We as a species had the opportunity to build a leisure society many times over the decades. We just prefer torturing each other with meaningless busy theater.
Software engineer in New England here. I love love my by hybrid setup.
I go to the office whenever I want. Some days I feel more productive there, other days I want to sleep in a bit and work from home. I can charge my car for free at the office so that’s a big motivator lol.
Needless to say, I’m happy and extremely productive. I’m sure the company benefits greatly.
My non-sciencey group of “experts in the obvious” said the same thing.
Still, it’s good to have solid data backing us up as well.
The lead scientist’s name must be Captain Obvi Ous, assisted by Pro. Casti Nator
How does that help employers?
LOL I just got one of those “all the data shows we’re Better Together, so we’re increasing in-office days. No, we’re not going to share any of the data.” emails.
Sadly idiot corpos think it makes them less money, so they don’t care
To be fair, most higher ups who keep going on about people not working when they’re home, are lying. They would notice pretty quick if 30% of employees suddenly did 50% less work. Some of them believe it, but that’s mostly projection.
They like use it as an excuse, because they know real reasons would make them sound like idiots. It’s things like not wanting to “waste” money on their 10year rental of office space that no one uses. Can’t keep paying some office managers and people in HR if there’s no one in the office. And so on and so forth. They literally want to justify their expenditure at the cost of company revenue, because they literally only care if the number for their department is positive of negative during budget review. Anything beyond that, including the company being run into the ground, does not matter to them evne if they were personally responsible.
TL;DR: Modern MBA education needs to be thrown out and rebuilt from scratch
. It’s things like not wanting to “waste” money on their 10year rental of office space that no one uses.
Which I’ve seen as a slightly hidden transfer of expense to the employee.
Company sees their empty office building as a waste of money but your home/apartment being empty for 8+ hours 5 days a week is okay because it doesn’t affect their bottom line.
Also your commute-related expenses, which are often a fairly substantial sum, and your uncompensated commute time.
If an employee isn’t doing any work at home and you don’t notice, you are incredibly shit. Either they did nothing before and you should have noticed then, or you should notice that now they are doing nothing.
Too bad the folks in charge don’t care about your happiness.
The assumption is that if you have time to be happy, you have time to work more so happiness needs to be stamped out to increase productivity. That’s of course a myth as data shows happy workers are more productive. The result is workers stuck in the twilight zone of not being happy and not getting more work done. It’s one of the business religious beliefs.
Who gives a fuck what they care about? Too bad folks don’t take matters into their own hands.
This whole thing is just garbage and should probably be taken down -
- The writing quality is low and looks AI generated
- It doesn’t actually link to a study that agrees with its conclusions
- The one study that was linked shows the following results:
- More sleep (+27 minutes)
- Less physical exercise (-50 minutes)
- Worse diet (reduced amount of calories from protein)
- Higher alcohol consumption (increased amount of calories from alcohol)
- “no changes in weight or wellbeing”
- “however, their impact on health and wellbeing may accumulate over time.”
I don’t think it’s even out of the question that the study actually supports the opposite conclusion, but all of this of course doesn’t matter since there was a massive confounding variable involved in that there was a global pandemic going on during the study.
WFH enabled so many Americans who are disabled to actually hold a job, a job they wanted, and this is a direct attack on disabled employees and disabled people. WFH is inherently more accessible so you end up with more disabled employees, which cost your work sponsored health insurance to go up, which they do not want, so they erect this barrier of being in the office to prevent people who need to work from home from being employed there. Disallowing WFH is explicitly to get around the ADA
RTO is ableism
I would argue that Work from Home is an economic booster. More people get to work, less time and fuel spent on commuting, unneeded buildings don’t consume money anymore, social distancing, and so forth. It is just good all around.
Still waiting on the government of Canada to release their GBA+ report on imposing a return to the office that applies the same way to all even though pre-COVID such a measure didn’t exist and they intentionally hired people that couldn’t RTO during COVID… You know, a report that public servants are told is a necessity whenever a decision with a big impact has to be made…
Excellent point. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I think that’s very likely an aspect of it.
As soon as we created highspeed telecommunications possible across vast distances and that we are making them faster all the time … making people travel to a work station makes less and less sense.
What does it make in a modern city? Let’s make tens of thousands of people wake up at 6am and all travel to work at the exact same time every day. Let’s make them all travel simultaneously at roughly the same two hour time slot every morning in the same direction.
Then at the end of the day, let’s make them all make the return trip between 4pm and 6pm.
All because we want a captive group of workers to perform menial tasks they could perform in a couple of hours at home but instead they get to work and wander around and waste as much time as possible to justify why they are at work.
My friend just lost a dream job they barely had for a week because the company went full RTO and they wanted him to relocate and he couldn’t.
Fuck RTO.
Why don’t they add in shit employers care about like it makes everyone work 10x better only fools return to office. Shit like that. Shit people can use. The ghouls don’t give a flying fuck if we are happy or not, eat better, sleep better. They want metrics that show if workers can produce more or not for same wages and same hours. Period.
Who is this study even for, who commissioned it.
Even when presented with the numbers they don’t care. Management told us, going from 2 days in the office to full WFH increased our productivity by 15%, they’re still forced to make us go back 3 days a week (so more than before COVID) and they told us that a reduction in productivity is expected.
When IBM senior management was asked by a staff member for data supporting their RTO policy one of the managers literally said, “I’ve managed teams before. I don’t need data.”
Shit people can use.
Sounds like people could use unions.
Your statement is very absolutist therefore it cannot be true.
Personally I did WFH for 4 years as a contractor and now I am back to office, but not always for forced to be in only 50% and I much prefer it, to the extent that I am doing more than 50% in the office.
I still have the option to just not go in if I don’t feel like it, I am a bit under the weather or just haven’t slept well or have stuff to take care of and I don’t go in on fridays because traffic coming out of the city those days is horrendous.
I would probably quit if I had to dogmatically go in everyday no matter what.
Much as I agree with the headline, this site appears to be entirely AI generated slop.
And there’s no study to be found there.
In other news, the sky is blue and water makes you wet.
