I’m so happy that my BIL can work with home. He saves so much time not navigating the Austin traffic. And he says he gets more done now. He helps Dropbox’s important customers when they have issues (his division is called "white glove).
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I have certainly had jobs where some people worked much, much harder than others. At times, I was not given proper direction or support so I kind of backed off until I found something better. But when I am engaged in a job, the satisfaction of doing it right is a huge payday for me. Never mind what others are doing unless it works to my great disadvantage one way or another. I don’t mind doing someone else’s job if it doesn’t make waves and in just a few minutes or hours, I can get it done so the wheels keep turning. Keeping score is extremely unproductive, imho.
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I’m trying to understand the logistics behind the efficiency improvement. So, you’re saying you went from working 5 days/40hours to 4 days/32 hours and saw more patients. What allowed that to happen? Did the time with each patient decrease? Did work outside of seeing patients lessen dramatically allowing for more patient time? Were less complicated patients being seen requiring less time? Just trying to understand what happened.
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I worked in a high volume ophthalmology practice that relied on a lot of help from technicians. I saw all sorts of patients, from routine vision exams to complex medical cases. I also saw all of the acute cases. I hadn’t maxed out my personal capacity in five days, so was able to see the same number of patients in four, and grow. At the time I quit, I was the busiest provider in practice.
Many jobs require that you be in person. Many do not, but the head honchos do. In many of those cases, it seems like a push to justify the positions of middle managers to supervise the peons.
I’ve been working from home since Covid, and my production has improved, because my team had to get creative and really focused to do our jobs well, and we did, and the results are measurable and excellent.
But oh man, my quality of life is off the charts now. My RT commute, not counting “getting ready,” was over four hours. A lot of that was sitting around waiting for public transportation.
I will not go back; the amount of life I’ve gotten back is priceless.
But the bosses are pushing back, and there’s a real disconnect between their stated benefits of working togther - the farcical “synergies” and the chance hallway encounters that result in amazing collabs, and on and on and on. Bah.
There may be some of that stuff, but my colleagues and I are quite convinced that it only happens with middle-aged white guys, to be perfectly blunt.
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Ok, so it sounds like it was more a result of having technicians that could do much of the work to assist that allowed an increase in throughput over a shorter workweek. Your personal workload adjusted down by adding workload to others and increasing efficiency. That makes sense.
My private optometrist recently joined a large practice. When I previously saw him at his personal office he would see two patients an hour. At the new practice, with workload shared among several technicians it appears he can see about 6 patients an hour.
I think many people can do their jobs from home with proper training/skills; many others can’t or won’t do more than the bare minimum and require a lot of direction (which becomes more difficult when you’re completely remote so these kinds of people maybe are not best suited for working from home). That’s why I said it’s not a one size fits all. I worked with someone recently who would get the same emails as me and another coworker. We would find ourselves literally drowning in actions to complete while he sat back and ignored everything unless he was directly asked to do something. Like “can you please respond to this email or send details to this group of people”. His response was to draft an email and ask us to review it. This is not an entry level position but a full performance professional in government making 6 figures. No one should have to review their emails. I see things like this a lot. These types of individuals maybe are not best suited to work from home because they need close handholding and oversight. I also work with a go-getting, proactive individual. She takes care of things that need to be handled without me having to give her a daily or hourly to do list. She is very well suited to work from home.
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It actually sounds like perhaps the first person is in the wrong position. Management may need to actively deal with this situation. I once supervised an employee who made tons of mistakes that directly reflected on me due to the nature of the work. I put on my big girl panties and had a very difficult conversation with her. I spent many hours crafting a performance improvement plan for her, and she rose to the occasion. It’s not easy to manage sometimes, but managing involves helping employees succeed. If they don’t make necessary changes, though, the even more difficult part of managing people comes into play … parting ways. (I’m not saying that this is your responsibility in this case, just kind of commenting in general that a bad fit needs to be addressed somehow.)
But I’m getting off track for the thread, so I apologize.
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No. For 21 years my patients were treated the same as the ophthalmologists’ patients were. The technicians took histories, did preliminary testing and refracted. I wasn’t the rate limiting factor in a 5 day schedule. The demand was. It wasn’t until several years later that I became the constraint. That was at 50 patients, mostly medical, per day.
Now we better stop this line of conversation, for fear of being scolded. 
I think a medical practice, a retail store, etc efficiency can be measured.
In the office world, it’s different.
That CEOs want workers back tells you what you need to know.
Everyone thought covid will change things permanently. Yet with travel back and CEOs threatening workers who don’t come back - there’s a reason.
I think small independent business and corporate jobs that don’t necessarily have metrics are different.
I completely agree with you - unfortunately doing that in the government becomes a full time job in itself due to the bureaucracy of it all - I could tell you some messed up stories of people behaving horribly and still keeping their job where in any private company, they wouldn’t have been tolerated. But it would be digressing 
The creators of The Jetsons, when envisioning the “future” world, predicted that technology would shorten the work week. Not only did George Jetson avoid traffic jams in his flying car, he worked three-hour days, three days a week.
Oh, to be a Jetson!
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Feel like Adam Grant put out a piece that was less than convincing. Too bad because he is generally insightful
During Covid we worked from home remotely. Recently my firm wanted to go back to the office 3 times a week. It has added a lot more stress to the staff with very little benefits. I work for a very large global company. A lot of my colleagues are in Europe and Asia. My day tends to be back to back with meetings with colleagues across many locations. Whether I am in the office or not, I conduct most of my meetings through teams. When I am in the office, my schedule is such that people wouldn’t be able to just pop in to have a chat. The only difference between my home and office is my home office is better equipped. I have high speed internet with a high quality monitor and state of art camera and speaker.
I know how hard my staff is working, whether they are in the office or at home because I see their output. I work in an heavily regulated industry. If we weren’t doing our jobs then my firm could go to jail. So I know the team is not slacking off. I also call people via video all the time. I would know if people were not at their desks.
I do think by allowing people to work from home, they are less stressed and have more time with their families (saving 2 hr/day on commuting). I am going to bend the rule a bit to have my team to come in one whole day to the main office and have them go to an office closest to their homes for half a day.
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My husband had to return to the office 3 days a week last year, and it’s so stupid. Truly stupid. Added 1.5 hours in commute time and a $400 a month pay cut for gas, tolls and parking. Meanwhile, all of his colleagues are based on the opposite coast and he meets via video conference all day, as he does at home. But he works for a bank with huge real estate holdings in the city. They don’t want to lose their shirts on leases and someone’s gotta buy those $20 salads.
Thing is, he works way fewer hours on the days he goes in. It’s perfectly acceptable to leave by 3 pm to avoid traffic.
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Interesting article - from Oct 2023. This is more around remote/flexible work than number of hours. But still good.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/business/remote-work-effects.html
From article:
“It all comes down to how workers are managed. If you set up fully remote with good management and incentives, and people are meeting in person, it can work. What doesn’t seem to work is sending people home with no face time at all.”
Maybe it’s just about finding the right hybrid balance.
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