I am at a point in my career where I can be selective and only consider 100% remote roles. I am also a manager, so I understand some of the management challenges that lead people to dismiss or be skeptical of the claim that remote work can be just as effective as office work.
One thing I will admit: It is harder, as a remote manager, to manage low performers or people who show signs of disengagement. You can get more out of an office worker who lacks intrinsic motivation than a similar remote worker.
But that's not a knock on remote work itself. You just have to have the right people on the team, just as in any other circumstance.
I agree with you a fair assessment is warranted. Dismissing the downsides of remote work leads to unrealistic expectations/conversations.
That said,
> You can get more out of an office worker who lacks intrinsic motivation than a similar remote worker.
Is this because for an office worker it's harder to disguise the lack of motivation? Or are they pressured into going through the motions even if they don't feel like it? I wonder if this is a good thing at all.
Let me explain: as a fully remote worker, there are days I don't feel like working. On those days, I'll slack off. My work won't suffer because on the longer term I'll achieve my objectives; I'm just not wasting time pretending to work when I don't feel like it. My mental health is better as a result. This wouldn't be possible if I was at the office, because this isn't a socially acceptable mode of working.
> I am at a point in my career where I can be selective and only consider 100% remote roles.
I assume “point in career” you mean “around the block for a while”. My kid graduated and considered only remote jobs, and after a couple of years when the big-company employer tried Return to Office he jumped to a startup. That’s just an n of one, but these days anybody can consider it.
My company is not 100% remote, but that’s only because we have a chem lab with some special instruments and other equipment. But if/when you don’t need to be in the lab, remote is the default.
> You just have to have the right people on the team
you put it nicely, the flip side is most of companies/teams may not have the luxury to have all 100% right people, they may get disengaged and some of them may come back engaged again. the challenge here is remote work makes it relatively harder to get some of them back on track.
I've never met a manager that was good at these things. In my industry they just look for any defect and then start applying pressure, until they get someone new, or you change.
Pretty atrocious policy when disability, mental health and trauma can come into play. It essentially relies on inducing despair. I know for a fact much of big tech is like this. Atlassian has been called out for it.
Agree with this completely. I have found it consistently challenging to create the structure necessary for low performers to turn their work around. We have also had issues with people actively working for other companies while turning in poor work, spending most of their time freelancing, etc. It is hard to correct that level of effort when they think it is "good enough". Sadly the whole overemployed phenomenon is ruining it, not because they work multiple jobs but because they are disingenuous about it.
Even though I had this team all the time who are pretty engaged, lot of people are not motivated and a lot of them cannot be ever motivated enough. They had a childhood that killed it.
Until we have 40% unemployment, these people are working under certain CEOs. After some easy deduction, lots of CEOs have to decrease/kill the Home Office for these people if this is true what parent commenter wrote.
Every time this comes up I'm struck by the same thought: do these cats measure _anything_ their people do? And what in the world happens when someone takes off for two weeks to go on vacation?
The solution to all this is very simple. Management needs to hold everyone, including other managers, accountable for measurable output. These are usually based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and are semi-standard in many industries these days. From there, you don't have to care how, when, or why anyone does anything, just as long as they hit the target.
This also has reaching ramifications for everything. People are no longer stressed out by working under ill-defined objectives or nebulous directives. Remote work is now palatable, since things are now results-focused rather than means-focused. Under-performing employees are now easier to discharge with cause, and identifying top performers is dead-simple. Reports are now easy to generate, sometimes without human involvement, so nobody can fib to the CEO. And all that applies to managers too, which I think we can all appreciate.
In contrast, a workplace that runs on vibes and gut-checks will have the drama cited in the article. The whole org relies on a near co-dependent level of trust, leading managers to have anxiety attacks when they can't put eyes on things. Accountability is less about facts and more about feelings. Nobody has a firm grasp on how the company will make that quarterly objective, but we're all going to "work hard" and "do what it takes" anyway. It's all well and good for a startup of 20 people, but it's miserable for an army of 200 or 2000.
Even in-office, we shouldn't be conducting performance reviews on a gut check or how happy you make your boss. It should be down to setting measurable goals, gathering supporting data through the year, and assessing the results at regular intervals.
