Productivity Will Go Down This Year
But you probably won’t hear business leaders talking about it.
But you probably won’t hear business leaders talking about it.
Productivity will go down this year, as more workers get forced back into the office and back into commutes that suck up a significant portion of their day’s attentional capacity and time. It will go down because it will have to, as workers begin having to worry about childcare and eldercare again, flitting all across the city dropping off bodies and picking up lunch. Time spent exercising, daydreaming, and doing the dishes in between work tasks will be replaced with time stuck in aimless meetings. Breaks in the sun will be supplanted by dull moments eating yogurt trapped under fluorescent light. This will not magically boost our ability to focus or execute tasks — quite the opposite.
Soon many of us will be surrounded by our coworkers and bosses for the first time in eighteen months, and the distraction of their presence and the pressure to put on a suitable performance of professionalism will hang over us, and wreck our flow. Our habits will be disrupted, our hobbies abandoned, and our carefully cultivated work-life balance will be forced to erode.
Home cooked meals will be replaced with dripping-wet fast casual salads in plastic tubs. Moments of stillness and reflection will be eclipsed by blaring speaker phones on the bus. Our bosses will be satisfied and we’ll have less time alone, but somehow we’ll be far lonelier, with fewer moments in the presence of our family and close friends. We will still be grieving the losses of the last year, the cataclysmic consequences of a year-and-a-half-long mass death event, but from under our masks we will be required to smile. And the eight-hour work day, which has never been evidence based, will force us to pantomime compliance and focus long after our will to get things done has waned.
Our resentments will grow, and the fear of Delta never be far from our minds. We will do less work, shittier work, work fueled by regret and resentment. Our morale will plummet and our hope of a better, more balanced life will disappear. Our misery will leak into everything we do, because it always does when employees are unhappy. It’s a thing industrial organizational psychologists have known for decades at this point. Unhappy people cannot focus. They spread burnout amongst one another like a contagion. They get sloppy because they recognize nothing they do really matters to anyone, that all their efforts and suffering will never be either recognized or repaid.
Our productive abilities as workers will leak out of us this year, in lost minutes, in lost sleep, in lost peace of mind. But when this inevitably happens, you won’t hear any managers talking about it. You won’t see concerned reports about the drop in Fortune or Bloomberg Businessweek. The very people who fretted constantly in the past year and a half about how work-from-home might tank worker productivity (it didn’t) won’t actually bat an eyelash when a return to the office actually does. Because returning to the office was never about productivity. It was always about control.
Did you know worker productivity went up during the pandemic? It did! A massive study of over 9,000 work teams conducted by Wharton found that across a variety of sectors, employees proved more productive during the pandemic than they were before it began. A study of 1,000 workers conducted out of the University of Southampton found much the same thing: a majority of employees reported they got more done per hour when they worked from home. A report from SP Global found that worker productivity went up a whopping 41% during the past year. All of this is in line with pre-existing research from before COVID-19 struck, showing that remote workers tend to be more effective than in-office ones.
Why are remote workers more productive and focused than their in-office counterparts? Well, if you have been working from home throughout the pandemic, you already know why: because they are happier, healthier, and have more autonomy. When workers are allowed to focus on the job tasks that matter most, instead of having their time eaten up with distracting meetings and busy work, they are more efficient and more satisfied with their jobs. When employees have autonomy over their schedules and lives, they get more done, collaborate more effectively with their colleagues and are happier. Workers are more productive and happier when they get to spend a great deal of time with their families and look after their wellbeing and health, too. These are all very well-established effects, which industrial organizational researchers have been sharing with the business community for years.
Beyond this, there is the simple, mathematical fact that when you no longer have to travel to work or move about an office going from meeting to meeting, there is simply more time on the clock to get the things done that matter. Commuting to work is an incredibly costly endeavor; long commutes erode physical health, attention, and lower people’s moods. If you have to travel from home and into an office each day, you have less time for things like food prep and exercise. If you spend most of your days away from your household appliances and possessions, you often have to buy replacements for things while on the road. If I spill coffee on my shirt at home, I can just change; if the same thing happens at work, I might have to run to the department store down the street.
These inconveniences have a way of piling up, slowly depleting our bank accounts and energy reserves the longer we’re stuck in the 9-to-5 lifestyle. And it’s all ultimately for nothing, as research has repeatedly shown that the average worker is only able to focus on job tasks for about three to four hours per day. All the remaining time at work is spent dithering around, pushing away distractions, and forcing ourselves to appear productive for the sake of placating managers and appearing virtuous to colleagues. Conversely, when a workplace switches to a more relaxed schedule, such as four-day workweek, productivity soars.
Despite all of this, many organizations took a downright punitive approach to managing remote workers during the pandemic. Investment in employee monitoring software boomed. Bosses utilized things like key-loggers and programs that took screenshots at random intervals, because they did not trust employees to remained focused when free from their watchful eyes. In some cases, employers even required employees to broadcast their entire workdays via screen share on Zoom, to prove they weren’t getting away with something — because heaven forbid someone take an extended bathroom break in the middle of a years-long international crisis.
These measures were not adjusted or dropped once the data revealed work-from-homers were, in fact, far more effective employees. And that’s because for all their crowing about the bottom line, many organizational leaders do not actually care about what circumstances create committed, productive employees. If they did, we all would have switched to remote work many years ago.
If the metrics actually mattered, every corporation that could afford to would have already been giving its employees flex time and shorter workdays. Instead, the numbers are only deployed when they serve an employer’s desired narrative. For example, many managers have pointed to basement-low employee morale as an argument for why workers need to return to the office, but then they ignore when the data shows that forcing people back into their workplace actually causes a drop in morale. It was never about making workers feel more connected and energized. It was all about soothing leaderships’ egos, and creating the illusion of a bustling, harmonious workspace.
In his book Bullshit Jobs, the late David Graeber writes about how many middle managers struggle to justify the necessity of their own positions. Micromanaging does not an effective employee make. In general, employees perform better when they feel trusted and free of surveillance. This means that often those in middle management positions are left either feeling useless, or fearing their own bosses might eventually notice their work has little positive organizational impact.
To save their skins, managers have to create the illusion of their own necessity — hiring underlings, restructuring departments, and overseeing projects that cause their supervisees nothing but frustration, but keep the office looking busy. These performative organizational tasks are the very “bullshit jobs” Graeber was writing about. When your own position is meaningless, you have to erect protective professional edifices around that meaninglessness. Time-wasting, productivity-killing, morale-destroying tasks become many middle managers’ reason for existence.
All of this helps to explain why the only class of work-from-home employees who performed worse during the pandemic were middle managers. A survey of over 3,000 workers found that among those in middle management positions, job satisfaction plummeted by 46%. Many bosses felt useless and powerless in the past year and a half — and as the data proved they weren’t necessary, they were left casting about desperately for a way to fill their days. For a little while, employee surveillance was the solution. But now that more and more workers have gotten vaccinated and schools and events are reopening, the answer is a swift, and forced, return to the office.
It doesn’t matter whether this move expends millions of dollars, spurs a series of enraged employee walk-outs, or causes organizational productivity to plummet. Because returning to the office was never about productivity. It was always about control.