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Clocking hours during remote work has not necessarily helped increase the output, reports The Economist. Although surveys early during the Corona virus lock-down had shown that remote work did not reduce productivity, a new study showed 30% more work hours than before the pandemic, including an 18% increase in working outside the normal hours. But this extra effort did not translate into any rise of input. So you can conclude the productivity (output per working hour) fell by 20%!

Managers checking on their team

This happened because employees spent more time in “collaboration hours” (various meetings) and less “focus hours” (uninterrupted by calls or emails). A possible explanation of these extra meetings is that managers want to check on their teams, and also it’s more difficult to co-ordinate a team while working remote.

Important lessons learned:

• Employees had less focus time than before the pandemic.
• They were involved in more meetings.
• Some managers could be holding more meetings to check on their employees (for the good or the bad reasons), and some could be avoidable.
• Employees spend less time being evaluated, trained and coached.

Recognition: flow interruption

Personally I recognized most in the “less focus” part, when I’m in a flow of doing my work (outside the many daily calls), then always things happen: someone from my house hold runs in and asks a question, doorbell rings for a package, the cat comes in and want some attention, the neighbors are working in their garden with lots of noise… Besides of course the work related distraction like team chat, emails, etc.

It brings you out of this flow and costs time to get back in (more than you think!). According to research, it takes an average of about 25 minutes (23 minutes and 15 seconds, to be exact) to return to the original task after an interruption, according to Gloria Mark, who studies digital distraction at the University of California, Irvine. Multiple studies confirm this. Distractions don’t just eat up time during the distraction, they derail your mental progress for up to a half hour afterward (that’s assuming another distraction doesn’t show up in that half hour) (source).

Not only less productivity, also negative emotional effects

And if you need to take care of situation at home (leaving your desk), then you also need extra time to catch up that time lost. In the end I spend more time on work days than in the office, but indeed less productive. Like found in the survey. And it also makes me feel I’m not giving my 100% for my work, but as you work longer, you also feel you’re not 100% available for your personal life either.

The same article about distractions at work confirms that all these distractions not only hurt productivity, they have negative emotional effects: higher stress, a bad mood and lower productivity (now I can explain it to my family).

In the survey the Economist is referring to, it was indeed reported that “employees with children worked around 20 minutes a day more than those without, implying an even greater fall in their productivity, presumably because they were distracted by child-care duties.”

Positives for working in the office

But besides the loss of productivity and influence on the mental state, what I miss in this survey about working from home instead of the office:

• it’s less fun, as during face-to-face meetings and the chitchat afterwards or during the breaks you have a laugh, you hear some other stories, etc.
• it reduces innovation, as you only talk with the people you have a call appointment with, but new ideas exists when brainstorming with others, you run into them accidently at the coffee machine, or you see someone at their desk and you check with them this idea you have and get feedback right away.

Future

We expect that many companies will adopt a hybrid way of working: partly from home, partly in the office. Independent of where you work, one conclusion we and our managers have to take into account the real source of inefficiency: the time spent in meetings.

What to do about it? Remember: Don’t schedule that many meetings, and keep them short.

How was your effectivity while working from home? Am I the only one? Please share your experiences in the comments sections.

(source: Paul Blow, picture copied from economist.com article