Going all-in on remote work: The technical and cultural changes

The new way of work requires a new way of managing, whether you like it or not.


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[jasonridesabike]

For me, the biggest hurdle has been training. We're expanding and I typically hire Jr devs/engineers to then train into seniors. Then either myself or another senior pair develops with them, helping them over the hurdles that would otherwise cost them hours to do what would take a senior minutes to accomplish. That system is so much harder when we're not in the same room. Juniors by definition don't know when they need help - they don't know that what seems like a monumental development task can be greatly simplified with just a little assistance.

We're working through it, a lot of screensharing and a lot of checkins, but there's still significant efficiency loss.

Conversely, some of our seniors are actually more efficient remote. Which, of course, they're spending less time helping juniors.

 

[Case]

Pros and cons with remote work vs an office for most of us. When I had a toddler in the house, it was very difficult.

When my workplace followed the trend and went "open and collaborative" (ie, "cheap"), I couldn't get home fast enough. I would watch the Matrix and pine after Mr. Anderson's cube, which was incredibly private compared to the tiny stalls my company went to (on an interior aisle, you can touch 4 people without moving your chair, and hear a ton of conversations (prompting the entire team to get noise-cancelling headphones so they could code.) "Open and collaborative" my ass.

The one thing I do miss is having the occasional, dare I say agile, face-to-face meeting with a whiteboard for drawing stuff out. video conferencing sucks balls, it's creepy as hell and in no way equates to actually being "with" someone. My favorite is the up-the-nose laptop cam shot.

I've heard managers say, "how can I know my people are doing their work?" My thought is, you don't know enough about what they do to tell if they were doing their work if you were two feet behind them all day. They could type out sentences as in the Shining and it would look like they were coding away. Perhaps a system of requirements and enough planning to know people are getting their work done would be preferable to you walking behind someone like a UPS manager on the belt lines (THERE'S a fun gig....)

 

[AreWeThereYeti]

Not being a work-from-home person, I'd be interested to know how many such people are blowing through Comcast-or-whoever bandwidth caps because of it. Is this a major problem? I would expect so, and now that caps are back in place, the ISPs will be getting a massive windfall from either cap-overages or upgrades to business accounts.

 

[Crescens]

I've been extremely fortunate to be able to continue working from home, but man I hate it. I really don't have the mental discipline to keep myself on task. Like, I know that 100% of the time at the office wasn't spent fully on work stuff, but man... it just feels even worse.

It's also been super hard to try and actually coordinate meetings for both pending projects as well as feedback. Compared to when you've got your co-workers in a cube right next to you to toss ideas off of immediately, it just feels... even more unproductive. This is more a managerial thing I guess, versus what I would normally be taking on but it's just been another added challenge.

On the plus side, it means I've been able to get more use out of the hardware I bought for Twitch streaming to look like 'that pro guy' in our infrequent WebEx meetings haha.

 

[poltroon]

For small companies worried about the multi-state problem, which is also a big problem for purchasing group health insurance, you can outsource your HR department to companies that do only that and will make sure you're following all the rules, paying all the taxes to the right places, handle your direct deposits, and give access to a large employer group health insurance plan and other benefits. This makes it much much easier to have employees wherever they need to be without it being a burden on your paperwork.

 

[worknman]

For me, the biggest hurdle has been training.

I actually like being trained on Zoom or Webex, because I can record the training and then go back over it again later. Plus, I'm visually impaired, so it's hard for me to look over someone's shoulder, without getting right up on them.

For me, the biggest hurdle to working from home (which I've done for over a decade) is managers ignoring my attempts to communicate with them. If you both work in the same building, you can always go to their office or cubicle. But when you both work remotely, you're basically shit out of luck. I mean, what do you do when they don't answer their phone, IM, or email? You can complain to THEIR manager, but often times they're just as bad about it.

 

[poltroon]

For me, the biggest hurdle has been training. We're expanding and I typically hire Jr devs/engineers to then train into seniors. Then either myself or another senior pair develops with them, helping them over the hurdles that would otherwise cost them hours to do what would take a senior minutes to accomplish. That system is so much harder when we're not in the same room. Juniors by definition don't know when they need help - they don't know that what seems like a monumental development task can be greatly simplified with just a little assistance.

We're working through it, a lot of screensharing and a lot of checkins, but there's still significant efficiency loss.

