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Do mediocre workers prosper more when they work from home or when they are in the office? This is not an issue I have ever raised before the pandemic, although if I had, I would have imagined the second-class preference that would be seen at home.
Undoubtedly, this is what some senior executives have suggested, as this year efforts to fill Covid’s empty offices have increased. Working from home adapts to the “less committed”, According to the head of WeWork, Sandeep Mathrani. Not good for people who want to “press”Says Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase.
But what if the opposite is true? Max Thowless-Reeves is a former UBS private banker who runs his own wealth management company in Stafford, north Birmingham, where he is a visiting lecturer at Aston Business School.
Not long ago, he wrote a letter to the FT who made an arrest warrant. “Mediocrity is hidden in the offices,” he said, adding that it was easier to identify which staff brought the most value when everyone was working remotely. When I called him last week to find out why, he told me something interesting. During the pandemic, his company had started using Google Docs much more, which meant that people were working on the same material at the same time, from their respective homes.
“You can see everyone writing in the same document,” he said, adding that this meant you could also see who responded quickly to a query, made a helpful suggestion, or generally contributed, and who didn’t.
“It was clear to us – and it wasn’t in advance – which team members were really pushing us,” he said.
Your company has only 15 employees, although it is worth considering their experience. Just because someone is in the office, in front of their nose, doesn’t mean they do anything as useful as someone who works hard, but invisibly, at home. The debate does not end here.
A few weeks ago, I received an email from a retired businessman in England trying to finalize three separate property deals. His parents had recently died, leaving enough money for each of his two children to get a mortgage on a first home in London. So in addition to selling his parents’ house, he helped his two descendants navigate the purchase of a property in London.
That meant he was dealing with three groups of real estate agents, surveyors, mortgage lenders and lawyers, all of whom worked quite a bit at home and provided what he said was a “continued level of incredible and unprofessional services.”
This included: searches on the wrong property; the incorrect selling price of a vital contract; the incorrect time in a mortgage application and the incorrect names that are written in the documents. To top it off, a lawyer was unable to pull out the necessary mortgage funds in time to complete it, leaving one of his children facing the loss of his deposit and homeless.
Were the workers, then, mediocre or did they have some other fault? This man thought that remote work could be the problem.
“I think working from home has tipped the balance towards chaos,” he said, adding that it was possible that people were overwhelmed and left to cope alone. The job of a lawyer she had used three times in the past with no problems (when she worked in an office) had been “full of mistakes” now that she was home.
His is, of course, an isolated case. But it echoes some of the findings of a study that looked at how more than 10,000 workers at a large Asian technology company found themselves before and after Covid forced them home.
The researchers found a total of hours worked shot up approximately 30%, which included a lot of work done outside normal working hours.
But overtime produced no increase in production, so the study concluded that overall productivity had declined by about 20 percent.
This does not necessarily make skeptics working from home correct. The study did not directly measure the quality of the work done. All of this underscores the complexity of Covid’s great remote work experiment, and why it’s still too early to draw fixed conclusions about it.
Twitter: @pilitaclark
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