The effects are much more pronounced among those young workers, among those workers who are new to the company, who are the ones who have the most to learn from their more senior coworkers. And she and her colleagues worked on this study of software engineers and looked at how much these coders helped each other when they were working in the same space versus when they were working apart.ĮMMA HARRINGTON: You receive about 20% less feedback if you're on a distributed team than if you're all co-located with your teammates. We spoke to Emma Harrington, who's an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. MA: Another cause of productivity loss - mentoring and training. That delay seems to be kind of what is dropping the productivity, kind of these frictions to communication. MA: In various studies, like the one observing police dispatchers, face to face meant workers could complete tasks faster.īARRERO: You could write an email asking for those instructions and for that clarification, and it might delay your action a couple of minutes. MA: And when you tally up a bunch of other studies on fully remote work in other industries, as Jose's done, the evidence for worker productivity.īARRERO: It's anywhere up to a negative 10% effect on productivity. So the best evidence Jose looked at studies jobs where a clear output is measurable, like police dispatchers in Manchester in the U.K.īARRERO: Basically, the communication seemed to be more efficient when these two people - the person who receives the call from the citizen and the person who sends the officer to attend to the incident - are in the same location. Now, measuring productivity is tricky business, especially because the kinds of work that can be done remotely tends to be knowledge work, things like marketing or legal work. WOODS: But working fully remotely five days a week, the productivity there is a whole different story. JOSE MARIA BARRERO: I'm an assistant professor of finance at ITAM in Mexico City, which is one of the main universities here.ĪDRIAN MA, BYLINE: Jose says, yes, working hybrid - coming in a couple of days a week - is about as productive as being fully in the office. Darian Woods and Adrian Ma from our daily economics podcast, The Indicator From Planet Money, found new evidence suggesting that working from home - at least full time - may not be as productive as we once thought.ĭARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: Jose Maria Barrero is one of the top experts in working from home. But three years later, the data is changing. At the beginning of the pandemic, many economists thought working from home was just as productive as working in an office.
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