Chỉ làm ở công ty nào cho phép làm việc từ xa

phải mất hàng thập kỷ, các công ty mới điều chỉnh thích hợp với điện khi thiết kế lại nhà máy, sản phẩm, quy trình công việc...

với làm việc từ xa (ở nhà) cũng thế, khởi đầu không tốt thời kỳ đại dịch Covid-19, nhưng giờ có kế hoạch nên đã tốt hơn, tăng 13% năng suất, do ở nhà yên tĩnh hơn, không phải chuyện phiếm với đồng nghiệp, ăn trưa ngắn hơn, ít ngày ốm hơn...

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It took firms decades to adjust (điều chỉnh) to electricity by redesigning factories, products, and workflows to take full advantage of (tận dụng tối đa) the new possibilities. Similarly, the benefits of work from home start to come most profoundly when expensive offices can be shrunk (sụt giảm), employers can draw from a much larger pool of workers and workers can adjust when and where they work, including the location of their homes. It’s not surprising, therefore, that with little time for either the workers or the firms to adjust and with few options to choose how much to work from home, productivity fell when COVID sent workers home.  But, with more time to plan and more options for hybrid but extensive work from home (e.g. work from home Mondays and Fridays), work from home has large benefits. We are also seeing management redesign to take advantage of work from home in the same way we saw factory redesign to take advantage of electricity. Management, for example, is shifting (chuyển đổi) from input metrics (chỉ số)–do you show up?–to output metrics–did the work get done? Designing and validating new metrics takes time, but these changes are helping to increase the benefits of work from home.

Nick Bloom reviews the evidence (slides here).

Looking at micro economic (kinh tế vi mô) studies on working from home productivity (hiệu suất tại nhà), the classic is “The Stanford Study” I helped oversee in 2010-2012. We randomized (chọn ngẫu nhiên) 250 employees in a large multinational firm into those who would work from home and those who would report to the office. The expectation, of course, was that home-based employees would goof-off (lười biếng), sleeping or watching TV rather than working.

So, we were shocked to find a massive 13 percent increase in productivity.

The productivity boost came from two sources. First, remote employees worked 9 percent more in minutes per day. They were rarely late to work, spent less time gossiping (ngồi lê đôi mách) and chatting with colleagues, and took shorter lunch breaks and fewer sick days. Remote employees also had 4 percent more output per minute. They told us it’s quieter at home. The office was so noisy many of them struggled to concentrate.

The macro (vĩ mô) evidence also suggests or at least is consistent with work from home working:

In the five years before the pandemic, U.S. labor productivity growth was 1.2 percent; since 2020, this picked up to 1.5 percent. Given the state of the world, that acceleration was miraculous.

What could have caused this? Perhaps rising government expenditure (chi tiêu chính phủ) and easy monetary policy (nới lỏng chính sách tiền tệ)? Possibly, but greater government activity traditionally is associated with lower, not higher, productivity growth. Perhaps an acceleration in technology and computerization (vi tính hóa)? Possibly, but the pandemic did not witness any pickup in technological progress. Perhaps the five-fold surge in working from home post-pandemic. Maybe cutting billions of commuting hours, replacing millions of business trips with Zoom meetings, increasing the labor supply of Americans with disabilities or child-care commitments, and saving millions of square feet of office space increased productivity? It is honestly hard to say.

Revealed preference is the most telling piece of evidence. Workers value the option to work from home and many firms now advertise the options for hybrid work as a benefit:

…millions of firms around the world are adopting hybrid and remote work, there has to be something there. I have spoken to many hundreds of managers and firms over the last three years and I repeatedly hear they use home working as a key part of their recruitment and retention strategy (chiến lược tuyển dụng và giữ chân nhân viên). Indeed, another recent experiment on 1600 employees found hybrid reduced employee quit rates by 35 percent. 

Despite a rocky start, work from home appears to have stabilized at around 25% of work days overall and stunningly, nearly 40% of work days for college educated workers! Work from home thus appears to be a permanent and beneficial change in how work is structured.

source: marginal revolution,