Opinion: Working from home is great — except for productivity
After 15 months of tumbleweeds blowing through near-abandoned commercial and financial centres, major North American cities are poised for a gradual downtown renaissance. The traffic that once flowed into downtowns by foot, bike, train, tram, and car and then up, up, up into the embrace of commercial office towers like arterial blood to the heart has already started to return.
In parallel, a debate rages about whether white-collar workers, who have proven they can work remotely, ought to return to the office at all. Should companies expect a return to the pre-COVID default of five days per week office “presenteeism”? Will workers even accept such terms? Is there a middle ground between strictly enforced pre-COVID attendance and the cabin fever of being isolated in a bachelor apartment all day long?
Arguments based on dogmatic views about how businesses should be run or hard-to-measure variables such as “Zoom fatigue” leave out one of the most important parts of the debate: productivity. A full year and change into the pandemic we have better data on this key metric that matters equally to employees and management. Productivity is most often measured in terms of output per unit of input. How much are people actually getting done relative to their effort?
