Is Work from Home Really "More" Productive, or "Less?" How Can We Even Tell?

Though many employees express a desire to continue working from home permanently, even after there is no Covid-19 reason to do so, it also seems clear that work from home fatigue is setting in. That might also be accompanied by the end of the initial period where firms claimed that productivity had not been affected.

A survey of 365 U.S. workers by The Manifest found that 30 percent of respondents think they are more productive working from home. Fully 45 percent believe they are more productive working in an office, and 24 percent say they’re equally productive working from home and in an office. Keep in mind those are examples of what people think about their productivity. It is not an actual measure of whether they are, or are not, more productive in home or office settings. 

source: Agility PR 

Some have argued that even if productivity can be sustained for a brief period, it might well not sustain itself over the long term. A survey of the heads of nearly 50 U.S. businesses employing 443,895 people in industries that include technology, legal services, advertising and the finance, insurance and real estate sector found that 40 percent of them have started to see decreases in productivity as staff work remotely. 

To be sure, Vocon is in the office design firm, with a vested interest in continued office work. But it should always have been clear that emergency, short term workarounds during the mandatory work from home period would eventually begin to test whether productivity actually could be sustained. 

Most of us can sustain productivity for short periods of time. What never is so clear is whether we can do so if a long-term disruption happens. 

J.P. Morgan also seems concerned that WFH productivity is slipping, while others note growing evidence of mental health issues caused by enforced WFH. 

At least, that might be true for the 25 percent of workers who can work from home.  

Also, there is a growing sense among professionals that WFH is hurting their career progression. Others might point out that WFH has positives and negatives, not including burn out or work-life balance, even if WFH once was viewed as a perk.   

“Effective leadership is all about presence and persuasion,” says Bob Fisch, Specialty apparel retailing pioneer. “The best mentoring happens close-up, with a senior executive encouraging a younger associate, and with the associate embracing the unique opportunity to offer the leader her own perspective.”

“It is that irreplaceable intimate element of mutual mentoring that is lost outside the office,” Fisch says. 

The percentage of those indicating they would like to continue to work remotely at least occasionally declined from more than 80 percent in July to 67 percent in August in the United States, according to the IBM Institute for Business Value. The percentage of respondents who say they would like this to be their primary way of working dropped from 65 percent in July 2020 to just 50 percent in August 2020.  

Information worker productivity is notoriously hard to measure, as output itself is intangible. So key performance indicators might not even be possible. Quantifiable measures such as “emails sent and received” might not measure anything of true importance. 

In fact, even outcome measurements might be more valid than output measures. A policy paper might be the output of a person or team. But its value comes if there is a policy outcome. It might therefore seem obvious that tracking qualitative inputs (subjects interviewed, hours spent interviewing, number of interviews and so forth might be nearly irrelevant. 

Output is what people do; outcome is what they achieve. In other words, for knowledge workers, input measures are generally unhelpful. But even output metrics might not be germane. Only outcomes might really matter.

Fixed Wireless or Mobile Access are the Best Ways U.S. Telcos Can Gain Home Broadband Share

Fixed wireless is not a new platform for internet service providers. It has been common in many rural areas for wireless ISPs, using unlicensed spectrum and point-to-point or point-to-multipoint networks. But many argue fixed wireless will be a more-common platform for a wider range of service providers in the 5G.

There are a few good reasons. First of all, use of huge amounts of new millimeter wave spectrum, open source radio technology and the relatively high cost of fiber-to-home networks in highly-competitive markets make 5G fixed wireless more attractive.

For starters, the initially installed cost of fixed wireless--even before 5G and millimeter wave spectrum availability--is lower than fiber to home, by a substantial margin. That is true for both the cost of passing a location as well as connecting a location.

source: Siklu 

There is more. One crucial business model issue is the amount of stranded assets when deploying any new cabled network in a market where there is robust competition. To use an example, in a market where a cable company has 70-percent market share and a telco has 30 percent market share, a new FTTH network might still mean stranded assets (no customer attached) of at least 65 percent, assuming the telco can gain about five points of market share. 

In other words, in highly-competitive markets where a competent competitor already has 70 percent of the installed base, fixed wireless might offer the only hope of remaining competitive, as the cost of FTTH might never prove sustainable. 

Verizon’s FiOS FTTH network, even after years of marketing, topped out at about 40 percent take rates until perhaps 2018, when take rates broke above 40 percent. Keep in mind FiOS was introduced in 2005. 