That _sounds_ good, and they've been trying to do that since long before Covid forced them to try the grand WFH experiment, but it's based on very specious reasoning. KPIs are not only easy to game, they _force_ you to game them even if you're trying to actually get something done. Not to mention that if a business could be reduced to a set of quantifiable KPI's, the entire management chain could be replaced with a spreadsheet.
I remember when I first started working for a BigCorp. We were trying to decide on the timeline for some project, I can't remember what. But it was about 6 months long for about 20 people. So about 21,000 hours total. I remember thinking, that this number of 21,000 hours must include vacation time as a deduction. And that BigCorp knew what the estimated amount of sick time, dentist appointments, etc, must deduct from that estimate, based on past years. That they knew if it was going to be a bad flu season. That they had done studies of their estimates and knew what the actual completions were versus the starting point. They someone, anyone, knew what the actual work output of BigCorp was.
Man alive, no, hard no. Laughably, no.
It was eye opening for me. Not a single living soul at BigCorp was measuring anything and all of them were too jaded to even think that if they did measure anything, that it would make any material difference. Every single person was faking it.
While this sounds good on paper, it's very hard to do on practice.
You can "easily" assign KPIs to the company as a whole or to business units (and hopefully you pick the right ones, as other commenters pointed out). But the more granular you get, the harder it is.
How do you assign KPIs to an individual person? Sales sounds easy. But what about finance roles? Software developers? The cleaning staff? Office administrators? Then you need to make it really specific for each person. Should the KPIs for a Junior Frontend Dev be different to those of a Mid or Senior? What about a Data Engineer? And MLOps Engineer? DevOps? How do you measure the exact output of a Creative Designer? And UI UX designer?
Its VERY hard to do what you suggest, and the typical result is that people mend up being measured not on what really matters but only.on what could be quantified easily for a spreadsheet.
While it's absolutely true that KPIs or other clear, measurable metrics of success are objectively better than having no such metrics and just going off of vibes and gut-checks...
...it's important to remember that:
a) People who are bad at creating KPIs can absolutely still make them ill-defined and nebulous.
b) KPIs do not always measure the things that actually matter.
c) Indeed, it's (unfortunately) all too common to have KPIs measure only the things that matter to the people making the KPIs, and not the things that will actually make the organization successful. (For instance, making the stock price a KPI, whether directly or indirectly, through targeting specific visible results that are likely to improve the stock price while having disproportionately low benefits for the actual core business.)
d) Even if the nature of the KPIs are chosen well (ie, they're measuring the right things), the numbers being targeted for them can still be wildly unrealistic and lead to unnecessary stress.
e) Goodhart's Law[0] applies whenever you're creating metrics. You may need to either actively combat efforts to game the metrics, or rotate the precise things being measured periodically to ensure no one has the opportunity to optimize their output too well for a specific metric to the detriment of actual productive output.
TL;DR: KPIs and other ways of clearly communicating and measuring success are a necessary but insufficient component of a healthy workplace.
The hard part about remote is collaboration outside of meetings is hard. Chat is soul-less and leads to a lot of misunderstandings with tone. Video is too formal. Phone is interrupt. For the past 6 months we've been using a walkie-talkie app that transcribes and it's pretty magical. It feels like it's solved some of the issues with unstructured collaboration. Plus the bonus is you can add anyone to a discussion and they can catch up by listening to previous messages at 1.5X
> Chat is soul-less and leads to a lot of misunderstandings with tone.
Chat isn't soulless.
Chat being async has benefits over conference calls.
> Video is too formal. Phone is interrupt.
Work lacks cheap interrupts, which is not a remote-only problem.
In my most recent position, when working from home, I've made a habit of writing to people on chat if I can bother them for 5-20 minutes. It works great. I have typically interacted with at least one customer and 2-3 colleagues during a day at home.
But I can only interrupt certain people. Having sat in the office with them before, we have built a relationship.
Back in the days of face-to-face conversations, I don't ever recall a _spontaneous_ conversation that wasn't just a random complain-fest that nothing useful ever came out of.
Video chat also has enough of a delay it short circuits a lot of collaboration thought forming. Creative discussions go from free flowing back and forth to queued up saying of pieces with little interjection.
I find screen sharing easy rather than hard. Someone wants input, they share their screen and we work it through together. When it's done or on track again we have a social chat before shutting down the meeting software and get back to lone work.