Conversely, some of our seniors are actually more efficient remote. Which, of course, they're spending less time helping juniors.

Our team has set up regular coworking hours a couple of times a week to give people a chance to talk through problems. In addition, good ticket management makes it easier to see when a task is stalling and needs a second voice. The ability to screenshare and use remote access works really well for pairing for our all-remote team.

Sometimes people are bad at asking for help and that's true in-person as well. Maybe try pairing up each junior with a senior and scheduling a standing meeting where they check in and chat about whatever is going on, or if there's nothing, they say hi and skip. These standing meetings IMHO tend to really help remove friction because setting up specific meetings is sometimes just a little too much barrier.

Our team also finds regular retrospectives with sticky note boards a good way to bring up random topics on their mind, and those often lead to very productive brainstorms.

 

[jhodge]

If a company wants to make this shift, management will need retraining also. Not all, or even most, managers are 'leaders' no matter how in-vogue that terminology may be at the moment. Many of them are competent at managing people and work using techniques and systems that they have been trained in over time, but in companies that have until now worked out of an office, most of those techniques presuppose that office environment.

It's not that different a proposition from a dev team shifting languages or tooling. If you move from COBOL to Java (to pick two business-oriented back end languages), you either retrain your team or you replace them. Even with retraining. not everyone is going to make the transition, no matter how good they were in the old environment.

Managing remote or hybrid teams requires different skills, and I'm not convinced that most companies are conscious of that and prepared to address it.

 

[JustVisitingThisPlanet]

Will be interesting to see the hit on office market over next couple years. It's starting to show some impact now but as more leases are up for renewal, expected to get hit even harder over time.

 

[baub]

Remote work can be either costly or cost-saving, depending on how you approach it and how well-equipped you are to truly support it. When done right, properly assessing the appropriateness of remote work for all your employees, and then implementing the changes necessary, saves money. It's the old idea of "right-sizing," except instead of a saccharine euphemism for "firing excess people," the term in this context means targeting and shedding capital and operational expenditures that are only necessary if you're stuffing all your people into an office.

Funny how even with no net overhead, that cost savings doesn't translate to higher salaries. IF a company stops paying the expenses to rent a huge building and nobody is getting fancy new equipment, the extra cash has to be going somewhere.

 

[jasonridesabike]

For me, the biggest hurdle has been training. We're expanding and I typically hire Jr devs/engineers to then train into seniors. Then either myself or another senior pair develops with them, helping them over the hurdles that would otherwise cost them hours to do what would take a senior minutes to accomplish. That system is so much harder when we're not in the same room. Juniors by definition don't know when they need help - they don't know that what seems like a monumental development task can be greatly simplified with just a little assistance.

We're working through it, a lot of screensharing and a lot of checkins, but there's still significant efficiency loss.

Conversely, some of our seniors are actually more efficient remote. Which, of course, they're spending less time helping juniors.

Our team has set up regular coworking hours a couple of times a week to give people a chance to talk through problems. In addition, good ticket management makes it easier to see when a task is stalling and needs a second voice. The ability to screenshare and use remote access works really well for pairing for our all-remote team.

Sometimes people are bad at asking for help and that's true in-person as well. Maybe try pairing up each junior with a senior and scheduling a standing meeting where they check in and chat about whatever is going on, or if there's nothing, they say hi and skip. These standing meetings IMHO tend to really help remove friction because setting up specific meetings is sometimes just a little too much barrier.

Our team also finds regular retrospectives with sticky note boards a good way to bring up random topics on their mind, and those often lead to very productive brainstorms.

That's more or less what we're doing now, it's just a bit less efficient. I get to know my developer's tells in person, I can hear them grunt or sigh in frustration and I know after so many of those tells it's time to check in and see how they're doing. Maybe white board whatever they're stuck on with them.

At the moment we're tiny, almost microscopic. Only 6 people. I'm handling a lot of varied roles as we organically grow so we set check-in times on our morning calls around all my sales calls. The pace of growth is expanding, so I foresee needing several new juniors before the pandemic ends. We'll likely have to adjust either hiring practices or on-boarding away from how we handled in person work.

It's working, just less efficiently.

 

[jimlux]

One comment about "reimbursement for utilities" (not counting internet service here) - in many case, the employee is now not commuting to work, so they're saving on gas, fares, what-have-you. I'm not sure it pencils out for everyone, but in the aggregate, it is probably about a wash.

