Work From Home by the Numbers: Are We More or Less Productive at Home?

Work From Home by the Numbers: Are We More or Less Productive at Home?

Businesses across the world have been challenged with creating digital workplaces to enable working from home. It’s completely changing the nature of work. This week, we take at how companies are coping in our very first exclusive study of work from home. 

But first, some market highlights:

  • Remember when we said Microsoft reported 900 million meeting minutes in the last newsletter? Two weeks later, they are at 2.7 billion minutes per day, 3x increase in 2 weeks...
  • Slack CEO says: “If Microsoft is such a competitive threat to Slack as it says, we would not have grown in sales and $1 million customers. I mean, 44 million is an impressive number, but that is out of 200 million Office 365 customers. That’s about a 20% adoption rate.”
  • Verizon’s CEO Hans Vestberg shares his advice on how he leads his remote team of 135k+ employees in Harvard Business Review. He discusses the frequency of internal communication, as well as how often he speaks with his managerial teams. Key takeaway being is to communicate frequently during times of uncertainty.
  • People don’t hate meetings, they dislike the ones that waste their time. Productivity coach Ellen Faye discusses what you can do to make meetings more impactful and productive, such as clear agendas, inviting fewer people, limiting tech, calls-to-action, shorter meetings, and tracking meeting time. 
  • From older updates, but extremely related to our study below, Elon Musk tries to avoid 3 things: Large meetings, frequent meetings, and if you are not adding value to the meeting, leave. The first two incidents we saw occur in our study, and the third one I saw when my 7 year old son connects to Zoom with his teachers and leaves. He simply says it's not adding any value for him. Oh well…but back to the topic

The Topic of Today: An Exclusive Look at How Enterprises are Coping with Work From Home

Working from home has been claimed to be the future of work. Many companies saw work from home only as a myth for Silicon Valley employees or a benefit for the chosen few weeks ago - but due to the Coronavirus pandemic, everything has changed. Advances in both technology and connectivity made working from home possible. 

We wanted to understand the situation a bit more - and how big companies are coping with collaboration tools, video conferencing applications, and more, and have a few key highlights:

  • Perhaps not a surprising one, but an important observation: micro-management increased. Managers join meetings more than they did during last year. Micromanagement grew by nearly 4% in one month, and it was already at approximately 42% before we saw the increase.
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  • More recurring meetings: 38.1% of meetings were recurring in February, 47.2% of meetings were recurring in March. There was a huge structural increase (and see back to Musk’s note on recurring meetings), in recurring meetings as companies moved to work from home. 
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  • Real-time planning: companies changed to real-time planning by scheduling almost half (47.2%) of their time less than 24 hours in advance, up from just over 1/3rd in February.
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  • And the biggest insight of all, and something we all hoped would go away with working from home: Large meetings. I mean, how do you even run a large Zoom meeting (Large is defined as over 8 people)? While meetings are shorter, large meetings went up to 14.4% in March, as opposed to 11.3% in February.

All in all, many companies think that an increase in communication due to working from home means they are more "productive". On the contrary, I would argue that just because people are communicating more, doesn't mean they are more productive. There are more signals that should be looked at to make an accurate conclusion. Of course, a lack of communication or teams not connecting to tools or each other would be a different kind of problem, which should also be considered.

Contact me if you would like to here more about having such metrics from our Time is Ltd. platform for your organisation.

Subscribe to this LinkedIn newsletter for more insights, we are trying to understand digital calling more and more each week...

Geraldin DJEMBO

INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR

4 年

Good point..Thank you Jan

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