Working at the office isn't about floor plan or seat time.
Working at the office is about "staying in touch". When you are in the office you see new directions the company is interested in long before you get an assignment.
It doesn't matter if you are in an office with the door closed, or working from home: either way you miss things that you should have been told directly but nobody thought to tell you. So you end up doing otherwise great work that it leading the project in the wrong direction.
That is when you are in the office someone from marketing can see you in the hallway and ask about the hot new feature of today without invoking all the formal channels to take to the guy remotely. Thus when you are working from home you lose a lot of opportunities to do what is needed as opposed to what you are told. People who can figure out the right thing and do that are more valuable than people who only do what they are told.
Note that the title is correct: all employees should be trusted to work remotely from time to time. However that does not mean you should work from home all the time. You should be a regular at the office so that you don't lose touch. At the first sign of illness (you or your kids), bad weather, or a hard no interruptions problem: you should be out of the office and working from home. However you should also be a regular at the office for the benefits of being at the office.
Of course this depends on your job. If you are a contractor you might be in a situation where you do the letter of the contract and are gone - the only time you might want to do something else is if you are trying to turn the contract into a full term position. Even then though, some contracts are get release N out the door, with a possibility of renewal for release N+1 - in that case you may have the option to change what is in release N.
> without invoking all the formal channels to take to the guy remotely
In the remote shops I worked people discuss everything (and anything) on IRC, slack, hipchat etc. Even their pie in the sky ideas. Never had the problem you described. If anything, people are more open and engaged: they would even sign in after (or before) work to bounce ideas. Sometimes even from their vacations. Never seen that in "onsite-only" shops, BTW (open-space or not).
I visited Fog Creek in NYC once and as you know Joel Spolsky is a very big advocate on giving devs a good work environment. However he is also a big advocate of hiring good people no matter where they live. They had a policy that they had to discuss everything in chat or teleconference from what I saw. They said that despite being a door or 2 down from someone they wanted to talk to the forum of discussion had to be online for the sake of the remotes too.
If it isn't like this (and most places aren't like that) you are going to miss out on things when not in the office.
As someone who has worked remotely a great deal, this claim is generally true. A team is either remote-first, or full-time remote employees won't work well.
Notice that I said team. You can still have a remote team inside of a mostly office-going company and it ends up being similar to a satellite office for a regular company.
Eg Google has many satellite offices, so they could arguably have "remote" be one of those "offices". I don't see this ever actually happening, but they could do it if they make sure that team is remote-first.
THANK YOU for the idea of remote first. It seems like mobile first in that you take what used to be the second priority and make it a first priority and in the process get most if not all of the first priority.
That is a very important distinction, between "remote" and "distributed" a.k.a. "remote-first", "remote-only" and "all-hands-remote-even-if-not-really"
That's one of the big benefits of slack, but many organizations don't use it - you have to think to reach out to the person by calling or emailing, or you are scheduling a virtual meeting with something like webex.
Sure, without tools like that being the rule, there's no way to make it work.
I sometimes wonder if many of the "on-site only" employers even realize how much they are missing out on. For example, when I'm in the office, I work from 9 to 6, period. When I work for a remote gig, I can be working 12 hours a day without realizing it - my job literally becomes my life. I understand that it may not be very healthy for me, but isn't that every manager's dream? Yes, you have to make sure people like what they are doing, but that's a different problem and relevant even for onsite gigs.
Depends... are you working on the most important stuff first?
I'd rather have a strict 9-5'er that's always working in priority order than a 12-2am'er that's scattered and not delivering important work.
IMO the most important thing for success in remote work is having a prioritized backlog and defined iteration. It's way too easy to lose hours and days down an unimportant rabbit hole without these things.
I'd say many places don't have enough PM rigor to make remote work sensible.
i don't think that's a fair comparison given the likely hood of the reverse also being true. Personally I like to work at home when I have a huge complex task so that I can focus and spend all my time on it. I can easily when WFH start work at 8am and work til 2am because I can't sleep until big problems are solved. I also feel more inclined to hang back take my time to do needed research, where in the office I may not do that so It doesn't appear that I am just browsing the web. Overall, I can have complex tasks completed in a couple days WFH where if I came in to the office it could take weeks.
I've seen what OP mentioned in startups that are "remote", where remote means a hybrid of on-site / remote, but mostly on-site (i.e., not "remote-first"). In any case where the majority is not remote, I think it applies.
