Cushy? Working from home has real efficiencies

The pandemic has shown that worker efficiency cannot be measured by the hours spent in the office.

It used to be the dirty little secret of office employees – just how much time is wasted when two or more workers are gathered together in the same space.

Even the workers themselves rarely realised the time involved in the greetings, gossip and conversations that helped make a workplace more pleasant, but perhaps less productive.

Not for much longer, however.

The forced exit from offices across the world almost exactly three years ago lifted the lid on efficiency. Managers may find it hard to accept but working from home can often lead to better, focused work uninterrupted by chats or questions, or the noise from the next cubicle destroying another worker’s concentration.

There is a school of thought that argues time spent talking to colleagues is not time wasted but an opportunity for creativity. That’s true enough; and building relationships with fellow workers is important for combined work down the track.

But in the end, it’s a matter of scale.

There is a considerable research into how much time is wasted at work – with meetings universally seen as the big culprit. But a June 2022 article in Forbes argued that about 30 per cent of employees waste about 30 minutes a day “with water-cooler talks, social media, and the internet”.

The office “water cooler” chat has a reputation for being a time waster.

There are a stack of other time-wasters such as constantly dealing with your emails instead of saving them for an assault every hour or so. And many workers organise their lives, making travel or restaurant bookings at work.

But those activities are as easily – in fact more easily – carried out at home as in the office and are these days regarded by most bosses as part of the contract.

Few desk-based workers would accept any restrictions of these online forays which are now taken for granted. And if you think your employees will do less personal emailing in the office than if they were at home, you are misled.

Of course, the really big time waster for workers is the commute: research released this week by the US National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that over the Covid-19 years, commuters saved an average of 72 minutes each day by not having to go into an office.

One of the greatest time wasters is the commute to and from work. Picture: Daniel Pockett

That’s six hours each week, which is considerable, and of course for some people in some cities the time saved is far greater.

Still, travel to the office from home has long been seen as part of the deal in modern societies. In general, it has never been an issue for employers because it has been seen as eating into an individual worker’s time, not the boss’s time. Thus, the length of an employee’s journey to work has been of little or no concern to an employer.

Very occasionally over the years before Covid-19, an employer allowed an employee with a long train commute to work en route on their computer or phone and claim that time as work time. But such arrangements, secured as part of an attraction or retention package, were rare. Most of the workforce is on its own when it comes to managing their commute.

The past three years, however, have seen travel patterns disrupted – in a good way. For many people, especially parents with the responsibility of depositing and collecting children in childcare or school, avoiding the work journey is nothing short of miraculous, an unexpected gift. Little wonder companies continue to have trouble getting people back into the office: the logistics of working and running kids are often much harder if parents have to spend time in the office.

Although there is pressure for workers to return to the office, many are resisting.

I have argued since the start of lockdowns and through the evolution of hybrid work that it will be very difficult to get some employees back into the formal workplace because flexible work really works for them and their families.

Many companies agreed and only gently suggested to workers that they codify their work patterns and stick to their days in the office rather than casually deciding where they would work.

The softly-softly approach showed an acceptance that the value of remote work was going to be hard to counter. There was a recognition “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”, and that trying to reverse the revolution would not work.

But for some employers, 2023 was to be the year when, with Covid-19 more or less done and dusted, they would muster the troops and get them back to headquarters. It will take time to know if that works – especially given we are in the midst of a fresh wave of Covid-19 cases, providing the “stay-at-home” lobby with health arguments against office work.

Some workers will be too afraid to ignore a manager’s edicts to come back to work, but those with a little more power will resist, arguing they should be judged on outputs. They may not quit if their boss insists on their physical presence but are likely to do everything they can to get the work pattern that suits them.

Sorting the structure of work remains a big challenge for many companies: once upon a time, three years ago, everyone was on the same page – working in the office was the rule with relatively minor, customised departures allowing some people to work from home. Today, managers have to understand that working from home is the norm in eyes of many knowledge workers.

It’s hard to comprehend just how dramatic the shift has been, but the best HR departments realised some time ago that “one size fits all” would not cut it.

The website Hubble carries an “official list of every company’s back-to-office strategy” and reports there is no longer a “standard” way of working. It lists 25 companies from Adobe and Airbnb to Canva and Citigroup to Salesforce, Shopify and Zoom.

Take a look a look at how the biggest companies are addressing the revolution.

hubblehq.com/blog/famous-companies-workplace-strategies