Remote Work Can (and Does) Boost Employee Productivity | Hacker News Reader

Remote Work Can (and Does) Boost Employee Productivity

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152 pointsrcvictorino82 comments

After having spent plenty of time in multiple environments, any kind of absolute statements one way or the other are bound to be incorrect. IMO it's highly person and situation specific. For me the best order of productivity is:

1. In office but not surrounded by co-workers i.e. can focus for long hours without distractions.

2. At Home and not distracted by family members or other "temptations/errands" at home.

3. Office with co-workers

4. Home with family members/errands to take care of, which there can be plenty of during these Covid days.

Some people don't like to be alone and for them Option (1) isn't going to work. They like to be surrounded by other working people to have that sense of group work which helps power them through. For them Option (3) will clearly be the best.

Beyond that it also comes down to individual habits. Do you have a system to work at home? Without that one can be pretty ineffective. What's your "sustained focus" mechanism or algorithm? It can be a mix of:

- Micro goals system that works intra-day not just inter-day.

- Shutting off distractions by keeping the phone in a separate room (if the job allows, since computer can still relay most of the information)

- Clever use of headphones with the right kind of music or background noise that works for you.

- Some notion and measure of self-accountability.

- many others

The current environment is a pretty good time (and test) to strengthen any of the productivity habits. It takes practice but I don't see what the alternative is.

> IMO it's highly person and situation specific

Yeah, I wish this was more normal to aim for, "It depends". Everyone is always trying to come up with a silver bullet that works for everything, and once they find something that works for them, they try to shove it down everyone's throat.

Same happened when "open floor offices" gained popularity, the cargo culting began and now you're a bad company unless you have a open floor office. Same is happening with remote work.

As someone who mostly does frontend, I need to be able to work tightly with product and design teams, to communicate and ask questions during implementation.

But back when I did backend work, I could mostly just receive requirements from product and frontend team, spend time in isolation to fulfill those requirements and my work was done (most of the time at least, not always).

IMO the real reason open floor plans persist is because it's cheaper for the company than the alternatives (cubicles, offices). The more people you can pack into work "pods" the better.

The usual cost argument for open floor plans is that by devoting less square feet to each employee, you save money on rent. (The costs to actually put in a door and some sheet rock walls is a one time expense that isn't very high in comparison to the monthly costs for rent.)

The reality though is that if employees are less productive, any savings in rent will be small compared to the costs associated with lower worker productivity (assuming you have expensive employees like engineers etc).

TBH you should hard stop on errands and temptations. Just set aside time on the calendar for them and keep it in sync with your flow. These can be very damaging to productivity since they are disruptive.

Agree with the idea that it depends a lot on many factors, many of them unique to each person. I'm sad that we interpret averaged figures as "data proves that [...]" as if we were trying to win a war of opinions instead of trying to make everyone's life better.

What kind of work do you do? What type of person are you? What's your work space, both at the office and at home? Who's your boss and which are the work dynamics at your workplace? How many distractions do you have there vs at home? How long do you have to commute if you go to the office? And how annoying is it?

I feel we are still pretty new at all this and really suck at it. There are many ideas very unexplored, like making pairs or small groups from time to time to let employees that are geographically close work together in some projects, and have flexibility to organize their work inside their own group. Who knows, maybe in 100 years, for the types of jobs that allow it, we won't have such strict employee - company relationships, and we will focus more on projects, with spaces and teammates being something more flexible, where we have a say in the way we want to organize. That might be interesting.

> any kind of absolute statements one way or the other are bound to be incorrect.

The article: "Data proves it: Remote work boosts productivity." "This groundbreaking study, involving 16,000 participants, was conducted by Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom"

Of course different people work better in different modes. But since there's no reason to believe that we are uniformly distributed through those modes, one mode could be net more productive by objective absolute measures even if lots of people are in a suboptimal mode.

The mistake people and companies will inevitably make is believing that because, on net, having everyone work from home makes people more productive, it will make a specific person more productive.

In other words, companies may misinterpret this study as "everyone working from home" is the optimal solution.

But the optimal solution is some people working from home and some people not.

Agreed. I just looked at the study itself, and there's an important fact that the article does not mention. There were two test groups WFH and on-site. The WFH groups were volunteers, and their outcomes were better.