Figure you've got maybe 100W of AC loads for your telework space - at peak rates here in SoCal, that's about 5.4c/hr, so about 50c/day, or $10/mo. Even if you have a behemoth system with multiple monitors, etc., it's not likely to be more than $50/mo. Again, referencing SoCal, at $3/gallon and 25 mi/gal, that's about the same as a 20 mile round trip commute (Or, using $.55/mile, to account for wear, tear, depreciation, a 4-5 mile round trip). Lots of people have longer commutes. Not to mention that you're typically not paid for commute time.

Two possible exceptions to the "it's a wash":
1) A/C - when I commuted, the AC didn't run during the day. Now it does. and at $0.54/kWh on peak, it's expensive.
2) Internet - what *I* might consider acceptable for personal use probably isn't what is acceptable for high performance telework (nothing less than 10 Mbps bidirectional, really - we regularly move Gbyte files around for my work). OTOH, if you live in a gaming friendly house with 500 Mbps fiber, the work demand is less than the leisure demand.

And on the subject of internet - I think that this is a big problem - There are places where decent service just isn't available. The shared upstream capacity of cable modems is brought to its knees by heavy telework on a neighborhood basis. It is possible that the cableco can reprovision (fewer downstream channels allocated, more upstream). And, typical consumer service level agreements basically let you twist in the wind with undercapacity or outages. I think a business, particularly buying in bulk, might be able to negotiate business accounts with a more "industrial" service level agreement. Certainly this was the case for me when buying phone, then ISDN, then DSL, then fiber - It cost (significantly) more, but you have a different number to call for service, and a much more responsive org behind it. But I'm fortunate to live in a fiber are with new construction, so the physical plant accommodates improved service (bigger underground conduits, pull boxes, etc.)

If your employee happens to live in an area that doesn't have "commercial potential" for the provider, it may be grossly underprovisioned at every step of the way. And, no, 5G is not going to save you here, at least not in the next 2 years in the US. They're not going roll out high capacity nanocells in "older, poorer" neighborhoods.

 

[DukeOfGeeks]

Not being a work-from-home person, I'd be interested to know how many such people are blowing through Comcast-or-whoever bandwidth caps because of it. Is this a major problem? I would expect so, and now that caps are back in place, the ISPs will be getting a massive windfall from either cap-overages or upgrades to business accounts.

On charter... which, so far, has no caps on my service.

 

[Boskone]

This job is probably not one you can do from home, unless your home is very awesome or very scary.

Doesn't everyone's garage have a fume hood? Where else do you haphazardly replicate experiments from YouTube and change diapers?

(Note: You should probably avoid doing both at once. Don't want to risk screwing up an experiment with fumes from diaper mess.)

 

[baub]

Will be interesting to see the hit on office market over next couple years. It's starting to show some impact now but as more leases are up for renewal, expected to get hit even harder over time.

Meh, the property management companies will likely simply sell off some properties or request to have the properties rezoned, and repurpose the structures. Let's not cry for the commercial property owners, they'll be fine. Property is always valuable.

 

[Dilbert]

As a supervisor at work here's what we've discovered. Introverts love remote work, extroverts hate it. Introverts are MORE productive. Extroverts probably about the same.

Slackers be slackin' either way. We used to catch them browsing memes at work. Now they are probably doing it on their home computer instead. Solution to better productivity is well defined deadlines and deliverables. I don't care if you are slacking if you work twice as fast as your team mate and still deliver on time.

 

[jhodge]

One comment about "reimbursement for utilities" (not counting internet service here) - in many case, the employee is now not commuting to work, so they're saving on gas, fares, what-have-you. I'm not sure it pencils out for everyone, but in the aggregate, it is probably about a wash.

Figure you've got maybe 100W of AC loads for your telework space - at peak rates here in SoCal, that's about 5.4c/hr, so about 50c/day, or $10/mo. Even if you have a behemoth system with multiple monitors, etc., it's not likely to be more than $50/mo. Again, referencing SoCal, at $3/gallon and 25 mi/gal, that's about the same as a 20 mile round trip commute (Or, using $.55/mile, to account for wear, tear, depreciation, a 4-5 mile round trip). Lots of people have longer commutes. Not to mention that you're typically not paid for commute time.

