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At JPMorgan, Productivity Falls For Younger Employees At Home (bloomberg.com) 102

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A troubling pattern emerged as most of JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s employees worked from home to stem the spread of Covid-19: productivity slipped. Work output by younger employees was particularly affected on Mondays and Fridays, according to findings discussed by Chief Executive Office Jamie Dimon in a private meeting with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analysts. That, along with worries that remote work is no substitute for organic interaction, are part of why the biggest U.S. bank is urging more workers to return to offices over the coming weeks. "The WFH lifestyle seems to have impacted younger employees, and overall productivity and 'creative combustion' has taken a hit," KBW's Brian Kleinhanzl wrote in a Sept. 13 note to clients, citing an earlier meeting with Dimon. "Overall, Jamie thinks a shift back to the office will be good for the young employees and to foster creative ideas," Kleinhanzl wrote.
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At JPMorgan, Productivity Falls For Younger Employees At Home

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  • I'm sure we could all organise a whip-round for poor old JP. Boo hoo hoo.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Being a bank I imagine they are heavily invested in property and the kinds of businesses that rely on people doing the daily rat-race. They doubtless own/long term lease some expensive office space, maybe a tower or two.

      • Bingo (Score:5, Interesting)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @10:24AM (#60507584)
        In my smallish city we couldn't build an express way for years and years because the fast food joints got together and opposed it. They didn't want us commuters bypassing their crappy restaurants in the morning and using that time to eat breakfast at home.

        You would be amazed how much behind the scenes business lobbying affects your life, and usually to it's detriment.
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          I mean most of Republican politics comes down to business lobbying. And if you call them on it, they decry your lack of willingness to help "small" business and entrepreneurs overcome onerous government regulations.

          When in reality, they're getting tax breaks and *new* regulations implemented to limit competition and maintain monopolies.

          We're still fighting to buy beer at grocery stores and being told by Republicans that it would be "unfair to small business owners who run liquor stores." Plus Jesus gets w

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Bank shills with mod points on Slashdot? I'm surprised.

    • I"m trying to figure out just how "creative" one has to be in a banking environment??

      I mean, you work with money, that hardly takes a creative mind, no?

      You bring money in from depositors, you invest, you loan, you charge interest, etc....not terribly creative as far as I can see.

      • At least some of these personnel are salesdroids. Creativity is part of sales.

        Some of the others may be traders. Creativity is part of trading.

        Creativity is a problem-solving skill, that's why it's of value to employers.

        • "Creativity" might be just code for not doing their jobs. Since we went mostly remote it's funny how nothing seems to get done by the remote people. It's also funny that it takes hours to get an email response from people who are supposed to be online during "work" time. That is assuming you get one at all.
          • Most companies I talked to about this or heard about from friends say their productivity went up during lockdown and continues to be up with people remote working. The people are happier (since they get to see their families) but also put in more time for work since they don't need to commute. Maybe your company lacks some remote / mobile first tools? Maybe you need to add more reasonable management practices? Perhaps your company hasn't been looking after it's people right or hasn't been making sure their

            • To be clear, the article headline indicates that it's the YOUNGER employees who are less productive working from home.
              Presumably the older (over 30?) employees are just as if not more productive?
              Though I'm... well over 30... and would not be productive AT ALL working from home, so I didn't, I still came to work.
              And I'm in a state in a country that has rather low Covid issues, no transmission here for over 155 days, before people arc up and start calling me names.

              • To be clear, the article headline indicates that it's the YOUNGER employees who are less productive working from home.
                Presumably the older (over 30?) employees are just as if not more productive?

                Yeah, I noticed that too. My thought was that actually it maybe shows that the younger employees are getting support from the older ones (as they should be) and so I'm not sure how to see that. Maybe it shows the importance of working together (otherwise younger employees are disadvantaged). Maybe it shows the importance of the older employees. In any case, I guess it shows problems with JPMorgan in any case. Maybe they have failed to recognise the value of experience and need to actively encourage the

        • Creativity is part of trading.

          Yep. It takes a lot of creativity to come up with daily justifications as to why your highly managed portfolios aren't doing any better than the untrained chimp's.

      • by Jaime2 ( 824950 )
        See: Wells Fargo circa 2016.
      • Re: Shame (Score:4, Interesting)

        by AvitarX ( 172628 ) <me&brandywinehundred,org> on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:55AM (#60507498) Journal
        There's some creativity to financial engineering.