I've noticed teens using snapchat to just send quick videos. Just one sentence and then send. Is there anything like this for work, maybe where I can do a really fast screen recording?
In 2008 or so I worked for a consulting company where most of the workers were remote. Eventually, they opened up an office where I lived. We were encouraged (required?) to come into the office a few days a week. We free parking, table tennis and a cooler stocked with pop and beer.
My teams were always remote but I found the social aspects to be beneficial.
The latest salvo in the RTO war is reposts of stupid TikTok and Xhitter videos of people bragging about goofing off the entire time while they WFH.
That’s a sign of either a shit manager, over hiring, or bullshit jobs (jobs that you think you need but you don’t).
It still happens in an office except instead of baking or lounging they are fucking off on the Internet or creating make work to look busy but not actually creating value.
> It still happens in an office except instead of baking or lounging they are fucking off on the Internet or creating make work to look busy but not actually creating value.
One thing that should certainly be considered is the externalities associated with on-premise work as more roads, transit, infrastructure, emissions, etc, is required. Taxes should probably be lower for companies embracing remote work.
Taxes only in theory pay for those things. In reality lots of borrowing from the future, and inflation, pay for them as well, so proportionally it's not that much.
Frankly, a 2021 opinion piece doesn’t tell you anything about the state of remote work. So much has changed in the last three years. CEOs and companies have adapted, and in my anecdotal experience, lots of employees as well. Notably those who were once bullish on full remote, would like to see some form of hybrid setup if it makes sense.
>those who were once bullish on full remote, would like to see some form of hybrid setup if it makes sense.
interesting, so many of my peers are full on the remote train. I guess it depends on the age of the workers? I know for sure I haven't heard any one of my coworkers > 35 ever preferring hybrid to WFH.
The best setup is that my organization builds an office that is a 10-15 minute walk from my existing home and I come in whenever I want. And whenever I decide to come in, everyone else does too. Until that happens I guess I'll just have to settle with fully remote.
I've been "bullish" on it for more than a decade, and worked as a developer full remote since 2019, with roughly one or two office days per month at most when employers have insisted on it.
The company I work for now is fully remote and has been since it started. We have two to three meetups per year. Project leaders and CEO do roughly as many trips to customers and prospects per year.
When we hire and bring in consultants this is one deciding factor, that people are willing and able to work remotely.
To me, if I were to demand that someone spends time on a commute, then I'd also want to pay for this time. I much prefer that they don't commute and I instead get work out of it, and that they have a short distance between work and family or hobbies.
> Notably those who were once bullish on full remote, would like to see some form of hybrid setup if it makes sense.
Within my social group I don't know anyone that agrees with this that isnt working a job that already could not be remote so this never affected them.
Personally, I like the idea of Hybrid but I don't need it by any means. I do it at my current job because we have an office but if we did not have one I would not miss it.
I go in one day a week, but that was also my choice. I was not told I had to do it, if I wanted to stop going in I am still classified as a remote employee.
The fact is, I am more productive at home than in the office. I have less distractions talking to coworkers, I am comfortable in my space, I am less incentivized to want to leave because I need account for the trip home.
When I WFH I will hop on later in the day to check in on something, I am online more hours, and just the week by week output is higher.
Sure I have the distractions of home stuff, but again more hours. If I need to take a break I can go play a game for a few minutes and feel far more refreshed than I would in the office. I don't feel drained by the end of the day.
There is value in being seen by colleagues, but that is something that can be addressed virtually and there are full remote companies that find solutions to this.
Side Note: My cat deciding to come and sit on my lap while working is a pretty good motivator to get some work done.
I’ve been thinking recently that a lot of the pathologies in tech work culture come from the fact that a lot of the most successful tech executives are “wunderkinds” - people who have an extremely rare combination of incredible talent AND incredible drive - who want to only work with people like themselves.
The upside of this is that if you are such a person, as an employee you’ll be amply rewarded. I’ve worked with a number of such people at several of the big tech firms and they are recognized and compensated like the unicorns they are (such people could easily go start their own businesses if they wanted to be entrepreneurs, so they have to be rewarded lavishly to keep them as employees).
But most people aren’t Elon Musks or Jeff Bezoses or the like. Most of the people I have worked with are talented and motivated but not nearly so far out on the right hand long tail.
And motivation waxes and wanes for most people; most people have balanced lives that include lots of time spent not working for someone else.