Two possible exceptions to the "it's a wash":
1) A/C - when I commuted, the AC didn't run during the day. Now it does. and at $0.54/kWh on peak, it's expensive.
2) Internet - what *I* might consider acceptable for personal use probably isn't what is acceptable for high performance telework (nothing less than 10 Mbps bidirectional, really - we regularly move Gbyte files around for my work). OTOH, if you live in a gaming friendly house with 500 Mbps fiber, the work demand is less than the leisure demand.

And on the subject of internet - I think that this is a big problem - There are places where decent service just isn't available. The shared upstream capacity of cable modems is brought to its knees by heavy telework on a neighborhood basis. It is possible that the cableco can reprovision (fewer downstream channels allocated, more upstream). And, typical consumer service level agreements basically let you twist in the wind with undercapacity or outages. I think a business, particularly buying in bulk, might be able to negotiate business accounts with a more "industrial" service level agreement. Certainly this was the case for me when buying phone, then ISDN, then DSL, then fiber - It cost (significantly) more, but you have a different number to call for service, and a much more responsive org behind it. But I'm fortunate to live in a fiber are with new construction, so the physical plant accommodates improved service (bigger underground conduits, pull boxes, etc.)

If your employee happens to live in an area that doesn't have "commercial potential" for the provider, it may be grossly underprovisioned at every step of the way. And, no, 5G is not going to save you here, at least not in the next 2 years in the US. They're not going roll out high capacity nanocells in "older, poorer" neighborhoods.

In the extreme case, I'd throw in people who would literally need to move if WFH were mandatory.

I'm in DC, and there are a LOT of studio and 1-bedroom apartments as well as 2-over-2 houses (kitchen & living room on ground level, 2 small bedrooms & 1 bathroom upstairs. No basement). One person can make WFH work in those cases, maybe, if their 'office' doesn't take up too much space, but for a couple both WFH, there isn't any practical way to make it work long term. In a 2-over-2, a couple with 1 child isn't unusual at all, so you can forget setting up any home office at all.

How many companies are going to make even a small contribution towards moving? I'll go with 'none' as the closest answer. What we're seeing now is a lot of 'making it work' short term; a large scale shift to WFH long term would have a lot of implications that aren't clear yet.

 

[Deputy Cartman]

This is my first week at my 100% remote position. I still don't have admin accounts or even a Microsoft Teams account because "we're out of licenses." So I'm mainly just shadowing someone, learning their incredibly convoluted way of doing certain things, and reading their Knowledge Base. This is a gigantic company, they've acknowledged they have a ton of work to do on this front, but it still feels frustrating.

But you know what? No subway ride to an office to listen to people have obnoxiously loud conversations. No listening to people trying to expel their intestines through their mouth via coughing. No soul-sucking waking nightmare known as "open office" which leaves one yearning for Mr. Incredible's cubicle. No complete and utter lack of privacy. I kick my feet up on my desk with my dual monitors, listen to my music on speakers, not headphones, and do what I can.

I'd say I'm sorry for embracing WFH and saying the only way you will claw it away from me is if the economy implodes and it's either a 100% on-site job or the bread line, but that would be a lie because I'm not sorry. Get rid of open offices, empower HR to tell people "Cover your fucking mouth when you cough or you're fired with cause. We just had a pandemic, you stupid diseased asshole" instead of punishing people like me who speak up about it, and I'll willingly agree to come back to the office more often than once or twice a week, if that. Considering the "appease the lowest common denominator, lest they sue us," we'll see.

Until then, I'll be here in Queens, listening to Armin Van Buuren and preparing to take the RHCE 8 exam.

 

[bthylafh]

Not being a work-from-home person, I'd be interested to know how many such people are blowing through Comcast-or-whoever bandwidth caps because of it. Is this a major problem? I would expect so, and now that caps are back in place, the ISPs will be getting a massive windfall from either cap-overages or upgrades to business accounts.

Oh yeah, it's been a problem for me since March. I've had to pony up an extra $20/mo for unlimited bandwidth so I don't get ridiculous overcharges.

 

[Dilbert]

Not being a work-from-home person, I'd be interested to know how many such people are blowing through Comcast-or-whoever bandwidth caps because of it. Is this a major problem? I would expect so, and now that caps are back in place, the ISPs will be getting a massive windfall from either cap-overages or upgrades to business accounts.

Oh yeah, it's been a problem for me since March. I've had to pony up an extra $20/mo for unlimited bandwidth so I don't get ridiculous overcharges.

