It’s a battle we’ve heard over and over again in recent years – whether working from home or in the office is more productive for companies.
For years, data showed the former was the better choice, but recently opinion has shifted in the other direction, leading many companies to require employees to return to the office.
A woman on TikTok laid out why the answer is clear to her — and it turns out her perceptions align with a lot of data on the topic.
The woman perfectly explained why working from home is more productive than working in the office.
For years, the prevailing data on this topic has shown that working from home is the better choice. But recent studies have begun to shift conventional wisdom in the other direction, leading many companies to require employees to return to the office even though employees have made it clear they have no desire to do so.
These office mandates don’t seem to be working – a recent FlexJobs survey found that more than half of respondents personally knew someone who had quit their job due to a return-to-work rule or was planning to do so.
TikTok creator @brandnamecereal recently gave some insight into why this has become such a bone of contention for so many employees.
She says the main difference is that in the office she was forced to ensure “availability” while managing constant interruptions.
“I just remember what it was like to sit at my desk all day instead of sitting at my home desk all day,” she said in her video, “and basically the only difference was that I was at the Work had to check availability.” Full time.”
She says she gets just as much work done as she did when she still had to go to the office. What has changed is how she uses the small periods of time between tasks. In the office, “you sit on the phone and talk to your colleague,” while at home, I “still log the same amount of work… but whenever I have five minutes, that’s not the case.” I talk to mine “Colleagues and unload my dishwasher.”
She acknowledges that this use of company time for a personal task would likely provoke outrage from a boss or executive, but maintains that at the end of the day it doesn’t matter.
“The five minutes I spent waiting for someone to email me would be less productive anyway,” she said.
After all, chatting with colleagues isn’t productive either. And when she doesn’t have to do chores like unloading the dishwasher after an hour-long commute, she’s “consistently more productive” because it saves energy and because “the people who aren’t supposed to bother me don’t bother me…” Me respond to things in a timely manner.”
This reminds me of my brother, who has been required to return to the office two days a week – days when, he says, he attends the same Zoom meetings as in his home office and endures constant interruptions that result in that he has to take a job. He has to go home in the evening instead of helping his wife with the children.
However, recent data suggesting that working from home actually has a significant negative impact on productivity doesn’t tell the whole story.
So why is there such a large discrepancy between worker perceptions and the latest productivity data? The study, conducted by economists at MIT and UCLA that has become most central to many companies’ rationale for returning to office work, found that working from home led to an 18% drop in productivity.
However, there are some problems with this claim. For one thing, this study focuses exclusively on data entry workers in India – hardly comparable to all types of work done from home. For example, the creative work I do as a writer and video maker is not as clearly measurable as entering a finite amount of data into a software system in a finite amount of time. These are not apples-to-apples comparisons.
More importantly, Stanford University economics professor Nick Bloom, who has led productivity studies for decades, says the productivity declines shown in recent data can be partly explained by management practices that have not yet adapted to the new way of doing things – a factor that even the studies most against working from home also blame for more negative productivity reports.
And when it comes to the broader data about how working from home impacts productivity and especially profitability, the numbers don’t lie.
As Bloom noted, overall U.S. labor productivity growth, which was steady at 1.2% from 2015 to 2020, has increased to 1.5% since the start of the pandemic in 2020 – a development he said given the difficulties and upheaval The miracles we are experiencing have continued ever since, especially given that U.S. productivity has been declining for decades.
And from a purely profit perspective – which is of course the case in most companies – the claim that working in the office is more productive overall makes no sense at all. Work-from-home programs eliminate companies’ primary source of overhead costs – the real estate rents, utility bills and equipment expenses needed to run an office in the first place. That’s like saying that eliminating rent or mortgage payments and all utility bills at the end of each month won’t immediately leave exponentially more money in your pocket. It is simply not true and the suggestion is absurd.
Similar stories from YourTango:
The conspiracy theorists among us posit that this push to return to the office is largely due to companies’ heavy investment in commercial real estate, particularly among the small handful of private equity megacorporations that own virtually every company and business in America and who have disproportionate lobbying influence on state and federal governments. Considering how little sense the arguments against work-from-home programs actually make – and the fact that even companies like NASDAQ have acknowledged that this is indeed a factor – these claims aren’t exactly a tinfoil hat case. Territory.
Especially because it’s not just the overhead costs that working from home saves – multiple studies have also found that it significantly reduces turnover, makes recruiting easier, and enables global hiring, resulting in significant savings in employee retention , recruitment and wage costs.
So CEOs and other companies can demand a return to office work all they want, but that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny – and workers have made it clear they’re not ready for that. And with a workforce that is as consistently dissatisfied as ours? Business leaders might want to think about this.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer covering topics such as pop culture, social justice and human interest.