When I see pathologies such as RTO (which is always combines with making the offices more shitty with hoteling and such), and performance management practices reminiscent of Roman decimations, I see wunderkinds who are unable to accept that most people aren’t like them.
>Remote work is seen as a threat to many CEOs simply because of their fear of change and resistance to progress.
No. This just is false and extremely lazy thinking. CEOs do not "fear change" or "resist progress", these are absurd motivations to ascribe to thousands of people you have never met and it goes counter to what actually happens. CEOs change things, they like to change things a lot, they also love "progress" as progress is the only way to expand.
What CEOs fear isn't "change", they fear that if employees aren't physically tied to an office, they aren't mentally tied to it during work. They fear that employees will neglect their duties and communication will get harder. Whether they are wrong or right is irrelevant. But if you aren't even willing to ascribe to someone the ability to think deeper than "change bad", then all your arguments are irrelevant as you are arguing against a man made of pure straw.
maybe we need tackle this from a totally different perspective.
tie the performance to rewards monthly, no more stable monthly salary other than some base salary, you get paid each month based on your results, the manager can focus on how to itemize the tasks and set expectations, instead of how to watch out low performers.
the better you perform, the more you earn, if the produce is not good for a while, you're let go so you can focus on your other freelance jobs.
yeah this is rare a common approach, but something needs to be changed to cope with remote jobs.
I think the position lacks nuance, but I can easily undermine it. If anything, in person work favors people, who rely on relationships rather than skills. Remote is almost the exact opposite of this as it requires a verifiable result.
I don't think a May 2021 article – before widespread vaccination even made return-to-office policies possible, and before the tech layoffs – is the best starting point.
Okay, calling CEOs that demand a return "bad" and "fearful" is a provocative take, but the article doesn't back up these assumptions. Much less does it actually explain the reason why bad, and only bad, CEOs "fear" remote work.
With, for example, Apple enacting RTO, one has to wonder whether the author would go so far as to say that Tim Cook is a "bad" CEO who "fears" remote work.
In the article the author does call out not doing research or at least cognitive bias toward research that agrees with RTO. They provide examples like Citrix who have been doing this for years. I would agree that a CEO who doesn't look at all the research and just does what Apple and Amazon do because they should have "done the research" is a bad CEO. Especially if the reason the big companies did it was to paint what would otherwise be layoffs in a way that they don't have to disclose to shareholders. Of course these "bad" CEOs may be doing this too. That just makes them bad to employees which is kind of a unspoken truth...
My employer and many others started RTO in July 2020 with a playbook from a White House lead "return to work" committee. I wouldn't say it was made possible by vaccination. Many CEOs absolutely are fearful of the new environment created by WFH.
I can't really agree with the idea that a vaccine made return to office "possible". I was only sent home (mandatory WFH in my case) because the local government told my employer there was the possibility of liability if they had me keep coming in the office. At this point, plenty of people were already getting sick and some were dying. That didn't motivate my employer to close their offices. The government and legal counsel did.
as someone who's been developing software for 25 years, software development workers are the worst when it comes to the "i know everything" mentality heh. I've always felt new college grads should spend 2 years in a small, eat-what-you-kill consultancy. There you'll learn that your direct deposit isn't a given, you don't produce then you don't eat. Also, another important thing you'll learn is that writing code is maybe only 15% of the effort to make a company work and keep the direct deposits coming.
High-performers will perform regardless of location. If they are constantly unblocking people and being pinged they might have some lags in deliverables and the reason for that might not be as clear as if they were in office and everyone can see them being tapped on the shoulder and being distracted.
Those that lack internal motivation/sense of urgency might perform better on-site, but you as a manager might need to micro manage them. Is it worth it? I’m not sure. The employee and manager will most likely not enjoy the situation, esp if it goes on for a while.
Remote work should just be for call center type jobs (where the feed of work is consistent); sales people that constantly visit clients (which doesn't happen much now ); or extremely talented superstars.
For everyone else that has a bad commute and wants to be home, they should consider retiring or get one of the jobs above.
If people can't don't 5 days in office, they should move to a 4 day work week and get 80% of pay.
I don't know why I have to commute 90 minutes just to open AWS consoles, terminal tabs, Microsoft teams and Outlook. Then any communication I have with my team members and leaders must be written before I can do anything anyways.
