Linked – Research: Where Managers and Employees Disagree About Remote Work

I think this is true. It’s also why I’m glad to work in a team that was remote before the pandemic. We don’t have to have these arguments.

Managers and employees disagree profoundly about key aspects of work-from-home, according to surveys we’ve conducted. For instance, managers believe that work-from-home reduces productivity while employees think it massively increases it.

They point out a hypothetical situation where the employee looks at their “work” day to include the commute and maybe some other time, but the manager isn’t. That’s a huge disconnect. Speaking for myself, I will never volunteer to go back to an in-office or even a hybrid position because of how much time you spend going back and forth and the limiting factor of needing to be in that place for the entire time in between. Why? If the work can get done from anywhere, why would we expect anyone to spend so much time going somewhere else every day?

It boggles my mind to consider how many people are fine with taking a 9-hour work day and turning it into an 11+ hour day when it could be just 9 hours of your day. I don’t understand it, and I never will, especially when it appears that managers are only considering the 9 hours anyway. (We won’t even start talking about the fact that somehow the 9-hour day became the acceptable work day in many industries instead of 8, mainly through the disappearance of lunch breaks. That’s a whole rant unto itself.)

Read on to learn more about this disconnect and how it impacts many decisions about hybrid work. I think this is an interesting read, though it may not surprise you that I can’t entirely agree with their premise that hybrid is the answer. I think hybrid is the coward’s way out of building a remote-centered workforce and is mostly there to appease employees’ desire to be remote while moving back to fully in-office work as soon as the job market swings back to where management feels it is less likely they’ll have a mass exodus. But maybe I’m just cynical. 😉

https://hbr.org/2023/01/research-where-managers-and-employees-disagree-about-remote-work

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