Work-from-home productivity often is thought to be as good, if not better, than in-office productivity, at least in the short term, and at least for knowledge workers. It is less clear whether productivity for many types of government services has improved.
It likely is much more complicated and nuanced than that. Business owners, for example, do not share the belief, though employees like it. But such attitudes are not the same as productivity gains.
And there is some evidence that work from home productivity actually is lower than in-office work.
According to Microsoft, “when we compare collaboration trends in Microsoft 365 between February 2020 and February 2021:
Time spent in Microsoft Teams meetings has more than doubled (2.5X) globally and, aside from a holiday dip in December, continues to climb.
The average meeting is 10 minutes longer, increasing from 35 to 45 minutes.
The average Teams user is sending 45 percent more chats per week and 42 percent more chats per person after hours, with chats per week still on the rise.
The number of emails delivered to commercial and education customers in February, when compared to the same month last year, is up by 40.6 billion.¹
And we’ve seen a 66 percent increase in the number of people working on documents.”
So people spend much more time in meetings than they did when in the office; more time with email and chat; more time working on documents.
In principle--and assuming one can measure it--productivity increases as output is boosted using the same or fewer inputs. An initiative in Iceland, which has notable low productivity, suggests that service productivity by units of government does not suffer when working hours are reduced.
To be sure, service sector productivity is devilishly hard to measure, if it can be measured at all. It is hard to measure intangibles. And there is some evidence that satisfaction with public sector services is lower than private services, and substantially lower for many types of government services.
Productivity is measured in terms of producer efficiency or effectiveness, not buyer or user perception of value. But it is hard to argue that the low perceived quality of government services is unrelated to “productivity.”
And what can be measured might not be very significant. Non-manufacturing productivity, for example, can be quite low, in comparison to manufacturing levels.
And there are substantial differences between “services” delivered by private firms--such as airline travel or communications-- and those delivered by government, such as education, or government itself.
The study argues that reductions in work hours per week of up to 12.5 percent had no negative impact on productivity. Methodology always matters, though.
The studies relied on group interviews--and therefore user self reports--as well as some quantitative inputs such as use of overtime. There is some evidence of how productivity (output) remained the same as hours worked were reduced.
For public service agencies, shorter working time “maintained or increased productivity and service provision,” the report argues.
There is perhaps ambiguous quantitative evidence in the report of what was measured or how it was measured. The report says “shifts started slightly later and/or ended earlier.” To the extent that productivity (output) in any services context is affected directly by availability, the key would be the ability to maintain public-facing availability. The report suggests this happened.
But the report says “offices with regular opening hours closed earlier.” Some might question whether this represents the “same” productivity. Likewise, “in a police station, hours for investigative officers were shortened every other week.” Again, these arguably are input measures, not output measures.
So long as the defined output levels were maintained, the argument can be made that productivity did not drop, or might formally have increased (same output, fewer inputs). In principle, at least over the short term, it should be possible to maintain public-facing output while reducing working hours. Whether that is sustainable long term might be a different question.
The report says organizations shortened meetings, cut out unnecessary tasks, and reorganized shift arrangements to maintain expected service levels. Some measures studied were the number of open cases, the percentage of answered calls or the number of invoices entered into the accounting system.
In other cases the test seemed to have no impact on matters such as traffic tickets issued, marriage and birth licenses processed, call waiting times or cases prosecuted, for example. Some will say that is precisely the point: instances did not change as hours were reduced.
Virtually all the qualitative reports are about employee benefits such as better work-life balance, though, not output metrics.
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