To think remote workers exaggerate how much they actually work?

[ZippyGreyOtter]

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?”

If you never did any work at the office before covid, I don't know how you kept your job

It's so weird how many people say they were not productive unless they were working.For what did you do before the pandemic?You will rubbish at your job and got absolutely nothing done and didn't hear any of your targets? Of course you did. You just prefer working from home, don't tell lies. Perfectly capable of being productive in an office. If you want to be otherwise, you wouldn't have kept your job.

You're also making a choice to chat to people and swan around at lunch, doing no work. Do your job and shut your mouth. It isn't difficult to do that.

I'm more productive at home. I have a quiet space to work, whereas in the office I'm hot desking in a large open plan room. It makes a huge difference to my concentration. Yes occasionally at home I might put a wash on, speak to a member of my family etc, but that's much less time than I spend speaking about non work things to colleagues (or being distracted by their conversations) in the office.

However, I'm only at home or in the office a small amount of time, for admin or when schools are closed. In term time my role means I'm out visiting schools most days. So it's a bit different because I've never been in either place all the time, and what I'm doing while in the office / at home isn't the main thing I'm being measured on. So my office time was always less productive than my outreach time, because that's my quieter time anyway and chance to catch up with colleagues. The catching up with colleagues bit of the office has become more important since a lot of us do most of our admin time from home now, so only see each other rarely, so that's made the office even less productive than it always was, if you see what I mean. In the school holidays I essentially go to the office if I want to be social with colleagues and feel less isolated, and work at home if I want to get my head down for an admin task or make lots of phone calls etc.

if we had to go back to only going to the office when not in school now, like we did before COVID, it would be a huge adjustment to get used to having to do a lot of admin or make calls to external people with that many distractions going on! My productivity would definitely go down, at least initially.

I had a remote job for a bit and it was great. I basically did fuck all and I got to sit upstairs while dh dealt with the carnage of the children downstairs (it was evening work).

We've all got to have something to talk about whilst we are slacking working from home. Mumsnet is the water cooler equivalent.

So an observation of a boring, done-to-death media narrative rather than a meaningful empirical one. Indeed, not actually an observation of anything real at all.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 😂

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

What about contracted hours?

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.