WFH is a great amplifier. The conscientious take advantage of the absence of distractions and the flexibility and get more productive.
The skivers also take advantage to skive more.
It is no surprise that the public sector, which attracts a lot of people who want an easy work life, has more than its fair share of skivers. And since it also has more than its fair share of bad managers and supervisors, and because people cannot go to the competition, they get away with it a lot more than they would in private companies.
In my business (accounting) I see lots of different businesses and how WFH has worked for them.
I think the “Skiving off” is probably more with the public sector. I don’t see much reports of that with the SME sector that I work with. An odd one hear or there, that is quickly dealt with. (Maybe more happens in big organisations but it’s too easy to see in small ones).
However most employers are saying that productivity is not as high as it was when everyone was in the office. However with a difficulty in recruiting skilled staff at present, many employers are trying to work a hybrid model. Some employers do say that WFH is working for them, and some (growing number each day) say that they are insisting on everyone back in the office.
Productivity is different depending on whether you look at it from the employee prospective or the employer prospective.
With many jobs, more junior staff needs to ask more senior people for help or guidance. When working from home this is more difficult. So often the junior person struggles on wasting time (perhaps doing useless work with will later need to be undone by someone who knows what has to be done) instead of walking over to a more senior person asking for guidance. They think they are doing something productive but aren’t. Meanwhile the more senior person is getting more done because they are getting fewer interruptions. They are convinced that they are more productive. But what they are missing is that they are no longer doing part of their job, which is bringing along and guiding more junior people.
So the junior person (of which there will be multiple per one senior person) thinks that they are just as productive as before. The senior person thinks that they are super productive.
But from an organisational prospective less is actually being done because the senior person isn’t doing part of their job which is directing and assisting the junior people!
It’s also true that part of the senior person’s job is often client relationship building. This isn’t happening via Zoom, and in time client loyalty will be affected.
There is also the issue with call centres (which should be easily monitorable) that often the operator can’t help. Often the answer is “I don’t have access to that information as I’m working from home” or “I’ll need to ask my supervisor. I’ll send them an email as I’m working from home”. From a measurement point of view it’s probably recorded as that person taking x number of calls, but the customers problem wasn’t properly dealt with.
It’s clear to me, that at least for the SME clients that I deal with, almost all employers want their staff back in the office, but they don’t feel that they can push too much in the current labour market. But in time, I think all but the purely transactional jobs, will be back in the office. Most are back already.
Cobalt wrote:
t is no surprise that the public sector, which attracts a lot of people who want an easy work life, has more than its fair share of skivers.
You shouldn’t generalise. The “public sector culture” is very different between countries. I’m sure you can think of examples.
As I mentioned, the level and degree of ‘skiving off’ that I’ve seen associated with WFH is completely beyond my previous experience, and even more surprisingly it’s at every level of organizations. To say that it didn’t and hasn’t had an effect on productivity would be completely nuts. The effect on societal productivity is obvious to anybody who is watching and started before Ukrainian energy issues and other excuses that are being presented.
However as with every problem it is an opportunity for those who act on it, in this case it makes skilled and committed labor a more valuable asset, as we’ve seen.
I can imagine that in some types of analysis or computer work where (1) you have tools to track the work and (2) it is a solo endeavor, it works for some individuals. Also for low level work like call center stuff where the job itself is just talking on the phone. Otherwise, forget it.
Government is having difficulty even awarding approved contracts now, never mind doing anything useful on its own.
Cobalt wrote:
WFH is a great amplifier. The conscientious take advantage of the absence of distractions and the flexibility and get more productive.
The skivers also take advantage to skive more.
I think you nailed it. Good management helps a lot. If you are a crap manager then WFH is hard. For good managers with good people, WFH is great.
Clearly some jobs and projects are helped when people are face to face, but the loss of productivity to get to and from the office should not be neglected.
Effective leadership always helps. My technique was to lead by example and I never worked from home, and then oddly enough almost none of my staff worked from home. Just one guy and his was a special case. He’s back in the office now. Meanwhile we watched as other organizations we work with fell into non-productive WFH disarray, some people completely checked out, and they remain there.
It varies across different industries and different sorts of businesses.
In my sector, pharmaceuticals and clinical research, WFH was already well embedded before Covid. I’ve been doing it myself for about a decade.
In the part of the business I run, bids and proposals, it is incredibly easy to see if someone is skiving off whether they work in an office or at home. They have a lot of work to do and short deadlines, and if they get missed then the shit hits the fan. Skivers wouldn’t last five minutes and I’ve never had a problem with anyone.
My employer (~600 people worldwide) employs about 25 people in the UK. There is no UK office and we’re scattered about all over the place. Establishing an office and expecting people to go into it every day would be a non-starter – they’d just leave – such is the strength of the job market (and this is not new in this sector).
I enjoy going to an office once in a while and mixing with people, but I have deliberately engineered the commute out of my life. The time and money saved, as well as the freedom to live anywhere without having to worry about where the work is, is valuable to me.
From talking to people locally in various different sectors, I found that a firm’s desire (or otherwise) to bring people back to the office post-covid usually had a fair bit to do with how long was left on the building lease!
I don’t see much difference in WFH/office in the company I work for.
For example in my team (until two months ago) all of my counterparts (and a manager) were not in the same country, so there was no difference if people work from home or from some office – they still spend all/most of their day using their computer + headset. And re: people do nothing – they could do the same nothing while working from office, depends only on if the employee if a self-starter and/or manager finds the correct way to set the right goals.
Most of the cases where a manager demanded office presence were examples of either a micro-management or just manager’s insecurities.
@Graham, oddly enough I have exactly the opposite reaction on a personal level: I bought a house 10-15 minutes from work because I value that the company provides me with a very nice office, laboratory facilities and so on. I would not under any circumstance want to lose that benefit and locate my working environment in my house, of all places… My house is my house, not a free rental property for my employer 
I’m happy to say that given the creative, collaborative environment and our need for the facility itself (we build big, first of a kind things) working from home has never been a serious proposition in my world, and in fact when WFH was dictated by local government for a while, we were explicitly exempted. However, that didn’t stop groups that aren’t likewise at the core of our business from disappearing.
We don’t lease buildings, we buy them.
Well, we each have our own approach to it and I’m pretty sure we’ve done the house vs workplace discussion before. Of course I’m not confined here, nor do I have to provide the house as a workplace. If I want to go to an office, I can (at least I could in this country with my previous employer, which had multiple UK offices).
We certainly don’t build big, first-of-a-kind things (except maybe some really complex spreadsheets) so we don’t need that kind of a facility. Really I just need somewhere to sit and an internet connection. If I need to take the TB for a 50hr check, I can fly it over early in the morning and work all day in the engineering shop office while they do it.
Then throw in the fact that most companies in my line of work have their offices in parts of the UK that I have no interest in living in – expensive and soulless dormitory towns around London. I want to work for them, but I don’t want to live near them. The geography affecting different work situations makes a huge difference – I basically have the pick of any company in this sector to work for, and geography just doesn’t come into it.
