Kerby Anderson
The business world is seeing a reverse migration from Zoom to the conference room. Employees may love working from home, but there is growing evidence that productivity drops when people work from their dining table or home office.
We all know the benefits of remote working. You spend less time commuting. You can take a short nap or a mid-morning run. You can fit in several commitments from carpool to doctor’s appointments. During the pandemic and lockdowns, a few surveys found that workers reported higher levels of satisfaction and happiness.
Those may be the positive aspects of working from home, but more and more companies are calling their employees back to the office. Even the notoriously flexible Big Tech companies want employees to show up at least 2-3 days a week.
The reason for the call-back is productivity. A study reported in the Economist illustrates the change in perception. A study done by two Harvard University doctoral students originally found an 8 percent increase in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes. But a revised version of the paper changed that estimate to a 4 percent decline. The researchers had not made a mistake. As they received more precise data, they found that the employees answered fewer calls and put customers on hold for longer.
Another study done by researchers at MIT and UCLA concluded workers at home were 18 percent less productive. And a research study from the University of Essex found a 19 percent drop in productivity.
What is also lost is face-to-face communication, human interaction, and team building. It is easy to see why more and more companies are summoning their workers back to the office.

Kerby Anderson
If you go to the State Department website, you will find the Bureau for Global Engagement Center. The section on “Disarming Disinformation: Our Shared Responsibility” has this quote from President Biden. “There is truth and there are lies. Lies told for power and for profit. And each of us has a duty and responsibility, as citizens, as Americans, and especially as leaders – leaders who have pledged to honor our Constitution and protect our nation — to defend the truth and to defeat the lies.”
In a recent commentary, Thaddeus McCotter observes that “there are times when irony isn’t enough.” We are being lectured by the president and the state department about the danger of lies.  McCotter reminds us of the 51 current and former members of the US intelligence community who claimed the Hunter Biden laptop was likely Russian disinformation. They knew that wasn’t true but spread that disinformation anyway.
Once that letter was made public, it gave the establishment media and Big Tech companies all they needed to censor the reporting by the New York Post and prevent millions of Americans from knowing about the laptop and its contents. Miranda Devine concluded: “The letter was a domestic disinformation operation by the CIA to deceive the American people and help Joe Biden win the 2020 election.”
Years later we now know that those who signed the letter understood it was not Russian disinformation. Instead, we know they were spreading disinformation. Special Counsel John Durham’s report concluded that the FBI probe of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia was “seriously flawed.” FBI officials “discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative.”
It now appears that while federal agencies were warning us of the danger of disinformation, they were often the ones dispensing disinformation.