I both agree and disagree with the conclusions in the title…
I agree that for many people, they’re happier, and likely more productive, working from home.
I would also agree that for many different people, working from an office makes them happier/more productive.
It entirely depends on the job, who you are, and the work culture. Some places are toxic and working from home to get away from it is helpful for job satisfaction. I’ve known people who simply focus better when they’re at the office since they have a lot of distractions at home. I know for me, the opposite is true. at home, I’m in control and can limit exposure to distractions, and I can be more productive, more comfortable and overall less unhappy with my job.
IMO, this discussion is less about what companies want, whether work from home or hybrid, or in office … The main conclusion that we should be driving home is that different people need different environments to do their best work, and be happiest with their particular job. To put it simply: workers need to be able to choose.
Until we’re at the stage where employers care less about how, and where you do the work, and they care more about the work getting done… We’re going to keep going back and forth on this.
I like to work from home. That’s me.
I know people who prefer to work from an office. There’s plenty of people who feel they work best from the office.
There’s plenty of people that need to mix between home and office work.
Bluntly: as long as you can do the work from where you’re working, and how you’re working, the rest should be flexible. We’re (presumably) adults and professionals. If we’re given work and we’re being paid to do the work, then we will do the work. We don’t need to be constantly supervised by middle management like toddlers.
I am more productive and less depressed working from site and if i work too much from home I get depressed and adhd kicks in and paralizes me.
I don’t see how it benefits everyone not to allow people to work from home at the same time.
Tl:dr “Nah-uh, not me.”
Work, and society in general, isn’t meant to make us happier.
It fuckin should be. We are all here for a blink of an eye on a spinning rock next to uncontrollable chaos. Let us enjoy the ride and quit squabbling over which idol is right or who has the most manufactured wealth.
Correct. I am merely relaying my observations.
It’s also nice eating out of your own fridge, using your own toilet, and everything else.
Bidet, and that’s all I’ll say
Agreed, thanks COVID(I guess?)
from a “managing people” standpoint it’s a little easier (at least in my field) too, because it becomes obvious when someone’s product is shit if I’m paying attention
also i really like shitting at home
I could tolerate going in to the office if I had my own bathroom.
Maybe for most people. I start getting a little too suicidey when I spend too many days working from home.
That sounds like you are using work as a replacement for whatever it is missing in your personal life. Nothing stopping you from going to do things outside of work hours.
I loved working most days until 12 or 1 in the office, coming home and refocusing on “my” part of my workday. Just enough office, not too much. Sadly now I am glued into a windowless room with a camera on me. Major dissatisfaction, huh.
Yeah I actually do that at my current job. WFH the first hour or so, leave after traffic is down, work from the office until 2ish and leave before afternoon traffic starts up, then wrap things up at home while I prep to workout. That flexibility is one of the only reasons I’m not looking to move unless there’s a huge raise in it for me. The job sucks otherwise.
Haha! Now if only the point of work was to make you happy! If research showed it made your boss wealthier then everyone would be WFH tomorrow!
It DOES make them wealthier. Since productivity isn’t lost while employees WFH, that means that they get the same results while saving money from having costs associated with office space like rent, utilities, furnishing, and maintenance. The reason why they don’t do it is because office real estate is a business worth billions and the rich are all invested in it. They’re so greedy and out of touch, they’d make up any lie to demonize WFH.
It also makes employees wealthier… Think of all the money you flush down the drain making your car move from home to the office and back again… Just that alone is easily thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars per year, depending on your vehicle and type of fuel, efficiency, etc.
Everyone wins except the real estate owners and their stakeholders, which, as you astutely pointed out, are the business owners. Rent is a way for them to essentially launder money into their own pockets. They legitimately pay their office rent, and a chunk of that comes back to them in dividends from the land owning company.
It’s a club, and you ain’t in it.
We’ve had this capacity for several decades now, and it seems ridiculous that our culture has not fully embraced it with open arms. If that’s not a sign that “we the people” aren’t running the show, I don’t know what is. Freedom my ass.
Due to how isolating our culture and urban planning has become, a lot of people have started using their work as a replacement for their social life. Without it they realize just how caged they are under this system, so they refuse it. They think being given more free time and the ability to do work from the comfort of their own home is a bad thing because it takes away their social outlet.
