No Productivity Boom from New IT or Remote Work?

It seems incontestable that knowledge and office workers prefer remote working. Whether such work results in higher, lower or no change in productivity is among the issues, though. 

Some economists say there was no post-Covid productivity increase, despite the information technology investment boom that happened during the pandemic lockdown. That is not surprising. 

There long has been a lag--sometimes lasting a decade--before big IT investments show up as correlated with higher productivity. It can be argued that the places new IT was deployed are not likely to grow productivity. 

Supply chain investments might or might not contribute to productivity, even if they improve resilience. Investments in security, remote work, personal computers and so forth likewise might or might not contribute to any measurable lift in productivity, even over a five-year time frame. In fact, to the extent such investment were necessary simply to allow work to continue, and might actually be duplicate investment of sorts (people already had computers and broadband at work), they might reduce output, compared to input. 

Work-life balance arguably is better. But is that necessarily good for productivity? It is terribly hard to say. 

Outcomes also often are based on team output, not individual output. In such cases it is team productivity that matters. And such output often is intangible. How do you properly measure an intangible?  

To be sure, such measurements always are difficult, whether we are looking specifically at post-Covid or “during Covid” time periods or non-Covid times. 

Where it comes to knowledge or office workers, some might say the task is nearly impossible. Indeed, observers often note the difficulty before proceeding to argue such measurements can be made. 

Whether measurements actually can be made remains debatable. The point is that all our discussions about the productivity of remote work are opinions, not facts. We mostly cannot measure knowledge worker or office worker productivity, especially non-tangible outputs, whether remote or local.