Is The Hawthorne Effect Impacting RTO Studies?
Alban Gér?me
Founder, SaaS Pimp and Automation Expert, Intercontinental Speaker. Not a Data Analyst, not a Web Analyst, not a Web Developer, not a Front-end Developer, not a Back-end Developer.
A new India study reveals that WFH employees are more productive
A new study of data entry workers in Chennai, India, by MIT and UCLA, has shown that the employees working from home were 18% less productive. The study ran over eight weeks, using customised laptops that monitored typing speed and catching the participants delegating the work to offshore people. The main challenge here for RTO advocates is to demonstrate reproducibility. Cultural and sector differences may lead to different and even opposite results. Also, the Hawthorne Effect may come into play. People behave better when they are monitored. People have debated whether this behavioural effect is genuine. How we could measure people's productivity without triggering this effect is an intractable question, but monitoring people may produce inaccurate data. Reproducibility and transparency are crucial. Any study, whether pro-RTO or pro-WFH, must share information about the following:
Until independent teams reproduce the study, it will be, at best, a cultural and industry-specific finding, or worse, propaganda.
Soft RTO initiatives work better
Zoom, once a thriving company during the pandemic as its solution allowed for virtual video meetings, has felt the full impact of the RTO push of many companies. Its market value has dropped 100 billion USD since its peak. There could have been a business case for abandoning all their offices, but perhaps the costs of breaking the office leases were too high. Zoom has called a return to the office but chose a "structured hybrid approach", i.e. not a strict one-size fits all plan :
Another company that opted for a more intelligent RTO strategy is EY (formerly called Ernst & Young). After consulting with their staff, EY chose to pay people to cover the following costs:
EY spent $600,000, and 1,500 EY employees benefitted from these incentives, and it's working for them. It may not work for every company, but here is another example of where considerate RTO strategies can work for some companies. Let's not forget that when RTO can work does not mean that WFH can't work, too. It's not a zero-sum game, and Zoom's commitment to continuing hiring remote talent attests to that.
Strict RTO mandates damage employer brands
Fortune published an article about strict RTO mandates this week, revealing that the CEOs pushing for such strict orders regret the decision. And now that article is gone! I will be charitable and not think that some influential hardcore RTO advocate has ordered them to withdraw the article, but you can find it on another syndicated source... for now. A couple of points struck me:
Perhaps I am stating the obvious, but strict mandates only beget temporary compliance from employees.
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Work environments with many interruptions lead to a temporary 10 IQ points loss
I saw a teaser for the Diary of a CEO podcast episode 114 on LinkedIn, where the guest mentions a Hewlett Packard study. The first group could do their tasks uninterrupted, while the second group had a heavy load of emails and text messages in addition to their workload. Then the experiment team measured the IQ of all participants and found that the second group had lost 10 IQ points. Working in an open-plan office will result in more interruptions and distractions, such as people coming and going, colleague discussions, and colleagues on video calls or the phone, and people eating smelly foods at their desks, so working from the office will lead to the same results.
Productivity requires focus, interruptions destroy focus, interruptions happen more frequently at the office. So how can office productivity be higher than when working from home?
Working from home is not without interruptions, but they will be less frequent. I would expect interruptions to impact my focus and my productivity, and this negative impact is more likely to happen when working at the office than at home. It is not without a sense of irony that working from home was a perk only my managers had. It allowed them to be more productive and uninterrupted. But when the shoe is on the other foot, not being able to interrupt people leads to reduced collaboration and productivity.
The late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (I had to check my spelling four times!) had this famous book called Flow that studies this particular frame of mind we find ourselves in when we are engrossed in a task. We are in the zone; switching to another task is difficult, and returning to what we did previously is equally tricky. An interview by the late Formula One racer Ayrton Senna revealed how he found himself in a flow state during his trials for Monaco Grand Prix and was utterly baffled when he saw how fast he had been. He had no idea. Distractions destroy focus and flow. Task switching taxes productivity, so how can executives defend that working at the office is more productive? Open-plan offices don't work, says a 2019 HBR article.?
Ayrton Senna at Monaco GP Trials interview in the film called Senna.
Does the aggregated impact of a company's employees' commutes counts towards its environmental impact?
HSBC to scale down its worldwide headquarters
Meanwhile, in London, HSBC will give up its world headquarters in the Canary Wharf business district. HSBC will move to the former BT headquarters near St Pauls Cathedral, next to the London Stock Exchange in the City of London. The new building is much smaller. Ah, the days when they used to call the Barclays world headquarters, literally next door, the "bungalow" because their tower has 50 floors and ours only 31 are ending! But I left Barclays in 2019. HSBC expects savings of around 40% from the move and letting more staff work from home. HSBC will also make savings by reducing its carbon footprint. I wonder whether the aggregated impact of a company's employees' commutes counts towards its environmental impact. I believe it's only fair it did, and it would encourage more companies to embrace WFH.
The contrast between HSBC and Zoom could not be more visible. When the lease is up for renewal, the companies opt for less office space. When the renewal time is a long way ahead, it's because of flagging productivity. Was UK productivity stellar before the pandemic? It was not, but it continued increasing during the pandemic, confirming what several studies have reported worldwide and is now dipping again. According to the ONS, low-productivity companies such as bars and restaurants could no longer operate, but the companies which did have adapted. It's called an allocation effect. Now that the hospitality sector has reopened, UK productivity will decline. Suppose a company takes UK-wide productivity figures to justify an RTO strategy. Instead, they should use sector-specific because office work will likely be more productive than the UK average.
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I am a staunch pro-RTO advocate... just kidding
The studies reveal that productivity and profits increased during the pandemic. But the CEO is pro-RTO, and there is an opportunity to stand out if I get my team to return to the office, maybe even a promotion. I can't redefine "profits", but "productivity" is more flexible. So, my definition of productivity will include collaboration, another very loose concept. When I can't get fast answers from people, it impacts collaboration and productivity. If it destroys their focus, they probably worked on something for someone else, perhaps even my worst rival.
When the times are good, it's thanks to our culture, and the times are tough, let's blame the economy!
Why stop at things we can measure? There is an impact on intangibles, such as the office culture. If we could measure culture, when the times are good, it's thanks to our culture, and the times are tough, let's blame the economy!
Next, let's find a few ambitious scholars and underpaid academics to produce surveys to counter the pro-WFH surveys. If they want to get paid, they must remain silent about who commissioned it. The data and the code are proprietary, which protects us from pesky pro-WFH people trying to debunk our studies.
"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones." said John Maynard Keynes, and almost as a reply, R. Buckminster Fuller said: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." So, let's not try debunking the pro-WFH studies; let's produce our own counter-narrative with our own surveys!
Then, there are ailing media outlets, who also need money to stay afloat. We will ask for their collaboration to publish our surveys. Collectively, we might succeed in drowning the WFH narrative, pushing these opposing articles down the search engine results pages, like the stories about how Tesla didn't have enough desks for everybody when Elon Musk threatened to consider that people working from home had resigned.
Finally, I recommend a "temporary" increase from two to three days a week. When my team gets used to three days, it becomes permanent. Slowly, it becomes four days and then five days a week. The secret is in the incremental return to the old way. If you try to cook a live frog, throwing it in the boiling water won't work. Let it enjoy the lukewarm water, increase the temperature slowly, and they won't notice.
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