I had a manager for a while who would make a point of catching me up on watercooler talk once a week or whenever we met about something else. Somebody quit in a dramatic way a few days ago? New project everyone's talking about that has nothing to do with me? Only took about 3 minutes, but really helped me feel connected, be more aware of the big picture, what else was going on that might indirectly impact my projects. I understood when a team I communicated with might be stressed or distracted. I understood when resources were going to be harder to get. Really good practice.
Sounds like there should be specialist training for people who manage remote teams. I wonder what GitHub does in comparison to Google (which seems to be sort of anti-remote).
Great idea. I think it's the same with many management scenarios. You could put someone in charge of a group of employees from a very different culture, and without any training or other investment into learning about how to make it work, they're likely to end up thinking, "I just can't get the team to perform - let's not hire people like that."
Not sure what you mean - I meant to say this is what my manager did for me as a remote employee. I've worked remotely for about 4 years, and this manager really made it work better than anyone else because of little things like this.
I've done this as a weekly team conference call + hipchat for ad-hoc announcements (where announcements = anything from we're doing a new project to cat pics). It can still work pretty well.
This is what I like to call "ambient communication". It's like water of the company life - too much of it and you drown, too little and you get ill and disoriented.
I have the opposite experience. We have many more informal channels and opportunities to check in and learn what other teams are doing by being remote and having our conversations openly in our group chat.
IMO, good communication, collaboration and transparency is not about remote vs. office. I'm sure we can find plenty of bad experiences for both.
This is only one of a possible spectrum of outcomes. Presenting it as the only one is disingenuous. It describes a company almost at war with itself due to abysmally poor internal communications.
I'm sure we all recognise it, because it's the shitty baseline, but we can do and do better than this.
I've worked both situations. The "saying in touch" thing you mentioned is a myth as far as I'm concerned. Even in an office things are worked out behind closed doors.
Groups with good communication skills will succeed at communicating no matter what. Groups with bad communication skills will fail at communicating no matter what.
Technology can't fix political problems. However technology can enable additional solutions to political problems.
It's still politics (and policy and actual leadership effort) that must happen to apply the fix, but technology offers tools and tools can be the basis for enabling options that were previously impractical, infeasible, or impossible.
This day and age keeping remote employees in the loop is trivially simple (as long as the company is willing to make the small effort) - slack, hangouts for standup meetings etc etc.
Sure, you might miss out on some irrelevant water cooler conversation and get less face time with the management, on the flip side though - you have less political crap to deal with.
Could you elaborate on the etc etc.? I work at a company that has a handful of full time remote people. They're mostly senior engineers who had to move for personal reasons but were too valuable to part with. We have Slack, we have networked conference rooms, we have email. We fly them in a few times a quarter.
Those employees do a good job on their work, but they're still compartmentalized. They don't participate in company-funded culture/morale boosting activities. They can't really break a problem down at a whiteboard with a group of engineers who are in the office. They can't participate in much of the interviewing process that brings new people into the company. They can't get coffee with that random junior person in sales who has some great ideas about the product but is hesitant to schedule a formal meeting with a senior engineer who's surely busy with far more important things. You get the picture...
I believe that a "remote-first" organization can work with the right people, but how does a primarily on-site org accommodate remote workers?
By "etc etc" I mean all of the technology available for conferencing, messaging, screen sharing etc. Yes, it's a bit of a hassle but not a major effort by any stretch of imagination. Whiteboarding - I actually find that diagrams drawn in a screen sharing meeting using any of the bazillion options available (giphy, visio, ms paint even) are way easier to comprehend than a picture of a whiteboard drawing.
Juinor ppl getting face time with architects/engineers - this is more of a company culture thing I think.
Everything you mentioned can be accomplished in text chat and I would say those kind of interactions are more likely to happen on something like Slack.
Text chat allows people to "overhear" conversations in an unobtrusive way to both the person doing the eavesdropping and the person(s) talking.
In-person requires more active engagement to do the same thing -- you have to go and interrupt that conversation, or awkwardly put yourself into the conversation and "listen." If your entire company is in the #general channel, you will naturally discover things passively eavesdropping that you wouldn't see or hear otherwise in a physical office.
I've never inadvertently run into the head of marketing in Slack. I have in an elevator on the way back from lunch.
I don't randomly run into colleagues while eating lunch on Slack. I do in the cafeteria.
If I need to casually run something by someone else without raising hackles, I can arrange to bump into them in person. I can't do that in email/Slack.