        Both the bad kind (securities that look great and trash the economy) and the good (from an honest business perspective) kind (where you have a new angle that lets you outperform a FICO score in lending and therefore offer lower rates to people less likely to default (since lending to the top 2/3s or so of people is a highly competitive business).

        This isn't me saying woe are the banks or even defending the business model, simply saying that there's more to it and not all of it simply hiding numbers.

        A bank that just naively lent out money would go under.

        A bank that didn't have better internal predictors than FICO score is going to underperform (will only get the less likely to pay back customers that shop around).
      • Creativity as in how to scam and con your banking customers. What shitty fees can we creatively come up with this month? The fact that they are basing this on the "younger" crowd and have daily metrics, I am assuming these employees are more likely WFH call center employees. These kinds of jobs have all kinda of bullshit metrics, how quickly you pickup your calls, how quickly you handle them, do you resolve them, did you make an upsell
      • I"m trying to figure out just how "creative" one has to be in a banking environment??

        You'd be amazed how much custom software it takes to run a bank.

      • Accounting and finance is two of the parts of society where I highly prefer if them I do business with isn't creative...
      • "I'm trying to figure out just how "creative" one has to be in a banking environment??" My thoughts exactly! Perhaps scheming up the next financial derivative with unknown consequences?
  • Should read "employees who had nothing to do no do nothing"

    Not shocking to be honest. And let's be real. Financial services isn't exactly rocket science. They sell products and add a profit margin onto those products.

    Could it just be that they could be replaced by AI based phone messengers? Or that people are out of work right now and more concerned about paying next months mortgage?

    • This is exactly it. There is no one surfing over your shoulder constantly pumping extra work across your desk so productivity appears to fall since the "extra work" is building up. Now do a survey on employee stress and tell me how that's trending

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Means we couldn’t spy and physically harrass people. Since jp morgan is a company dedicated to scamming people out of their money they need these abilities.
  • "Productivity" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bickerdyke ( 670000 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:15AM (#60507360)

    Outside of actual manufacturing of goods, are there any lines of work where the actual "production" could me measured on a daily basis?

    • Sure. These "workers" output is measured by how many dollars they manage to bilk people out of.

      • Sure. These "workers" output is measured by how many dollars they manage to bilk people out of.

        FTFA -

        "JPMorgan last week told its most senior sales and trading employees that they would be required to return to their offices by Sept. 21, the strongest move yet by a U.S. bank to restaff its workplaces. "

        So, yep - you're right!

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Nope. At least not ones that produce actually good data. There are a lot of BS metrics though.

    • by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @10:14AM (#60507554)

      Outside of actual manufacturing of goods, are there any lines of work where the actual "production" could me measured on a daily basis?

      Yes. Software projects can be measured based on burndown charts and delays. In science class, they'd distinguish between accuracy and precision. Software metrics are more precise than accurate as estimates they're based on are a subjective human-supplied number, but my team tracks it closely with great precision and we did have some delays in the first few months of COVID lockdown. There are additional metrics you could use like function points modified or pull requests submitted or pull request time, bugs found, automated issues (FindBugs, BlackDuck) introduced, etc.

      There's no simple formula for software project productivity. Every one I can think of has some flaw. However, there are many sloppy and unreliable metrics one can combine to get a decent picture. A dozen unreliable metrics an suddenly paint a very accurate picture, especially when combined measured over time.

      I'd imagine there are heuristics one can use in most industries to get a decent sense of output and productivity...not perfect, not objective, but given enough data and enough time, they can be applied to get a decent sense of output.

      • by bickerdyke ( 670000 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @10:18AM (#60507566)

        But are they granular enough to notice a regular x% drop in productivity on a certain weekday?

        • But are they granular enough to notice a regular x% drop in productivity on a certain weekday?

          Not easily, but the raw material is there and you could do it.

          My favorite metrics are typically measured over a sprint, but you could use the less perfect metrics to get a sense.

          If developers commit their code pretty frequently, you'd get a sense of what code was written on a Monday or Friday vs Tues through Thurs. You could measure lines of code produced, function points modified, compiler warnings introduced, static code analysis bugs and warnings introduced per commit.

