Productivity Likely is Lower as Huge Numbers of Employees Work from Home

About 34 percent of work-from-home employees report they are getting less done while working from home, while 25 percent said they were getting more done, a survey by Waveform finds. 

source: Waveform

Those are self-reported outcomes, and might not be entirely accurate, but the reports are congruent with at least some other reports of lower productivity as huge numbers of workers are forced to work from home. 

The new conventional wisdom is that more remote work is coming, as a permanent change after all the stay-at-home rules put into place to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. But there is some debate about whether remote work is less productive or not. And if remote work turns out to be less productive or more productive than face-to-face work, there will be consequences for its extension and use. 

Looking only at the impact of the massive stay-at-home orders to counter the Covid-19 pandemic, there is at least some evidence that productivity has suffered, in some countries, because of remote work from home. 

Aternity, for example,  has aggregated from millions of employee devices from over 500 Global 2000 companies, reveals that the United States has become less productive due to remote work because of the pandemic. The metric is hours of work, captured because Aternity hosts a cloud-based analytics application that captures work-related application usage. 

source: Aternity

At the end of March, 77 percent of work has been moved to be performed remotely in North America, the largest amount of any continent. The North America trends were bifurcated. U.S. enterprise worker productivity actually dropped 7.2 percent, Aternity reports, though Canadian productivity increased about 23 percent. 

“Overall productivity (as measured by hours of work computing time) in Europe declined by 8.2 percent,” according to Aternity. 

Another study of worker attitudes suggests that about half of workers 18 to 24 believe their productivity is lower when working from home, according to a study by National Research Group. Half also believe they are distracted at home. That does not necessarily mean productivity is lower, but the workers feel their productivity is lower. 

Some believe remote work, in some cases, is wildly less productive. A study by Scikey MindMatch that estimates only 0.2 percent of the Indian IT workforce actually is capable of working from home at high levels of productivity.