Telecommuting/ WFH and Remote Work

The problem is with the managers.

In a 2014 study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, researchers ran an experiment in which a NASDAQ-listed company randomly assigned call center employees to work from home or the office. Working from home resulted in a 13% performance increase and a 50% lower attrition rate.

COVID-era studies are finding similar results. In a July 2022 working paperfrom the National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers reported back on an experiment in which programmers were randomly assigned either to fully office-centric work or to a hybrid work model. Hybrid workers had 35% less attrition and wrote 8% more code. A separate data analysis of 30,000 users from the employee monitoring software company Prodoscore found a 5% increase in productivity during the pandemic work-from-home period.

Remote work productivity also appears to be improving over time. An ongoing research group from Stanford and several other top universities found that remote work efficiency increased from 5% better than in-person in May 2020 to 9% in May 2022.

So why do half of all business leaders ignore the data? The key lies in how they evaluate performance.

Leaders are trained to evaluate employees based on “face time,” or the amount of time an employee spends in the office. Those who come early and leave late are perceived and assessed as more productive. This perception, known as proximity bias, leads to managers favoring and rewarding employees in closest proximity to them. But given that studies have shown that in-office employees actually work between 36% and 39% of the time, the association of employee presence in the office with increased productivity is incorrect.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/remote-hybrid-work-17437036.php

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I never understood promoting the people who are working the most hours. How on earth will they handle MORE responsibility? Then companies wonder why people are promoted to the point they fail or burnout. Every team should have quantifiable metrics of performance. If not, then outsource it to the lowest bidder, because it’s not important.

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What does that mean when SF startups get their exit? Oh right, all that cash won’t be coming to SF. It’ll go to wherever the people live.

America’s WFHiest cities/places in 2021 (population 65,000 or more)

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https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-executives-call-remote-employee-surveillance-spying-wrong-2022-9

That’s hilarious. I was talking to my boss about flying back to Michigan then driving down to Florida with my dad in December. I want to stop in Nashville to check it out. His reply, “You should rent an AirBnB and spend a week there and really see what it is like. Just work from there and take some days off too.” He literally doesn’t care where I am.

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I also heard of many first time buyers who bought in Mountain house, Manteca, Lathrop etc. My guess is such people have to rarely show up to office.

The shift to working from home drove more than half of the increase in house and rent prices during the pandemic and will likely drive up costs and inflation going forward as the shift becomes permanent, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San > Francisco.

“The transition to remote work because of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a key driver of the recent surge in housing prices,” economists Augustus Kmetz and John Mondragon, of the San Francisco Fed, and Johannes Wieland of the University of California, San Diego, wrote in a note published Monday.
Remote Work Drove Over 60% of House-Price Surge, Fed Study Finds

Exactly…

If some place has value because of less commute(and literally nothing else), AND if the value of less commute diminishes over long term the value of the asset representing it will reduce as well, while other areas which had bad commute but good everything else will gain.

Just bringing back a topic/question that was mentioned/asked by @SVRE long time back.

Work-From-Home or Return to the Office? A Rift Is Emerging Among US Workers

Shared by Satya Nadella

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/hybrid-work-is-just-work

153% increases in meetings. Yeah, that’ll help people get more done.

Working From Home Is Sticking in US as Office Occupancy Stalls

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