- Elon Musk said COVID-19 ‘has got people saying you don’t really need to work hard’
- Working from home hasn’t reduced employee productivity, three economists assess in an interview with the American Insider
- The only limit to performance was having to take care of the children at home
- You can find more information on the Onet homepage
Musk posted a comment below the tweet which was apparently a screenshot of his email to Tesla employees. Under the topic “Remote work is no longer accepted”, Musk wrote that “Anyone who wants to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (I mean *minimum*) 40 hours per week or leave Tesla.
Although Musk has not confirmed the authenticity of this email, when asked if such a strict work policy at the office is no longer outdated, he replied: “[Ci ludzie] they should pretend to work somewhere else.”
These tweets did not come out of nowhere. In the May interview for “The Financial Times” Musk disgusted American workers who ‘avoid going to work’although he compared them to employees in China, not fixed and remote employees.
Last month he tweeted: ‘All this talk about staying home has fooled people that you don’t really need to work hard.
Remote work. Economists explain why Musk is wrong
Musk, who has protested factory shutdowns during the lockdowns, may have a misconception about remote working. The American Insider spoke with three economists who all agree remote work during the pandemic hasn’t hurt employee productivity.
“Most of the evidence suggests that productivity increased while people stayed home,” Natacha Postel-Vinay, an economics and finance historian at the London School of Economics, told Insider.
People were wasting less time commuting so they could spend some of that time working and spending more time with family and sleeping, which made them happier and ultimately more productive, she added. .
Until the publication of the text, Elon Musk had not answered questions from the American Insider.
Data published on Bloomberg in February 2021 by NordVPN shows that working from home means longer working hours in many countries.
Albrecht Ritschl, professor of economic history, noted that avoiding travel is beneficial for employee productivity and added that teleworking reduces the number of hours spent in “useless meetings”. “Time in the office doesn’t mean it’s hard work,” Ritschl said.
Almarina Gramozi, professor of economics at King’s College London, said the leading research of American and British workers shows that workers are at least as productive at home as they are in the office. On the other hand, a similar study in Japan found that workers reported lower productivity when working from home.
All three experts admitted that, in some cases, productivity sometimes drops, but not because people shy away from work.
People who had children at home during a pandemic often had to split their attention between work and caring for them, resulting in lower productivity.
Gramozi pointed out that productivity does not only depend on individual employees – The level of productivity largely depends on the support provided by employers, the use of technology and whether the nature of the work allows it to be done easily at distance – she told Insider.
author: Isobel Asher Hamilton, trans. Mateusz Albin
See also: Remote and hybrid working delighted the Poles. They point to savings