It's interesting that the net productivity of the on-site workers did not go up despite the removal of the self-selected WFH-curious population.

The study: https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/...

That is a really important detail I must say.

This is great in that it shows that people who volunteer to work from home end up being more productive at home. However, knowing that you are part of a study that is measuring how effective people are at home and in the office and being someone who volunteered to work from home, there are clearly incentives for those assigned to work from home to work harder and for those assigned to work in the office to work less hard.

Except the people who worked in the office also volunteered to stay, so why wouldn't they work harder too so they don't have to start working at home when they don't want to?

Sorry, that is just pertaining to the first part of the study. After seeing those results they did indeed allow all who wanted to work from home and saw an increase in their productivity.

> "This groundbreaking study, involving 16,000 participants, was conducted by Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom"

I clicked through to the study and it is 16,000 call center employees. This simply doesn't translate to a lot of other jobs.

If you are a call center employee, you're probably not doing a lot of collaborative work. Moreover, it's easy to track your time on the phone, so being at home doesn't necessarily make it easier for you to slack off.

Also, of note, the participants all volunteered for it. It's a strong assumption to assume that people who want to work from home being more productive will mean that everyone working from home will improve productivity.

In short, this article makes a lot of assumptions about how the data would generalize. A more accurate, but less click-baity title would be "Remote Work Can (And Does) Boost Employee Productivity For Certain Types of Workers".

Remote work seems to slow EVERYTHING down every time my teams have been fully (or near fully) remote. I expect the shortening of the work week to boost productivity, but I don't see remote work doing the same, at large.

How do you explain successful fully remote orgs such as Gitlab, Hashicorp, and Zapier (in no particular order, just off the top of my head)?

It's possible to succeed while being non optimal.

Fully remote orgs attract people who want to work remotely. I, for one, don't work as well at home as I do in the office, even with all the distractions. So I'd probably not take a gig at one of these companies.

You can't take a self-selected group of people and make broad generalizations about the entire population.

Tough to fully answer this question without context, but a few thoughts which may be useful. I work at GitLab, the world's largest all-remote organization, and have 14 years of experience in remote settings. I penned the guides you'll see below.

Hybrid-remote environments are tough if you don't have leadership on the office side of the equation implementing remote-first practices, such that everything is optimized for remote-first. Otherwise, your remote staff are always a second tier and at a disadvantage. https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/how-to-w...

It's possible that you're operating in Phase 1 of remote adaptation, which is imitating the design, structure, norms, ebbs and flows of an office environment. This is passable but not optimal. https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/phases-o...

Many office norms become slower when you try to copy/paste into a virtual world, which sheds light on the reality that those norms aren't the ideal way to accomplish the work. Instead of looking through the lens of "why doesn't this process transfer well to the virtual world?," look through the lens of "how could we be a more transparent and efficient team if we didn't have the burdens of the office?" In a way, it's scarcity vs. abundance mindset. https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/what-not...

Remote isn't for everything, and it isn't for everyone. It needs to be implemented well with intentional leaders, just the same as a colocated team needs intentional leadership to thrive. The conversation is often framed as us vs. them because that's the recipe for clicks, but it's a weak argument. Remote can work, colocated can work. You need great leadership, documented processes and culture, and company-wide trust in both instances.

Yes, but the overwhelming consensus I read on other forums is the report of the failure of the work-from-home policy at Yahoo some years ago.

So, this is a counterpoint to the current absolute-statement circulating online.

I was extremely productive WFH full time till the stay-at-home started. Now I've the wife WFH and 2 kids to take care of. I can't get any sustained work done.

IMHO working from home only really works if you are alone (or the other people are also working from home, i.e. quiet and considerate). Sure you might be able to get an hour or two of quality work time while your partner and kid are watching a movie but the rest of the time is a nightmare.

I have worked from home for a while now. I have a home office that is just for work. I work from home to be more flexible, remove my commute and remove physical office interruptions. And because I just generally prefer being on my own when I work.

Even with a dedicated home office I find working from home very difficult when others are around such as weekends.

Cannot agree more!

Yeah, absolute statements about this (and many things) are rather silly. It depends on so many variables - office setup/environment, home setup/env, type of work, personality, coworkers, commute distance, etc.

Everyone will have to figure out what works best for their particular situation. For some that'll be remote, for some office and for others a mix of the two.

