Return to office not so great for productivity
Marjorie Roberts, who runs a nonprofit in the Florida Keys, started a recent morning with a list of tasks that ideally she would have raced right through. Figure out coverage for someone going on summer vacation. (Easy.) Look at the accountant’s recent audit. (Blah.) Redo a reimbursement request that the county finance department turned down. (Why?!) All simple enough.
But in the office — “a hoarder’s paradise,” as she called it — her time isn’t always her own. Clients and colleagues pass through all day with requests.
Even the work that Roberts isn’t particularly well equipped to handle often winds up on her desk. “I’m the IT person,” said Roberts, who runs Keys Area Interdenominational Resources.
By the end of the workday Roberts, like so many, leaves the office with a to-do list no shorter than it was when she arrived.
The last two decades saw businesses rethink their office spaces — some squeezing into smaller ones as rent increased, others undertaking an arms race for perks. The most luxe offices gained slides, nap pods, laundry, ball pits and streams of cold brew.
But when more than 50 million people started working from home in March 2020, some of them discovered a luxury their companies couldn’t offer: peace and quiet. As executives tighten their returnto-office policies, workers are finding their days filled with more interruption. The workplace, they’ve discovered, isn’t always the ideal place for doing work.
“I have my larger to-dos, but I just have to address things as they come up,” said Jennifer Choi, who manages finances and operations at a nonprofit in New York and finds herself fielding office maintenance, technology and human resources questions.
Office interruptions aren’t distributed evenly, according to pre-pandemic research. Women are more likely than men to be asked to do tasks that do not lead to promotions and that “everyone prefers be completed by someone else,” like coordinating holiday parties, according to a 2017 paper in the American
Economic Review. Women were 48% more likely to volunteer for this type of work.
All this means that going back to the office comes with more trade-offs for certain workers. Someone has to reset the router. Someone ends up ordering the birthday cupcakes.
Research tends to back up the squishy sense that people get more done outside the office. A study from Stanford of a 16,000-person travel agency found that call center employees working remotely were 13% more productive than their in-person colleagues.
But many executives feel strongly about the benefits of the office: the opportunities to find mentors, build relationships and brainstorm. Some workers also struggle to be productive at home, especially those with care-taking responsibilities. So companies are going to extremes to bring quiet into the office.
Azeema Batchelor, who works at law firm Wiley Rein in Washington, D.C., has become reliant on her office’s red light, green light system. A rod the width of a sharpie sticks out of her monitor with a dome on it. When she needs to focus, she turns the dome red. When on a call, she switches it to yellow. When she is open to people strolling through her office to chat, a green light beckons them in.
The aim is to help employees find that balance between productivity and the desired stop-andchat. Just the other day, for example, Batchelor’s boss came by her office to discuss a training they were planning. The green light was on.
“We started talking about the fact that I went on the Peloton for the first time since my second son was born,” Batchelor said, adding that had they both been out of the office, the conversation would have been all business.
Samu Hällfors, an entrepreneur from Finland, found inspiration in his own experience getting distracted in the office. He co-founded a company in 2010, called Framery, that makes office privacy booths, which has sold over 75,000 units. Framery’s sales jumped to $93 million last year from $83 million in 2020, and the company is on track to make $150 million this year.