

The great irony of the office-centric mentality is that it’s not just productivity that suffers employee engagement takes a hit, too. However, office-based mentoring, especially full-time, is often inconsistent, inefficient, and dependent on factors like proximity, office politics, and personal dynamics, which can limit its reach and impact. The unspoken belief in many organizations is that if you pack employees into an office like sardines, mentoring will magically happen. However, you have to be intentional about mentoring. While productivity is harmed by in-office presence, mentoring is boosted. Structured mentoring can strike the balance between in-office and remote work It’s high time we stop trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. People are working longer hours and barely putting out more products. The EY-Parthenon research shows a direct correlation between the forced return to the office and plummeting productivity. 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. In other words, they were more productive but that meant that less experienced coders got weaker mentorship. However, the engineers who worked in different buildings commented less on others’ code.
TO WORK REMOTELY DEFINITION SOFTWARE
In fact, research shows that the office is detrimental to productivity.įor 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. 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. It’s as if they think the office is a productivity vending machine: Insert employees, receive increased output. Many CEOs are clinging to the false belief that the office is the secret sauce to productivity. This, my friends, is the very definition of insanity. Yet despite the overwhelming evidence that flexible hybrid work is more productive than forced in-office work for the same roles, top executives are stubbornly herding employees back to the office like lost sheep, expecting productivity to miraculously improve.