I think the important thing is for companies to consider the options in a thoughtful, big picture way. Also not assume that current remote productivity is indicative of remote work during non-pandemic times, heh.

Right, there are always tradeoffs. Some engineers think LOC is a measure of productivity but 2 days of architecture discussion could save 100s of hours. At the same time, constant Slack messages and all day meetings create too much overhead. There is no silver bullet. I've always felt it best to have each team run how it runs best and let the team leads handle the synchronization. It is hard to have teams go off and not build the wrong thing even with documentation. Managers have to understand not just the what but also the how and why.

Additionally, some people like me hate working from home. I don't feel part of a team at home. It feels more like a hated chore at the house. I've bought co-working memberships to help separate work life from home life. It helps some people create and maintain healthy balance. Time together in person builds relationships in a way you can't over the phone. This happens today at larger companies that have several "work from office" locations. It creates a very us vs them mentality. People don't get the benefit of the doubt and (bad) assumptions are made.

The productivity boost I have seen for teams is the large drop in meetings. Better yet meetings in many cases end when the content runs out instead of just dragging on to fill the time slot.

Then top it off with many converting their time normally spent commuting into extra time working. I see more IM lights green than ever before and for much longer. There is no longer that need to get out early to beat traffic.

Yet without clear objectives work from home can end up with far less getting done and there are people who just cannot work unsupervised which is something that many are loathe to acknowledge. Some of this definitely is insuring you have your space to work in and your family respects it.

I've found the meetings I do have seem more productive with everyone remote. In my case, most meeting I attend always have someone remote. This also isn't entirely new to me, because my team has be unofficially practicing the "one person remote, everyone remote" rule, but now it's company-wide, and it's awesome.

First, it puts everyone on a level playing field. Everyone hears the same thing. If we're using video, everyone is a face in a box, instead of getting the "fly on the wall" view of a bunch of people in a conference room.

It forces you to talk in a slightly different way to avoid talking over each other. Once you get a turn to speak, you have to speak more complete thoughts, and don't put in short pauses between sentences that confuse others making them think you're done talking.

I'm way more productive using my multi-monitor, full-size mouse and mechanical keyboard setup than I am on just my laptop. I can take notes faster, lookup details faster, etc. And not just me -- I've noticed a couple times where we were able to solve an issue during a meeting because others were able to lookup detail needed for a decision/action (that we didn't realize before the call), where often in the past that would have been done after the meeting and then we'd have yet another follow-up discussion.

I'm not sure if these results will hold in the long term. Richard Hamming makes the case better than I can:

> I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

(from http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html )

I think this is a broad generalization. Too broad. It depends on what type of work you do. It depends on your personality, etc.

I am working from home third week right now, and I dislike it A LOT. I've worked from home for 6 years in the early 2000s. I love office. I love socializing. I love walking from one floor to another. I actually like my morning commute, etc.

> I actually like my morning commute

This one has really surprised me! (It probably helps that I have an easy bus commute.) I actually have been finding that my evening commute is critical to my mental health -- who'd have guessed that, it's usually the other way around! It's been the way I detach from work, and separate my "work headspace" from my "home headspace". Historically I've been really good at leaving work at work and home at home, and this crisis has been revealing just how big of a role my commute played in doing that. There are ways you can cope (e.g., end your workday by going for a walk), but it's taking a lot of experimentation to find a routine that works well for me.

When I was commuting, I had a theory that looking out the bus window or biking into work was important because it forced me to be aware of the distance and time separating my home and work. It allowed me to transition between the two, whereas being deep into a research paper or carpooling with a nicely chatty coworker did not.

Same here, I don't drive so my commute is 80% public transportation, 20% taxis. I do walk sometimes, but only if the weather is nice. I actually miss public transportation and I am sure I am not alone.

I too prefer office to WFH. I miss socializing, randomly taking meeting co-workers at their desk, fun gossiping etc. Another huge problem is WFH induces guilt if nothing gets done in a week. Working from office even i don't commit for more than 2 weeks no body ask about as long as i show up to work.

> It depends on your personality

This is the biggest factor IMHO.

Working from home is similar to being self-employed in my experience.

It requires you to be strict and disciplined with your time and priority management and concentration. You need to be comfortable working by yourself without your mind wandering off.

