Background: the “2 year old” I take care of is an executive at a major global corporation. I get to see the ‘inner workings’ on how the company operates, and have had the opportunity to talk to many higher level employees at the company.
The entire r/d division he works in, including his ‘team’, have been working from home for a long time now.
The “2 year old” has showed me a corporate level report that was just released . Overall the productivity throughout the company is 61% lower year/over/year from last year, and 63% lower year/over/year from 2 years ago. The “2 year old’s” r/d division currently has 56% lower productivity.
Many departments are ‘over budget’ and losing money for the corporation. From what I have been told, if this trend keeps up into 2021, there will be a lot of people losing their job, and in some cases, entire divisions may be closed or sold off. The “2 year old’s” division is currently 34% over budget.
There are lessons that have to be learned from the “new normal”. The successful companies will find these and implement them. An old argument for not working at home is that you don’t have the work attitude while wearing your bathrobe. The fix was to dress for going to the office to set your mind and working and breaking at set times as you would at work. Except for online meetings, that is great for us crossdressers.
Someone has to review the online meetings and find where the problem areas are. The problem might be that the team members don’t talk together individually as they did in the office. Is everyone getting the same information on a timely basis?
Don’t look at events as being just problems. They are also opportunities to do things differently.
Work from home will shake out differently depending on the profession and the particular circumstance. There are real estate savings having employees work from home but positives you get from team interactions will be lessened.
Most likely there will be a hybrid model with perhaps less pay for those working from home which could result in more jobs.
I did a job once where I worked remotely for 6 weeks and then went in to work with the client for another two weeks to finish the project. We exceeded everyone’s expectations working in that fashion.
I work for a managed service provider doing IT, and while the stats show our engineers are fully booked, the quality of the work is absolutely garbage, missing deadlines, not communicating back with customers etc.
I find that interesting but that doesn’t surprise me honestly, I imagine a lot of people have trouble working from home. For me, if I were to ever work from home.. I think I would need to dedicate an entire room to being “the home office” that would kinda look all professional and everything to help give it that motivational environment, so to speak ^^
We’ve (custom software consulting) been very successful working entirely remotely. We’re at the same utilization level or higher as when we were on-site. The only issue I see are breakdowns in communication between teams and clients and between upper management, sales, clients, and project managers. Those issues already existed before the pandemic but all-remote work has made them more apparent.
This is the dirty secret everyone is trying to gloss over right now.
WFH has been a technical possibility for a long time, with the benefits and cost savings being stupidly obvious. There is a reason that not only has adoption been slow, but big companies who made the effort gradually clawed it back.
The numbers show that despite what people feel, despite how productive some people and some teams can be working entirely from home, in a lot of cases you just don’t see the same long term productivity when you actually boil it down to the numbers.
Covid has forced a lot of companies to figure it out, or at least make due, but I think over time we’ll see the WFH trend recede once again. It’s not like big companies don’t want to shed the expense of maintaining an office. It’s that they know it doesn’t work as well as everyone wants it to.
i started with this company in January and was basically out of the training cubes for a month or so before we did the mass exodus to work from home. I seriously thought the whole covid thing would end in 3-4 weeks and we’d be back to the office. That hasn’t happened. I wasn’t comfortable in my job and how to do it really well when i was sent home
no easy way to ask a question of my co-workers
not able to get tips and tricks from my co-workers
i rely on my help desk more than i would like, which i wonder if that usage is being tracked.
it is so easy to get distracted
i miss my coworkers
i miss my alone time on my long commute.
Pros:
that commute (my old commute was an hour each way)
The number of meetings I have been invited to has skyrocketed since people started working from home. It seeks that many if those fortunate enough to work from home are trying to justify true his with meetings instead of work. That being said I haven’t budged a lot of decreases in productivity in my areas, but most of my areas require people to be onsite.