The American worker is on a productivity tear and it may have more to do with a surge in working from home than the effects of AI, according to a Stanford economist.
For the past five years, the output for non-farm businesses has increased by a sizable 2% per year, The Economist reported citing statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is a marked increase from the 1% productivity growth per year that defined most of the 2010s, and a trend that has taken even Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell by surprise.
Yet, while the hype around AI over the past several years makes it a logical candidate for the main driver behind the productivity boom, Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economics professor who is known for explaining the Great Resignation of the early 2020s, says it’s more likely work-from-home policies since the pandemic are fueling the trend.
Our entire business is remote and work from home unless they need to be in the field. Currently the execs support it because we provided overwhelming documentation about the productivity going up.
But we had to work for it, in the sense that we needed to change how we did business, to accomodate for writing things down, asynchronous work etc.
But our biggest threat to all this are certain managers, like you mentioned, and these weirdos who think we should have friends at work. They want to get together and nothing kills remote work faster than hybrid meetings. They start to blather on about needing more hall meetings and knowledge from “bumping into someone”. They can bump into whoever they want on teams, stop with the damn hybrid meetings!
And the dumbest part of this is we already had several office hundreds of miles away from each other. We already we not bumping into most of our 7000 employees.