          Perhaps more interesting,

          • by JeffSh ( 71237 )

            I like reading your thoughts on the matter and think they have value and you've provided many measurable metrics that can be used to measure a form of productivity. But that's the problem I feel right is that ultimately they are an objective measure of /something/ more or less tangible, but none are a measure of impact or quality. Many of the best lines of code are the shortest blocks and written in the least amount of time, but they took weeks of careful thought to understand how to do them so elegantly. T

            • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

              The problem is really how do you measure quality.; Is a programmer who commits 10 quality lines of code more or less productive than someone who commits 100 lines of code?

              What if someone is bug hunting, and they only commit 1 line of code that week?

              The problem with objective measures is it can't measure subjective things. If you attempt to measure, you get your measurement as everyone starts to game the system.

              The other thing is, how are they measuring productivity? Are they measuring it over a day? Per hou

          • by Anonymous Coward

            I think the problem is for JP Morgan is that they're still potentially jumping to conclusions even if they do use these metrics.

            They're claiming productivity is down on Mondays and Fridays, but are the metrics the same as before? Or have they just started capturing these metrics because people are now working from home and they're making assumptions?

            Even if the data is valid, it's still potentially a case of correlation over causation. What if staff are working just as hard, or trying to, but their systems

      • The terms "BlackDuck" and "productivity" never belong anywhere near each other.
    • Call center workers, probably have metrics per the hour. How many calls taken, how quickly you answer them, did you resolve it, did you make an upsale, how many times have you stepped away for a shit or piss, how many times has the mouse been idle on your screen for more than 3 minutes.
      • And is this actual productivity in a sense that benefits and advances society as a whole?

        • And is this actual productivity in a sense that benefits and advances society as a whole?

          No more than some hack coder doing work for Facebook.

          Call centers are there so when you call with an issue they can either fix your problem or pass the issue along to the next higher group. Getting problems fixed seems like a good benefit to society.
      • Call center workers, probably have metrics per the hour.

        How about "how pissed off were the customers whose calls got dropped?"

        And please can we close down all call centres where the workers are not allowed to use the word "No". If you ask a yes/no question, and the call center operative cannot say "no" then they cannot communicate. It is as simple as that.

        Yes, I know of languages that do not support words for "yes" and "no" (I know of two). People from these cultures are unsuitable for employment in cal

    • I am in consulting engineering, and we can see it pretty readily as well. We track construction change orders, missed deadlines, project profitability, hours billed (different than profitability for lump sum contracts), and several other metrics. We have a problem with people under 25 for sure, and some issues up to people between 25-30. People in the 35-45 age group show an improvement with WFH, and the data is inconclusive for people over 45 for us.
    • Outside of actual manufacturing of goods, are there any lines of work where the actual "production" could me measured on a daily basis?

      You work to achieve a goal or task. Most tasks can have KPIs applied to them often by some PHB. Sometimes this is detrimental, sometimes this is informative and can very quickly lead to quick continuous improvement wins.

      Example of productivity loss: In our office I was tasked with firefighting. But I was the furthest from the door, so one KPI on productivity was the number of times in a day the person closest to the office door was interrupted by "Is thegarbz here?" (it was a medium side shared office with

  • by demon driver ( 1046738 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:16AM (#60507366) Journal

    Younger employees probably found out at home what their elders already know and therefore have already been applying in the office, too, that creating some space for oneself helps making the work-life-balance healthier, if the job already costs you the largest part of your awake lifetime.

  • As there are no really working metrics for productivity, this is much more likely a measurement artifact.

    • I concur.

      It's not like these are assembly line workers cranking N widgets an hour.

      And it's very likely that even if they had existing metrics of productivity, they didn't have enough robust data for a baseline, and those metrics probably aren't 100% applicable to working from home which further makes a comparison useless.

    • by ranton ( 36917 )

      There are plenty of jobs in financial services where productivity can be measured. Especially over a large enough sample size. Client services have a certain number of client interactions per hour, which is impacted by how quickly they respond to clients during those interactions. If you are in operations processing trades or wire disbursements or whatever, the number of transactions you process per hour can be measured. Sales staff are the easiest to measure of them all (number of sales). A company the siz

      • There are plenty of jobs in financial services where productivity can be measured during normal times with normal financial activities.

        FTFY.

        How much of the lack of productivity is directly tied to the economic issues that we're currently having? I bet a lot of people who are financially secure are not taking risks right about now. The people insanely rich, of course, are gobbling up discounted stuff like mad. But I'm sure there's a large swath of the population who are not engaging with financial services right now, either because they can't or because they are being cautious.

