| > Despite this, I still routinely meeting high level people in companies who insist that assess in seats somehow give more productivity. I don't buy that hypothesis. I'm teaching a software development programme to mostly 18 to 20 year old students. One of the ideas behind the programme is that students need to work through many increasingly difficult programming assignment. And that they do this for 40 hours per week in our 'office' (a class room with fancier furnishing and less density). Due to COVID, we experienced some periods during which we had to revert to (partially) working from home. On average, about 40% fewer assignments were completed during these periods. Our explanation (and also the reason that we have students come in full-time in the first place) is that: A) Students who get stuck need to be able to easily seek help at that moment. Many students just don't ask for help when working from home, regardless of the many things we tried to stimulate this. B) When students get stuck, feel frustrated, feel tired or are satisfied with something they've accomplished, many will come up with the idea to play a quick computer game. And get sucked in for the rest of the working day. This doesn't seem to apply to the few older students (with working experience) we have though. So what does this tell us about employee productivity when working from home? Probably little, though I wouldn't be surprised if an organisation with lots of juniors has similar experiences. |