People have to do what’s best for them. If they need to commute to a job to have a social life, let them. This is absolutely not a reason to force other people to do it.
Of course it isn’t but you are the one who said that it was ridiculous that we haven’t embraced it.
It isn’t ridiculous. It’s actually pretty expected of the society we have built to be against it. There are perfectly explainable reasons why we have yet to embrace it.
I don’t say this to tell you it shouldn’t change. I’m saying this to specifically highlight the things we need to change so that no one will be forced into doing it.
People do need to do what’s best, so we should probably fix things so that being forced to use office work as a replacement for a social life isn’t the best option people have available to them.
I know a few boomers who are against it. They think that online work is not real work and that people who work remote are lazy bums who should get a “real job”. They’re the same type of people who went insane during the lockdowns instead of enjoying the free vacation.
Boomer here, software developer, I started fighting the telecommuting battle with managers in the early 90s. They’d say, “We need you here.” I’d ask, “Why? I can dial in. You have contractors in India you’ve never even met, and that works out fine.” “That’s different.” “How?” They never could come up with valid reasons why we really needed to physically be there, and would generally shut down the conversation with like, “Well, I can see we don’t agree on this.” Correct, and 30 years later they’re still making the same ludicrous arguments.
how will landlords who own all the buildings in business districts get paid, then? do you want their properties to stay empty? do you just want them to starve?
Just an FYI, most commercial real estate is owned by massive corporations because they’re the only ones with enough money to build and own skyscrapers. Most mom and pop landlords are residential and they own 4 units or less. It’s very rare for an average, even a wealthy average person to own more than a couple of commercial properties that they rent out. Corporate landlords are very much a big reason why WFH isn’t the standard.
Of course it does!
When I get a complaint email I can yell at Myles to go fuck himself with a toilet brush, all whole sitting in my favourite chair and Myles will still wish me a good evening at the end of the work day.
What’s not to like?This popped into my head…
A hard truth is that if you see an executive pushing return to office, you know one of two things about them. One of the following is true.
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They are terrible at finance and don’t understand the sunk-cost fallacy. They have to keep using that building they bought; they’ve spent so much on it and simply can’t bring themselves to sell it.
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They’re a sexual molester. They’re someone that uses the power of their position to coerce sex out of their employees. Fucking their employees is their primary motivation for not retiring early right now. You can’t coerce your secretary to give you a blowjob over Zoom.
That’s really it. They’re either bad at business or they’re a sexual predator. If you see an executive pushing return to office, be sure to ask them which one of these they are. Because they’re definitely one or the other.
- Tradition.
- Belief that work-from-home is less efficient.
Those are both covered under ‘bad at business’.
As well as being a sexual monster. A lot of tradition is built around reinforcement of sexist gender roles.
So
- They’re morons and terrible at business.
- Remote didn’t work as well for the company.
- Remote didn’t work as well for any number of people at that company.
Found the executive.
We have work from home, i have gone to the office twice this year. But it is true it didn’t work for everyone. Some left because of isolation factor, some fired because without anyone watching they just could not self motivate. In some case in-office meetings are way more productive, and you get those moments when a coworker overhears your convo and chimes in with something relevent that you would never have connection on in WFH
While there are a few that work better in an office, the overwhelming majority work better at home. Why should we force everyone to suffer for the handful of folks who can’t self-motivate at home? We don’t bend over backwards to cater to people who say, have auditory issues that make working in a crowded open-plan office debilitating. We tell those folks to go die in a fire if they can’t handle an office environment. Plenty of people can’t work in an office, but that was never been seen as an argument to get rid of offices.
Honestly I think your first point is just a subset of something larger and even more basic - “we’ve always done it this way. Change is scawwy. Different bad. Are you implying I was wrong before?” Etc.
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I propose that the mods should take this post down, or at least point to the original post, that cmu.fr has obviously plagiarized.
Here is what seems to be the original post: https://indiandefencereview.com/theyve-observed-teleworking-for-four-years-and-reached-one-clear-conclusion-working-from-home-makes-us-happier/
The big difference is that the original article actually points to the study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35379616/ where as the cmu.fr plagiarized version makes no reference whatsoever to the study. Just vague slop about “scientists”.