Your commute cost was way more than $20 wasn't it and that too was not covered by the company. Not to mention time wasted commuting is more valuable than money

 

[bthylafh]

Not being a work-from-home person, I'd be interested to know how many such people are blowing through Comcast-or-whoever bandwidth caps because of it. Is this a major problem? I would expect so, and now that caps are back in place, the ISPs will be getting a massive windfall from either cap-overages or upgrades to business accounts.

Oh yeah, it's been a problem for me since March. I've had to pony up an extra $20/mo for unlimited bandwidth so I don't get ridiculous overcharges.

Your commute cost was way more than $20 wasn't it and that too was not covered by the company. Not to mention time wasted commuting is more valuable than money

Yes, and?

 

[NorthGuy]

I personally believe every chat should be a video chat. Picking up the phone is okay and works in a pinch, but you lose all of the non-verbal communication doing that. As a supervisor, it is very very important to couch my words in non-verbal communication. I've had to teach myself to smile at all times, because an emotionless voice can come across as mean or uncaring, which is not my intention. Plus, its easier to understand a heavily accented person when you can see them talk. Which is going to be an issue if nation wide hiring becomes a thing.

 

[C-A_99]

Outside of work itself, the prospect of going remote offers complete, untethered freedom on where you can live, and this is one of the best parts of it.

 

[chalex]

Here is a relevant article about the new types of tourist visas:
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20 ... ers-abroad
e.g. "Beginning 24 July, Barbados implemented a Welcome Stamp plan to allow visitors to work from the Caribbean island for 12 months."

 

[unconcerned]

One comment about "reimbursement for utilities" (not counting internet service here) - in many case, the employee is now not commuting to work, so they're saving on gas, fares, what-have-you. I'm not sure it pencils out for everyone, but in the aggregate, it is probably about a wash.

Figure you've got maybe 100W of AC loads for your telework space - at peak rates here in SoCal, that's about 5.4c/hr, so about 50c/day, or $10/mo. Even if you have a behemoth system with multiple monitors, etc., it's not likely to be more than $50/mo. Again, referencing SoCal, at $3/gallon and 25 mi/gal, that's about the same as a 20 mile round trip commute (Or, using $.55/mile, to account for wear, tear, depreciation, a 4-5 mile round trip). Lots of people have longer commutes. Not to mention that you're typically not paid for commute time.

Two possible exceptions to the "it's a wash":
1) A/C - when I commuted, the AC didn't run during the day. Now it does. and at $0.54/kWh on peak, it's expensive.
2) Internet - what *I* might consider acceptable for personal use probably isn't what is acceptable for high performance telework (nothing less than 10 Mbps bidirectional, really - we regularly move Gbyte files around for my work). OTOH, if you live in a gaming friendly house with 500 Mbps fiber, the work demand is less than the leisure demand.

And on the subject of internet - I think that this is a big problem - There are places where decent service just isn't available. The shared upstream capacity of cable modems is brought to its knees by heavy telework on a neighborhood basis. It is possible that the cableco can reprovision (fewer downstream channels allocated, more upstream). And, typical consumer service level agreements basically let you twist in the wind with undercapacity or outages. I think a business, particularly buying in bulk, might be able to negotiate business accounts with a more "industrial" service level agreement. Certainly this was the case for me when buying phone, then ISDN, then DSL, then fiber - It cost (significantly) more, but you have a different number to call for service, and a much more responsive org behind it. But I'm fortunate to live in a fiber are with new construction, so the physical plant accommodates improved service (bigger underground conduits, pull boxes, etc.)

If your employee happens to live in an area that doesn't have "commercial potential" for the provider, it may be grossly underprovisioned at every step of the way. And, no, 5G is not going to save you here, at least not in the next 2 years in the US. They're not going roll out high capacity nanocells in "older, poorer" neighborhoods.

In the extreme case, I'd throw in people who would literally need to move if WFH were mandatory.

I'm in DC, and there are a LOT of studio and 1-bedroom apartments as well as 2-over-2 houses (kitchen & living room on ground level, 2 small bedrooms & 1 bathroom upstairs. No basement). One person can make WFH work in those cases, maybe, if their 'office' doesn't take up too much space, but for a couple both WFH, there isn't any practical way to make it work long term. In a 2-over-2, a couple with 1 child isn't unusual at all, so you can forget setting up any home office at all.

