Having WFH for the past 3 years, Im not sure I would start my own WFH company. Maybe Im in a company that doesnt have the culture to support it very well, but the amount of inefficiency I see on the engineering level would make me prefer a hybrid solution for my own company.
At work there tend to be other inefficiencies. A lot of "spontaneous collaboration" that people claim happens in the office is people talking to pretty/handsome people in other departments, without necessarily adding to the bottom line.
In person collaboration is definitely worth it, but this needs to be planned. It doesn't happen automagically if you are being forced to sit at a desk.
I can see why middle management's hates it thought. You can no longer tap on someone shoulder and pester them in prioritising your work above others. You need to make a business case rather than bullying a poor Engineer.
WFH just amplifies management incompetence, it’s not a problem per se. If it doesn’t work, it’s better to look deeper to understand the root cause of inefficiency.
WHF amplifies all incompetence, especially around comms. Managers are particularly bad at that but in my experience everyone is at least a little bad at it...
It's not just comms, many live in a digitalized world FORMALLY, they formally works on desktop computers, but their mind work on paper and they seems to be unable to works on computer other then mimicking their works on paper.
Aside managers like people in the office because they are more tied to the company, change employer often means having to move elsewhere and the worker might be in couple and his/her partner might have issues moving, they might have kids suffering from loosing friends and change schools etc, this means workers more keen to accept bad condition at work at a certain point in time. A remote worker can potentially change employer just changing some login screens.
The comms thing is a bit of a bug bear for me too. I like to respond quickly to messages/emails because I believe the person at the other end appreciates having their questions answered quickly so they can get one with their day. When I have to wait an hour (or whatever timeframe feels disproportionate) for a reply to my message it grates. Still, I can live with it if I don't have work in a noisy shared space.
About the remote work comms there is a widespread attitude that irks me: People texting "can we talk?" or simply "hello".
No! tell me straight away what you need so I can judge how and when to respond.
When people state what they need, most of the time the response is immediate and it's the thing they need or some ok followup.
"can-we-talkers" I'm starting to let stew for a few minutes, because I suspect they do that on purpose to "skip my queue".
I agree. Having worked on the shop floor I don't like my time being wasted and I'm careful to add detail for my colleagues so that they are engaged from the outset with my query. All I ask is 'give me half an hour' or some similar response so I can manage other people's expectations.
This is why so many orgs find remote working hard. Everyone has to be willing to compromise on how they communicate to find a middle ground, or the company has to hire for people who work the same way as everyone else. When you have a team made up of people who communicate with different expectations, and they're not willing to accept that other people will think differently about what's reasonable, remote working starts to break down.
Maybe that's why so many companies push for people to return to the office. In-person working where someone can just walk up and interrupt someone else is equally awful for everyone.
I'm all about the compromise. I don't mind waiting for an answer but I'm often hassled for a response in my role and then I need an update from another member of the team. If that response is not forthcoming guess who gets the follow up? Now I'm badgering people who are probably busy but have neglected to tell me and I'm now the block in the pipe to those above me. I don't mind a pat response that they're busy but someone somewhere always needs a status update.
Urgent ad-hoc status update requested by someone above is in most cases a communication anti-pattern. Why would someone need it outside of regular reporting structure (DSM, weeklies etc)? Even in case of disaster recovery, when updates need to be more frequent than daily, it’s better to agree in advance on how communication proceeds and plan the work correspondingly.
When WFH(A) is a real alternative, office work means hiring a mediocre team to achieve mediocre results. It is not better value for money, because poor management is not just about inability to organize remote work. Toxic environment will result in higher churn and missed opportunity costs, poorly designed processes will inevitably decrease quality and increase time to market etc.
I own equity in a fully remote company worth billions of dollars and highly profitable, and I would buy more if I could. There is (edit: at least) roughly $120B in enterprise value in fully remote and remote first orgs.
Feelings and anecdotes aside, the data shows the model to be effective imho.
> There is (edit: at least) roughly $120B in enterprise value in fully remote and remote first orgs.
There aren't any North American private companies that have an enterprise value of over $120B right now so the company is public, why not just name it?
Figure presented is an aggregate if that was not clear, not a single enterprise. Open to suggestions how I could’ve improved that sentence in that regard.
I am lazy and time poor, not a liar. No need to troll if you [1], for whatever reason, take issue with the concept of remote work. You’re free to the opinion. I believe in the model based on a preponderance of the data (enterprise financial success and metrics, worker quality of life, environmental impact, etc). Probably a bit of “talking my book” [2] too if you will.
I’ll make time to have the Google Sheet cleaned up and shared here as a post.
How much more would you be willing to spend to get these employees to work in your office? Or put another way, at a fixed salary budget, how much smaller a talent pool would you accept to recruit from?
Recruiting only from the pool of "people who accept to work 100% in an office" is a massive handicap, at least in some regions and positions.
+1. I tell any recruiter not offering WFH to pound sand. It’s not the 1920s. I don’t need to commute to sit in front of a pc. I can do that just fine at home.
I've worked for two types of WFH company - the kind where everybody is kind of just left to their own devices and the highly collaborative kind.
I think a lot of people really like the former but I don't think it works very well. There's a marked tendency of many people to drift apart and communication breaks down within and across teams and the fallout it quite ugly - a lot of people individually doing their jobs (and perhaps doing them well), but nothing really fits together very well. I personally found working in this environment to be torture because my work felt performative and meaningless.
I find that the highly collaborative kind works about as well as working in person - possibly better. However, I think it's only really possible with a lot of camera-on video calls which many people find quite draining.
Things “fitting together” is generally on management though. Can’t speak for other industries but if you leave this up to engineers then they settle down into something like design by contract, or you write my tests I’ll write yours, etc. management often actively resists that with or without wfh because they don’t get to run fiefdoms on the strengths of their network and charisma, look important by forcing meetings, etc.
So effectively you have middle management failing to be fulfilled at an emotional level as well as failing at a professional level to do management, and their plan to deal with this is to first blame others, then try to convince leadership to kill wfh for line workers before anyone notices the real problem.
Nothing against any individuals out there, just seen these things play out a lot and have been having the wfh discussions since long before Covid.
Technical alignment is easy in a sense because it’s clear when two ends of a bridge don’t meet in the middle. Product people or department heads have a harder time of things, but if I were a ceo, I don’t want to buy office space for 2500 when 25 will do.
It’s kind of evil to advocate for back-to-office if you know it’s good for you, but bad for both the company and your coworkers, and I expect many of the most vocal advocates know these things in their secret hearts
> I find that the highly collaborative kind works about as well as working in person - possibly better. However, I think it's only really possible with a lot of camera-on video calls which many people find quite draining.
I think it's something else. It's providing space for employees to interact spontaneously. In software there's a huge push to have everything public and recorded, which makes me very cautious about how I present myself. When I switch to private messages, I get much higher sense of connection with the other person, because I don't need to stay that formal.
It's all down to the approach. I work for a company which has been remote right from the start (10 years ago) and if it's done right then it's great. A lot of it comes down to treating your employees as adults and trusting that they are doing their jobs. A good company culture is key to making it work.
As an employee though, Im happy with WFH :)