        • by ranton ( 36917 )

          How much of the lack of productivity is directly tied to the economic issues that we're currently having?

          I addressed that at least partially with the comment: "A company the size of JP Morgan probably has decent control groups of people in and out of office so the current business climate doesn’t skew measurements."

          The story doesn't really give anyone enough information to criticize or agree with their findings, but if JP Morgan's business analysts are worth half their salary they would be mitigating for everything I have read in this story's comments so far. As for comparing things to pre-pandemic, even

          • if JP Morgan's business analysts are worth half their salary then the danger of flying pigs is massively under rated.

            FTFY

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        Client services have a certain number of client interactions per hour, which is impacted by how quickly they respond to clients during those interactions. If you are in operations processing trades or wire disbursements or whatever, the number of transactions you process per hour can be measured. Sales staff are the easiest to measure of them all (number of sales).

        All of those are easily dominated by external factors, such as a pandemic affecting client behavior. You can't average 50 client calls an hour if only 100 clients call all day. JP Morgan's observations may well say as much or more about client behavior as they do about their employees.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          All of those are easily dominated by external factors, such as a pandemic affecting client behavior. You can't average 50 client calls an hour if only 100 clients call all day. JP Morgan's observations may well say as much or more about client behavior as they do about their employees.

          Indeed.

        • by ranton ( 36917 )

          All of those are easily dominated by external factors, such as a pandemic affecting client behavior. You can't average 50 client calls an hour if only 100 clients call all day. JP Morgan's observations may well say as much or more about client behavior as they do about their employees.

          It may be common for people to just think business analysts have no idea what you are doing, but do you honestly think they wouldn't be able to notice when work levels are lower just because the amount of available work is lower? There is nothing insightful about your post, except perhaps to people who have no idea what good business analysts do.

          They would be reallocating and/or reducing staff instead of trying to address lower productivity if this was the case.

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            Considering that I have seen business analysts wringing their hands over the fact that 40% of workplace absences happen on Monday or Friday and attributing it to people skipping out for a long weekend...

            Also a bunch of crap statistics trying to measure programmer productivity based solely on LOC or bugs fixed.

    • Well, it is kind of like the difference between efficacy and efficiency, and frequent misuse of the latter term. “Effectiveness” is generally a better term IMO.
  • by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:26AM (#60507396)

    I have visibility into a fair few companies. I see a marked decline in individual worker productivity and it seems to be widespread.

    However, I'm often told by (upper) management at these same companies that productivity has actually increased.

    As yet, I'm unable to determine a reason for this discrepancy. Though I must admit, I haven't yet cared enough to look closely.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Oooh, I know, I know!

      You're a consultant! Probably one of those morale booster types who depend on convincing management that you can come in and raise productivity by some insane percentage by spitting platitudes and running "team building" exercises with bored employees who have better things to do with their time, but since you've bilked management into believing they need you, the employees have to be there.

      In short, it's not that you see productivity going down, it's that you see your payday evaporatin

    • It seems to me those that are already productive are more productive. Those that werenâ(TM)t productive are still not productive and have less engagement thus slowing others down less time with pointless meetings.

      I can identify a list of people that could simply disappear in many organizations I interact with and there would be no reduction in work done, there might be more as those drains of times are now gone.

      The first fields to go would be HR as you canâ(TM)t harass people if you donâ(TM)t

  • by backbyter ( 896397 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:29AM (#60507408)

    I've worked from home off and on since 1989 and full time since 2006.

    You can't successfully WFH at the kitchen table, or living room couch unless you are the only person/animal in the house.

    If you work from home, you have to create a workspace where you can close a door and not be disturbed. Your spouse and kids should act like you are working in the office. No 'quick questions', no 'leaving for the store, you need anything?'.

    If you work from home, you also use the internet the same way you would at the office. No social media, no browsing /., etc.

    They and you need to know and respect that it's work on one side of the door and home stuff on the other.

    I suspect the younger group probably doesn't own a home in the suburbs with a den/office/spare bedroom that can be used as an office.

    • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:40AM (#60507450)

      I suspect the younger group probably doesn't own a home in the suburbs with a den/office/spare bedroom that can be used as an office.

