By all means, cherry pick your studies on ‘work from home’

By all means, cherry pick your studies:

The convenience of hybrid working is being tempered by the limits of virtual collaboration, which empirical data are now starting to identify.

• One University of Chicago study found that remote workers put in longer hours but were less productive — effects that were especially pronounced among parents. Workers spent more time in meetings, the study found, but lost out on important face time with their managers.
• A September 2021 study of Microsoft workers found that the software giant’s business units became “less interconnected” over time, and that an over-reliance on email and messaging made it “more difficult for workers to convey and/or converge on the meaning of complex information.”
• And a Webex study published last month found high degrees of “meeting fatigue” among remote workers.

What they’re saying: “Hybrid work and video meetings are the new normal, and companies need to provide employees the best technology to reduce meeting fatigue and minimize negative physical ramifications, while taking steps to improve collaboration practices and reduce meeting overload,” the authors of the Webex study wrote.^[1]

By positivist standards, these studies would need to be replicated. But of course that’s not how the business world works. When managers get a study that tells them what they want to hear, it’s “golden,” in sharp contrast to however many studies that tell them something else. Nyah! Nyah! Nyah! Not hearing that!

The Axios report doesn’t provide much detail about the studies it cites.^[2] Neither, really, does a Vox story from late last month that says pretty much the exact opposite:^[3]

People who work remotely are reporting being more productive than they were early on in the pandemic, according to data from Stanford University professor Nicholas Bloom. Bloom, who’s been studying remote work since before it was cool, has teamed up with other academics from the University of Chicago, ITAM, and MIT since May 2020, to conduct a huge ongoing survey about employees’ work arrangements and attitudes toward remote work. In April, people who worked remotely at least some of the time reported being about 9 percent more efficient working from home than they were working from the office. That’s up from 5 percent in the summer of 2020. . . .

Of course, this data on productivity is self-reported, and most people report wanting to keep working from home, so take it with a grain of salt. There is, however, objective data — like more calls per minute for call center workers, engineers submitting more changes to code, and Bureau of Labor Statistics data on growing output per hours worked — that has generally shown that people are, in fact, more productive working from home. But even the idea that people feel more productive is important.^[4]

I’m deeply suspicious of and in fact downright disdainful toward managers’ demands, including, prominently, Elon Musk’s,^[5] that workers return to offices. Because in some management texts I picked up along the way that compare two management “theories,” I find a lesson I wish I had learned decades ago:

• The classic “Theory X” projects managerial laziness and incompetence onto workers, devaluing worker knowledge and experience, and seeking to motivate them through a series of carrots and sticks.^[6] It’s everything you know and hate about working for bosses.

• “Theory Y,” in contrast, values the knowledge and experience of workers and other stakeholders as it promotes environmental sustainability. This management style has repeatedly been shown to be at least as, if not more, profitable than “Theory X.”

But if you guessed that “Theory Y” is being embraced in workplaces near and far by every manager that ever learns of it, well, you’d be wrong. Rather, within a few years, “Theory X” reasserts its dominance even in workplaces where “Theory Y” has succeeded.^[7]

From this, we know that profit is not more important than control. Why? Because any competence you may possess is a threat to your incompetent bosses who fear for their own positions or to their spoiled brat incompetent children’s hopes to succeed them. It is incompetent and utterly subservient sycophants who get promoted.^[8] You knew that.

So, of course, that thing where bosses command everyone to fight gridlocked traffic to all be in the same place at the same time? It stinks to high heaven of control freakery.

This, of course, is a lesson that all you long-suffering “Theory X” workers learned long ago. And it’s a lesson I probably could never have conformed to even if I’d understood it, which probably helps explain why I am where I am.^[9]

So whatever you do, do not suggest that Elon Musk is a control freak.^[10] Nope, no way. It can’t possibly be true.

1. ^[1]Javier E. David, “Remote work may not be working any more,” Axios, June 5, 2022, https://www.axios.com/2022/06/05/work-from-home-elon-musk-remote-office-meetings↩
2. ^[2]Javier E. David, “Remote work may not be working any more,” Axios, June 5, 2022, https://www.axios.com/2022/06/05/work-from-home-elon-musk-remote-office-meetings↩
3. ^[3]Rani Molla, “Tell your boss: Working from home is making you more productive,” Vox, May 30, 2022, https://www.vox.com/recode/23129752/work-from-home-productivity↩
4. ^[4]Rani Molla, “Tell your boss: Working from home is making you more productive,” Vox, May 30, 2022, https://www.vox.com/recode/23129752/work-from-home-productivity↩
5. ^[5]Hope King, “Musk’s WFH warning amplifies threat level for workers,” Axios, June 1, 2022, https://www.axios.com/2022/06/01/musks-wfh-warning-amplifies-threat-level-for-workers↩
6. ^[6]Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley, The Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned From Patagonia’s First 40 Years (Ventura, CA: Patagonia, 2012); Chip Conley, Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007); Gary Heil, Warren Bennis, and Deborah C. Stephens, Douglas McGregor Revisited: Managing the Human Side of the Enterprise (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000); Art Kleiner, The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008); Carol Sanford, The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011); Marvin R. Weisbord, Productive Workplaces: Dignity, Meaning, and Community in the 21st Century, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012).↩
7. ^[7]Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley, The Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned From Patagonia’s First 40 Years (Ventura, CA: Patagonia, 2012); Chip Conley, Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007); Gary Heil, Warren Bennis, and Deborah C. Stephens, Douglas McGregor Revisited: Managing the Human Side of the Enterprise (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000); Art Kleiner, The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008); Carol Sanford, The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011); Marvin R. Weisbord, Productive Workplaces: Dignity, Meaning, and Community in the 21st Century, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012).↩
8. ^[8]Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (New York: Crown, 2012); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956; repr., New York: Oxford University, 2000).↩
9. ^[9]David Benfell, “About my job hunt,” Not Housebroken, n.d., https://disunitedstates.org/about-my-job-hunt/↩
10. ^[10]Hope King, “Musk’s WFH warning amplifies threat level for workers,” Axios, June 1, 2022, https://www.axios.com/2022/06/01/musks-wfh-warning-amplifies-threat-level-for-workers↩