It’s a battle we’ve heard about constantly in the last few years — whether working from home or in-office is more productive for businesses.
For years, the data showed that the former was the better choice, but lately, the wisdom has shifted in the other direction, leading to many businesses demanding employees return to the office.
A woman on TikTok laid out why for her, the answer is clear — and it turns out her perceptions match up with a lot of data on the subject.
The woman perfectly explained why working from home is more productive than working in the office.
For years, the prevailing data on the subject showed that working from home was the better choice. But more recent studies have begun to shift the conventional wisdom in the other direction, leading many businesses to demand that employees return to the office even as employees make it clear they have no desire to do so.
These in-office mandates don’t appear to be working — a recent survey by FlexJobs found that more than half of respondents personally knew someone who had quit or was planning to quit their job because of a return-to-office rule.
TikTok creator @brandnamecereal recently provided some insight into why this has become such a bone of contention for so many employees.
She says that the main difference is that in the office, she was forced to ‘perform availability’ while fielding constant interruptions.
“I just recall what it was like to sit at my desk all day versus sitting at my home desk all day,” she said in her video, “and basically the only difference is when I was at work, I had to be performing availability full-time.”
She says she gets the same amount of work done as she did when she still had to go to the office. What’s changed is how she’s using those little bits of time in between tasks. At the office, “you’re on your phone, you’re talking to your coworker,” whereas at home, “I’m still logging the same amount of work … but whenever I have five minutes, I’m not talking to my coworker, I go unload my dishwasher.”
She acknowledges that to a boss or executive, this use of company time for a personal endeavor would probably inspire outrage, but she contends it’s all the same at the end of the day.
“Those five minutes that I was waiting for someone to email me back were going to be less productive anyway,” she said.
Chatting with coworkers isn’t productive either, after all. And not having to do chores like unloading the dishwasher after an hour-long commute makes her “more consistently productive” because of the energy it saves, and because “the people I don’t want bothering me aren’t bothering me…I respond to things in a timely manner.”
This makes me think of my brother, who has been mandated to return to the office two days a week — days he says he spends attending the same Zoom meetings he does in his home office and fielding constant interruptions that result in him having to take work home to complete in the evenings instead of helping his wife with their kids.
Recent data that suggests working from home actually has a decisively negative impact on productivity, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
So why such a huge discrepancy between workers’ perceptions and the latest data on productivity? The study which has become most central to many companies’ justifications for mandating a return to in-office work is one conducted by economists at MIT and UCLA which found working from home resulted in an 18% decline in productivity.
However, there are a few issues with this claim. For one, that study focuses exclusively on data-entry workers in India — hardly analogous to all types of work being down from home. The creative work I do as a writer and video maker, for example, is not cleanly measurable in the way typing a finite amount of data into a software system in a finite amount of time is. These are not apples-to-apples comparisons.
More importantly, Stanford University economics professor Nick Bloom, who has been leading studies on productivity for decades, says that the productivity declines shown in the recent data can be explained in part by management procedures that haven’t yet adapted to the new way of doing things — a factor even the most anti-work-from-home studies also blame for more negative productivity reports.
And when it comes to the broader data on how work-from-home affects productivity and especially profitability, the numbers don’t lie.
As Bloom has noted,…
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