To think remote workers exaggerate how much they actually work?

Some people take the piss, some are more productive. I prefer working from home because our office is open plan, and hot-desking. There are at least a hundred other people on my floor on any given day, and there's constant noise and movement from people wandering about for loo breaks, talking about their projects, talking about their kids, nattering in the kitchen area and so on. It is all REALLY distracting, and I don't even work with any of them. All of my immediate colleagues bar one either work overseas or in a different UK location, and I can just as easily do a Teams call with them from my home as from the office, then get on with some proper thinking in peace and quiet.

YABVU

Except the objective (ahem that's not subjective) research into this area shows you're wrong in this assumption.

According to the studies highlighted in the Economist, see up thread for details, productivity drops by about 18-20% when workers are allowed work remotely versus in an office. This is due to a range of factors e.g. harder to supervise, out of sight out of mind factors, less cooperation & productive serendipity from bumping into each other & working more collaboratively in the office.

As for me, I (very subjectively) find my own productivity to be quite good when wfh, until I come on Mumsnet , etc when I get totally distracted & immersed in the online debate de jour instead of attending to my work, and then my productivity falls off a very steep cliff sadly.

I suspect this last sentence will resonate with many other wfh people on here right now, e.g. is there not something a bit more productive You could be directing your energies into!?

QED

@ILoveWhales

You just prefer working from home, don't tell lies.

And that’s bad why?

This attitude is bizarre. You seem to assume that because a certain way of working suits millions of people it must be bad.

That says more about your attitude to work than it does about home workers.

The whole attitude to wfh from some people is: “people are getting on with their jobs quietly and no longer needing babying or micro-management. Let’s take them down a peg.”

It’s based on bitterness and lack of imagination.

It really depends. Some days I can do 10 hour days and barely move because it’s so busy. Other days can be quieter but that happens less often. I also work 2 days a week in the office.

I think it really depends on the job and yes I would imagine that there are some WFH jobs that allow for a lot of ‘relaxation time’ throughout the day!!

Right because children always come what theyre told? Surely your child is coming in because they're bored when parents are working with no child care in place for them

I can’t speak for yours but my child is 14, at school between 7.30am and 5pm so she doesn’t disturb or distract me at all at home. On the rare occasions she is at home she clearly understands she can’t disturb me and stays out of my way.

Younger children obviously need professional childcare in place. Mine was with a childminder from 8 until 6 until she started secondary.

Working parents who WFH have childcare in place. There may be a handful who abuse this and try to work around it. But there are plenty of dossers in an office environment who spend most of the day online shopping or on social media.

Why is it assumed that home based workers are inherently more likely to be workshy? There’s no evidence for this, its pure prejudice.

What about contracted hours?

I WFH and it largely depends on the workday as I work in a business that is either absolute chaos, in which case i extend my hours to deal with international clients and don't even get a break to eat, or it's a day when all is peaceful/coasting, and i can peruse mumsnet until work comes in.
It is much the same in the office, so really, theres no difference at all.
No kids.

YABU to make a generalisation. Everyone is different. I’ve seen some people who sit and gossip all day in the office. I can’t imagine that they are very productive when they treat the office like a social gathering.

WFH is convenient but AIBU to think lots of people log on, do a bit, then spend most of the day coasting, while loudly insisting they’re “more productive than ever?”

It's no different to working in the office. I know plenty of people who work in offices and spend a hell of a lot of time chatting, making tea, taking a suspiciously long lunch break and coming back with a ton of shopping, and dicking about on the internet. They probably claim they're 'more productive than ever' too.

Ultimately, how productive people are is always going to depend on the individual and the demands of their job, regardless of where they're located. I find the chippy, oppositional tone of office worker vs. home worker threads really fucking weird, to be honest.

We've all had colleagues who take the piss at work and I expect these people take the piss at home too. Its a problem with their attitude, not wfh.

If I was always away from my computer, not producing work and not picking up calls my manager would be questioning what I was doing.

My children are far less likely to interrupt me than my husband or any work colleagues. They are able to occupy themselves

And an occasional quick question is no where near as detrimental to focus as some idiot at the next desk having a three hour teams call where they are doing most of the talking (we actually have special rooms for these but noone seems to use them)

you havent' got children have you 😂

Surely your child is coming in because they're bored
no, that's why they're coming in. HTH

Not in my teams they don't. They are required to achieve a certain performance, complete tasks etc, and if they weren't working properly at home, as their manager, I'd notice their performance was falling short of the expected level and address it. If you're a manager concerned about this, than you need to do likewise. If you're an office based worker who feels your workload is too heavy because remote colleagues are not working, then raise your workload issue with your manager.

that

plus my kids are either at school, or more than happy to stay in the living room with their friends playing with their Playstation and not reminding me of homework and other things they should be doing

They're the least likely to disturb me so I leave them to whatever they're doing 😂

Right because children always come what theyre told? Surely your child is coming in because they're bored when parents are working with no child care in place for them.