Do I just have to sacrifice 5% of my lifetime to corporate gods? Because I gladly sacrifice more, and there is an opportunity to negotiate for better mutual terms.
Let me counter by saying in-office work should be just for poor performers who need to be watched, or socialites who like to pretend to work but maintain their role by being popular with the right people.
jawns|1 year ago
One thing I will admit: It is harder, as a remote manager, to manage low performers or people who show signs of disengagement. You can get more out of an office worker who lacks intrinsic motivation than a similar remote worker.
But that's not a knock on remote work itself. You just have to have the right people on the team, just as in any other circumstance.
the_af|1 year ago
That said,
> You can get more out of an office worker who lacks intrinsic motivation than a similar remote worker.
Is this because for an office worker it's harder to disguise the lack of motivation? Or are they pressured into going through the motions even if they don't feel like it? I wonder if this is a good thing at all.
Let me explain: as a fully remote worker, there are days I don't feel like working. On those days, I'll slack off. My work won't suffer because on the longer term I'll achieve my objectives; I'm just not wasting time pretending to work when I don't feel like it. My mental health is better as a result. This wouldn't be possible if I was at the office, because this isn't a socially acceptable mode of working.
willcipriano|1 year ago
If the top performer is getting a 3 percent raise this year, the "slacker" is probably higher paid on a per hour basis considering they work less.
When the top performers start buying vacation homes and sports cars as a reward for being one, I'd wager the unmotivated might start moving.
gumby|1 year ago
I assume “point in career” you mean “around the block for a while”. My kid graduated and considered only remote jobs, and after a couple of years when the big-company employer tried Return to Office he jumped to a startup. That’s just an n of one, but these days anybody can consider it.
My company is not 100% remote, but that’s only because we have a chem lab with some special instruments and other equipment. But if/when you don’t need to be in the lab, remote is the default.
onethought|1 year ago
Remote work has just as many issues as in person.
But perhaps a lot of the issues are the employers problem more than the employees. Hence the shift and the tension
jordanpg|1 year ago
jimmydoe|1 year ago
you put it nicely, the flip side is most of companies/teams may not have the luxury to have all 100% right people, they may get disengaged and some of them may come back engaged again. the challenge here is remote work makes it relatively harder to get some of them back on track.
P_I_Staker|1 year ago
Pretty atrocious policy when disability, mental health and trauma can come into play. It essentially relies on inducing despair. I know for a fact much of big tech is like this. Atlassian has been called out for it.
Perhaps you work for a small-to-midsize company.
econner|1 year ago
giftjames121|1 year ago
[deleted]
rrr_oh_man|1 year ago
No, you will have them sitting at their desk.
That's not work.
That's the appearance of work.
Unfortunately, that's enough for bad managers.
szundi|1 year ago
Until we have 40% unemployment, these people are working under certain CEOs. After some easy deduction, lots of CEOs have to decrease/kill the Home Office for these people if this is true what parent commenter wrote.
pragma_x|1 year ago
The solution to all this is very simple. Management needs to hold everyone, including other managers, accountable for measurable output. These are usually based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and are semi-standard in many industries these days. From there, you don't have to care how, when, or why anyone does anything, just as long as they hit the target.
This also has reaching ramifications for everything. People are no longer stressed out by working under ill-defined objectives or nebulous directives. Remote work is now palatable, since things are now results-focused rather than means-focused. Under-performing employees are now easier to discharge with cause, and identifying top performers is dead-simple. Reports are now easy to generate, sometimes without human involvement, so nobody can fib to the CEO. And all that applies to managers too, which I think we can all appreciate.
In contrast, a workplace that runs on vibes and gut-checks will have the drama cited in the article. The whole org relies on a near co-dependent level of trust, leading managers to have anxiety attacks when they can't put eyes on things. Accountability is less about facts and more about feelings. Nobody has a firm grasp on how the company will make that quarterly objective, but we're all going to "work hard" and "do what it takes" anyway. It's all well and good for a startup of 20 people, but it's miserable for an army of 200 or 2000.
Even in-office, we shouldn't be conducting performance reviews on a gut check or how happy you make your boss. It should be down to setting measurable goals, gathering supporting data through the year, and assessing the results at regular intervals.
commandlinefan|1 year ago
Balgair|1 year ago
Man alive, no, hard no. Laughably, no.