      The younger group is also likely to have younger kids at home. Kids who are too young to go to school and require a lot of attention. I have a 6 month old, and the days I've had to watch her while her daycare was closed for the day, I could tell my productivity was severely impacted simply because I always had to keep my eye on her.

    • by afidel ( 530433 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:43AM (#60507462)

      No 'quick questions', no 'leaving for the store, you need anything?'.

      If you work from home, you also use the internet the same way you would at the office. No social media, no browsing /., etc.

      Lol, you're acting like people in an office are perfectly productive and have zero distractions. It couldn't be further from the truth, in fact when I really need to be 100% productive I turn on my noise cancelling headphones and tune out the office because there are SO many distractions and my ADD will let them take over if I allow it. Nope, if people are being less productive at home it's probably because management is not being effective without being able to shoulder surf. Set expectations and dole out reasonable workloads and you can get the same work out of people as you could in the office. It's true that certain interactions in the office are net positives for the employer, but many, many of them are a drain. The key is to capture as many of the positive ones with the technology as possible.

      • You nailed it.

        Prior to this I had to fight to get a day working from home so I could get uninterrupted work done. I'm in a giant open office with cubes, and the noise is insane. Lots of chatty people there. It's not uncommon for the next isle over to talk sports for an hour or two in the afternoon.

        The employees slacking at work are slacking at home, and the employees cranking out work at work are cranking out more work at home.

        A big issue with management is that they don't know how to set expectations. They do know how to wander over and see if people are chatting with each other, and that's their cue that they need more work. That just doesn't work at home. I think a big part of the problem is that most managers aren't planning and tracking work, they're just reacting. They don't know what their people have historically worked on when, how long it took, etc. They just haven't kept track of that in the past, so now they don't have the baseline data to know how to reasonably assign work and set expectations.

        • Everyone and every team is different.

          I've noticed that I have a harder time getting into a flow state and my productivity has dropped. I live alone and have a home office, so no distractions. Prior to this I could WFH for 2-4 week spans and be hyper-productive.

          It's not like I work constantly with others when I'm in the office, either: largely I'd be at my desk with isolating headphones on. Something about the monotony of being stuck at home and the lack of in-person interactions (despite several weekly vide

          • And I can't wait for it to die so I can go work for an afternoon in a coffee shop or the back bar of a tavern nearby which usually has like 2-3 people there tops on any given weekday afternoon.

            I need a few people around and a little entertainment, but I definitely don't need the office. I don't need the monthly fire alarm check that deafens everyone for 10 minutes and interrupts meetings and calls. I don't need the chatter from the isles around me. I don't need to hear the two people in my row babble on and

        • I think too as you get older and more experienced you rely less on the validation of your peers for your work... you know what to do and how to get it done and are self critical of your work.
          • And as you get older you likely have way more shit to do such that you don't have time for a lot of bullshit.

            When I was younger I entertained meetings called by people because hey, I was getting paid for sitting there. Now I reject a lot of meeting invites because they don't have value for me, and I have far more important things to do.

    • You can't successfully WFH at the kitchen table, or living room couch unless you are the only person/animal in the house.

      Absolutely true. One thing that's really stunned me about people having to work from home during the pandemic is the number of people complaining they don't have a workspace at home. I've worked from home since 2017, with a gap of a few months when I changed jobs the end of last year. It was an easy move for me, I've always had an office, I consider it a part of my computer-geek lifestyle. The only improvement I made was to have a guy come in and wire the house for ethernet. Even when I was living in a one

    • I have none of those things when I work in the office. I don't have a quiet, separate workspace. I don't have a door. I'm not the only person around. I get all sorts of "quick questions" and social interruptions. And those are all choices my employer makes, that they could change if they thought they were important.

  • by Errol backfiring ( 1280012 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:30AM (#60507412) Journal
    Well, as regular gambling is more popular around the weekend, it is only natural that financial gambling takes a hit.
    • More like already hung over on Friday as well.I remember my 20's Thursday nights were typically "college nights" since many college had very few classes on fridays. Plenty of bars and clubs open to make you loathe that drive in to work Friday morning.
  • the be at your desk at 7:3oam and stay until 8pm has taken a hit.
    • There may very well be some truth to this, but I think it goes both ways.

      For example; my day "officially" ends at 5PM. Quite frequently, there are things like scheduled maintenance happening at 6:00 PM or so, that I need to be involved in. My commute to the office, in regular rush hour traffic, is about an hour. If I were in the office, I'd stay, find something to do with the extra hour, and then leave once the maintenance or whatever is finished.