How many companies are going to make even a small contribution towards moving? I'll go with 'none' as the closest answer. What we're seeing now is a lot of 'making it work' short term; a large scale shift to WFH long term would have a lot of implications that aren't clear yet.

How is that worse than a cramped open office concept ? The kid running around is the speakerphone call on the desk behind you. If the space is at premium there are foldable desk which can be hidden after the workday is over.

 

[wffurr]

Another key element for non-terrible video calls - everyone needs to have a quality headset or directional microphone, either in a quiet place or with the headset / directional mic positioned to only pick up the person on the call.

Using your laptop's built-in omnidirectional mic, especially for a presentation, is really awful for everyone else. Especially if you're in an echo-ey room with background noise like pets, construction, traffic, etc.

 

[poltroon]

I mentioned that our coding team uses a collaborative sticky note board (https://stickies.io) for retrospectives. For those of you who aren't coding teams, in the retrospective, which we do every two weeks, the first 5 minutes of the meeting is a time for writing sticky notes divided into categories like "what went well" and "what could have gone better" over the last two weeks. After the sticky notes are written (in a hidden mode), they're organized and discussed one by one. It's a great time to celebrate victories as well as commiserate setbacks, and a time where random brainstorming is part of the agenda. So for example, a team member might write, "I spent a lot of time looking for a staging server" which could lead to a discussion about whether more staging servers are needed, whether one was available and that wasn't communicated, whether this was a one-off because the team was super productive, or maybe it was that QA was backed up and we need more QA capacity.

Sometimes what happens is someone mentions frustration with a particular tool and another person knows just the solution. Sometimes what happens is someone mentions how well some new thing is working for them - like "I love my new standing desk." It's a chance to give shout-outs to other team members who were especially helpful, like, "I enjoyed teaming with X on problem Y." Sometimes we use this to decide we're meeting too often or not often enough, or that meetings are not focused enough. And we also use it for personal stuff a little, like "I miss going out to restaurants" or "I found a great new recipe in our Cooking channel."

It's not a common practice as far as I know to use these outside of coding environments but I bet they could be really helpful to any remote team on some regular interval. You can pick any interval that seems right to you. I can see that an editorial team for example might enjoy talking about what stories did well and what stories didn't work out, frustrations with finding some data, whatever.

As always, meetings should only be used if they're productive and beneficial.

 

[afidel]

Not being a work-from-home person, I'd be interested to know how many such people are blowing through Comcast-or-whoever bandwidth caps because of it. Is this a major problem? I would expect so, and now that caps are back in place, the ISPs will be getting a massive windfall from either cap-overages or upgrades to business accounts.

I've worked entire days and only used a couple hundred MB, but no video conferencing. If I did audio only calls for meetings where something wasn't being presented I could probably get by on my 5GB of hotspot data even with software updates to my work machine, but it would be close. But, all of my work is done on machines around the world on the other end of a RDP/Putty/Citrix connection so YMMV.

 

[bthylafh]

Outside of work itself, the prospect of going remote offers complete, untethered freedom on where you can live, and this is one of the best parts of it.

You don't live in the rural United States, do you.

 

[bthylafh]

I personally believe every chat should be a video chat. Picking up the phone is okay and works in a pinch, but you lose all of the non-verbal communication doing that. As a supervisor, it is very very important to couch my words in non-verbal communication. I've had to teach myself to smile at all times, because an emotionless voice can come across as mean or uncaring, which is not my intention. Plus, its easier to understand a heavily accented person when you can see them talk. Which is going to be an issue if nation wide hiring becomes a thing.

I understand why you think that, but I'm on the autism spectrum and strongly prefer voice only to video. The motion is distracting and I dislike keeping eye contact.

 

[smistephen]

"This job is probably not one you can do from home, unless your home is very awesome or very scary."

Top-tier photo captions all around. I love hotdish and I'm not even American.

 

[Xerxex]

It's hard to separate pandemic issues with everyone now wfh issues. However at least in my group (where I've been working for the last four years) we're far worse off right now. After the first month or two of wfh a lot of people stopped communicating effectively (or at all). Managers that were skating along aren't equipped for this and basically haven't done anything to remedy the situation.


I agree that wfh can be beneficial for knowledge workers that mostly have solo work. I personally hate it on my current team as we were/try to be highly collaborative and the available/allowed tools make life much more difficult.