Many (probably most) people who like the idea of working from home but have only ever done a day or two a month tend to see it as pure luxury. Of course it is in some ways but then I would argue working in a nice office with an on-site (probably subsidised) restaurant and most likely other on-site (or nearby) facilities such as a gym are also luxuries.

I am a very sociable person but I hate being interrupted when I work. I don't like to socialise by going for a coffee with colleagues. I just like to get on with my work and take mini-breaks as needed to clear my head by myself.

Out of work I love meeting friends and family for things. Coffee, lunch, dinners out, having people round, etc. It is just when it comes to work I much prefer being by myself in my bunker than sitting in an open office with loads of background noise and interruptions.

My wife is working from home right now as well (as is our 7yo son!) and she really does not like it! She used to always make comments about how "lucky" I was to be working from home and would love when she had the odd day at home as well but now she is on her third week of it she realises how much she misses and needs that social element of the office.

So while my wife thought she would love the freedom of working from home full-time she now realises it is very different to the odd day or two. She feels overwhelmed with everything.

Obviously this situation isn't normal with having our son at home as well and literally being on a government set lockdown but I think she has realised that while she moans about the office she actually is quite fond of it!

As for me, well I am just trying to go on the best I can. We split the day up into chunks so we can get calls/VC done while the other is doing the provided schoolwork with our son, etc. It has been difficult for me as well but that is to be expected and as I am better adjusted to working from home I am trying my best to make it easier for my wife to get her work done. Hopefully only a few more weeks before things can (slowly) start to return to normal.

Remote work changes the economics of productivity.

In an office, you're there for ~8 hours per day. You might as well produce as much value for the company as possible since there isn't much else you can do there.

Remotely, there is reason to think about how much effort you're exerting & if the resulting productivity is worth it. Do you want to get a promotion? Do you want to scrape by? Do you want job security? In an office, it's clear which of these paths to go down. But when you're remote, all of a sudden you are able to exercise the trade-off between spending time to produce more for your employer vs using that time for things that benefit you and you only. And it's very possible to produce well above the bar of employability and have more free time for friends, family, entrepreneurship, etc than you could get when you're forced to spend 8 hours on your employer's property.

I think if the space is relatively well optimised, remote working is fantastic.

I suspect, because of Covid-19, a lot of people have just been thrown into remote-working like they've just been thrown into a swimming pool fully clothed.

Not an ideal first experience, but they'll have time to get used to it.

Can't beat my favourite tunes, control of my time, conversations, no distractions but for my wife. Socialise when I choose to. Remote working ftw.

On my current team, we would all WFH on Thursdays and Fridays as a norm. At the beginning of the month, we were told that we should WFH indefinitely because of COVID-19.

I've got a great office setup and am used to working from home, sometimes for a week or two at a time, depending on circumstances, but WFH during COVID-19 feels like something else entirely.

I don't even have kids to take care of, but some combination of 1) having my wife home during the day, 2) the feeling of being cooped up (even though I get outside time walking my dog in my suburban neighborhood), and 3) the foreboding feeling of existential dread taking a toll on my mental health has cut my productivity in half.

I hear that and agree. I'm all for remote-working but had to make some adjustments also in the current situation.

Being able to close the door when you need to focus really, really helps.

A lot like having an office in the old days. Having a defined working space and being able to shut it off when needed.

Perhaps, but the real question is whether the productivity increases of the younger/single workers will balance out the losses from the ones with families. I am personally at 50% of my normal capacity (possibly even less) given that I'm now in a home environment with constant distractions.

Additionally, add the lack of school/childcare, people forced to stay in their homes (distracting each other even more), financial stresses, and the like, and it's hard to imagine this is a net productivity gain for society right now.

And the rest of us need a lifetime supply of adderall for a single day to focus at home instead of at a office :(

> Project management apps like GitHub, Jira, and Trello democratize critical knowledge.

This reads like marketing.

The problem with measuring remote work productivity is that you have to pick some set of metrics. We have always known that knowledge transfer is more difficult and just happens less with remote workers.

If you have a team of ten experts, each capable of independently focusing and being productive, you can easily see an uptick in “top-line” productivity metrics when you send them home and they are not constantly interrupted by meetings and office chatter.

The new member of your team is going to go through hell to ramp up, though.