      Working from home, I'll get up, chat with my family, eat dinn

  • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:52AM (#60507488)

    New Employees are not being productive with new work from home. If this is a case for new employees and not established employees. I expect it is a case the HR hasn't fully planned out how to properly train new employees for their job. Probably relying on their manager to randomly drop paperwork on their desk for them to process.

    Young Adults today are no less lazy than Young Adults 20 years ago or Young Adults 40 years ago, or Young Adults 60 years ago. Work from home for many organization have improved productivity. As well the older employees seem to be less effected by this.

    It seems to me that JP Morgan is failing in it HR Responsibility to make sure employees know what their jobs are, their expectations, and what to do to get promoted in the organization.

    In most Orgs People under 30 have the highest turnover. Because their lives haven't settled yet. They are still trying to learn and understand their job, and outside work they are working on getting a family, buying a house... Doing all these adult things for the first time. Having them given their first professional job, then try to do their job without correct training or proper supervision. Will just make them unproductive. Because they don't have work life balance yet, and they don't really understand what is required for their job.

    • I don't think it is generational at all, older experienced workers are mostly self directed. There is a reason they have 'senior' in their job title.
  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:55AM (#60507502)
    In commercial real estate.
  • by Arzaboa ( 2804779 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:59AM (#60507524)

    I have known many young adults that went into the New York Financial world straight out of college. These big New York financial firms buy up young talent straight from college. You get a 2 year contract. You work 20 hours a day. You're sent home after they can't wake you up anymore at your desk. They pick you up 4 hours later and shuttle you straight back to work.

    These "younger employees" are probably just getting some rest in finally. My guess is a fairly large number of them won't be willing to go back to those kind of hours.

    All I truly hear from Jamie is, "My culture is slipping! How will these kids understand the idea of hard work when they're sleeping and having fun?! They can enjoy life when they're dead! Now lets get them back to work! We got profits to make boys and girls!"

    --
    In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. - Lee Iacocca

    • As long as they are only complaining about one demographic of workers it means work from home is working and management just needs to get better at managing that demographics of the employee base. It's not like they are going to work everybody form home forever either, so MEH. The headline should say .. remote work mostly successful other than a few glitches. For not having spent years planning a transition to massively expanded work from home options, things seem to be going just fine on that front. Not p
    • I have known many young adults that went into the New York Financial world straight out of college. These big New York financial firms buy up young talent straight from college. You get a 2 year contract. You work 20 hours a day. You're sent home after they can't wake you up anymore at your desk. They pick you up 4 hours later and shuttle you straight back to work.

      These "younger employees" are probably just getting some rest in finally. My guess is a fairly large number of them won't be willing to go back to those kind of hours.

      All I truly hear from Jamie is, "My culture is slipping! How will these kids understand the idea of hard work when they're sleeping and having fun?! They can enjoy life when they're dead! Now lets get them back to work! We got profits to make boys and girls!"

      -- In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. - Lee Iacocca

      The experience I've had with COVID with my team is this: The productive employees became more productive as they were doing less commuting and socializing and a lot more working. The less productive team members have become even more so, spending even more of their time on social media, surfing the web, or whatever it is that I catch them doing on a regular basis while in the office. Unfortunately HR is 100% willing to let these people go and replace them and my boss is the obstacle.

    • Yeah, that was my first thought too. That the distinguishing causative factor isn't the age of the employee. It's the type of job. The younger employees just have the crappier jobs which required them to work an inhumane number of hours, so their productivity slips when they get to set their own schedule. Older employees have climbed up the corporate ladder, so they have the cushier jobs which involve only 4 hours of real work in an 8 hour workday. So they're doing just fine with all the distractions wo
  • They think creative combustion is a term they should use to describe their workers behavior. That suggests to me they are professional bullshitters. The good news it that if they are only listing younger workers it appears that means working from home is mostly working and they just need to wrangle up their remote management skills to keep productivity up for that demographic. Anyone in their right mind would expect MAJOR changes in working conditions to reduce productivity. You need to study and improve
  • When you take from US taxpayers a huge chunk of change and give it to Jamie Dimon and his cohorts at the top of JP Morgan, and then fire people, I just can't imagine how motivated the lowest-level employees are to jump into the fray.

