Music, Productivity and Skills

One of the biggest arguments in remote and hybrid environments is whether remote workers are more productive or not. An interesting new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research tried to get to the bottom of this by looking at an empirical measure – lines of code written by software developers and found that they wrote on average 8% more code during a week.
But many of us have jobs that are far more ambiguous than that, and here is something else we do know – while the majority of workers generally believe that they are more productive, the majority of managers and in-office colleagues disagree. Of course, as long as that persists, it can be a problem for you as a remote worker – your contribution may be systematically devalued.

So what can you do about it? Two things can really help.

• Focus on making your work more visible. That doesn’t have to be through constant zoom calls, but it can be by for example regularly publishing your work in a portal where it is easy to find, or persuading your team to start doing daily standups.
• Prove to your manager and colleagues that you are great at remote work. In many cases, distrust about whether you are productive or not really stems from distrust that ANYONE can be productive in a remote work setting. One way to establish proof is to get a challenging Remote Work Certification, such as the BillionMinds Remote Work Professional.