AT&T’s FTTH adoption rates seem to have been historically lower, at about 25 percent, though AT&T execs hope they eventually can boost those rates to somewhere in the 40-percent range over time (where FTTH is available). AT&T execs have sometimes said they believe they can reach 50-percent take rates. Some of us highly doubt that. 

With cable operators having 70 percent of the installed base, typically leading in bandwidth and offered speeds, and with the next generation of cable modem service already being developed, to supply more symmetrical service at 10 Gbps, it does not seem that even FTTH is going to change the value proposition. 

Essentially, FTTH only allows a telco to play catch up. So long as cable operators keep investing to maintain their lead, it seems unlikely FTTH will allow telcos to leapfrog the competition. Keep in mind that cable operators have been the U.S. broadband access market leaders since at least 1999. 

The FTTH business case, for consumer customers, now seems irreparably damaged. But that is why AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon are so focused on ways to use 5G and future networks to challenge all cabled networks as platforms for internet access. In the U.S. market, it may no longer be possible for at-scale FTTH to compete sustainably with cable operator services.

That includes using fixed wireless or even standard mobile access instead of FTTH. Though it might not have been so clear 20 years ago, once cable operator hybrid fiber coax emerged as a platform for consumer internet access, even FTTH was not going to be enough for telcos to remain highly competitive. In recent years, all net gains in accounts have been garnered by cable companies.

How Much Post-Covid Change Will Businesses Achieve?

One often hears it said these days that one impact of Covid-19 on organizations and firms is that it will cause permanent changes in the ways businesses and organizations work. Most of those changes, though--agility, reaction speed, cost reduction, productivity changes, customer focus, innovation, operational resiliency, growth, financial performance, for example--were important organizational objectives before the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Even remote work on a full-time, part-time or episodic basis is a trend decades old, if many believe the difference is that a large percentage of information workers will shift to permanent remote work settings, and a larger number of observers might agree that many information workers will routinely work more often from home. 

One might note that very few of the key changes executives now say they have--because of their experience with the pandemic--can be addressed directly by better or more use of communications services. A recent survey by McKinsey found that “speed” was the driver of organizational changes related to Covid-19. 

source: McKinsey

What is not so clear is how much actual change has been accomplished, as organizational change normally is very difficult and also takes a long time. Consider the extensive changes needed to increase speed and agility.

Organizational silos, slow decision making, and lack of strategic clarity, for example, are impediments to speed. But do you really believe that big firms have been about to abolish silos, speed up decision  making and gain new strategic clarity in a few months' time?

Big barriers exist for real reasons. If they were easy problems they would have been fixed long ago. Few would doubt that executives say these long-standing issues are being addressed. But also, few of us might believe real progress is being made, fast. 

source: McKinsey

Rigid policies and formal hierarchy also are cited as impediments to speed. Have you heard of massive reductions of top level and mid-level management over the past few months?

Or consider the impressionistic claims some might make. “Higher meeting attendance and timeliness” resulted in faster decisions,” one survey respondent says. Do you really believe that? More people in meetings produced faster decisions? Much of the literature specifically argues that more people in meetings. reduces decision-making ability. 

It might be fair to hypothesize that meetings, as such, have had no discernible impact. Does anybody really believe holding more meetings improves output? In fact, there is evidence tot he contrary: more meetings mean less time for getting the actual work done. 

A team of researchers said this: “We surveyed 182 senior managers in a range of industries.  65 percent said meetings keep them from completing their own work. 71 percent said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. 64 percent said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. 62 percent said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together.”

Another leader notes that “communication between employees and executives has become more frequent and transparent, and as such, messages are traveling much more efficiently” through the organization. 

There already are signs of what might be called collaborative overload. “In most cases, 20 percent to 35 percent of value-added collaborations come from only three percent to five percent of employees. 

Colloquially, that proves the truth of the observation that “if you want something done, give it to a busy person.” The practical observation is that the highest performers are besieged with the greatest amount of demand for time spent in meetings and on work teams. At some point, the danger is that these high performers simply get asked to do too much, reducing their overall contributions and effectiveness. 

source: Harvard Business Review

Not to belabor the point, but value--assuming the insight is correct--can be gleaned by having many fewer people in meetings. 

Nor, for that matter, is it entirely clear how greater numbers of  team members working remotely actually addresses any of those aforementioned issues. Some changes could materially impact performance in a positive way. But the issue is how remote work, for example, materially abolishes silos, speeds up decision making, produces strategic clarity, abolishes rigid policies or reduces hierarchy. 

Some will argue that “employees like it.” The more accurate statement could be that “some employees prefer work from home, and some do not prefer it.” But productivity is not a matter of what people believe. It is a matter of fact, to the extent we can measure it. 

