Worker Shows Remote vs In-Office Efficiency Struggle

COVID-19 showed a lot of companies that it’s possible to have a large portion of their workforce effectively perform their job duties from home. Of course, there are many industries that cannot subsist on an entirely remote workforce: you can’t remotely send someone their groceries via a Slack message, for example, or work from home on an oil rig.

But there are tons of businesses that realized they can reduce overhead and get more efficacy out of their employees if they allow them to perform their tasks from their homes, as many office jobs only require a computer, an internet connection, electricity, and whatever relevant software/access to work files/tools so they can complete their jobs.

In fact, after government-mandated stay-at-home and social distancing orders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic were lifted, there were tons of businesses that even decided to stick with their remote work setups, as they were being just as, if not more profitable when they had workers buzzing about their days in the office.

There are many who would argue that this type of approach to the work that they do is unnecessary, like a TikToker named Amber (@amberkacherian) who says that she worked way more efficiently when she was logging in from home in a recent clip she posted to the popular social media platform.

In the clip, she can be seen sitting at her desk at work, clicking away on her desktop, looking at her computer monitor intently. The camera then transitions to show what she’s actually doing: randomly pressing buttons on the Windows calculator app.

Amber writes in a text overlay of her video, “When you’re a remote worker and you’re used to finishing all your work at home in 2 hours but today you have to work in the office for 8 hours.”

But if you work a “reactionary” job, i.e., managing IT systems for a business where you’re the person who’s called when something goes awry, and you have a handful of tasks that just need to be monitored, and you can manage these systems remotely most of the time, then this is a gig you could probably do from home.

There are tons of other gigs that folks happily do from home, and companies are still highly successful despite not requiring their employees to come into the office.

Take WordPress for instance: the popular content management system has a workforce that is 100% remote. If you’re a WordPress programmer, let’s say, you can write your code from your home office/couch or whatever setup you have and never have to worry about sitting in traffic five days a week just so you can do the same work you do at home in a place your business is paying a rental lease for.

Many folks have also lambasted some of the corporate reasoning behind asking employees to come back to work in the office: like the idea of returning for the “culture” — even if that culture is just Keurig coffee machines, a foosball table no one uses, and flickering tube lights above your desk.

When it comes to efficiency, there are also folks who manage to get their work done in a more timely fashion when they’re working from home because they’re able to focus better and lock into their job tasks instead of worrying about maintaining small talk with chatty coworkers.

What do you think? Have you worked both remote and in-office jobs? Which ones do you prefer? Do you like the routine of heading into the office for a minimum of 8 hours a day? Or do you like your work-from-home setup?