According to a contact of mine, this is only going to make productivity go down. According to them, since work from home was established productivity has been up by quad. This could be fudged numbers so that our brave boys in rainbow socks can play Marvel Rivals while on the clock, but if actually true it's gonna be kind of funny to see the aftermath. Sorry, fedbro.
Not for Feds.
I'm going to tl;dr this because I was at a place that went WFH and from what we saw:
A) there was increased incentive to voluntarily work outside of "normal hours". You would have work apps on your phone and your WFH set up, so you might check your email at 7, or get a call at 9:30 from someone who needed something. When people were in the office there was more of a "I'm not in the office = I'm not at work, fuck off". With WFH there was more of a "I'll respond to this and just take a long lunch/start/later/quit earlier tomorrow" or they felt 'guilty' since they taken care of personal stuff during the work day so felt being pinged at 7 for something important was a fair trade off. Nearly everyone was taking very long lunches. 11 to 1:30 all work would pretty much halt - it was pretty great if you needed to focus.
Additionally, there was no more need to "I'm in the middle of this, but if I don't leave now I'm going to be stuck in traffic". People would work well past normal clockout time if they were in the middle of something.
People still got just as much (And sometimes more as we'll go over) done, just over a longer period of time, instead of the work day going from 6 to 6, it was now going from about 4-5am until 8 or 9. This was the single biggest driver.
B) Less people being bugged for bullshit. There was less time spent talking at the watercooler or people stopping by cubes to interrupt you because you didn't "look busy". Even before the universal WFH policy I would tell my boss "I'm got something I really need to focus on, I'm going to be WFH for this week". The downside to this is you don't have people building the connections they did.
C) Better focus (sort of). They had a 3rd party do a survey and people universally agreed: There was no more need to take time off to go get kids from school, or wait for a handyman, or worry about any number of things at home. You weren't thinking about things at home. The downside was things from home would intrude especially people with spouses/partners/kids/pets.
D) Sick time usage dropped to something like 20% of pre-WFH. Part of it was people weren't giving each other the flu, the other part was they might not feel up to a 6am drive in traffic, but logging in 9am was something you could do. There was also less disincentive for if you misjudged just how sick you felt - if you suddenly ended up being sicker than you though you were, it was just a shuffle back to bed instead of needing to drive back home. Resulting in more people who would work at least part of the day before being out sick. This meant less stuff was on absolute hold if someone was sick because they would at least respond to their emails/check their calendar.
Anyway, for the feds, point A doesn't apply. In fact it anti-applies as working outside of prescribed hours, even checking mail, is usually forbidden. The other "savings" the company saw was employee retention went skyhigh. Now that might have been COVID related, but employee turn over dropped by over half, and given Feds are lifers its unlikely we'll see that happen. And with the ammount of sick days you get as a Fed point D doesn't matter since if you never take any time your bank maxes out after like 3 years.
