How We Contextualize The Benefits Of WFH

Fun with colors and charts.

I got this from Andrew Spence’s newsletter. It’s not bad. I’d say the order is generally right if you ask average employees about the benefits of working from home, or whatever WFH days they get, etc. No commute is a big one, because commutes can be painful and tedious. Gas/lunch savings is big too — one of my neighbors lives in Fort Worth, i.e. he’s my neighbor and that’s where I live, but he works in Coppell, which is like 45 minutes away, and I’d say a quarter of each paycheck is going to lunch and gas. I am suprised that “spending time with family and friends” was lower, but it’s possible people didn’t want to admit they do that during the workday, even though virtually everyone does. The “busyness” culture in American work is very much currency.

A Partial List of Everything That Is Now “Currency” in Some Way

I’m glad only a few people said “fewer meetings,” because that lines up with the narrative we’ve been getting that more meetings are being called when people are remote — so that managers have an incorrect proxy for productivity that they can lean upon.

The Slow Demise Into Meaninglessness Of White-Collar Work

Managers are scared to death of actually defining “productivity”

It should be noted that the “RTO” (return to office) pull is real for many organizations, and an increasingly smaller amount of people are even allowed to work from home anymore. I think in the USA, it’s something like 17% all the time, 55% part of the time, and even that seems high — the US has tons of on-premise and service industry jobs, and those cannot be done remotely. There is something to be said for a constant discussion on WFH to be akin to class warfare.

The discussions around WFH are still akin to class warfare

It is always good to know that people like the fact that they can “spend less time getting ready,” though. Heh.