This article grossly exaggerates the study that it cites. The Stanford study of 16,000 people showing increased productivity for those WFH studies a unique population of:

1) Call center workers

2) Who volunteered to work from home

Are you a call center worker who wants to work from home? Great, this study is pretty good evidence that on average you will be more productive.

Otherwise, take it for what it is. The data here may or may not apply to you, but it's a big stretch to make the bold general claim that this study proves that "remote workers are more productive than employees who work in the office," as this article suggests.

The company that I work for(DockYard) is totally distributed and fully remote, so my productivity stayed about the same since the lockdown in California was put in place. But a friend of mine who works for a big media company, whose bosses were pretty hesitant to let their employees work remotely, says that their superiors have noticed that productivity is actually up and are now very much open to remote positions now that they've witnessed the benefits. A few weeks ago, the answer probably would have been that employees could only work from home a few days out of the week. Now the answer is that employees can be totally remote. For the average business, that's a pretty big change of tune.

That said, I don't know if remote work necessarily boosts productivity across the board. Some people prefer to work in an office with other people around, and they probably work better that way. I do think that remote work can and does compete with a traditional work environment in terms of productivity.

We need more remote work to be available if we are going to reduce traffic, pollution, and urban congestion. Remote work allows people more free time during the day, reduces risk of injury and death, allows people to be better parents, and means you can live anywhere you want to. I don't ever want to work a non-remote job ever again if I can avoid it.

There are good and bad things about remote work. It's best when you have the right personality, a distraction free spot at home, and management that respects personal boundaries.

I am not a fan of these broad generalizations. I'm in my 4th week of working from home and my productivity dropped dramatically. I used to enjoy working from home, as I was doing it consistently for 1-2 days a week to be able to run a few errands and save on commute time. I used to be super productive. Woke up at 5, was online by 6:30 and off by 5 PM, sometimes getting a week's worth of work done in a single day. True focus. But now, even with great hygiene (bedroom is for sleep, study is for working, living room is for TV/Games/exercise) it's too much for me. I need the physical separation between my home and my work. I feel I need to chew the fat with other folks in the kitchen, I miss having lunch with my work friends in conference rooms, I miss being able to help others debug stuff on their computer by moving my chair. I dread the fact that I'm gonna supposed to be doing that for another month. I think broadly there should be a balance for this. Some people thrive when working from home. I don't. I just need a day or two to truly focus but other than that, even as an introvert, I need office time. And it pains me to write this, I love my family wholeheartedly but I think there needs to be healthy amount of away time in order to keep things sane.

Pessimistic interpretation: employees can work harder than ever before, non-stop. Optimistic interpretation: employees have more freedom to focus. Realistic interpretation: it works for some employees but not for everyone.

My anecdotal opinion. I personally am working harder than ever.

My first two weeks working from home: unbelievably productive. Best two weeks since I first started in this role.

The last four weeks: terrible. My "home office" used to be my hobby zone, with all my books and other things I tinker with to "zone out" after work. I hate coming in here now. I'm always getting pings, late in the evening, as everyone else is always in front of their screens too. Some of this is the nature of the work from home situation (during a pandemic) and other things are disrupted (schools) that wouldn't be in a different mass work from home scenario.

The feeling of being on-call is what sucks the soul from a worker's body. I've experienced it off and on over the last 20 years and IMHO it's one of the great problems of our time. I'd like to see labor move towards a direction more like Uber, where you decide when you're on the clock, and when you're off, you're off.

One of the difficulties though is that the Uber model only works for saturated and playbook industries like driving, delivering food, walking dogs, etc. It doesn't work so well for the decision-making tasks of more complex jobs where there are ramifications for every step:

https://blog.ycombinator.com/read-this-before-you-build-uber...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15150083

Do you have separate work/home computers/mobile devices?

This for me -- along with dressing in work-attire (even when I'm at home) during office hours and changing out after hours -- helps me establish a psychological separation between work/home in the same space. It really works.

I have a KVM setup that switches between my work laptop and my home desktop, and only 1 computer is on at any given time. (Ideally work computer and home computer are in separate rooms, but I don't have the luxury of space in a city apartment)

Work phone doesn't get checked after hours.

I have a separate work laptop. No separate phone though, but that is a good idea ... I have an old iPhone I suppose I could wipe and just use that with work. Apartment is too small to keep things physically separate.