It was eye opening for me. Not a single living soul at BigCorp was measuring anything and all of them were too jaded to even think that if they did measure anything, that it would make any material difference. Every single person was faking it.
salomonk_mur|1 year ago
You can "easily" assign KPIs to the company as a whole or to business units (and hopefully you pick the right ones, as other commenters pointed out). But the more granular you get, the harder it is.
How do you assign KPIs to an individual person? Sales sounds easy. But what about finance roles? Software developers? The cleaning staff? Office administrators? Then you need to make it really specific for each person. Should the KPIs for a Junior Frontend Dev be different to those of a Mid or Senior? What about a Data Engineer? And MLOps Engineer? DevOps? How do you measure the exact output of a Creative Designer? And UI UX designer?
Its VERY hard to do what you suggest, and the typical result is that people mend up being measured not on what really matters but only.on what could be quantified easily for a spreadsheet.
danaris|1 year ago
...it's important to remember that:
a) People who are bad at creating KPIs can absolutely still make them ill-defined and nebulous.
b) KPIs do not always measure the things that actually matter.
c) Indeed, it's (unfortunately) all too common to have KPIs measure only the things that matter to the people making the KPIs, and not the things that will actually make the organization successful. (For instance, making the stock price a KPI, whether directly or indirectly, through targeting specific visible results that are likely to improve the stock price while having disproportionately low benefits for the actual core business.)
d) Even if the nature of the KPIs are chosen well (ie, they're measuring the right things), the numbers being targeted for them can still be wildly unrealistic and lead to unnecessary stress.
e) Goodhart's Law[0] applies whenever you're creating metrics. You may need to either actively combat efforts to game the metrics, or rotate the precise things being measured periodically to ensure no one has the opportunity to optimize their output too well for a specific metric to the detriment of actual productive output.
TL;DR: KPIs and other ways of clearly communicating and measuring success are a necessary but insufficient component of a healthy workplace.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
cajunboi34213|1 year ago
sshine|1 year ago
Chat isn't soulless.
Chat being async has benefits over conference calls.
> Video is too formal. Phone is interrupt.
Work lacks cheap interrupts, which is not a remote-only problem.
In my most recent position, when working from home, I've made a habit of writing to people on chat if I can bother them for 5-20 minutes. It works great. I have typically interacted with at least one customer and 2-3 colleagues during a day at home.
But I can only interrupt certain people. Having sat in the office with them before, we have built a relationship.
commandlinefan|1 year ago
whywhywhywhy|1 year ago
cess11|1 year ago
treespace8|1 year ago
rihegher|1 year ago
hahamrfunnyguy|1 year ago
My teams were always remote but I found the social aspects to be beneficial.
rrr_oh_man|1 year ago
Yeah, but did you use those "office days" for work, really? Or for socialising?
(Not saying socialising is unnecessary in a good team)
rrr_oh_man|1 year ago
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)
api|1 year ago
That’s a sign of either a shit manager, over hiring, or bullshit jobs (jobs that you think you need but you don’t).
It still happens in an office except instead of baking or lounging they are fucking off on the Internet or creating make work to look busy but not actually creating value.
rrr_oh_man|1 year ago
I wish bad managers would understand.
osigurdson|1 year ago
robertlagrant|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
_tk_|1 year ago
johnnyanmac|1 year ago
interesting, so many of my peers are full on the remote train. I guess it depends on the age of the workers? I know for sure I haven't heard any one of my coworkers > 35 ever preferring hybrid to WFH.
scrapcode|1 year ago
cess11|1 year ago
The company I work for now is fully remote and has been since it started. We have two to three meetups per year. Project leaders and CEO do roughly as many trips to customers and prospects per year.
When we hire and bring in consultants this is one deciding factor, that people are willing and able to work remotely.
To me, if I were to demand that someone spends time on a commute, then I'd also want to pay for this time. I much prefer that they don't commute and I instead get work out of it, and that they have a short distance between work and family or hobbies.
nerdjon|1 year ago
Within my social group I don't know anyone that agrees with this that isnt working a job that already could not be remote so this never affected them.
Personally, I like the idea of Hybrid but I don't need it by any means. I do it at my current job because we have an office but if we did not have one I would not miss it.
I go in one day a week, but that was also my choice. I was not told I had to do it, if I wanted to stop going in I am still classified as a remote employee.