    YES, make them come into the office and get COVID-19 and die. That will certainly improve productivity. And... if it doesn't... get another bailout from US taxpayers.

    JP Morgan SUCKS.
    Chase SUCKS.

    E

  • Here's a different angle. CEO really doesn't like work from home. CEO hires consulting team, lets them know about his strong preferences in the kickoff meetings. Consulting team delivers report which agrees nicely with CEO's position.

    A similar thing happens with CEO 'compensation consultants'.

  • I have so many questions about these measures.

    What is the age range for these younger employees?
    Is it possible the younger employees have young families and the kids are back to virtual school now?
    Did all employees measured actually have work to do?
    Did the company try to find out why Mondays and Fridays were different?
    Was it just number of hours worked that went down? Did overall output change? Is it possible people can get things done without cranking away 5 days a week?

    I’d want so much clarification

  • by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @01:19PM (#60508252)

    Personal opinion to get it out of the way: Do a hybrid model where you go into the office one or two days a week. That'll make all the agile coaches and collaboration coordinators of the world happy, then you can spend the next 3 or 4 days actually doing work. Rotate different teams between home and office so you have utilization every day, but then you can scale back on how much space you provide.

    I've been seeing more of these articles creep in lately -- there are a lot of people who have a vested interest in keeping workers in the office. Middle managers would be one; they have nothing to gauge productivity on that they're used to using, and there are -millions- of middle managers still. All of them make good money and it would be an economic disaster to just all at once chop out all but 4 layers of an organization like the consultants seem to want now. Lots of other interests too -- executives in general not wanting to pay for people to work at home, commercial real estate interests, clothing retailers, car companies, even service businesses like restaurants and bars near offices -- all of them have been affected by WFH. I live near NYC and Manhattan is heavily dependent on millions of workers trudging into the office every single weekday, working crazy hours, buying food, drinking at bars, etc.

    I guess my question would be what metrics they're using. If they're just using the M365 "engagement score" thing Microsoft computes based on how chatty you are, what docs you edit and how many people you contact, I could see that being misinterpreted. If they're using VPNs, well, I do about 90% of my work without having to be on a VPN these days.

    • I think there's a few things going on.

      Sure, there's people with a vested interest in the office life, and they want to avoid telecommuting becoming a new normal.

      But I think there's also a lot of variety in the workers themselves. Everybody likes to think they're more productive at home since they don't want to commute, it gives you more autonomy, and you can blame your lack of office productivity on other distracting people.

      And for sure, a lot of people probably are more productive at home.

      But I think a lot

  • Initially, there was a bump in productivity due to WFH. Many attributed it to people not feeling comfortable with when to quit. That feeling grows stale after a while. I suspect that older employees are more jaded, and didn't have as much as an initial bump, so the drop-off is only apparent for the younger workers.

    More experienced workers are also more like to understand Scotty's advice to LaForge, and they've been sand bagging all along anyway.

  • The failure is that mid-level managers don't know how to lead and motivate their people in a remote workplace environment. Put the right leadership in place and productivity will increase.

  • The CEO of Netflix was interviewed in the WSJ recently. He was asked how soon after a COVID vaccine became available would he require employees to go back to the office. He said "The next day." He has a point. It's not easy to measure someone's productivity when they aren't making something tangible or when they don't have a deadline for a deliverable. Plenty of people don't have a strong work ethic. People tend to take advantage of things when they don't have to produce which is one reason why UBI wi

  • I wonder if what JPMorgan calls "younger employees", most companies would call "older employees with young children". New grads have their own sets of issues, but if you're a few years out of school, you're not a "younger employee" any more.
      It's too bad none of the articles define what JPMorgan means.

  • The youth, mostly due to the coddling of their parents, don't have the work ethic that older people had. After WW2, the WW2 generation went to work. They had the money to get "stuff" for their boomer parents, who in turn grew up somewhat lazy, per se. They passed that onto their children and on and on. Now, those under 30, for the MOST part, don't have the work ethic to actually WORK. Most want to sit back and enjoy life, which is understandable, but not practicle.
  • ... but I'm having a hard time reading this as anything but "Really old company run by old people says young people are getting lazy.". Like the article doesn't have any examples, cite studies or even define how they measure productivity. This line of people not being productive or creative enough, however has always, at least in my experience, been used by heads of businesses (usually old men) that want to see people back in the office because reasons. Graveyard or nightshift and you're doing remote tech s

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