[gdubs]

Only skimmed, but do they address the fact that last year was more “working at home during a pandemic” than “remote work”? How much of the communications issues were due to the fact that people were juggling homeschooling, housekeeping, caregiving, while trying to stay productive?

[civilized]

They use the people who were already working at home before the pandemic as a control group. They experienced the same pandemic changes as everyone else, except they were already working from home. So theoretically, taking the difference between the newly WFH group and the already WFH group "cancels out" pandemic-related effects and isolates the impact of moving to WFH.

In simplistic terms, Group A experienced "pandemic + effect from changing to WFH" while Group B experienced only "pandemic". Therefore, B-A = "effect from changing to WFH" alone.

It's a nice idea but I'm not sure it's entirely convincing. It seems like you'd have to assume a couple things: (1) the pandemic affected both groups in the same way, so that taking the difference between the two groups cancels out the pandemic effect; (2) new WFHers are interchangeable with veteran WFHers.

As a veteran WFHer, Assumption 2 seems especially suspect to me. People who self-selected into WFH and have been doing it for a while are going to be a very different group than the general population forced into it by a pandemic.

That said, I am a fan of econometrists and the crazy stunts they do with data to obtain so-called "natural experiments". So I'm open to changing my mind here. These kinds of papers are rarely convincing but never boring. Perhaps they managed to prove the somewhat uninteresting proposition that people thrust into WFH by a pandemic aren't very good at it.

[null_shift]

“(1) the pandemic affected both groups in the same way, so that taking the difference between the two groups cancels out the pandemic effect“

i think this is a significantly flawed assumption. in my experience, the people that had been working from home previously are much better equipped to deal with the pandemic (e.g. likely have a home office set up vs. working from makeshift workspace like a kitchen table).

[Natsu]

Yeah, not all businesses were well-prepared for a sudden WFH transition like this. At my employer, we were already doing limited WFH (one day a week) and productivity & satisfaction increased broadly for full WFH, but I know that doesn't generalize and some particular people had individual issues (e.g. it's hard to work on stuff that requires focus while small children want your attention).

[Bilal_io]

> They experienced the same pandemic changes as everyone else

It takes a while to adjust to the changes.

[furyofantares]

On the flip side, something that I haven't seen discussed really, the experience I had was that over time, I found there were ways in which working from home got harder rather than easier. At the start of the pandemic, I already had a ton of work to do, and when I finished it I already had a good idea of the next work to do, and so on. That became less and less true over time

And then, unrelated to that, I eventually switched teams, and had a much more difficult time finding my place on the new team

[maerF0x0]

Also it's worth considering that remote vs in-office work may be different skills and it takes time to build up skills.

For me, I'd rather work on building the skill with a higher sum value ver time (integration of value rate), even if their is a learning/adaption curve.

Taking someone who has worked in an office for 10 years and expecting them to be more productive in the first 6 months of work from home is failing to treat it as a skill that develops over time.

[lostcolony]

It's worse than that; the skills and learnings -run directly counter to each other- in some cases.

For instance, in the office, what is the single best way to collaborate on something? Why, you get people together and chat, likely informally, in a free ranging discussion.

Remote, what's the single best way to collaborate? Why, you write up a document with your initial thoughts and send it out for everyone else to weigh in on; you have a fully asynchronous, documented communication.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, but, tellingly, the people who are best with one of them are likely not the people who are best with the other. And trying to impose one in the other's context will lead to poorer results; written docs in the office when a conversation will do feel heavyhanded and process heavy, but zoom meetings, especially if the hours don't all line up, in a remote workplace feel unnecessary, and reduces participation.

A LOT of companies have treated the pandemic as "figure out how to carry in person practices to remote", rather than a new beast worthy of learning new ways of working.

[UnpossibleJim]

Not only that, but this article is being held up by Microsoft as the end all, be all of answers. No one answer fits all jobs. For quite a few coders, working at home while communicating over Teams (Microsoft) is a better fit, but for the execs and producers, of course they do better face to face in a dynamic group setting. Artists probably do as well.

Talking to your team and seeing what works best and looking at productivity metrics is probably a really good place to start =[