Source | amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org | Dan Price
The average worker logs almost an hour of unpaid work each day, for no good reason.
I’m talking about the commute, which for decades has been taken for granted as a necessary part of the workday but which recently has been proven to be completely unnecessary for a large swath of workers.
The miserable trek down the freeway or the sweaty wait for a late bus is coming back in vogue now that companies from Apple to Amazon and Goldman Sachs to JPMorgan Chase have told their workers to come back to the office in larger numbers. They say they need to do this to foster innovation and increase productivity.
As a CEO, that doesn’t make any sense to me.
Our credit card processing company, Gravity Payments, has worked remotely since the pandemic began. How was our productivity affected? This April, we set a record for revenue. In May, we broke that again.
The extra revenue allowed us to grow past 200 employees for the first time, and remote work opened up our recruiting pool significantly: we now have workers in 24 states.
Nationwide, research shows remote work has fueled a 5% increase in productivity, largely because people aren’t burnt out from commuting.