I hear you -- I live in a very small place too. 1 desk, 2 monitors, desktop box (home computer) under desk, and a small side table for the work laptop. Total footprint = 15 sqft. The HDMI + USB switch (which functions as a KVM) is what makes it work. I only need one set of keyboard/mice/monitors and can toggle between work/home.

It depends what you're doing. My experience is that it mostly works but is pretty useless for doing design collaboration where you need a whiteboard, or brainstorming sessions with more than three people.

This is huge. As parent points out, there are some tasks that are very, very hard to do remotely. I'm not aware of anything that's hard to do in an office per se, but there certainly are a lot of tasks which benefit from concentration and focus. Those tasks get easier if the remote environment is calm and the office environment is not.

It seems to me that most software development is primarily the latter sort of work, which may explain why so many people here advocate remote work. But not everything is software yet. Just try debugging a circuit board over a video conference and you'll see what I mean....

>Remote workers don’t sleep until noon, wear pajamas all day, and slack off because no one’s watching. Studies suggest the opposite: remote workers are more productive than employees who work in the office.

Speak for yourself, I do wear my PJs all day, especially now when I know I won't really be going out anywhere after work except the grocery store. For some people they need the work costume. For me, I go for maximum comfort and minimal effort when I can get away with it.

I also work in a fairly intense frequent problem solving environment where I'm faced with new problems I haven't seen before on a regular basis, similar to what a lot of creative workers also deal with. When it's at the office and I have strict timelines, we all run around pretending like we can just turn on/off the creativity needed for advanced problem solving but for most people I've spoken to sincerely about it... they're just like me and there's no on/off switch.

At home I have the flexibility of taking on a problem, hitting a hurdle, then taking a relaxing break until aha later a Eureka moment hits and a new strategy emerges. Viola, progress, and my employer wasn't paying for the time I was relaxing, they just get to pay for more productive times and I enjoy the less productive times. Banging your head against problems repeatedly may be required as optics for some management but it just doesn't jive with reality and is very wasteful, for everyone.

I hate, hate, hate working from home. There are so many distractions, and it messes with my work/life balance in various pernicious ways. Yes, maybe I a more productive - but I am distinctly unhappier and often spend more time working. And our team's quality of work takes a huge hit.

I think the negatives of remote work are way underreported because a) it saves companies a lot of money and b) journalists and influencers are generally a self-selecting minority who prefer working alone.

I work from home for about a year. I found it quite hard at first. I think working part remote is preferrable (under normal situations I appreciate at the moment it isn't). However this is what I found worked for me:

* Having a routine. Getting up to work, commuting, working, going to gym, eating dinner, relaxing etc. is a routine. I find it gives me some structure to the day. If you are working remote I would encourage you to work out a routine and stick to it.

* You need to have a separate work space and have "working hours". I have a completely separate PC and office setup for work. Once I am out of that office it helps me mentally switch off from work. A friend of mine who runs his own business rents a small office (these can be inexpensive). However I am freelancer / contractor and this can be considered a business expensive.

* Make sure you go out for a break during the day. Make this part of your work routine.

* I typically have to drive about 1hr 30 minutes to the office. So that is typically a commute of 3 hours everyday. Doing this 5 times a week is tiring and adds up to 15 hours each week. That is 2 working days. However I do like the social aspects of an office. So being able to go in maybe 2 days a week, talk through solutions work face to face helps. But obviously not possible at the moment.

This is not universally true, and, furthermore - there's a serious issue here.

Working from home requires a level of personal discipline that a lot of people aren't used to. It took me years to be as effective, or more, at working from home than I am from the office - and that was (almost) always with the option to also be working from the office.

I'm hoping there are more resources and programs available to those working from home, especially for the first time, soon.

Except when it's a pandemic.

I've worked from home for 8 years running a software company, and so do all of my employees. All of our clients are discovering "work from home" which basically translates into "free vacation" for them, so we're not getting a lot of feedback.

This is a particular rare instance, obviously, but I think it is different than regular work-from-home because there is more existential dread interferring with productivity. I've given most of my employees time off because they were taking sick days or personal days to cope with getting food and dealing with spouses and children at home who aren't used to it. Heck, even I find myself sort of spinning on news and anxiety and my mind drifting from work (I've googled more about preppers/prepping than I ever have, and not just to laugh at them.) And we've talked about this during All-hands staff meetings, but I don't let on the extent to which it stresses me out personally. (Yay anonymous accounts!)

