Linked – Remote workers are feeling pressure to prove their productivity

This is dumb, but it’s also understandable. How many of us working remotely fear our status actually showing that we are “away” during the day, even though we are “away” for a few minutes in much the same way we’d be in the office too?

On their own, these are small expenditures of time, and some of them are useful. En masse, they’re a dizzying waste of time. In addition to their regular working hours, office workers said they spend an average of 67 extra minutes online each day (5.5 hours a week) simply making sure they’re visibly working online, according to a recent survey from software companies Qatalog and GitLab. Workers everywhere are feeling burnt out by this behavior. In other words, fears about lost productivity could cause lost productivity.

It’s all the remote equivalent of sitting at your desk later than your coworkers to show you are hard-working. That never told anyone who was getting the most work done, but it rarely stopped bosses from using it as a proxy and rewarding people for looking like they worked hard. It’s been an issue in the workplace for years, and remote work finally allowed us to get rid of it forever if we chose to.

Or we can just keep doing it and never make any improvements.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/9/22/23360887/remote-work-productivity-theater-back-to-office

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