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Remote Work to Wipe Out $800 Billion From Office Values, McKinsey Says
(www.bloomberg.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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It's insane that we as a society are even having the debate between pushing capital investment strategies to adapt and come into the 21st century or dragging globally-distributed workers back to the 20th century just to avoid short-term pain and costs associated with updating outdated laws, tax incentives, and capital business practices.
The problem is that the idea of WFH being more productive is slowly being shown to be false.
It can be a viable business strategy of you design for it, but WFH being the best in all cases has shown itself to be false.
Edit: The working-from-home illusion fades from TheEconomist
That is the source. Feel free to post your own sources.
Every efficiency study, environmental model, and psychological model disagrees with your sentiments that WFH productivity is less than in office productivity. I am a software engineer, so it might be anecdotal and industry specific, but my experience as well as the studies done by my employer show that they get more out of WFH employees or Hybrid (1-2 days a week in office) than the traditional route. Commutes, in office distractions, etc are massive drains on the employee.
The working-from-home illusion fades from TheEconomist
The studies cited in the article say otherwise. Feel free to show your studies.
That article is pretty trash, a half finished doctoral study from 2020 and it draws some wild conclusions from this authors work who comes to the opposite conclusion than what was provided by the article. You can see more information mathematically here in this paper that seems to suggest that a lot of the WFH productivity might be eaten up by the lack of effective tools at the disposal of the worker provided by the company. You can also find more data driven, finished papers on WFH efficiency here:
This is a chinese study from 2013 for a call center, similar to the unfinished 2020 paper mentioned in the beginning of the terrible Economist Paper. This was done without the current tools and innovation, so I imagine if it were to be run again the numbers would probably be higher: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/does-working-home-work-evidence-chinese-experiment
Here is a study on jobs that could be done from home. The above study allows you to see that the environmental impact from having those jobs actually be done from home could be massive. Especially since most of those jobs are located in urban centers and require commuting and/or massive carbon footprints.
This is a small (n = 519) study showing that peoples general mental health and happiness are higher when they are WFH. Also, a study showing that people who are happy are more productive.
The problem with the argument is that it is reductionist, it makes it seem like the ONLY thing that matters is how much more productive it is. It is more productive, and it can have a HUGE benefit to both the mental health of the individuals who are able to WFH as well as the environment.
So, like I said. The large company I work for is 80% WFH, with an optional hybrid approach and spent a bunch of money researching this and are looking to keep it up because their workers are happier, healthier, and more productive... That single economist piece that misrepresents data and uses kind of trash studies isn't really a great one to be leaning on.
Edit: There are absolutely jobs that cannot be done from home, and people who can't handle WFH because of their personality. However, WFH is primarily a good thing. All these hit pieces and garbo articles trying to justify people returning to these monolithic buildings without any value are trash and shouldn't be promoted as information. At their core they're opinion pieces.
Since I've had more time to read your sources.
The first study you cite only discusses the ability to work from home. Nothing in the study talks about productivity. I agree that a lot of jobs can be full remote.
The second study is about employee satisfaction, which I didn't argue as well. The third study may be a thing, but it doesn't outright compare those who work in an office to those who work full remote.
And as I've said earlier, it is fine if you want to make arguments for WFH outside of productivity. However, none of the studies you provided tries to directly measure the two. Thank you for providing some studies, though. You were the only one who tried to argue this via academic studies.