We keep hearing about ‘productivity’ in this context. Let’s explore that - back in the days when people were 5 days/week in the office, supervisors and managers concentrated on attendance and punctuality. They still could but now they are focusing on being in the office. In both cases these are proxy measures- they don’t directly measure output. What is this ‘productivity’ here? Because the actual verifiable data tells the opposite story
Basically, I think it’s exactly what @[email protected] was saying: these decisions aren’t being made with any actual facts/ data as the basis. The decisions are solely based on “gut feelings” of the higher-ups. Attendance is the only way the higher-ups know how to gauge productivity, and that is going to trump any actual productivity data.
I think it is less gut feelings than many of these top execs being personally invested in the same financial securities the company is invested in, like commercial real estate securities. But they don’t want to say that part out loud.
Funny thing; my company was using Zoom long before the pandemic. It was useful for organizing meetings between offices, and at the time was the only product with good enough sound quality to actually understand people connecting from low bandwidth connections.
As the pandemic was moving to “business as usual” mode, the company did a quantitative analysis of 5-day vs WFH, plus did an employee survey on 5-day vs hybrid vs WFH. Based on those results, they went to a hybrid model for a few months and then ran another quantitative analysis: end result was that WFH model was permanently adopted for all roles where it made sense, and the company started selling off properties.
Zoom’s still used because it was able to handle all these work models, but the company has its own contract with Zoom and would never touch the default agreement. If Zoom tried that at this point, they’d just lose a large customer.
We keep hearing about ‘productivity’ in this context. Let’s explore that - back in the days when people were 5 days/week in the office, supervisors and managers concentrated on attendance and punctuality. They still could but now they are focusing on being in the office. In both cases these are proxy measures- they don’t directly measure output. What is this ‘productivity’ here? Because the actual verifiable data tells the opposite story
Basically, I think it’s exactly what @[email protected] was saying: these decisions aren’t being made with any actual facts/ data as the basis. The decisions are solely based on “gut feelings” of the higher-ups. Attendance is the only way the higher-ups know how to gauge productivity, and that is going to trump any actual productivity data.
I think it is less gut feelings than many of these top execs being personally invested in the same financial securities the company is invested in, like commercial real estate securities. But they don’t want to say that part out loud.
Funny thing; my company was using Zoom long before the pandemic. It was useful for organizing meetings between offices, and at the time was the only product with good enough sound quality to actually understand people connecting from low bandwidth connections.
As the pandemic was moving to “business as usual” mode, the company did a quantitative analysis of 5-day vs WFH, plus did an employee survey on 5-day vs hybrid vs WFH. Based on those results, they went to a hybrid model for a few months and then ran another quantitative analysis: end result was that WFH model was permanently adopted for all roles where it made sense, and the company started selling off properties.
Zoom’s still used because it was able to handle all these work models, but the company has its own contract with Zoom and would never touch the default agreement. If Zoom tried that at this point, they’d just lose a large customer.