As the chair of the Productivity Commission, I feel it is my duty to write to you urgently to ask you to immediately enact legislation to ban the process of working from home.
The Commission has been investigating working from home for the last six months and the findings are highly disturbing.
The levels of productivity in the Work from Homers (Homers) is alarmingly high. We had two of our staff work from home as part of our studies and most of them had done their actual work before 10.30 in the morning. One of them has just won a major prize for literature, having written a novel in the time he had left over while the other is now the proud owner of two extra bedrooms and a rumpus room for the kids.
When we investigated how this could be, we uncovered some appalling truths:
1. Up to a third of office time in spent in meetings. Mostly meetings that are of no relevance to the participants, called by people who confuse chairing a meeting with being of importance, and in which some goofball who couldn't otherwise hold someone's attention for more than ninety seconds will hog the floor and drone on about how things in this place aren't being done the way they should be. Homers can just put the mic on mute and get on with it, mocking the speaker with their facial expressions whenever they feel like it. Some of this behaviour has even started to creep into real meetings with laptops popping up all over the place and topless meetings never really catching on because they didn't turn out to be what we thought they'd be at all! For Homers this time is deducted from their day.
2. There is a 20% reduction in efficiency brought about by the office idiot. This person takes up people's time repeatedly asking the same questions, insisting on pedantic clarifications of obscure points in an effort to appear intelligent, and launching themselves at tasks with inspiring energy and tragic incompetence, leaving a "whale fell from the sky" sized debris field that everyone else has to clean up. Homers can dodge the falling cetacean and get on with the job at hand.
3. Bosses are the worst time wasters. Having the social skills of a solitary bull elephant, most bosses blunder through the workplace, dropping "assignments" on people from a great height and wandering off to trample someone's morale without really stopping to get involved. Then, at some random future time, just as the remaining stench of the last piece of work is being removed, they'll charge across the floor again, intent on the tallest person they can find, ready to surprise them with another dollop of inspiration. Homers tend to get forgotten by the elephants and so avoid some of the more noisome parcels of management inspiration - meaning they don't have to spend large amounts of their day digging themselves out from under a pile of shit.
These are terrifying findings. The Australian economy cannot survive if it becomes widely known that, in spite of spending more hours at the office than a Japanese salaryman with a nagging wife, most people aren't actually doing anything very much. In fact, we could probably do without about half of the people currently consuming exquisitely conditioned air in most of our corporations and government agencies. How would we support this number of unemployed people? Much better that they waste five of their eight hours a day and go home stressed about the amount of work they haven't finished than take the red pill and realise that none of it is necessary.
Then there is the ancillary cost to the economy. Going to work costs money and someone is getting paid because of it.
More than 60% of the Homers surveyed, admitted to working in just their shorts or underwear. No suit. No tie. No snide little remarks from the supervisor about how the iron could have been used a trifle more competently. What of all the people making money designing torturously uncomfortable work-wear? What of all the salespeople, the tailors, the people in sweat-shops in Bangladesh. What would they do for a living?
And if we allow people to only come out of their homes to socialise with people that they actually liked spending time with, what would become of the restaurants and cafes in the city. Stripped of the forced jollity of the team's working lunch and the affected suaveness and cosmopolitanism of the executive coffee, these businesses would go out of business. What would become of the suppliers of those cut out letters that are mysteriously used to take up shelf space?
What of the people selling jam-jars with handles in an attempt to make a Cottees topping chocolate milkshake more chic than it really is?
Minister, we cannot allow Homers to continue. For the sake of the economy and our children's future, I beg you to outlaw the practice.
Yours faithfully
Absolutely Brilliant
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