulate this balance and for the best employees, that morale can go a long way to having a good outcome, but I think we have to confess that in-person has some value.
Maybe he is a hardware toucher