The forced return to the office is the definition of insanity

Excerpt from fortune.com

The myth of the magical office

Many CEOs are clinging to the false belief that the office is the secret sauce to productivity. It’s as if they think the office is a productivity vending machine: Insert employees, receive increased output. But the data tells a different story.

Instead of being a productivity wonderland, the office is more like a productivity black hole, where collaboration, socializing, mentoring, and on-the-job training thrive, but focused work gets sucked into oblivion. In fact, research shows that the office is detrimental to productivity.

For instance, a recent study by scholars at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Harvard University, and the University of Iowa found that software engineers located in different buildings on the same campus wrote more computer programs than those who were sitting close to colleagues. However, the engineers who worked in different buildings commented less on others’ code. In other words, they were more productive but that meant that less experienced coders got weaker mentorship.

To put it simply, expecting the office to boost productivity is like expecting a fish to ride a bicycle: The office serves a different, and very important purpose. The EY-Parthenon research shows a direct correlation between the forced return to the office and plummeting productivity. The numbers don’t lie. People are working longer hours and barely putting out more products. It’s high time we stop trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

 

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