That said, I think that even the original article miscaracterizes the paper. Here is the paper abstract:
Objectives: To investigate the impacts, on mental and physical health, of a mandatory shift to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Design: Cross sectional, online survey.
Setting: Online survey was conducted from September 2020 to November 2020 in the general population.
Participants: Australian residents working from home for at least 2 days a week at some time in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Main outcome measures: Demographics, caring responsibilities, working from home arrangements, work-related technology, work-family interface, psychosocial and physical working conditions, and reported stress and musculoskeletal pain.
Results: 924 Australians responded to the online questionnaire. Respondents were mostly women (75.5%) based in Victoria (83.7%) and employed in the education and training and healthcare sectors. Approximately 70% of respondents worked five or more days from home, with only 60% having a dedicated workstation in an uninterrupted space. Over 70% of all respondents reported experiencing musculoskeletal pain or discomfort. Gendered differences were observed; men reported higher levels of family to work conflict (3.16±1.52 to 2.94±1.59, p=0.031), and lower levels of recognition for their work (3.75±1.03 to 3.96±1.06, p=0.004), compared with women. For women, stress (2.94±0.92 to 2.66±0.88, p<0.001) and neck/shoulder pain (4.50±2.90 to 3.51±2.84, p<0.001) were higher than men and they also reported more concerns about their job security than men (3.01±1.33 to 2.78±1.40, p=0.043).
Conclusions: Preliminary evidence from the current study suggests that working from home may impact employees’ physical and mental health, and that this impact is likely to be gendered. Although further analysis is required, these data provide insights into further research opportunities needed to assist employers in optimising working from home conditions and reduce the potential negative physical and mental health impacts on their employees.
Keywords: COVID-19; mental health; risk management.
So, long story short: this article is slop, copied from another piece of slop that mischaracterized a study. Overall: meh.
With that, survey data are some of the poorest quality data.
Too bad that happiness is banned in the USA…
What a silly thing to say. It’s merely prohibitively expensive. I mean, reasonably priced and readily available for those that deserve it.
All in a monthly subscription service.
I thought it was a pay-per-smile subscription…
Happiness breeds self esteem, self esteem breeds confidence, confidence breeds learning. Education, confidence, self esteem, and happiness are all antithetical to fear and obedience. We’re much easier to rule if we’re stressed out. Plus, the real reason for return to office is real estate value. It has nothing to do with worker morale or productivity.
To be fair the pursuit of happiness in and of itself is an uncatchable carrot used to push the capitalist agenda. Happy moments are like sprinkles on a doughnut, few and far between. Contentment is what we should really be shooting for.
Yea sucks, they banned compassion and kindness too
That’s why they want to put a stop to it. You’re not allowed to be happy.
Even better is if we all got a monthly allowance and not have to work full time. 😆
Naive to think that those who set the prices won’t just adjust the baseline to absorb the entirety of your monthly allowance.
Better to just establish a system of community property that equitably shares and distributes necessities and the means of producing goods or providing services without the need to satisfy an arbitrary profit incentive of some private individual who will put their greed over your needs out of a sense of entitlement gained from their private ownership over such means.
Someone has to provide proof for the answers to obvious questions, if for no other reason than to short circuit the “SoUrCe?” clowns.
Exactly. It’s never a bad thing to have hard data on what we think is obvious.
Especially since it’s not uncommon for what’s ‘obvious’ to be wrong.
Truth. I am so happy where I’m at that I am not looking for a new job with better pay because I love WFH so much. I know here I will always WFH.
Don’t need to put on makeup, don’t need to put together outfits for the week, don’t need to drive anywhere. I wake up thirty minutes before I clock in.
Love it!
Here’s the weird thing.
I’ve been telecommuting for 23 years. I’ve never been able to just roll outta bed and put in a full day. If it’s scheduled then I’m showered and dressed and ready to go; just in shorts and a tee vs khakis and a fucking polo.
The only indulgence is on a o5oo wakeup I’m not shaving lest I lose an eyebrow or an ear. Even in our basic training it was o520.
But yeah, no smelly sweatpants for me.
Same here. I get ready to work in the same way as I would step into my car to go to the office.
Makes perfect sense. I get dressed, shave, and head right into the office and then head straight back home every day I’m working from home. It’s about good habits, you know?
