By Ken Dulaney
Worker Productivity: Is Work-at-Home Equivalent to the Four Day Work Week?
There have been widespread demands from business management to get those who are near their organization’s offices to at least come in 3 days a week. This is a clear signal from management that they have observed a loss in productivity compared to pre-pandemic workplaces rules. At the same time, some segments of work today are clamoring for a 4-day work week.
Most would say that the reduction in hours likely would mean a 1-day loss in productivity, 20% of the work week mathematically (loss will be somewhat less because employees may work longer hours each day). And as a carryover from the pandemic, many workers wish to remain working at home. While it would take a major study to determine the average loss in productivity, it is possible to look at the types of work and where productivity is lost for most workers.
Qualitative Look at the Work-At-Home Employee
So, let’s take a qualitative look at the work-at-home employee. Most Human Resources departments evaluate employees based on a standard bell curve. 80% of workers fall into the middle category, 10% in each of the top and bottom categories. We refer to the middle category as “normalized workers”.
If we look at home working, the first productivity issue raised is the sheer number of distractions. The distraction index of the home worker is high. There are family members with needs, there are television and other entertainment options, there can be a lack of tools, an improper working environment compared to an office environment that must meet ergonomic standards and lastly the alluring option to mix personal and business work tasks (e.g., exercise options, visiting the dry cleaners during the day, etc.).
What Makes a Productive Worker?
The most productive workers (top category) are those who are first and foremost deadline driven and take meeting those deadlines seriously. Top tier knowledge workers have these traits. Highly productive project workers see deadlines as a hard and fast commitment. The productive worker segment knows how to work smart, shedding unnecessary demands on their time. They may move to a local library or other private space to get work done when in-house distractions arise.
At the lower end of the pay scale, you can find highly productive workers because their job is highly transactional and highly monitored. A remote call center operator is measured against contact work, effectively a series of small deadlines. Their pay is based on heavily tracked performance numbers. They are productive regardless of location because their survival depends on it. Most workers in the top tier category can work anywhere retaining their productivity metrics.
The bottom category of workers often has work challenges that are highly varied and often lose their jobs during year-end review and in recession times. These workers cannot work at home and can only improve with the direct supervision they would receive in person at their official office.
The normalized worker is where we want to concentrate our assessment because the impact is the greatest. The conclusion in this blog’s title can be ascertained by examining this category alone. The job functions these workers perform; we can roughly divide it into two broad categories: task oriented and creative. Task oriented can be further subdivided into narrow tasks such as order taking, broader tasks such as project management and ad-hoc tasks, unpredictable tasks that emerge randomly. Below we grade the effectiveness of the middle of the bell curve at-home worker in each of these categories:
Expected Productivity for Work-at-Home Normalized Workers
| Creative | Narrow Tasks | Broader Tasks | Ad-hoc Tasks |
| Low | High | Medium | Low |
Creativity and Work-At-Home
The creative aspect of work at home suffers the most. The utmost creativity in any organization requires the totality of the workforce to contribute to ideas. The in-office workplace is clearly superior in this area because of the ability for workers to interact with each other organically. There can be random chance meetings and it is far easier to access talent that is nearby. The work-at-home employee must be very proactive in contacting those individuals who might influence creative ideas, something top-tier employees can do anywhere, but where the normalized worker likely will not have the initiative to reach out as aggressively as the top tier worker.
Types of Tasks and Their Productivity Levels
Narrow tasks are generally as productive as they are in the office. This is because they consume short amounts of time, meaning distractions have minimal impact. Generally narrow tasks are accompanied by systems that establish productivity metrics that keep productivity high.
Broader tasks require discipline over a period of time and may involve exception handling by the task owner. Distractions can cause the task owner to restart a task because they may have lost focus. When workers are spread out at home with schedules that may not include constant availability during normal work hours, completing these tasks may suffer.
Ad-hoc tasks that arise due to exception handling or changing management priorities suffer greatly because there is often little discipline in these tasks. They may compete for time. And if they require any collaborative work, the availability of workers may delay completion of the task.
Bottom Line
So, in the average business, considering the impact of normalized workers working at home, we believe that most will experience a loss of organizational productivity. Management demands to return to the office as mentioned earlier also support this belief. So is 20% the right number? Likely less, but we believe it will approximate the effective loss in productivity of a 4-day work week.
How Will AI Impact the Workplace?
See VP of Research, Betsy Burton LIVE for “Will AI Take Your Job?” on Wednesday, August 30th!
Will AI Take Your Job?
Does the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) into the workplace mean a job desert or a gold rush? The answer, in my view, is neither of these extremes. But it will absolutely change the workplace landscape and we must work on understanding and planning for these changes.
During this webinar, we will be exploring the potential impact artificial intelligence will have on different jobs and on the workforce, in general. In addition, we will be introducing Aragon Research’s new AI Technology Arc.
- What jobs will be the most impacted by AI technologies?
- How will AI change the workforce?
- What technologies do leaders need to track over the next 3 years?