You'll have to define "abuse" more concretely for this to have any meaning.
Do most knowledge workers actually put in exactly 8 full hours a day on work tasks working from home? Probably not.
But as a professional software developer since the 1990s the same was true for myself and virtually everyone I know when I worked in an office.
The way I 'waste' time is different now, but arguably a lot better (eg. me taking a nap just before or just after lunch improves my productivity in the afternoon a lot more than me fucking off on slashdot for extended periods of time in the office did back in the day.)
(And whether or not this not-directly-related-to-work downtime is really a time waste is extremely debatable, as switching thorny problems into the subconscious realm often turns out to be one of the best ways to actually power through them in my experience).
What I consider abuse is Lying and padding resources. I know people who will turn an 8 hour task into a 40 hour task, and spend the difference hiking. The other grift is when people have multiple projects to tell each manager that the workload is high on the other project right now.
This isn’t an exclusively remote problem though. This happens in-office, too.
It’s extremely easy to pad a week with meetings, “I’m checking/organizing my email”, “I need to double check code from last week”, etc… if you wanted to burn time.
Sure the remote worker has the opportunity to go hiking, but the business impact is the same. Except at least the hiking wastes less time from others.
This is not a WFH peculiarity, is the bad company architecture to blame, where workers can extort time and managers can't see that. It might happen more FH than FO simply because managers tend to have little to know digital culture, but it's still not a work mode peculiarity.
The real issue is that with the big RTO push to save cities, who can't be saved BTW, avoided baking a WFH culture where people take WFH seriously providing an office room per worker at home, with all things needed there, instead of working with craptops anywhere. It's not different from people who take a photo of an email and send it via WA because they do still not having a clue about CC/BCC.
Why can't your managers or engineering leaders tell who is underperforming their potential? That seems just as much of a problem for in-office folks, if not moreso - the in-office folks can get away with simply looking busy.
I work far more from home on average. When I worked from the office I had so many interruptions. We’d also take Wednesday and Friday afternoons to play table-top games. There was table tennis and foosball. Sometimes we’d all go out for lunch and it’d take 60-90 minutes. Now I just eat lunch at my computer, I don’t table top game or socialize. I just code and zoom all day.
The abuse is real, but since I’m not commuting it’s a great trade off of an hour wasted each way.
It might be workplace specific. Most co-workers I know who went remote are 25-50% as productive as before. Only one or two did I suspect had a 2nd job. The rest were spending most of their workdays hiking, sailing, or playing with their kids.
Given the choice, I would rather lead an in office team 10/10 times.
Anecdote for exactly the other side: most co-workers I know who went remote are 50% more productive as before. They don’t have to waste their preciously short lives in pointless office drama, pointless meetings that could have been emails, waste their lives in cars commuting to a soulless office complex because an incompetent manager thinks that butts-in-seat time makes for a productive workforce.
I would 100% lead a full remote team, and have done so, and will never go back.
Im not surprised. Like I said, it is likely workplace specific based on culture, management, and hiring. Some places you can coast for years working 10 hours a week.
I’ve been remote for 15 years with the past 3 in a C level position.
People fuck around in the office and they do at home too. Expectation management and selling yourself (aka know how to communicate) is all that matters. I can sleep in, tell people the truth, and life is good.
Offices are fucking expensive. It burdens IT and it’s a performance art at the end of the day anyway.
The boards job is to fire me. As long as I maintain my roadmap and provide evidence of progress nobody who matters has time to think about this shit.
Manage your SG&A expenses, risk, and be nice to legal. You’ll be fine.
Thats cool for you, but I'm speaking from my experience about my team's productivity falling off a cliff. Employees that do work when in the office, but wont even respond to email for days when working from home.
That may me a problem of the pepple tou hired, and how you lead them, instead of being a problem of where they work.
Perhaps they were slacking in the office as well, and only giving you the impression that they were busy. You might only be annoyed now because the mask is off.
That's great for you. I have had good experiences long ago in other companies.
In my current company, team leads have little input on employee performance, and nobody has been fired or PIPed in my 100 person department in the last 10 years.
The primary thing that incentivized worker performance was social pressure and visibility from an in person environment.
You might say this is a management problem, and yes, I would agree. However, it still stands that this management problem is greatly exacerbated by hybrid and remote work.
Please understand you are not representative of everyone. I'm aware of several teams that were heavily remote far before COVID. They worked fine then, and they work fine now.
What are you calling abuse? Not showing up for “company mandated fun time o’clock”?
Also, I hate to break it to you, but the employees that are “genuinely” abusing WFH and shirking work responsibilities are doing the same thing in the office.
