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What was the #1 argument against WFH before COVID? It was fear of productivity drop, that the company simply can't function with WFH. Then COVID happened and

What was the #1 argument against WFH before COVID? It was fear of productivity drop, that the company simply can't function with WFH. Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH. At this point, it shouldn't be called RTO, it should be called STO (Switch To Office), because WFH is the default existing state. And the companies that want to STO, they admit there's NO DATA to support this: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-return-to-office-rto-aws-2023-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re... https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-office-return/ https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic... The hypocrisy is obvious, they were all so against WFH before COVID, demanding data that it would work. Now it's working fine for three years, and yet they switch to office with no data, a simple "gut feeling" argument. It's indeed bullshit.

The_Colonel 3y ago
> Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH. I don't think we have good data on that "worked fine" part. Personally I saw a significant degradation of our team performance during COVID remote. Some people slacked a lot (difficult to catch, though), many people worked hard (perhaps even harder than in office), but the bad communication reduced the overall team productivity a lot.
- bit_logic 3y ago
  Where's the data? Before COVID, there were plenty of anecdotes from remote companies about how it helped their hiring and productivity, but that wasn't enough to convince the vast majority of companies to try WFH. They stubbornly said the status quo of in-office was enough and no further discussion was allowed. Now where's the data to change the status quo from WFH to the office? Amazon admits they have none. If the other companies forcing in-office had data they would be shouting it as much as they could, but when asked for data, it's just silence. Companies have had record profits and quarters with WFH, so clearly the financial data shows no issues with WFH. Again where's the data? All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?
  - gruez 3y ago
    >Where's the data? https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/06/28/the-working-from-home-delusion-fades https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/06/28/t... "Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4% decline."
    - bit_logic 3y ago
      This line from the article "...in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes.." shows that this study is about a call center. A few points on this: * The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees * Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-employees-work-from-home https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers. The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.
      - gruez 3y ago
        >* Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers. 1. The article in question cites 5 other studies that also found negative results for remote work. 2. The Ctrip study mentioned in your hbr.org link is probably the Trip.com study mentioned in the economist article. The article mentions issues with that study: "Call-centre workers for a Chinese online travel agency now known as Trip.com increased their performance by 13% when remote—a figure that continues to appear in media coverage today. But two big wrinkles are often neglected: first, more than two-thirds of the improved performance came from employees working longer hours, not more efficiently; second, the Chinese firm eventually halted remote work because off-site employees struggled to get promoted. In 2022 Dr Bloom visited Trip.com again, this time to investigate the effects of a hybrid-working trial. The outcomes of this experiment were less striking: it had a negligible impact on productivity, though workers put in longer days and wrote more code when in the office." >* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees >The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here. 1. Some data is no data. Sure, maybe doing the study with office workers will show different results, but until then assuming the positive unless there's evidence to the contrary is just intellectually dishonest. 2. Call center productivity is far easier to objectively measure than tech workers. Given issues above with studies on call center workers, I suspect that even if there were a study showing negative results for tech workers, there's going to be some many ways you can wriggle yourself out of that one that it's not going to meaningfully change the conversation.
- danaris 3y ago
  And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby? And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them? "Easy communication" can be a double-edged sword, and Slack/Discord/email can be silenced for specified periods of time.
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    > And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby? Some of them sure, but I believe less so. In my opinion, most slacking is not a result of very intentional attempts, but more of an environment / opportunity enabling it. > And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them? My intuition is that the trade-off is worth it. Larger projects lose the most productivity on information-sharing issues. Wrong things are being worked on, with focus on wrong aspects, which then again creates more useless work. Things are being reworked constantly because of wrong assumptions, people not reading miles long specs and thus missing or misinterpreting some details. People talking to each other frequently is IMHO critical for the success of the bigger organizations. Sometimes you need uninterrupted time for deep thinking, but that's in my experience a smaller part of the work. In such cases I either go to meeting rooms or home.
    - danaris 3y ago
      > > And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them? > My intuition is that the trade-off is worth it. Then my intuition is that you were one of the people popping over walls. (You weren't? Well, your intuition is worth about as much as mine.) (You were? Well, then you've got a vested interest in believing that that was better.)
    - nikau 3y ago
      > Sometimes you need uninterrupted time for deep thinking, but that's in my experience a smaller part of the work. In such cases I either go to meeting rooms or home. That's great until you are forced to come in on "anchor days" and there are no free meeting rooms left.
- somsak2 3y ago
  Not saying that you're wrong, but I'm interested in how you're able to measure "overall team productivity." I've found that to be a near-impossibility at any organization that I've worked at.
  - JambalayaJim 3y ago
    For many people it’s really just a gut feeling. That’s the issue with this debate; there isn’t really any data on either side of the aisle. Regardless, team productivity is both more important, and easier to measure than individual productivity; and most proponents of remote work are only focused on the latter.
- boston_clone 3y ago
  Isn't bad communication a management issue, not a team performance issue? Some articles have pointed out that the major driver (from executives) to return to office is simply underperforming real estate investments. In short, the attrition, decreases in performance and morale, and environmental impacts are simply not worth the massive losses that would be incurred from the innumerable empty office parks.

