Has any company taken the time to really test and experiment with the correct ratio of work from home (WFH) and work from office (WFO) to see if employees are more or less productive? Some studies suggest that people think they are more productive when they work from home but that is merely them being more busy. The reality is that a blend of WHF & WFO ensures that collaboration and culture does not fade away.
This is nothing new, no new insights there. What many don’t understand is that people don’t work in isolation and need support from other departments and employees. Studies also show that individual employees are more productive only if all or most of their colleagues are at the office. So when they have the support at their fingertips when they need it, remote employees are more productive.
Why are there so many people that are saying that people working from home are as, if not more productive? Well as I said, it’s because they think so but ultimately it’s because its not been measured over the long term. IBM and Yahoo! both had remote working policies for years, long before the pandemic but they cancelled those policies. Communication, collaboration, and arguably the company culture suffered as a result. They were simply not as productive as when people are in the office.
The challenge is that testing and measuring what the ideal output for an organisation on any given WFH / WFO split is that it can only be measured over time. A bigger issue is that you will need to make multiple adjustments to the split which means employees routines will be changed which will lead to dissatisfaction. If you call a two days in office, three days from home then change it to three in office and two at home, it seems like a small adjustment but it creates challenges for the employees.
What about the duration that is needed to see a change in productivity? If it’s change too soon the real impact is not felt. If its changed too late then the damage from the lack of productivity will be too great.
Productivity is not only a WFH / WFO issue. I was told by a friend working with barristers in England about a barrister that hit the nail on the head when it comes to productivity. He lives in the outer zones of London so he has a chauffeur that drives him to and from the office and to meetings at his expense. He sits and works while being driven and those then become billable hours.
Other firms only fly their legal teams anywhere in private jets. This sounds like being lavish and wanting to create an image for the company. In reality, not having the entire team sit and wait in queues and all the other time wastage that happens on a normal flight, the team now gets on the plane and can continue to work. So again, no wastage, more billable hours and ultimately more productivity for the company.
We see this in movies and don’t think that this applies in every day business. Especially not in South Africa but consider the following scenario; your top sales person from Johannesburg has a customer meeting in Pretoria North at 9h00. They probably need to leave home at 07h30, have the meeting at 9h00, 10h00 leave and they are back in the office at 11h00. On the other hand, providing that sales person with a full time driver will allow them to catch up on emails and calls, prepare for meetings and be a lot more productive. Has any company looked at this? Or (even if this idea popped up which I don’t think it has) do they just see the cost of the driver’s salary and it seems like a bad idea to incur additional costs.
Companies are not looking at productivity correctly. Incurring some costs can add exponential value. On the other hand, WFH and employees feeling that they are working harder can destroy productivity. We need to change the way we look at this and be truly productive!
Image credits: Photo by Andreas Klassen, Nabeel Syed, Yuri G. Magnet.me on Unsplash
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