Having worked from home for almost 20 years for different jobs, I’ll say that it’s much harder to work from home when you are not motivated to do the work. The house can get really clean when you’re avoiding a task. On the other hand, for one job, the 1.5 hours I saved on daily commute was billable work I was able to do that got charged to customers. Being part-time, with a baby and a husband in grad school, those hours were definitely better worked than spent on a commute, and my boss saved money on a smaller office. On the other hand, he did have trouble tracking down one of the other remote employees and eventually had to fire him.
One of the things people who actually do work from home like about it is that no one is looking over their shoulders so they can relax while they’re doing their work. Apparently this is especially true for graphic artists where they feel pressure when people walk behind them and make comments about the work - they can’t just let the creative juices flow because they’re always feeling judged. So I have to wonder if having offices again would help. One of the reasons I started working from home in the first place was that I had a job with an open-office plan that was so noisy, I couldn’t concentrate - people were talking, playing music (I hate ABBA now), screaming profanities while playing Doom… I do want to return to an office environment but the open-office layout has me worried. I’m really distractable and I know I’ll always be paying attention to people walking behind me or conversations nearby.
" * The only constraint on productivity was when workers had children at home they needed to look after."
That covers a lot of people doesn’t it? And I would question the “needed to look after” - even if a nanny were present, the kids will be a distraction both to the parent listening to their crying and because the kid is likely to try to spend time with the parent instead…
Well I know some people who are sending their kids to day care in spite of WFH. That way they don’t have to commute and the kid/s is also away when they’re working.
How is it any different from managing employees located in a different office and/or country? You don’t see them daily and depending on the country there can be a large time zone difference. You can’t check in with them during their work day. You catch them a little bit at the beginning or end of the day. I can’t imagine someone getting away with being consistently unavailable during normal working hours.
For more junior employees we always have them reporting to a local manager in the same office who is responsible for day to day oversight.
No one gets away with being unavailable constantly, but people do intentionally squeeze through the cracks if you’re focused on other things and not on top of them. Go read some financial forums like Bogleheads – everyone’s bragging that they’ve changed jobs twice over the past two year, are phoning it in 15–20 hrs a week from home and making ~$300–400k. Lazy overpaid pricks!
That’s insane if the standards are that low. I don’t get how that’s possible in a scrum team with daily stand ups. Someone would have to be solving problems and writing code much faster than people think it takes to maintain that. It’s obvious pretty fast when people are assigned stuff in Jira, and there are agreed upon estimates on the effort required for it.
Even I’ve the same question. If there’s a task X with 10 days sprint timeline agreed upon by product owner, PM and tech manager it’s tracked in scrum and jira. If I’m a lazy worker I can cheat at max 1-2 months. Companies using slack can have managers use huddle which tries to replicate ad-hoc requirement from manager. If a person completes X task in 5 days because of smartness then complaining about that is seen as jealousy, in my opinion.
I’m not in software so our deliverables are different and harder to quantify. It’s common for tasks to take longer or be harder than expected. Good employees dig in to the challenging assignments and figure out a way to make it work. Lazy employees check the boxes on the easy tasks to give the appearance of productivity all the while making excuses about the assignments that take them out of their comfort zone.
my kids are at school/aftercare/camps and I wfh. especially when they are younger. as they get older and more self sufficent, I let them have a week of endless screen time and they keep quiet and to themselves.
i know with the recent Tesla announcement, people in my world (Auto OEMs working on EVs) are already looking to poach talent that doesn’t want to go back to the office at Tesla.