The_Colonel 3y ago

> Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH. I don't think we have good data on that "worked fine" part. Personally I saw a significant degradation of our team performance during COVID remote. Some people slacked a lot (difficult to catch, though), many people worked hard (perhaps even harder than in office), but the bad communication reduced the overall team productivity a lot.

bit_logic 3y ago
Where's the data? Before COVID, there were plenty of anecdotes from remote companies about how it helped their hiring and productivity, but that wasn't enough to convince the vast majority of companies to try WFH. They stubbornly said the status quo of in-office was enough and no further discussion was allowed. Now where's the data to change the status quo from WFH to the office? Amazon admits they have none. If the other companies forcing in-office had data they would be shouting it as much as they could, but when asked for data, it's just silence. Companies have had record profits and quarters with WFH, so clearly the financial data shows no issues with WFH. Again where's the data? All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?
- gruez 3y ago
  >Where's the data? https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/06/28/the-working-from-home-delusion-fades https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/06/28/t... "Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4% decline."
  - bit_logic 3y ago
    This line from the article "...in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes.." shows that this study is about a call center. A few points on this: * The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees * Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-employees-work-from-home https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers. The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.
    - gruez 3y ago
      >* Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers. 1. The article in question cites 5 other studies that also found negative results for remote work. 2. The Ctrip study mentioned in your hbr.org link is probably the Trip.com study mentioned in the economist article. The article mentions issues with that study: "Call-centre workers for a Chinese online travel agency now known as Trip.com increased their performance by 13% when remote—a figure that continues to appear in media coverage today. But two big wrinkles are often neglected: first, more than two-thirds of the improved performance came from employees working longer hours, not more efficiently; second, the Chinese firm eventually halted remote work because off-site employees struggled to get promoted. In 2022 Dr Bloom visited Trip.com again, this time to investigate the effects of a hybrid-working trial. The outcomes of this experiment were less striking: it had a negligible impact on productivity, though workers put in longer days and wrote more code when in the office." >* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees >The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here. 1. Some data is no data. Sure, maybe doing the study with office workers will show different results, but until then assuming the positive unless there's evidence to the contrary is just intellectually dishonest. 2. Call center productivity is far easier to objectively measure than tech workers. Given issues above with studies on call center workers, I suspect that even if there were a study showing negative results for tech workers, there's going to be some many ways you can wriggle yourself out of that one that it's not going to meaningfully change the conversation.
danaris 3y ago
And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby? And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them? "Easy communication" can be a double-edged sword, and Slack/Discord/email can be silenced for specified periods of time.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  > And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby? Some of them sure, but I believe less so. In my opinion, most slacking is not a result of very intentional attempts, but more of an environment / opportunity enabling it. > And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them? My intuition is that the trade-off is worth it. Larger projects lose the most productivity on information-sharing issues. Wrong things are being worked on, with focus on wrong aspects, which then again creates more useless work. Things are being reworked constantly because of wrong assumptions, people not reading miles long specs and thus missing or misinterpreting some details. People talking to each other frequently is IMHO critical for the success of the bigger organizations. Sometimes you need uninterrupted time for deep thinking, but that's in my experience a smaller part of the work. In such cases I either go to meeting rooms or home.
  - danaris 3y ago
    > > And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them? > My intuition is that the trade-off is worth it. Then my intuition is that you were one of the people popping over walls. (You weren't? Well, your intuition is worth about as much as mine.) (You were? Well, then you've got a vested interest in believing that that was better.)
  - nikau 3y ago
    > Sometimes you need uninterrupted time for deep thinking, but that's in my experience a smaller part of the work. In such cases I either go to meeting rooms or home. That's great until you are forced to come in on "anchor days" and there are no free meeting rooms left.
somsak2 3y ago
Not saying that you're wrong, but I'm interested in how you're able to measure "overall team productivity." I've found that to be a near-impossibility at any organization that I've worked at.
- JambalayaJim 3y ago
  For many people it’s really just a gut feeling. That’s the issue with this debate; there isn’t really any data on either side of the aisle. Regardless, team productivity is both more important, and easier to measure than individual productivity; and most proponents of remote work are only focused on the latter.
boston_clone 3y ago
Isn't bad communication a management issue, not a team performance issue? Some articles have pointed out that the major driver (from executives) to return to office is simply underperforming real estate investments. In short, the attrition, decreases in performance and morale, and environmental impacts are simply not worth the massive losses that would be incurred from the innumerable empty office parks.