 

[Dilbert]

I personally believe every chat should be a video chat. Picking up the phone is okay and works in a pinch, but you lose all of the non-verbal communication doing that. As a supervisor, it is very very important to couch my words in non-verbal communication. I've had to teach myself to smile at all times, because an emotionless voice can come across as mean or uncaring, which is not my intention. Plus, its easier to understand a heavily accented person when you can see them talk. Which is going to be an issue if nation wide hiring becomes a thing.

I understand why you think that, but I'm on the autism spectrum and strongly prefer voice only to video. The motion is distracting and I dislike keeping eye contact.

We've got two members on my team I strongly suspect are on the spectrum. They have their cameras off and speak only when asked. We work in a progressive city with a well educated well behaved workforce, for an enlightened employer. Making accommodations is recognized as the right thing to do.

Anyway I'm saying this to tell you that people should recognize (it's pretty obvious to anyone observant) what you need and accommodate it. If they don't maybe it's time to move on?

 

[graylshaped]

Good story, Lee. You missed a category of workers, though. My wife is in business development--aka "sales"--and is most successful at that talking face-to-face with a potential client over lunch, or a beer, or whatever.

Her day-to-day sustainment work can be done on her phone from anywhere, other than where wet signatures are required.

 

[Defenestrar]

We've been doing a "Pub Zoom" trivia night to close out Friday evenings. It's BYOB (alcohol allowed), actually voluntary, and the winner gets a prize - including having to provide the next week's questions and prize ($20 limit).

It's been a nice way to maintain the social connections among our group of employees.

 

[khumak50]

For anyone who spends all day sitting in front of a computer, full time work from home is pretty much a win/win scenario for both employer and employee with no downside.

The company can permanently eliminate office real estate and all of the costs associated with it. Even if they still retain some office space, shifting some workers to remote work makes the most sense if you make sure to shift a large enough percentage to permanent full time teleworker status that you can permanently reduce your office footprint.

The company also suddenly has access to a much wider pool of employees since location is no longer a consideration. That guy you you turned down last year because he lives in some remote town in Alaska? He's an option now... So are people living across the world if outsourcing is your thing.

For the worker you have no more commute, lower car expenses (or sometimes zero for people who no longer need a car at all), no more eating out expenses, usually more flexible schedules, options for a fully customizable home office with ideal ergonomics, no more office related distractions, access to your own personal kitchen so generally healthier eating, etc.

So you have people who can work when they're the most productive instead of on a set schedule. For the early birds that might be 6am-2pm. For a night owl that might be noon to 8pm. What matters is output. You could argue for some core hours for meetings but that doesn't need to include the early morning or end of shift hours.

The biggest adjustment for me was deciding I needed to actually enforce my own "end of shift" to avoid working 24x7. There's always more work to do and not enough time to do it. It's easy to find yourself working 12-16 hours a day or more and only getting paid for 8 if you don't set yourself a reasonable schedule and say ok it's 5pm, I'm done for the day. Work laptop off. Work phone sitting next to the laptop, no longer monitored until tomorrow.

 

[pokrface]

Good story, Lee. You missed a category of workers, though. My wife is in business development--aka "sales"--and is most successful at that talking face-to-face with a potential client over lunch, or a beer, or whatever.

Her day-to-day sustainment work can be done on her phone from anywhere, other than where wet signatures are required.

Yeah, that's a good point—and, like you said, those types of jobs probably fit in the "location frequent" category. You need to pop by the office at least every couple of days to do office-y things.

I filled a similar role at EMC & Symantec, working as a presales engineer—I go in with the salesbro, he shakes hands and tells jokes and then points at me, I go draw on the whiteboard and answer questions, and then we take the client out to an extremely expensive lunch and/or dinner.

EMC was especially nuts. On the sales side where I was, you didn't even have to itemize entertainment meals in your expense reports, as long as the total was under $1000 and the meal was <50% alcohol. (And you quickly learned the workarounds. Like, if it's over $1000, you split it with the salesbro so you're both under $1k. And if the tab is > 50% alcohol, you just buy appetizers for randos at the bar until the food cost is greater than the alcohol cost. Seriously, everything about the sales culture at that company is beyond insane.)

I have so many stories from that job, including an epic $10k dinner at this place right here at the Cosmopolitan in Vegas. I can only tell these stories in person over drinks.