Text chat is a useful tool, but is not a full replacement for the human experience of walking around other people in 4D.
No it's not, but the point is, if the team is remote-first, you don't need to make that replacement. And you get all the benefits of not having to drag people to the office against their will (which are huge).
In your example, if your company were remote-first, the head of marketing would always be on slack and you wouldn't have to wait for the opportunity of inadvertently running into her just to have a conversation. And so would be your colleagues with whom you (apparently) can only interact when you happen to have lunch together. And so on.
You never "raise hackles" by asking something in Slack, because chat is unintrusive by definition (as opposed to walking up to a person uninvited).
> That is when you are in the office someone from marketing can see you in the hallway and ask about the hot new feature of today without invoking all the formal channels to take to the guy remotely.
By that logic anyone who doesn't want to partake alcohol-infused after works the company arranges needs not to bother. Or anyone who brings their own lunch while the rest of the department goes out for lunch. Or anyone who doesn't like small talk. Anyone with those preferences would not be "staying in touch" in exactly the same way as the remote worker.
At a previous company, my 100% remote co-worker spent all day in a Google Hangout and his team had a monitor in their area with the Hangout running. If anyone had a question, they could simply turn their heads or walk over to the monitor and have a regular conversation.
If all we need is to spend more time and work at communicate and staying in touch with each other, then that seems a very acceptable trade. Not only do we get more time by not commuting to work, but we also cut out the environmental effect of driving a car which in those days seems a rather major bonus. Just last year saw quite a few political drives to get people to change their diet in order to get a much smaller benefit than eliminating commuting would have.
I am sorry, but your comment sounds to me exactly as one that someone mistrusting RW could give (I actually heard that argumentation from such people).
-- do you realize that, one does not become effective in RW overnight? We get the habit of effective office work after several years of practice, RW should probably take only slightly less. Spreading this time one day every couple of month indeed turns RW days into days off IMO.
-- who can bring in figures of how much a random general company benefits from rank-and-file employees "knowing what needs to be done" rather than simply following orders? From my personal (very long and diversified) experience, deficient communication is rather a norm in a company, and ... everybody seems to survive?
I like to counter this argument (about the value of informal communication), by the example of the military (where by definition you are not expected to have all information), at which point people usually take offense ;-). Stil, the army to me is the example of the efficient human organization usually attaining the goal?
I agree. I've been working and managing a small group for several years working remotely. It takes about 6-12 months before someone fully adjusts to working remotely. Communication between each other isn't a challenge as we meet every morning.
PMs will sometimes come and complain that a team member has gone dark. I just tell them, have daily meetings if you're worried about keeping up productivity of the team.
Have worked remotely 18 out of the last 20 years. The interruptions +remote, but the structure of being in an office +onsite. I'm not sure people can make blanket statements which is more productive I feel it varies by person.
>Working at the office is about "staying in touch". When you are in the office you see new directions the company is interested in long before you get an assignment.
If the company is not competent enough to convey them in mail, Slack, Skype, and 200 other ways, then I'm not sure it matters...
Given all other constraints being equal, a co-located team will be more effective and will ship a correct thing (note: this is not "shipping a thing correctly"!) sooner. Because we are primates.
Working at the office is about "staying in touch". When you are in the office you see new directions the company is interested in long before you get an assignment.
It doesn't matter if you are in an office with the door closed, or working from home: either way you miss things that you should have been told directly but nobody thought to tell you. So you end up doing otherwise great work that it leading the project in the wrong direction.
That is when you are in the office someone from marketing can see you in the hallway and ask about the hot new feature of today without invoking all the formal channels to take to the guy remotely. Thus when you are working from home you lose a lot of opportunities to do what is needed as opposed to what you are told. People who can figure out the right thing and do that are more valuable than people who only do what they are told.
Note that the title is correct: all employees should be trusted to work remotely from time to time. However that does not mean you should work from home all the time. You should be a regular at the office so that you don't lose touch. At the first sign of illness (you or your kids), bad weather, or a hard no interruptions problem: you should be out of the office and working from home. However you should also be a regular at the office for the benefits of being at the office.
Of course this depends on your job. If you are a contractor you might be in a situation where you do the letter of the contract and are gone - the only time you might want to do something else is if you are trying to turn the contract into a full term position. Even then though, some contracts are get release N out the door, with a possibility of renewal for release N+1 - in that case you may have the option to change what is in release N.