Why companies who don’t embrace remote working are wrong
medium.com
medium.com
1. Some people's lives are better suited for it. This is especially true in the summertime when the kids are home from school all day.
2. Having an office is still very nice. Sometimes you simply can't get work done and home and need to come to the office.
3. Collaboration tools are awesome. Working with remote teams has never been easier if you have the right tools.
4. When you work from home you actually get more done. This seems strange, but you can actually get more done since there are no random impromptu meetings nor is there the guy that chats you up all morning with a cup of coffee in his hand.
5. Design sessions are better done in person. White boarding remotely doesn't work very well still.
6. Remote workers work at night. Give an employee a laptop and he'll work till 2:30 in the morning until the work is done.
7. Meetings tend to be shorter and more well defined. When people are co-located, there is a tendency to abuse people's time with meetings that have no agendas. When you have to organize people for a meeting, your forced to do a better job planning. That's been my impression at least.
I favor some sort of balance. 2/3 days in office 2/3 days remote seems like a good balance. this allows people to collaborate in person when they need to, but have a flexible schedule for the rest of the week. This sort of schedule actually is a productivity boost and is better for employee morale.
Sometimes you just can't get any work done at the office and need to go home and do it without distractions and micromanagement.
For the most part I agree with you. My most productive stint lately was when I was in the office on Mondays, and worked remotely the rest of the time. Get all the face-to-face stuff and boiler-plate communication out of the way on Mondays, resigning to the fact that nothing really productive will get done.
I would __much__ rather see two types of meetings.
b) A brainstorming session where ideas are proposed (just exactly that, no further discussion of them, even though that part is difficult).
v) A meeting where voting on pre-discussed ideas happens; this assumes you have a discussion mechanism of some sort outside of meetings.
I used to work at a large corporation who had a ton of middle management. For a few years people had the ability to work from home in an emergency, but it wasn't something normal and you were expected to be in the office otherwise. At this point, people were working from home less than 2% of the time.
Then we got a new manager, who was a huge promoter of "ROWE" or Results Only Work Environment. within 6 months, 90% of the office were working from home 90-95% of the time. I used to come in on Monday's and the office would be empty, dead, not a peep and where six months ago, we had 15-20 developers working, we now had one or two. You seriously could have mistaken the office as being on holiday - it was crazy.
As such, the middle managers suddenly had a lot less to do. Since results were all that mattered, their jobs of micro-managing all the daily/weekly/monthly metrics they were following and tracking and emailing developers pretty much went out the window. Three months later, 5 managers either quit or were laid off because ROWE made their jobs essentially obsolete.
The funny part is the manager who was all about ROWE ran into some roadblocks for his other initiatives and left shortly thereafter (he lasted just over a year). Once he left, upper management quickly revoked ROWE (even though it had been incredibly successful and raised production 11%) and required people to be in the office 5 days a week unless it was for an emergency.
It was an easy way for the executives to say, "See what ROWE got us? Production is down and turn over is increasing. See? This doesn't work and the developers are abusing it by working from home too much and missing their goals."
It pissed a lot of people off when then revoked it and more people started quitting in droves - and people who had been there 10+ years. I got a good taste of what were the corporate politics at its worst.
The increase in productivity was directly related to the increase in quotas month over month. It started at 18 sites per month, then was elevated 4 months in a row until it got to 22 and then more and more people started missing the quota, so they backed it down after developers started leaving, or just gave up. Thus, you had an increase in production while upper management essentially found the breaking point of the team, then rest the quota right under that level.
I think upper management thought by giving us something like ROWE, we could continue to burn the candle at each ends so to speak, and not have our managers breathing down our backs about metrics and still make quota since we could work at home at our own pace and on the hours of our choosing. One of the developers surmised it was because they figured if everybody was out of the office and at their homes - we wouldn't talk so much to each other to figure out how really bad it was.
Productivity went through the floor. Nothing got done. Nobody could get in touch with anyone.
