How Going Back to the Office Will Hurt Productivity or Will It?
Trying to revoke remote work may be the leading cause of a lack of connection to a company’s mission and customers.
Said Rani Molla from a study from HubSpot in her latest article on how bad it truly is to have company leaders trying to increase productivity when they don’t know what it means through Vox this morning. They even mention that Lyft is doing the same thing and calling workers back because the CEO reasoned that “things move faster face to face.” (In Mollas words) but it’s still not clear if this is actually true.
“Some 71 percent of business leaders say they’re under immense pressure to squeeze more productivity out of their workers, according to a new Slack survey of 18,000 knowledge workers, including managers” (Molla)
People in a meeting room, through the perspective of only hands that are articulating a point in front of a computer and others in business casual attire on a table.
However the same Slack survey revealed that a third of the time spent working is only performative, AKA pretending to look like they’re working.
All the while most workers are reporting that burnout is on the rise and worker engagement is taking a steep turn for the worse. So if we can’t definitively determine worker productivity by hours at the office because of performative working, and the time at home is spent oftentimes not immediately responding to emails, CEO’s and leaders of companies may be confused with what productivity actually means. It can be tricky to pinpoint especially for knowledge based workers.
Men and women talking in business casual attire in a professional setting.
The research indicates that when there is performance pay, people perform better, despite being at home or in the office. However, it is difficult to find a common consensus because another study found that when coders where around others they performed less, but when not in the same buildings, less experiences coders got less mentorship and potentially risked being less productive in the future. Assistant professor of economics at the University of Iowa summarizes best;
“It is relatively context-specific in the sense that it may really matter what the management practices of the firm are and what the incentive scheme is, […]”
In the same Slack survey mentioned above, there has been a high amount of executives tracking activity metrics, but when this is done more emails are sent out and more production is made but at a lesser quality. It’s hard to win. The main takeaway is that most leaders measure inputs instead of workers' net output. According to Slack’s SVP of research and analytics.
The pandemic allowed us to question work-life balance and satisfaction in the workplace, but returning to the office will decrease all the benefits we gained from working from home. Such as flexibility of our schedules, and the ability to spend more time with families instead of commuting.
“We know that employee engagement is down for all types of workers, but that it’s lowest for people who have to show up in person. Gallup estimated that low employee engagement cost the global economy $7.8 trillion in lost productivity last year.” (Molla)
A woman sitting at a desk in their own home filled with plants, natural light and bright scenery.
From many sources about many different sects of the industry on productivity I genuinely believe that rationalising decisions truthfully and succinctly to your workers so that they wholeheartedly agree with you will increase engagement of workers in companies, and this ultimately will lead to longevity and productivity (in all senses of the word) in any given company.
What are you doing to make sure your work-life balance keeps you engaged at work? Let us know through our many social media pages.