With WFH I can think of many advantages to both the companies and the employees. - No commutation, leads to less tired employees - Healthy food - No rent - if they are working from their own house, rather than renting a flat near to the office. - Flexibility of timing - Employee could work little longer if they want since there's no commutation. - Finance - rent & fuel - Happiness - since they're with the family.
Is it just a corporate management disconnection from the reality or something else ?
With lots of newly-minted remote workers I have seen HUGE drops in accountability and performance, including many, many folks who just seem to 'disappear' for hours and days at a time, and nobody knows that they are doing.
Yes, you can be unproductive in the office - but the temptation and opportunities to do next to nothing on a daily basis are too big a temptation for many people, and becomes a nightmare for the people that are supposed to manage the slackers.
Some people are just as productive at home, some people are more productive, but in my experience, the number of people that have become unproductive outweighs the benefit of the relatively smaller number of people who either stay the same, or are more productive.
It's unfortunate, but if you have ever had to manage large numbers of people, you know not all folks will work just as hard when nobody is watching.
In our team, we have some great remote workers but I had my share of some real bad ones including outright liars. I am very careful if hiring fully remote because frankly, it sets the barrier high and you need to demonstrate that you are dependable to do shit on your own. One person was most likely working 2 jobs concurrently even though I cannot prove it for sure. However, they did not deliver a single thing in 3 weeks and were hired as a senior 10+ PM. When asked why, I was told that I am "too much". Whenever we will message on slack asking a question, they would respond 10-15 mins later almost 90% of the time.
in fairness tough, i do that too sometimes, but it's because i'm in the middle of something and i don't want to lose the focus.
when i see the slack notification if it's not about an outage or something similar, i try to finish the thing i'm doing (or at least reach a state where i can commit to git) and then reply.
and by the way, remote work should exploit asynchronicity. forcing people to always reply within 15 seconds is going to burn them out (and would do the same in an office)
I thought that was really good, I was expecting more like 30 - 60 min delay on average. That chat isn't real-time communication afterall, personally I have all notifications turned off.
Well for us it is very rare that your progress would be blocked by not having a question answered, that is why we (try to) have well-specified tasks and daily meetups in the morning.
Unless it’s an emergency, an IM doesn’t require an immediate response, and I'm unsure how anyone would get focus work done with an expectation of <5 minute responses to IMs consistently.
Time management is mostly about emotion management. For example, procrastinating on asking for help overcoming a roadblock on is often a symptom of fear of appearing stupid or annoying. In-person interactions often help smooth over these sorts of problems. For example: If you are having lunch with someone, it is easier to trust him to be non-judgemental about you running into a package management error.
Were they productive in the office? It feels like "being in the office" is a form of productivity. You didn't actually have to do very much as long you were visible.
These people, for the most part, aren't any better when forced to work onsite - but it is harder for them to hide from their managers and co-workers.
It seems if you have a large number of employees who are unable or unwilling to do their job, asking everyone to work from the office isn't the optimal solution to the problem.
Like any sane manager, I don’t pick an arbitrary bucket of tasks at the beginning of each week and declare “Finish these by Friday” and not care if it takes 10 or 100 hours.
Instead, we work with the team to do things like sprint planning with input from the team’s velocity. We target a reasonable workload assuming people are at their desks for a normal workday amount of time.
The problem is that for some people, individual velocity plummets when they go remote. Their estimates skyrocket because they either know their productivity is down or they think it will be easier to get away with if nobody can physically see them.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone as I have some great remote teams, but I’ve also churned through some otherwise good engineers who were great in office but admitted that they just couldn’t focus at home.
Also, if you have anyone WFH with school age children then velocity drops come summer time like clockwork. We work around it and plan it in, but it’s another reminder that remote is hard for even the good remote workers.
Finally, not everyone’s work is 100% isolated and asynchronous. More often than not, people have to work together on things and be available to answer questions, fix things, or otherwise stay in the loop with updates. When people are disappearing for hours every day during the team’s core working time, this all gets slowed down immensely. I don’t care if two people who work together agree to work together at 3AM or noon, but the teams have to be present and available to cowork on things.
Is work getting done or isn't it? How do you tell?
College grad/New Hires are super difficult to onboard remotely. It's already difficult to go from school to a tech job, but add in that you now don't have any sense of what's going on and it's easy to get forgotten even with a good/active mentor.
Also lots of young people don't want to stay in their hometown and move to Seattle/SV/SF, and without the office it's very easy to literally have no friends. When I got a job and moved out to the west coast I had to very actively find people to meet up with, I know a bunch of coworkers who didn't and either ended up leaving frequently to go back just to combat mental health issues, or just sitting home alone. Not saying that ALL of your friends need to come from work or whatever, but if you're new to a city and single it's much easier to seed those friendships.
Lots of people don't buy the innovation, "talk about x by the watercooler", argument, but I think on a macro scale it's a bigger deal. How many startups are started because two people became friends in SV, lived together and started a new project. That only happens with talent density that you get from tons of smart people being colocated. (And it's something lots of ambitious young people move out to the west coast to get, where I came from most of the best jobs were trade schools, construction and trucking lol, not too many promising startups come from a small town in the middle of nowhere just because there's noone to work with.)
So there's def some demand from young people to go into the office which puts a pro in the return to office column for the pointy hairs. Not saying that specific policies are good or bad, just want to outline a datapoint.
If these people were all in the same room, they wouldn't get away with it for long - but somehow it has become acceptable.
That said, I am a big believer in WFH for people that cam manage their time and dedication just as well as if they were onsite - but so far, in my experience, that is about 20% of people.
Your team is either incredibly rude, or they're too polite to say that they're zoning out because the meeting is a waste of time.
I could just buy a rack and make a home gym but the actual gym is better for a number of reasons, same with the office.
It's a dedicated place. My home is for relaxation.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220329-the-coasting-w...
and thinking that having people in the office will reduce that situation.
Not effectively
It really does take a certain combination of personality type, personal drive, and interest in the work to be effective at remote work
It was a similar conversation I had with several mentees, not sure about whether they should just switch teams or leave the company because things weren’t moving forward, and they had no control over the situation.
Everyone blamed WFH since the significant decrease in productivity happened after WFH started.
I'm guessing that the company's interested in gradually moving away from a hybrid work approach and getting people back in their seats. It's the type of company (and industry) where face-to-face communication is deemed as highly important for everyone (those in staff and line positions).
And to my point on the shiny new office, I'm sure the ET wants to get their money's worth.
> when people quit on their own it’s not layoffs. There’s no lawsuits. No bad press. No questions on the business model. No risk of not raising the next investment.
Real estate becomes worthless if nobody is willing to rent it.