Absolutely. In the WFH vs Office debate people seem to forget that time-abusing employees always exsisted. I've had coworkers at past jobs who sat next to me and nobody on the team coukd come up with anything they did for a year besides browse the internet and plan vacations.
I worked 4 remote jobs for years long ago - I found companies with the same problem and resold my work. I probably put in 60-80 hours a week but made a killing.
Now ADP and similar companies offer monitoring services to HR to weed these people out. You might get caught now.
If managers are incapable of detecting and handling that unless people are in their eye line in the office then the company has bigger problems.
I don’t think remote work encourages bad behavior on the whole. It may make what was already happening more obvious. But I think there are few good workers who become bad when remote. And they can stay in the office.
I think it makes poor management more obvious and bad techniques like enforcing butts-in-seats as a your main way of enforcing productivity.
I’ve seen plenty of people in my career do nothing or next to nothing all day. But they were in their seat clicking on things or typing so they must be “productive”.
Instead of forcing everyone to be in office, how about getting better managers through training or hiring?
Anecdotally, knowing many people that work from home, there is definitely abuse of the system. And those people are ruining it for the rest of us! But it would be absurd to think that if everyone was really more productive at-home, companies would still be forcing everyone back in the office. I don't believe the conspiracies—most workplaces really do want collaboration and productivity. The only bit I'll buy is that some are doing it as a form of soft layoffs. But I find it hard to believe that every company doing this would act against its own interests in terms of productivity.
I've seen many absurd things working for various companies. I've personally seen millions of dollars set on fire over pet projects and egos, or petty power struggles. A sufficient justification to force people back into the office is because it gratifies a powerful man's ego to see people working in front of him.
Stress begets inflammation. Inflammation is suffering. Subjugating others secretes antiinflammatory cytokines; “Winning” is relief.
A stark and beautiful quote from the paper: “In animals with hierarchical societies, aggressive behavior is thought to help individuals gain and maintain higher social status (Box 2). It has been shown that aggressive behavior, especially the experience of winning, has rewarding properties in animals and repeated aggressive experience may lead to compulsive, pathological aggression that is highly reinforcing (Fish et al., 2002; Falkner et al., 2016; Golden et al., 2016, 2017).”
Are you actually going to reply to the substance of my comment or just do a Reddit like sarcastic reply? Yes, I am middle age and have worked for multiple companies. I've seen co-workers, friends, and even family abuse the opportunity to work from home. Which as I said is unfortunate because it hurts everyone who uses it wisely.
Show me or gp that there is no evidence of abuse. Anecdotally, I've seen it.
> I am middle age and have worked for multiple companies
Same. If you never saw a company kill teams productivity with completely retarded decisions and petty office drama, I think you might just have been lucky.
I think your original comment is entirely valid. It seems anyone who questions WFH gets downvoted.
I’m involved with several startups, and I can assure you there are clear advantages to people spending time together. WFH or not, people meeting and strategizing in person is incredibly valuable.
I also think people need to make a better distinction between remote and distributed teams. Because of the above opportunity to meet in person from time to time, and also because of the additional communication challenges of a distributed team with multiple time zones.
There’s an assumption that all work can be perfectly partitioned and assigned to people. But more often than not, innovation requires constant exploration of ideas and negotiation of resources being invested. more cohesive teams are way more likely to innovate.
>The only bit I'll buy is that some are doing it as a form of soft layoffs. But I find it hard to believe that every company doing this would act against its own interests in terms of productivity.
WRT "in terms of productivity"?
Companies do this all the time, and especially when they lay people off. (soft or otherwise)
There's absolutely a loss of productivity as everyone has to sort out the logistical changes while doing the things they normally do.
> To draw this conclusion one would have to assume that companies are measuring productivity correctly.
Or that the companies are acting rationally, and we know that's never always true.
So is your argument that bad management is so endemic that every company is making a poor decision about its productivity when it orders workers back to the office? I think some companies want to do soft layoffs. And I think others actually see real benefits of working in-person.
We don't have to take such extreme positions. Doubtless some people are more productive at-home, some people are less productive at-home. And some companies are actually seeing productivity decreases when their teams are remote.
Not management, upper management. Executives make RTO decisions. Companies aren't a democracy, we're talking handful of people per company, max. That includes companies with tens of thousands of employees.
Those people are typically egotistical and irrational. They have big ideas about what makes a good company and they execute them. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. They don't require rationale for office work.
They like seeing their engineers in office and so it is done. Why? I dunno. Maybe that's the way it's always done. Maybe that's the way it should be done. We do it right here, not like those other companies.
In actuality, it's because the CEO is a man-child who likes it and then conversation ends there. Does it cost money? Of course. I've seen millions burned in office politics; this shit is nothing.
Until then, it all sounds like game to me.