Aside from a few slackers, and the few who confuse WFH with free childcare for them, people work a lot more and more efficiently from home.

What I see in the office is people showing their face, but wasting so much time faffing around, doing tea rounds, walking around, chatting with anyone or everyone, and achieving basically fuck all AND disturbing everyone else in the process.

People justify their time at home and get results done. If they don't, they should be sacked, easy.

A lot of home workers can have flexibility, so they might look like they have an easy day - doing school run, popping out for appointments, doing laundry, diner... but what you dont' see is more often than not they work more hours, earlier and later and work the hours they would be wasting commuting.

It's a management problem, not a WFH problem

The critical difference here is that if Little Johnny walks into your home office you can say “piss off, I’m working,” whereas if a bunch of senior staff are loudly chatting behind your desk while you struggle to focus on a Teams call you don’t have the same leeway.

People have to maintain a certain social diplomacy at work which requires a lot if pointless chit chat and dead time. This isn’t necessary with your family.

A certain sort of person likes people to be in the office because they can’t compute that other people are genuine self starters and can organise their workload efficiently without needing to be corralled and marshalled everywhere. They assume everyone else is like them. We are not.

They also can't compute that quality productivity isn't necessarily measured in time spent at one's desk.

I've spent four uninspired hours at my desk slogging over a piece of work that, when I finally crawled through, was far from my best output.

On a different day I went for a run, made myself a good lunch and did a very similar piece of work in about 45 minutes, and absolutely smashed it. Less than a quarter of the time spent at my desk for a much better result.

Repeating it louder for those at the back: taking leisure breaks improves the standard of your work.

Yep. What pisses me off about the way this discussion has evolved is that its now being described as a “personality flaw” to want to work remotely. And it plays into the hands of people who are jumping on this as a political issue.

A certain sort of person likes people to be in the office because they can’t compute that other people are genuine self starters and can organise their workload efficiently without needing to be corralled and marshalled everywhere. They assume everyone else is like them. We are not.

I log on (on an average day) at 6am and, with a few meal and tea breaks and a break when my daughter gets home from school, I work until 6-7pm. So thats on average a 13 hour work day with maybe two or two and a half hours of break time.

I am far more productive than I would be spending an obligatory 30 minutes chatting shit about someone’s home renovation project, scrabbling to find a meeting room or trying to shout to make myself heard on a Teams call over the office background noise.

I challenge you to find someone with a more productive schedule.

I wish people who cant work without someone standing over them would all go and form their own company full of robots who cant work without programming and leave those of us who have some agency and grit to work productively as suits us.

I hated working from home when children were little. Now they are older and know not to disturb me. I have had to tell DH off on various occasions as he is the only one who interrupts me.

Back in the day we all used to have our own individual offices at work. We could shut the door if we needed to focus. Now we are in open plan offices people either use noise cancelling headphones or plan to work from home for focussed work

It also surprises me how so many are unable to productive in an office because of distractions. However equally so many object to coming to the office because they have children at home.

How strange the children dont distrupt them.

This method of working might just suit her and her role.

I log on and check my emails, the news, the headlines first thing in the morning when I wake up over a cup of coffee. Easy to fire off any quick replies that are necessary.

I also check the same things pretty much before I go to bed. I like knowing what I'll wake up to.

I don't work solidly in between! It totally depends on what I actually have to do but I'll frequently take both short breaks (the oft-cited laundry, which is barely time away from my desk as it takes 30 seconds to shove clothes into a washing machine) and longer ones (going for a run, doing some reading, sometimes popping out to meet a friend for lunch).

In other words WFH enables me to fit both my work and my leisure around each other throughout the entire day, rather than work having to take place in a 9-5 block (often inconvenient for me - not all the work can be done then) and leisure being crammed on either side (and not enough time for it).

I've also never skived more than in my first office job, where I did not enjoy the work, did not want to have a career in that industry, and spent 90% of my time browsing the internet.

So if that's the case arguably makes no difference to the setting someone works in. If someone is productive, they are productive the setting makes no difference.

Yes, IME this is more the case for DH and I when WFH. I'm unsure what job you have where no one notices you not working but it sounds like the kind of job that is pretty irrelevant within the workplace. I don't have timesheets or anything but if I wasn't responding to emails and providing the required work, my workplace would notice within about 2 hours!