Google extends homeworking until this time next year – as Microsoft finds WFH is terrific... for Microsoft
- Reference: 1595902935
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/28/google_homeworking_study/
- Source link:
The decision came in an email to employees from CEO Sundar Pichai. "To give employees the ability to plan ahead, we'll be extending our global voluntary work-from-home option through June 30, 2021 for roles that don't need to be in the office," he wrote. "I hope this will offer the flexibility you need to balance work with taking care of yourselves and your loved ones over the next 12 months."
Previously, the web giant had said it would allow remote working until the end of this year. This latest announcement suggests either Google bosses are OK with staff working remotely, or that staff aren't OK with returning to the office, or both. Productivity could be up, could be down, it doesn't matter: the inability of various nations, cough, cough, America, to contain and stamp out the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has seemingly prompted Google to keep its well-paid staff apart for longer.
Interestingly enough, Blind, a discussion-board app used by verified tech and finance pros, said a survey of 10,000 of its users [1]revealed 66 per cent of them felt remote working was damaging their mental health. For one thing, some people fall into working long hours, and can't switch off or escape work. In a [2]separate Blind poll, a third of techies said they "feel obligated to reply to work emails, regardless of time of the day," and one quarter "contact their boss often ... so they appear to be working hard remotely."
Home working is here to stay, says Lenovo boss, and will grow the total addressable PC market by up to 30% [3]READ MORE
In a [4]thread regarding the Google work-from-home extension, one Googler said bluntly: "I'm gonna fucking lose my mind." Another chimed in with: "Same here," and another: "I’m going to go insane."
Obviously, these are just anecdotes, and it doesn't necessarily mean the Googlers would rather brave catching the virus than work from home a moment longer. We've heard of staff wanting to get back to the office just to be able to catch people in the corridor or over lunch to pick their brains, yet are aware of the dangers of working in an office right now and not sufficiently socially distancing.
Crucially, there are benefits to working from home. And we're not just referring to the lack of a commute, the lack of distracting colleagues, home comforts, and the freedom to move some distance away from the office. We're talking about the benefits for employers.
Take, for example, this report produced by Microsoft and [5]published last week in the Harvard Business Review. It detailed a study of more than 350 Microsoft newly remote employees. The headline finding was that worker-bees were working harder and longer when at home than when they came in the office: on average an extra four hours a week.
Those employees were also scheduling more, shorter meetings when working from home, something that almost certainly has a positive knock-on impact on general business efficiency than hour-long gabfests. “We had 22 per cent more meetings of 30 minutes or less and 11 per cent fewer meetings of more than one hour," the report noted.
My life is efficient
In other words, Microsoft was able to get more work-per-body. Even more excitingly, the managers didn’t have to force this extra efficiency out of their staff; they did it themselves: "Our flip to shorter meetings had come about organically, not from any management mandate," the report states.
More good news: employees were abandoning their habit of going out for lunch and no longer sticking to the old-fashioned idea of finishing work at 5pm and having a life: "A new 'night shift' has taken root, which employees are using the evening to catch up on work."
"The share of instant messages sent between 6pm and midnight has increased by 52 per cent," the report noted. The lunchtime drop of activity was indicated by a fall in just 10 per cent of instant messages during the lunch hour, compared to 25 per cent previously.
And even those stubborn fools who used to insist the weekends were their private time to spend with friends and family have come around to the realization that nothing is more important in life than serving those that pay your wages: “Employees who had well-protected weekends suddenly have blurrier work-life boundaries,” the report noted gleefully. “The 10 per cent of employees who previously had the least weekend collaboration - less than 10 minutes - saw that amount triple within a month.”
Network effect
Are there any downsides to employees working harder and smarter while being paid the same? Not for the employer there isn’t, especially if you measure their social and mental well-being by tracking computer usage rather than actually talking to them about their feelings or emotions.
“We also measured networks across more than 90,000 Microsoft employees in the United States,” the researchers noted. “Frankly, we expected to see them shrink significantly, given the rapid shifts in environment, daytime rhythms, and personal responsibilities.
"Instead, we discovered that most employees maintained their existing connections. Even more encouraging, most people’s network size increased. We had assumed that in a time of crisis, employees might strengthen networks within their own work groups in an insular way. In fact, we saw network growth not only within existing work groups but also across different groups, indicating that to adapt and thrive teams sought to build bridges.”
If anyone was going to work out a way to not just function under lockdown, but squeeze every last drop out of employees, it would be the tech industry. ®
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[1] https://twitter.com/JeffElder/status/1287732840977727493
[2] https://www.teamblind.com/blog/index.php/2020/07/09/wfh-pressure-the-extra-hours-worked/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/22/lenovo_work_from_home/
[4] https://www.teamblind.com/post/google-extends-its-coronavirus-work-from-home-order-to-summer-2021-skrdk7tb
[5] https://hbr.org/2020/07/microsoft-analyzed-data-on-its-newly-remote-workforce
[6] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Anecdotally
It depends on what your job is. I've worked almost exclusively remotely for over a decade, as a contractor/consultant, and what my particular job is depends on whether my being remote helps or not. That's my preference, and companies stopped wanting to pay for weekly travel and expenses to get me on site, so I'm fine with it regardless but even though my work (obviously) can be done 100% remotely doesn't mean that's always the best way for it to be done.
If I'm doing something mostly independently and don't need input from others much or at all then obviously it is a big help. But doing things like gathering requirements from stakeholders I don't know and who aren't really aware of why they should care about the project I'm working on can be challenging. Following up with such people in person makes that sort of thing a lot smoother and easier on both sides.
WFH is also good
preparation for the day you say 'Sod that for a game of soldiers, I'm retiring'.
Much less of a shock to your system from not having the commute. No Office Politics to contend with.
I worked from home for most of my last 15 years of employment. It was far easier to do something else entirely when faced with a tricky problem. You'd be amazed at how theraputic a little weeding or potting on can be. you can clear your mind so that finding the solution to that problem can almost leap off the screen at you.
This blissful life is only as good as your manager allows it to be. If they insist in having 'virtual meetings' three times a day to discuss progress, you end up doing a lot less.
Lockdown was also a lot easier to handle. Well, it was for me until my old boss retired and the new one is a micromanager. He treats us like Lawyers who have to record everything they do for billing. Every 15 minutes of every day goes into the time report. I've decided that I'm done and I'm going to hand in my notice before froday. Our small department (6 people) are all considering retirement or quitting. IT is not as if we don't have the work but that we can't work for him.
I'm posting this AC as I have a good idea that our new boss reads this site. If he does then perhaps he'll realise that he is a totall asshole but there again he probably knows that already.
Anecdotally
My productivity is up but I still work precisely the number of hours stated in my contract, and refuse to do anything during silly hours. The differences are that I'm a lot more flexible with when I start (it's no longer consistently half an hour after the latest time I'm allowed to start; no fscking around with buses and sleep problems and my own incompetence) and how long/how many breaks I take, and have also gone from three screens (in the office) down to just my laptop screen (at home).
It was immediately obvious that despite the reduction in screen space (Windows 10's window manager is so screwed up by now that I had to Alt-Tab this much even with multiple screens, due to various inexplicable behaviours such as opening the newest window into the middle of the already-opened ones) I was actually focusing, which really wasn't happening much in the office.
I've got more free time, more money, I'm happier, my cat's happier. I'd like to see it become normal to offer this to anybody who wants it, but a lot of people have been saying this for years and we've already seen El Reg 's satirical missive from the year 2022.
It's interesting to see that Silicon Valley workers seem to be having the opposite reaction, though.