Boss is wrong! Employers think workers do less work at home, but workers disagree

Managers and workers have fundamentally divergent views on productivity when working from home, according to a key new Microsoft poll. Bosses wonder if working remotely is just as effective as working in the office. While 87% of workers claimed that working from home boosted their productivity, just 80% of managers agreed. More than 20,000 employees were questioned for the survey across 11 different countries. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the BBC that it was important to manage this conflict since it was doubtful that businesses would ever return to their pre-pandemic working methods.

‘Because all of the data we have indicates that 80% or more of the individual people believe they are quite productive – except that their management feels they are not productive – we have to get over what we refer to as ‘productivity phobia’.  That indicates a significant gap between expectations and how people really feel ‘,asserts Nadella. Companies were adapting to what may be the biggest shift in working habits in history, according to both Mr. Nadella and Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of Microsoft-owned LinkedIn.

However, Mr. Roslansky said data showed that sort of work may have passed its pinnacle. During the epidemic, there were far more completely remote positions advertised on LinkedIn than ever before. Prior to the epidemic, 2% of the 14 or 15 million routinely active job advertisements on LinkedIn included remote employment, he told the BBC. The percentage was 20% a few months ago, but this month it is just 15%. New working norms and practises haven’t always been easy for firms to adopt.

There has been resistance at Apple to pleas to return to the office three days a week starting in September, in contrast to Tesla CEO Elon Musk who sought 40 hours per week in the office in an email that stated: ‘If you don’t show up, we will assume you have quit’.  An unprecedented number of people have also changed jobs since the outbreak started. The ‘great reshuffle’ is a phenomena that Microsoft has dubbed among workers born after 1997 (known as Generation Z). This tendency is nearly twice as likely to cause a change in employment.