Thank you for the summary! This is the investigation I was looking for.

Disallowing remote with when it’s possible is anti-worker.

This really isn’t a study, so much as a lit review. Sort of. Anyway, in the fully remote section they cite three studies that argue show a fall in productivity. The first (Emmanuel and Harrington (2023)) found an 8% drop in call volume as a call center shifted to fully remote work at the onset of the pandemic. But their comparison group was a group of call center employees who were always remote. So even if you buy the argument that the change call volume is solely attributable to a drop in productivity, you cannot conclude that the productivity shift was caused by working from home, the group that shifted from on-location to remote work did 8% worse than the group than the always remote work!

The second study (Gibbs, Mengel and Siemroth (2022)) is, again, an analysis of call-center employees (this time in India) who shifted to remote work at the onset of the pandemic. They find no change in productivity, but that employees are working longer hours at home, which they argue means a real 8-19% drop in productivity.

The final study (Atkin, Schoar, and Shinde (2023)) is another firm from India which involved a randomized controlled study which finds an 18% drop in productivity for data entry work.

So, just taking their lit review at face value, one of their studies directly contradicts their argument, yet they somehow present it as if it is evidence of a causal relationship between working from home and productivity. Another study shows no effect, so they break out some razamataz math to try to turn no effect into a negative effect. Only one of the three studies shows a plausible effect.

Since these are the only three papers they cite to support their argument that fully remote work causes a drop in firm productivity, let’s look at them in more depth.

If you go to their references section, you find that there is not a Emmanuel and Harrington (2023) cited. Hey, that a bad sign. There is an Emmanuel and Harrington 2021, but its an unpublished paper. Maybe it got published and they just forgot to update the cite? I plugged the title into google scholar, and find one result, with no copy of the working paper, and no evidence of any sort of publication record from any journal. Plugging the title into regular google returns a “Staff Report” of the federal reserve bank of NY. So not a peer reviewed article. They employ whats known as a difference-in-difference design to compare employees who shifted from fully in person to fully remote. They report a 4% reduction in productivity for these workers, not the 8% reported in the original article. I just skimmed the article, so maybe they get their 8% figure someplace else. What is interesting to me though is that their DID models seem to show there is not any difference between the different groups for most of the periods of observation. IDK. I’d have to read more in-depth to make up my mind.

It seems like these conclusions, whatever you make of them should really only be applied to call-center work during the pandemic.

If the source of the article is suspect, where is the research by tech firms with a vested interest in cloud and communication platforms publishing counter studies?

Also, with both studies cited, the best argument is that workers are happy to work more than 8 hours a day. Does that mean you should expect workers to be on call for longer than an 8 hour day because they are working remote?

I must be in like some weird alternate reality because my boss recognises that the office is a distraction, and doesn’t go there often himself. We go there very seldomly, primarily to catch up with colleagues, but not to work on our tasks.

I get maybe 15-20% of my normal work done at the office.

Granted this might increase over time if I came in regularly but it’d never touch how productive I am at home. This rhetoric about losing productivity working from home is dangerous and bullshit.

That’s me too. Sure it’s useful once a week to sit down with my team but the rest of our work is solo or on an ad hoc debugging call where sharing screens actually makes things easier.

Even worse my office doesn’t even have enough desks for everyone, and even fewer of them are properly setup with a monitor from this decade. Each of I ur 3 mandatory office days is a complete crapshoot on whether you’ll actually get a proper workstation or will you be stuck at a table with your laptop all day.

They’re write offs where fuck all gets done. Some of my colleagues who are in meetings all day seem to be okay with the office but if you actually need to do work there’s little point in being there.

Dude, same. I’ve never been more productive than working from home specifically because people have to engage with me via teams or email instead of barging into the office and disrupting my work flow.

Shit… Did I commit that router config before Becky needed my help fixing her user error? Oh no, I did but I forgot to change the DNS on the DHCP pool so now I can’t hit the domain for remote authentication because they’re still using public DNS.

Fuck! I’ll just do it tomorrow when I have my coffee in hand and my cat buzzing happily, with lo Fi beats to overhaul WAN circuits to blaring.

Im the exact opposite. At home there are way too many distractions and temptations than in an office environment.

Im the same way, i just catchup with the coworkers and we spend most of the day chatting about various things and then a long lunch and at least two hours of meetings is basically my days in the office…at home no distractions, get shit done in the morning, make lunch, deal with any issues in the afternoon…can at least take a shit without smelling other peoples shit…

I’m like this too, but also social. I screw around with my coworkers so much in the office. I have to be home for my own good!

That’s obviously all due to the hard work and visionary leadership of upper management

Awesome! Eat the rich!

You also most likely don’t get paid more for being more productive.

Personally, I dissappear a lot during work from home just from pooping more because I’m not stressed out due to being around people all day

I was in the office 3 days this week. Got almost nothing done. Probably got more done half of today than the last 2 days

Meetings and distractions while in person

Same. We go into the office whenever the big bosses go in… so once every couple months. We get almost no work done on those days.

That’s a pay site

Something I’ve just realised going into the office is how much more unproductive I make everyone else.

If I’m not working at home, everyone else is free to keep working. But if I’m not working in the office I’m going to drag everyone in my team down to my level.

just so I can talk to your face in real

Just so we can keep the value of our office buildings high

There are peer reviewed studies saying otherwise

A lot of my colleagues want for everyone to be in office. Their justification is “well, when everyone is in office, I can just walk to a person and ask them for help”. Which is why it’s a bit annoying to work there as a knowledgeable person, everyone always asking you to help them, constantly.
Guess where are all the knowledgeable people going.

Sure, some people work better when surrounded by colleagues. Those people usually know that and will seek out on-site work, because it probably also makes them happier.

Bingo, some of us actually do like to get out of the house and physically go to work. It seems like everybody except corporate shills think that the whole world wants to work from home, but it would honestly drive me crazy.

But as you said, people like me are going to seek out jobs where that’s the expectation at the outset. It’s shitty to pull a bait and switch and force everybody to come in when they are used to working from home.

Yeah but they are also the ones who are gonna get promoted

Sorry about your arm, I hope it heals quickly.