The new, never-ending Many WFH employees feel they must always be available
data suggest productivity is up, at least at some companies.
“We’ve seen, anecdotally, some increases in productivity for some of our developers as they’re hunkered and focused at home,” Bank of New York Mellon Corp. Chief Financial Officer Mike Santomassimo said.
An internal case study at Publicis Sapient, an IT consulting company that tracked work by 410 employees on roughly 40 tech-focused projects for a large New York-based investment bank also found a productivity bump.
The gains haven’t come without costs. By early April, about 45% of workers said they were burned out, according to a survey of 1,001 U.S. employees by Eagle Hill Consulting. Almost half attributed the mental toll to an increased workload, the challenge of juggling personal and professional life and a lack of communication and support from their employer. Maintaining employee morale has proved difficult, said two-thirds of human resources professionals surveyed by the Society for Human Resource Management last month.
Parents with kids at home are stretched particularly thin, as they handle work and child-care duties, which now include learning sessions. In two-thirds of married couples with children in the U.S., both parents work.
A 31-year-old web designer at a medium-sized software company who declined to be named said he’s starting to lose steam working 12-hour days from his tiny bedroom to meet the demands of clients and supervisors, who expect him to immediately respond to emails.
His apartment doesn’t doesn’t have an office, and his roommates, a woman and her child, often are in the living room. He feels pressure to work harder than normal.
Some employers are attempting to help people cope. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. gave staff an extra 10 days of family leave; Microsoft Corp. is offering its workers an additional 12 weeks of parental leave. At Starbucks Corp., employees now get 20 free therapy sessions.
Mushahwar’s 8-year-old recently asked when all this was going to end. “I don’t have a good answer for him.”