Home work is great — except for productivity

After 15 months of tumbleweeds blowing through near-abandoned commercial and financial centres, major North American cities are poised for a gradual downtown renaissance. The traffic that once flowed into downtowns by foot, bike, train, tram, and car and then up, up, up into the embrace of commercial office towers like arterial blood to the heart has already started to return.

In parallel, a debate rages about whether white-collar workers, who have proven they can work remotely, ought to return to the office at all. Should companies expect a return to the preCOVID default of five days per week office “presenteeism”? Will workers even accept such terms? Is there a middle ground between strictly enforced pre-COVID attendance and the cabin fever of being isolated in a bachelor apartment all day long?

Arguments based on dogmatic views about how businesses should be run or hard-to-measure variables such as “Zoom fatigue” leave out one of the most important parts of the debate: productivity. A full year and change into the pandemic we have better data on this key metric that matters equally to employees and management. Productivity is most often measured in terms of output per unit of input. How much are people actually getting done relative to their effort?

A survey last month by Blind, an app that encourages anonymous career-related posts, suggested that 64 per cent of employees at the 45 largest companies in the U.S. would pick permanent work from home over a $30,000 raise. The most cited reason: dislike, not of the office, but of the daily commute.

What have North American office workers liberated from that commute been doing with the hours they've saved travelling to and from the office over the past year? Mainly, they have been working longer hours. Since COVID began the average employee newly working from home, not just in Canada but in the U.S. and U.K., is spending more than two additional hours per day logged in at their laptop. But to what effect? Have rededicated commuting hours raised productivity?

A comprehensive new study from three economists associated with the University of Chicago's Becker-Friedman Institute shows that in spite of spending two hours more per day on the job workers accomplished essentially the same at home as at the office. They did not spend their saved commuting hours on personal care, family time, or exercise; rather, they spent two full additional hours daily on emails and virtual meetings. Worse, they generally had less time in a day for focused work.

A global survey from Microsoft that tracked 30,000 users of its ubiquitous Office 365 software across 30+ countries throughout 2020, comes to similar conclusions: in essence, we have simply replaced old fashioned in-office presenteeism with a digital version, with employees expected to be online more frequently. Microsoft's data show that remote workers spent a staggering 148 per cent more minutes per week in virtual meetings and sent 42 per cent more instant messages after hours and 200 per cent more on weekends. Jared Spataro, a Microsoft vice-president who commented on the findings, says he has seen this phenomenon on his own team, with employees attending meetings unnecessarily in an attempt to demonstrate engagement.

Working more hours for the same output means both workers and employers are net productivity losers, at least in the short term. For obvious reasons the longterm productivity implications of this new digital presenteeism are not yet known, although late-pandemic studies around increased burnout suggest they may also be unfavourable.

Individual companies and teams will need to decide how to unpack these numbers and evaluate their own potential trade-offs. For example, for single parents is lower productivity more than offset by the flexibility benefits of being able to pick up their kids from school on a schedule a regular commute might preclude? Are some roles more conducive to solo work? Do others require active collaboration more frequently in a day?

In the end, determining what is optimal, when and for whom is best left to society's myriad micro-actors to figure out for themselves.