> WFO isn't necessarily about personal preference. People who want everyone to WFO believe that WFO produces better outcomes for the company.
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> Personally, I haven't seen many good arguments that WFH produces superior work outcomes.
And personally I haven't seen many good arguments that WFO produces superior work outcomes, and yet you seem to state it as fact.
I suspect WFH and WFO produce roughly equivalent work outcomes. That said, I hope we can both agree we're both to some extent guessing based on our own personal experiences (in my case I'm a VP at a dev shop and we've done more in the past year than we've done in the last five after landing a major deal; productivity is clearly not a problem for us).
But offering WFH as part of a flexible work policy:
1. Enables access to a larger labour market, meaning more high-quality candidates,
2. Creates a fairer labour market by removing barriers to entry (e.g. childcare),
3. Provides an additional benefit that helps attract and retain top talent, and
4. Ultimately improves the lives of individual workers since it provides more options to achieve work/life balance.
Honestly, in the end, I personally don't care if WFH actually maximizes "productivity" because I think chasing productivity has led to an extraordinarily toxic work culture.
IME, far from being a barrier to productivity, WFH can make it harder to maintain a good work-life balance if you're not careful.
For example, it's a lot easier for my colleagues in other timezones to justify pulling me into a 6am meeting if they know I can just roll out of bed to take the call. And I personally know people who've put in a lot more overtime because it's just so easy to keep on coding when you don't have a commute to bookend your day.
Stir in this latent perception that people who work from home are lazy, and I could see WFH being more toxic for people who aren't careful or work for a company with a broken culture.
...
> Personally, I haven't seen many good arguments that WFH produces superior work outcomes.
And personally I haven't seen many good arguments that WFO produces superior work outcomes, and yet you seem to state it as fact.
I suspect WFH and WFO produce roughly equivalent work outcomes. That said, I hope we can both agree we're both to some extent guessing based on our own personal experiences (in my case I'm a VP at a dev shop and we've done more in the past year than we've done in the last five after landing a major deal; productivity is clearly not a problem for us).
But offering WFH as part of a flexible work policy:
1. Enables access to a larger labour market, meaning more high-quality candidates,
2. Creates a fairer labour market by removing barriers to entry (e.g. childcare),
3. Provides an additional benefit that helps attract and retain top talent, and
4. Ultimately improves the lives of individual workers since it provides more options to achieve work/life balance.
Honestly, in the end, I personally don't care if WFH actually maximizes "productivity" because I think chasing productivity has led to an extraordinarily toxic work culture.