The fact is, I am more productive at home than in the office. I have less distractions talking to coworkers, I am comfortable in my space, I am less incentivized to want to leave because I need account for the trip home.
When I WFH I will hop on later in the day to check in on something, I am online more hours, and just the week by week output is higher.
Sure I have the distractions of home stuff, but again more hours. If I need to take a break I can go play a game for a few minutes and feel far more refreshed than I would in the office. I don't feel drained by the end of the day.
There is value in being seen by colleagues, but that is something that can be addressed virtually and there are full remote companies that find solutions to this.
Side Note: My cat deciding to come and sit on my lap while working is a pretty good motivator to get some work done.
efitz|1 year ago
The upside of this is that if you are such a person, as an employee you’ll be amply rewarded. I’ve worked with a number of such people at several of the big tech firms and they are recognized and compensated like the unicorns they are (such people could easily go start their own businesses if they wanted to be entrepreneurs, so they have to be rewarded lavishly to keep them as employees).
But most people aren’t Elon Musks or Jeff Bezoses or the like. Most of the people I have worked with are talented and motivated but not nearly so far out on the right hand long tail.
And motivation waxes and wanes for most people; most people have balanced lives that include lots of time spent not working for someone else.
When I see pathologies such as RTO (which is always combines with making the offices more shitty with hoteling and such), and performance management practices reminiscent of Roman decimations, I see wunderkinds who are unable to accept that most people aren’t like them.
constantcrying|1 year ago
No. This just is false and extremely lazy thinking. CEOs do not "fear change" or "resist progress", these are absurd motivations to ascribe to thousands of people you have never met and it goes counter to what actually happens. CEOs change things, they like to change things a lot, they also love "progress" as progress is the only way to expand.
What CEOs fear isn't "change", they fear that if employees aren't physically tied to an office, they aren't mentally tied to it during work. They fear that employees will neglect their duties and communication will get harder. Whether they are wrong or right is irrelevant. But if you aren't even willing to ascribe to someone the ability to think deeper than "change bad", then all your arguments are irrelevant as you are arguing against a man made of pure straw.
unknown|1 year ago
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synergy20|1 year ago
tie the performance to rewards monthly, no more stable monthly salary other than some base salary, you get paid each month based on your results, the manager can focus on how to itemize the tasks and set expectations, instead of how to watch out low performers.
the better you perform, the more you earn, if the produce is not good for a while, you're let go so you can focus on your other freelance jobs.
yeah this is rare a common approach, but something needs to be changed to cope with remote jobs.
unknown|1 year ago
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34jklajsdfasdf|1 year ago
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paulcole|1 year ago
A4ET8a8uTh0|1 year ago
knallfrosch|1 year ago
Okay, calling CEOs that demand a return "bad" and "fearful" is a provocative take, but the article doesn't back up these assumptions. Much less does it actually explain the reason why bad, and only bad, CEOs "fear" remote work.
With, for example, Apple enacting RTO, one has to wonder whether the author would go so far as to say that Tim Cook is a "bad" CEO who "fears" remote work.
rlili|1 year ago
Still, the author isn't saying "A CEO is bad if and only if they hate remote work". Being bad is the premise.
gibbitz|1 year ago
moi2388|1 year ago
tanjtanjtanj|1 year ago
sidewndr46|1 year ago
throwaway22032|1 year ago
It's really fucking hard to make a sustainable profit in business. Most businesses fail.
Yet HN turns around and says - no, management are clueless, I, the worker, know all.
chasd00|1 year ago
noashavit|1 year ago
Those that lack internal motivation/sense of urgency might perform better on-site, but you as a manager might need to micro manage them. Is it worth it? I’m not sure. The employee and manager will most likely not enjoy the situation, esp if it goes on for a while.
jfranche|1 year ago
For everyone else that has a bad commute and wants to be home, they should consider retiring or get one of the jobs above.
If people can't don't 5 days in office, they should move to a 4 day work week and get 80% of pay.
dashtiarian|1 year ago
Do I just have to sacrifice 5% of my lifetime to corporate gods? Because I gladly sacrifice more, and there is an opportunity to negotiate for better mutual terms.
gilbetron|1 year ago
I can be reductive as well!
meindnoch|1 year ago
bitcharmer|1 year ago
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