2024-08-09 02:58:56
Announcing the directive to work “primarily in approved offices”, NSW Premier Chris Minns said overseas research showed people were working in the city. Lower productivity When working from home.
“There’s been a reduction in mentorship. There’s been a reduction in the sense of shared purpose,” he said. “This is about building a culture in the civil service.”
Since the pandemic began, I’ve researched the impact of working from home, but I’m not convinced.
My colleagues and I at the University of Sydney Business School’s Institute of Transport and Logistics have been monitoring changes in home working and how this relates to performance. Since the outbreak.
Working from home means more work
We found that employees who chose to work from home could use up to a third of the time they saved by not commuting to do additional unpaid work.
When we asked employees working from home how the new arrangement had affected their productivity, more said it had made it more productive than it had made it worse.
About one in five said it made them “much more efficient,” while only one in 30 said it made them “much less efficient.”
Interestingly, when employers were asked the same question: whether employees working from home were more or less productive, their answers were largely the same.
About one in five said the change made their workers “much more efficient.” About one in 20 said it made them “much less efficient.”
Our findings are consistent with international evidence.
one Stanford University Research found that in the United States, working from home during the pandemic increased productivity by 5%.
The study found that most of the gains were not reflected in traditional productivity measures because they did not account for savings in commuting time.
Another study evaluated the productivity of remote and on-site call centers at Fortune 500 companies. It found that working from home can increase productivity by 8%.
Another study collected metadata via email across North America, Europe, and the Middle East and found that the number of meetings per capita increased, but the average meeting length decreased, resulting in Spend less time in meetings each day.
Our own work has found that some face-to-face contact is important, but just two or three days a week is sufficient to facilitate social interaction, mentoring, and sharing of ideas.
In Australia, Productivity Commission Controlling work schedules was found to be important for productivity.
It observed:
[…] Employees may be more productive at home because they have more control over their time and enjoy a better work-life balance.
Better matching of workers and jobs is important, the report notes.
Companies will be able to draw on a larger (and more productive) workforce. While this will not, strictly speaking, have an impact on productivity, it has been shown that employees working from home have been working longer hours during the pandemic.
Our research provides new evidence on how workers use the time they save by not commuting.
According to the workers who took part in our survey, the biggest use of this time – almost a third – was doing additional unpaid work for their employer.
Additional paid work took up a significant amount of time (whether or not working for the main employer), and housework took up about a quarter of the time.
The average commuting time saved by working from home in Greater Sydney was 9.4 hours per week in September 2022. This suggests that the extra time spent on additional paid and unpaid work is considerable.
This is important to consider when evaluating productivity.
It would be unfortunate if the biggest impact of return-to-office regulations was that employees would stop being so generous with their time.
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