Productivity. is often hard to measure--perhaps almost impossible for information workers--and employees claiming they are productive does not make it so. Also, what we can measure might not actually correlate well with actual output. Quantity is not quality, in other words. Innovative ideas and creativity might not be measurable at all, except by reputation. 

Productivity measurements in non-industrial settings are difficult, as it often is difficult to come up with meaningful quantitative measurements that provide insight. We might all agree that not all tasks create the same value for any organization. Productivity can be described as the relationship between input and output, but “output” is tough to measure. 

And what can be measured might not be relevant. 

Even some who argue work from home productivity is just as high as “in the office” note that work from home productivity is only one percent lower than in the workplace.  

Some argue productivity now is higher or equal to productivity when most people were in offices. Some of us would argue we do not yet have enough data to evaluate such claims or evaluate the sustainable productivity gains. It is one thing when all competitors in a market are forced to have their work forces work from home.

It will be quite something else when WFH is a business choice, not an enforced requirement. As might be colloquially said, widespread WFH will last about as long as it takes for a key competitor not working that way begins to take market share. 

Not to deny that post-pandemic, some firms will find meaningful ways to restructure business processes to gain agility, productivity and speed, but the actual gains will be slower to realize than many expect, as organizational resistance to such changes will be significant. Resistance to change is a major fact of organizational life. 

How Much Will IoT Lift Connectivity Revenue?

In some ways, trying to estimate connectivity provider revenue from internet of things devices is difficult. Some consider PCs and smartphones part of IoT, or tablets and other internet media devices. Some consider smart watches IoT devices. I personally do not use that definition, which seems to me to be legitimate as a way of describing “devices connected to the internet,” but not IoT. 

My own definition is narrower, essentially representing machines that talk to other machines, without direct human input. Sensors are the best example, whether industrial, automotive, for parking, traffic control, temperature monitoring, vibration monitoring, battery status or machine functioning. 

Devices supporting “smart home” or anything else “smart” (parking meters, traffic cameras or home security) would be IoT. There are other issues.

source: Strategy Analytics 

Many IoT sensors will not require their own internet access connections, which drive incremental revenue for connectivity providers. They can use Wi-Fi, short range connectivity such as near field communications or Bluetooth, for example. 

In some cases they might use Ethernet connections. In other cases specialized low power wide area networks will supply the connectivity, not a fixed telecom network or a mobile network. 

The point is that an IoT device connected to the internet does not automatically represent an incremental revenue opportunity for a service provider (telco, cable, satellite or LPWA provider). This breakout by IoT Analytics is similar to my own approach, and does not count smartphones, tablet connections, PC connections or fixed network voice connections. 

source: IoT Analytics

In fact, most IoT connections will not use a telco, cable, satellite or LPWA connection, but only a local wireless connection. Those devices will, in an indirect way, make use of whatever internet connectivity circuit happens to be purchased by the person, household or organization or business. The key point is that an IoT connected device does not automatically create an additional service provider access circuit. 

The IoT Analytics forecast suggests somewhere between 25 percent to 30 percent of IoT devices will require a dedicated access connection. 

 

source: IoT Analytics

Source

The point is that definitions matter where it comes to estimating the number of connected IoT devices in use. Connection choices likely are even more important. Not every IoT device--perhaps most--will need its own dedicated connection, which has implications for connection revenue upside. 

In Some Ways, Covid-19 Was a Non-Story for Service Providers

Over the last six months, as AT&T--like most other service providers--encountered an unprecedented change in end user demand caused by mandatory work from home and stay away from school rules, usage patterns changed, generally in the direction of more data and communications demand. 

source: AT&T 

Two observations are in order. The biggest non-story globally was that the sudden shift in demand would crash networks. That did not happen. Data centers and networks were configured with enough capacity to handle the sudden increase in demand without crashing. 

Observers generally agree that what we saw was a change in one month that might have been expected to take a year. But nobody now believes the demand curve has changed. We simply saw a sudden step change, but on the same growth curve as before.

The second incorrect story is that, with all the new demand, service providers “must” be making more money. In all likelihood, virtually all connectivity providers will report revenue declines. 

If you think about it, that just makes sense. Higher demand, as we all know, does not mean “higher revenue.” Usage is not revenue. No service providers, to my knowledge, actually raised rates. Conversely, many service providers temporarily removed data usage caps. So higher usage could not drive higher revenues.

