Fully expect most people in the discussion to be pro-remote-work. But does anyone have hard evidence that working from home is as productive as working in the office?
Humorous that you're getting downvoted for asking a valid question. It's simple to me - you can emulate remote work in an office by locking yourself in a conf room and never talking to anyone IRL. You can't emulate an office while remote. Working from the office offers more optionality for communication, so there's no downside and only upside vs. remote.
If you simply want to minimize time working, which is an unknown but certainly non-zero amount of employees, it's definitely easier and more fun to do that at home vs. in an office.
There won't be hard evidence for a long time, if ever, on which is better - but the optionality argument makes the decision pretty obvious to me.
You can emulate commute fatigue by standing next to your nearest busy street to absorb the noise pollution for 45 minutes before and after the working day. You can't emulate the lack of commute fatigue while working at the office. So there's no downside and only upside vs. from office.
The optionality argument makes the decision pretty obvious to me.
It depends (Thanks senior developer!). On the type of work, on the organization. On one extreme you have me: I do 7.5h of focused "alone work" a day. And if I went to my office, none of the people I work with would be there, as they'd be in offices in other countries. We aren't a fast paced startup and our office has individual closed-door offices for each employee. So basically IF I went to the office I'd be sitting in a room by myself doing 7.5h of programming and 30 minutes of video calls to other countries. It's not going to be more productive there. Scientific studies, as always, will be hard to find.
On the other extreme you have other people with other tasks and in other kinds of organizations.
In reality though the biggest productivity boost for me is the lack of commute. Because let's face it, I'm not going to commute an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening AND be eight hours ass-in-seat. 10-11 hours away from home. It didn't happen when I did work in an office and it certainly won't happen now. The solution most did I guess was being creative and doing emails or calls while commuting. I had to pick up kids at school or kindergarten at say 3-4PM regardless of whether or not that school was an hour away or two minutes. That meant I often left the office at 2-3pm if commuting. Now I can do kid pickups, do 8h of ass-in-seat all in 8h per day (which is basically the total time of one day that I'm willing to allocate to my employer).
Me personally, I couldn't give the slightest hint of a shit about of it truly is more productive or not, I just know that I personally will never in my life step foot in an office ever again