After a while the mandate went out, almost apologetically, that people would actually need to work at the office unless prior approval from their supervisor was obtained.
Of course the work atmosphere was pretty dysfunctional to begin with (the secure setting of a university job attracts people who don't like to work very hard) but it was rather interesting to watch it play out.
1 - how many sites did you get done yesterday?
2 - how many sites are in the queue?
3 - what was your QA defect rate? (this was eventually given to an off shore team, so we were no longer responsible for our own defects, which was totally bizarre to me)
4 - How close to your monthly goal were you?
5 - where were you with your professional development goals?
6 - what percentage of your goal were "refreshes" or sites that were re-designed and revamped?
There were a ton more I can't remember right now, but those were sent out in a daily email, in a list, to show were you ranked with your fellow developers. It was very outside sales like, so this really backfired on how developers took it. Most were very "fuck this, this shit is stupid" and performed really poorly under pressure and being micromanaged every day.
So once the only thing that mattered was just pumping sites out regardless of quality, then all the metrics became useless and the emails and micromanaging stopped. You were still handed a huge quota to hit every month though and many developers were burning out, getting put on PIPS and even without all the micromanaging, it was still a meat grinder.
Nailed it. My Manager told this jokingly but most are not foolish to talk this in public.Also author's affiliation is unclear. Retweets everything from PukkaTeam (a product mentioned in article) -- which says © isev -- which author works for. A disclaimer in the body or footer of the article would have been welcome!
Reading this headline, I feel like if you're not doing remote work, then you're wrong. Aren't there shades of grey here? Is remote work the way for EVERYONE? I understand that people need to get clicks but this is a worrisome evolution.
If the time zone range of a team is less than about 4, then in my experience the team works quite well. If the range is greater than 5, it almost always encounters problems that even good process, requirements, and communication struggle to solve.
There are always exceptions, of course.
- Remote work is hard. It's tough to get right. However, remote work is worth it. It's worth putting in the extra effort to try and get it right for your work place and your job. You get to spend more time with your kids, your SO, and you can travel.
- Face time is still important. Remote work makes face time a pleasant treat that you look forward to.
- Remote work makes financial sense.
- Good remote workers have to be excellent communicators.
It's not for everyone, but it's important that most organizations at least try and make it a reality for those that want it. Everyone will be the better for it.
For context: Employer is a late stage startup with ~500 employees that generally embraces remote work with many full-time remote employees.
Does Spotify hire remote employees?
If you have something spectacular to bring to the table and absolutely won't come aboard otherwise. Otherwise, no.
Spotify is not 37Signals - we work in small units called squads, and each squad fits into a medium-sized room. It extremely efficient, but totally suboptimal environment for remote workers, because we cannot shoot you with nerf darts to call your attention when it's time for the daily standup.
Do they have tickling contests too?
Of course, there will be jobs where telecommuting isn’t practical, but in situations where all you need is a computer and an internet connection, then telecommuting is something to try.
I work from home 3 days a week, so I still have enough office-face-time for that not to be a problem, but we have a lot of 100% remote workers too (who aren't even in the same country) and who get left out of a lot of informal conversations just because they don't happen to be there when a group of us walks to the shop or whatever it is. We do fly everyone over every few months, and those periods are fantastic, but I still can't help but feel that the remote people are losing out and the company is losing out on their input outside of the normal work stuff.
Would love to hear others thoughts and experiences on this and ideas on how it could be remedied!
For anyone looking for remote work, I suggest finding a "remote first" or "100% distributed" company.
Is company culture and the connection that people have as strong? What about the random after-work-pub-chats where people say whats on their minds or otherwise talk about things that they might not during the normal course of the day?
Maybe its not an issue when everyone is in the same boat.
I can see reasons to reject the former, but the latter (at least to me) should be a given. If you don't do it, you are losing a significant competitive advantage over the competition to hire great people.
I used to work at a company where WFH was not allowed. We were working with a recruiter to fill a few positions, and the guy was pretty honest, it told us "you guys are at the bottom of the pool because you don't allow WFH".