Also, the sudden shuttering of nearly all businesses in many markets seems to be driving huge numbers of small businesses into bankruptcy. That means lower demand. And while it is unlikely that enterprises cancelled service, if there were revenue-generating services that actually are usage based, that also would put pressure on revenues.

Also, it seems most workers who stayed home already had broadband connections, and did not create a burst of new demand. It is likely that there will be some uplift from customers upgrading service plans to higher tiers of service that do generate more revenue. 

The bottom line is that it is unlikely connectivity providers will get a revenue boost from the pandemic-driven increases in traffic. Virtually all should see revenue declines, or at the very least a less-robust rate of revenue growth. 

Also, many in the business-to-business portions of the business anecdotally are mentioning cancelled deals and delayed deals. Those developments also will depress revenue and growth. 

Are FTTH Best Days Behind it?

For all the justifiable importance of optical fiber access in telco networks, it is possible to make the argument that fiber-to-home investments will be relatively muted, globally, as priorities continue to shift elsewhere. The simple observation is that most of today’s revenue is earned on the mobile network, not the fixed network, and that tomorrow’s revenue might well be earned elsewhere than from mobile connectivity itself. 

Assume this EY forecast of telco capital investment is correct. Assume the orange bars include local access network capex (mobile and fixed), while the green bars are investments to support edge computing, cloud infrastructure or content delivery networks. The EY forecast suggests that investments in the access network are going to drop, to support other initiatives. 

source: EY 

In part, one might argue that access capex will drop because some big 5G builds will be tapering off, allowing more investment in complementary assets (edge computing, content delivery infrastructure, analytics and other investments) to support new revenue opportunities. 

The EY forecast likely includes both fixed and mobile network capex, plus support for any related businesses telcos might be in (data centers, for example), plus the other investments in information technology telcos make (buildings, rolling stock, computing infrastructure not directly related to the network). 

Still, mobile capex tends to dominate global telco capex, as this forecast by Infonetics suggests. Virtually all fixed network investment these days is for broadband, as voice and other services simply are carried over the broadband infrastructure, while investments to support voice are nil. 

In fact, fixed network capex has dropped dramatically since about 2000. 

source: Market Realist

That capex profile parallels the revenue generation profile for telcos globally, where almost all the revenue growth comes from mobility and mobile broadband, compared to fixed network broadband and voice.  

source: Infonetics 

And one implication of the limited capex for fixed networks is that there is probably not going to be much expansion of current modernization efforts (replacing copper with optical fiber to the premises). 

That is especially the case if one assumes that overall capex climbs dramatically, as the EY analysis suggests. 

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What U.S. Cellular, Ericsson Millimeter Wave Fixed Wireless Test Shows

Ericsson, Qualcomm Technologies and U.S. Cellular say the companies have successfully demonstrated the first extended-range 5G NR millimeter wave broadband connection in the United States, on a commercial network, at a distance of five kilometers, delivering speeds of 100 Mbps. 

You might not find that remarkable. The networks are supposed to work, after all. But the test suggests that millimeter wave 5G, often thought to be a tool for urban, high-density applications, also can be used in many lower-density geographies as well. The test implies a single 5G millimeter wave cell can serve an area of 10 km diameter, or about six miles. 

Three miles might not seem such an important distance, but it roughly mimics the reach of a fixed copper network from a central office or remote node. The point is that 5G NR using millimeter wave spectrum might work in many medium-density rural areas. 

As Ericsson has argued, fixed wireless is feasible in at least three basic situations. Where density if high enough, fixed wireless can support speeds between 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps and where customer spend is between $50 and $100 a month.

In some other cases, depending on the competitive situation, fixed wireless could supply 50 Mbps to 200 Mbps speeds at prices between $20 to $60 a month.

In highly rural areas, where fixed network costs are prohibitive, fixed wireless could supply broadband access at speeds between 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps for monthly retail rates between $10 and $20. 

The “sweet spot,” most might agree, is suburban markets with medium density. Urban areas generally have access to fixed network access from two or more providers where fixed wireless might not have value proposition advantages. 

Rural markets might have reach issues which make fixed wireless difficult. Many suburban markets, though, might have competitive settings where fixed wireless would be a competitive offering for much of the market where there is significant demand for service between 50 Mbps and 200 Mbps and recurring prices between $20 and $60.

In the U.S. market, where cable operators have 70 percent of the customer base, and are getting virtually all the subscriber growth, there may no longer be a sustainable business case for telco fiber to the home. In that case, 5G and all next generation mobile platforms might be the only sustainable option for mobile or fixed network providers who want to compete with cable company offers.