If Remote Work is incredible and extremely productive, you can literally arbitrage away and create remote-first companies and crush your competition who insist on WFO. According to the logic of WFH backers, it should be incredibly easy to attract the highest talent and that talent should be working at peak productivity and should have no trouble in beating competition.
The fact that none of the companies can do it, means WFH is a massive productivity failure. The reasons are aplenty
- Self-Reporting Employees or Researchers simply can't measure productivity that matters.
- WFH research is typically done and funded by WFH-friendly entities skewing it's benefits. There are no neutral social science research.
- Startups, which are a better unbiased WFO/WFH study (because all startups have the same starting conditions allowing us to control more variables), clearly show that teams (both technical and sales) sitting in room can crush/outrun Startups that are remote-only.
- Productivity measures done by these studies are almost always individual, but team productivity and firm productivity are emergent properties and hard to measure
The fact that none of the companies can do it, means WFH is a massive productivity failure. The reasons are aplenty
- Self-Reporting Employees or Researchers simply can't measure productivity that matters.
- WFH research is typically done and funded by WFH-friendly entities skewing it's benefits. There are no neutral social science research.
- Startups, which are a better unbiased WFO/WFH study (because all startups have the same starting conditions allowing us to control more variables), clearly show that teams (both technical and sales) sitting in room can crush/outrun Startups that are remote-only.
- Productivity measures done by these studies are almost always individual, but team productivity and firm productivity are emergent properties and hard to measure