Is Work From Home helping Employees to be more Productive? Report reveals

The coronavirus pandemic has forced many employees across the world to work from home. Over the past few months, discussions around productivity of employees are doing the rounds amongst professional and academic circles. 

Contrary to popular belief, the productivity of employees might have seen a decline instead of rise over the past few years. 

Marchetti’s law can be used to substantiate the aforementioned statement (the same observation has been attributed to Bertrand Russell).  The law says employees tend to spend an hour for travelling to work in any era. If an hour of commuting is eliminated and the time spent on work and other timings remain the same, it would lead to a 13% increase in productivity. 

However, experiments conducted through radical microeconomic reforms during the 1990s prove it wrong. Although using such techniques did see a rise in productivity, it was followed by a steep decline of the same. 

According to the report, “the total increase relative to the long-term trend was less than 1 percentage point per year above normal. Low productivity growth since then has wound back those gains.”

Similarly, people might expect work from home to result in a rise in productivity but employees end up spending a significant amount of time on household chores and tend to get preoccupied with other activities which is likely to cause distraction from work. This in turn does not increase productivity but leads to reduction. 

Managers too are finding it difficult to communicate with their co- workers digitally. Sometimes managers might check employee activity to monitor and analyse their performance but experts believe that intrusive checking on computer activity is to be resisted and evaded. Managers should rather choose to objectively assess employees under them.