Office workforce productivity fell during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic as white-collar employees transitioned to work at the home office, according to research from commercial landlord Investa that challenges claims that workers are more productive working from home.
Australia’s office workforce productivity fell 3 percent in April-June when the majority of office workers were in their first phase of working from home, showing economic performance was greater when businesses have an office presence, Investa said.
“Clearly there are some benefits to home-based office work, but increased labor productivity isn’t one,” said Investa head of research David Cannington.
“There’s no doubt that transitioning to home-based work has been a huge challenge for many office workers and businesses across Australia.”
As an office landlord, Investa has an interest in employees returning to the office.
Mr Cannington said workers may have been less productive during their initial months at home because they may have also been overseeing remote learning for their children, negotiating shared spaces with others in their household, or trying to set up a productive home office environment.
“There were clearly transition issues, and the data reflects this in the early days when people were trying to get their home office right and were teasing out technology issues,” he said.
“I think an important point is that there are a lot of surveys and views proclaiming that working from home creates a productivity benefit. However, even accounting for those early phase issues, the data shows that wasn’t the experience in Australia.”
The experience of previous economic downturns such as the financial crisis was that productivity held up as employment fell, but the comparison of ABS national accounts data with employment data for white-collar industries showed economic output, employment, and hours worked all decreased in those three months, Mr Cannington said.
“When workers are more accustomed to working from home and can dedicate more time to their work rather than managing to homeschool or creating the best home office environment, the data might show some improvement in productivity, which we will continue to monitor,” he said.
According to an April survey of 5000 workers in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, two-thirds said they were more productive working at home than in an office and one in three said the switch had made them less stressed.
But the report questioned whether respondents to those types of survey understood the definition of productivity.
“Survey responses [are] more likely to reflect production (total output, regardless of hours worked) rather than productivity (output per hour worked),” it said.
“This is a particularly important distinction for employees who are working more/fewer hours than usual or spreading work hours over a longer timeframe.”