Mixed Experiences, Mixed Reaction

"We are home working alongside our kids, in unsuitable spaces, with no choice and no in-office days. This will create a productivity disaster for firms."               "Everyone assumes I would be gushing over the global rollout of working from home. Unfortunately not."                                                                              "Working from home with your children is a productivity disaster. My 4-year-old regularly bursts into the room hoping to find me in a playful mood shouting 'doodoo!' – her nickname for me – in the middle of conference calls."              "Many people I have been interviewing are now working in their bedrooms or shared common rooms, with noise from their partners, family or roommates."         "I fear this collapse in office face time will lead to a slump in innovation. The new ideas we are losing today could show up as fewer new products in 2021 and beyond, lowering long-run growth."                                                                     "They [study volunteers] reported feeling isolated, lonely and depressed at home. So, I fear an extended period of working from home will not only kill office productivity but is building a mental health crisis."                                             "Phone calls make collaboration harder. You don’t know if anyone is really paying attention. In one conference call I was on, I thought the background noise I was hearing was actually a vacuum cleaner. When I asked ‘is somebody vacuuming', the sound mysteriously stopped. While a video call could seem intrusive, it is essential for ensuring the attendees are paying as much attention as they would in a physical meeting."                                                                                                      Nicholas Bloom, senior fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) 

An Angus Reid Institute poll tended to conclude that circumstances involved in working from home lead to those questioned falling into the category of plus-or-minus satisfaction. Of people living alone, seven percent felt work productivity has been miserable, working from home. Those people working from home with spouse and children present saw 17 percent stating productivity has been minimized. Close to 30 percent of Canadians, as  result of the pandemic, work from home. 

For many people working from home -- which before the pandemic must have seemed to many the perfect way to balance work and home life -- now that it has become a reality, seems stifling, never ending, with continually incoming business emails and meetings intruding into what was meant to be personal time, once sacred against interference. A huge study of the globe's new, coronavirus-enforced work habits indicates that the average workday for those working from home is an hour longer than it once was, working at a normal work site.

Polls show Canadians are relatively pleased to work from home. Getty Images

There has been a realized increase of eight percent of emails into inboxes after business hours, leaving the average worker to deal with after-hours email on an increasing basis. On the other hand, even so, polls indicate that Canadian workers remain fairly pleased to be working from home, as discovered by a recent Angus Reid Institute poll which found 87 percent of workers in Canada described working from home as "really great" or "OK". Of those polled, a mere 13 percent felt the experience was dreadful.

By those in the know, it is assumed that the greater satisfaction is due in large part to less time spent in meetings than what was occasioned at a workplace, balancing out the longer working hours. Even as the average worker is now participating in about one additional meeting daily than previously and meetings tend to include on average two more people than before, the length of time these meetings consume has decreased.

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Meetings tend now to be around 12 minutes shorter in duration than they had been prior to the lockdown so that the average length of time spent in those meetings daily has been reduced by ten minutes. There appears to be no particular reason to account for the shorter duration of meetings, but researchers referred to a previous study finding workers struggle to stay engaged in virtual meetings compared to in-person meetings.

Data from digital communications software used globally was analyzed in a working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States. Because the aggregated data is anonymized the question of whether people are working longer days or just taking advantage of flexible hours while working from home went unanswered. "It is unclear if this increase in average workday span represents a benefit or a drawback to employee well-being."

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Researchers found that in the first week of the lockdown, a flurry of emails internally and externally were unleashed by workers. Emails continued to be sent in high numbers through the first four weeks of the lockdown, then tended to descend to pre-lockdown levels, though the number of recipients for each email has continued to be higher than normal, even when volume returned to normal levels.