TL; DR: Normally I think WFH leads to better results for companies like mine, but under the current circumstances this isn't the case.

I've been at a remote company for about 20 months now and am wanting to get back to a non-remote company. It was nice at first and my productivity WAS higher, but now I feel like a code monkey and don't have much connection with decision makers and don't feel as "plugged-in" to the company/team pulse.

My preference would be 60-80% remote.

Although, I really enjoy remote work. I agree that it's health to have in-office / in-person interactions. Maybe one day a week.

(Maybe just not right now due to the virus)

Keep in mind that this company, Slab, has the tagline of: "A knowledge hub for the remote workplace."

Probably some bias here :)

I worry about working from home becoming a sort of class divide / opportunity thing. The COVID situation sort of made me think about this more.

I have a sizable house and space to work from home. I already have a nice desk and it is well equipped with monitors and etc.

For me being at home is not terrible.

For someone with a one bedroom apartment, the experience is probabbly dramatically different.

I met someone recently and despite working for years at a place where she was able to work from home. She didn't. She had a 1 bedroom apartment with her boyfriend and working on the little kitchen table was really not fun / hard.

She was really excited to work from home for the first time since they had bought a new house.

I wonder if those differences might play out as far as opportunity for people who don't have good resources at home.

It really depends on the space and how creatively you use it. I live in a relatively small 1-br and have no trouble. (I have a single desk with 2 monitors, and a HDMI + USB switch to toggle between home/work computers -- total footprint? 15 sqft. And it's comfortable).

The fact that your friend had a kitchen table makes me think her layout is optimized for other purposes. For 2 people, a small Parisien cafe table or a nook table are stylish, minimalist alternatives that would open up the space for a desk.

When I was a poor grad student years ago, I lived in apartments as small as 400 sqft (total) and never had any issues with my home computer setup. It does take having minimalist (but often inexpensive) furniture and having the spatial sense to use space efficiently though. Not sure I would extrapolate it to a class issue. Maybe an urban/suburban/rural divide? I have friends with rural/suburban upbringings who feel claustrophobic in these settings, but I grew up in a hyperurban environment where small spaces were the norm.

I've worked remotely for several years, and more recently in an office and my gut feeling is that people tend to use presentee-ism as a proxy for deciding whether someone is producing work.

As for most things, it's highly contextual whether or not remote work is more productive. It mainly depends on the organization you work for. If the work is physical, then working remotely is obviously an impediment. If your organization is focused on creating non-physical things without much need for physical proximity to other coworkers, then remote work is ideal.

There are just as many distractions involved with a physical work place, if not more (excluding things like watching your kids) than there are at home. Myself, personally, a large part of my day in the office involves walking to the restroom, waiting for the elevator, walking to meeting rooms (up to 4-5 different spaces, some on different floors), walking to the break room (lunch, coffee, etc), being polite and diplomatic by engaging in very casual office conversations whenever one starts, handling very low priority interruptions by coworkers, and not the least of which is preparing for, and performing a commute, of which I am not paid for. Pile on a few unnecessary meetings that could easily be e-mails and you've just lowered my productivity considerably.

So in my experience, the effort involved with physical presence around others is real and takes up a considerable amount of time. I'm not saying these activities are useless, face time is important, and it's great to be social with your coworkers, and is invaluable for improving your team skills, but am I working on a deliverable during these activities?

At home, I can use the restroom, prepare lunch while watching a long-running program run on my laptop, read and send an e-mail, all in the space of 10 or 15 minutes. Consider doing the same tasks at your office. Would they take more or less time than at home?

Also noteworthy is the idea that remote work forces a person to collaborate through written word, which is not always necessary when you're physically present. Writing down your ideas has the side effect of compacting your ideas into their essential components. This turns out to be a nice way to work if you're a knowledge worker.

I think what I realized from this mass WFH situation is that it doesn’t work. It’s inefficient, burdensome, and contains too much friction. I thought mass WFH will be a sign of progress, but I personally hate it.

Care to elaborate what's inefficient in your current situation? Ex. what your setup is at home, whether you have 12 kids all screaming 24/7 (hah), what situation is causing you ire?

2 kids, but I’m not even including that. Teleconference where multiple people jump over each other, web connectivity issues in an apartment, having people explain things to me on anything besides a piece of paper, the intangibility of reviewing things as a team, missing the pleasure of someone popping by my desk to just chat and see someone’s face.

Some finding WfH as a developer:

- It requires more effort to communicate with colleagues which made my queries more concise (less time wasted in pointless discussions).

- The effect of walking/cycling/driving to my office prepares me for the working day, there is no substitute for this when working from home.

- Not having any colleagues around felt freeing and I spent more time exploring avenues I would not have done otherwise.

- Not being in the office, I had little other social interactions during the day.

(edits for formatting and grammar)

This kind of depends: if you live alone or you have the ability to isolate yourself from everyone else you live with, be it flatmate, partner, family, etc., then yes. In that respect I am absolutely loving it and I find a lot more motivation to work(contrary to what I imagined).

HOWEVER, If you have to work with 2 4 year olds running around all day long(or someone who requires attention in any way), I'd argue things change drastically.

WFH has usually been great for me...

However, this time everyone is at home including a toddler, so productivity is definitely impacted, luckily many are in the same situation.

I thought this switch to 100% remote work would be fine, but it turns out to be very difficult to manage with nothing else to do. Having ADHD and not being able to get exercise to only make development 80% of my day rather than the most exciting thing I can expect to do really fucks with my head. I end up just bugging my partner and not focussing, which may lead to me losing my current job.

The hardest part is communicating async. I've worked remotely for a while (even wrote a book[0]) and interestingly, the hard part is not to initiate async conversations, but to decline synced conversations. Gotta get better at saying no.

[0] https://www.emergencyremote.com/EmergencyRemote.pdf

Sorta. If you think back to maker schedule and manager schedule - this seems to have opposite effects on me.

I'm getting more stuff done personally, but my ability to manage a team is suffering a fair bit.

Also noticing that the subordinate's disposition matters greatly. If they're not self-starters (to borrow a cliched phrase) then you're in for a bad time managing them. Drip feeding people remotely is just painful

If you have good process in place, developers and operations people benefit in many ways.

In my personal experience, it's a mixed bag. Ad hoc events outside of normal process are more difficult. Building a new process is harder as the tools aren't as good as in-person. The bigger the team or more teams the higher the friction.

That said, the tools we have today are exponentially better than they were 20 years ago.

I think one huge problem is work-life balance and having proper leisure. Remote work on some days has been massively productive. Lately, though? Not so much...

It also goes without saying that it depends on how good your remote setup is. I have a fairly nice setup for docking, with dual monitors and a keyboard/mouse. Software also matters, which in some circumstances can be tricky.

I know a guy who owns an entirely remote work company. He definitely pointed out that personality is key. One of the things they do is ask if people have good friends networks outside of work. They found people who didn't have the ability to have a social life without work did not do well or last long.

But you know what kills remote work productivity? Continuously being called and invited to pointless meetings all the day.

Stop doing meetings and just write down email. Asynchronous communication boosts the productivity even more

there is no one size fits all in my experience (1). some people work better remotely. some people can't work well remotely.

individuals are of course the most important variable, but please don't overlook that culture and tools can make a huge difference (either way).

(1) WFH for most of past 15 years in range of roles including small remote-only startup founder; mid-size remote-first founder/ceo; exec in large remote-last multi-national.

No doubt about it.

When you are alone at home, self-isolated, without any co-workers around you to take your focus away, your productivity will skyrocket.

What if you have a family to take your focus away?

I find it's a mixed bag and more challenging now when everyone else is home too. Some people are more productive at home and can set bounds between work and home stuff. Other people just can't do it very well. The good news is it's pretty obvious who is who.

> When you are alone at home, self-isolated, without any co-workers around you to take your focus away, your productivity will skyrocket.

Not necessarily, not all developer roles are created equally. Some need a tight feedback loop and some developers need to be around other humans in order to fulfill their social needs in general. Especially regarding the self-isolation part, which feels great if you're coming from a place where you're getting constantly distracted by other people, but after a while you're starting to feel lonely and disconnected unless you spend time with your co-workers and the stake holders of whatever you're working on.

Again, it depends on the situation, person and the overall context.

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