If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you shouldn’t have hired them

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).

IMO, good communication, collaboration and transparency is not about remote vs. office. I'm sure we can find plenty of bad experiences for both.

Groups with good communication skills will succeed at communicating no matter what. Groups with bad communication skills will fail at communicating no matter what.

-- 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'm sure we all recognise it, because it's the shitty baseline, but we can do and do better than this.

Of course all other constraints are never equal.

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.

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.

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...

Wanna work from home 4 days out of 5? I say go nuts.

But I would want some amount of face-to-face time, not to see asses in seats (which seems to be what every work-from-advocate assumes... as though there's no other concerns beyond accountability, a strawman if I've every seen one), but because it helps build team camaraderie.

I've seen this first hand. I'm the Product Owner for geographically distributed team. Skype is used heavily as a mechanism for the team to communicate, but we also include quarterly face-to-face get-togethers where the team can sit in a room and whiteboard problems, pair program, or really whatever they want to do that feels useful.

The first time we did this everyone, every single person, raved about how valuable the activity was. Not because they were inherently more productive, and certainly not because they were being held accountable. Rather, the simple act of people in a room together further cemented their bonds as a team.

Humans are social animals. We're used to physical proximity as a component of communication. Hell, the NYT had an article about why it's hard to make friends after 30:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/fashion/the-challenge-of-m...

Two of the three are proximity, and repeated, unplanned interactions.

That's just not possibility in a 100% remote working environment.

What? Direct quote from the piece:

"In the case of working from home/remote work, some employees do not do their best work from home, or simply don’t like it. That is fine."

That looks like an explicit acknowledgement to me.

>In the case of working from home/remote work, some employees do not do their best work from home, or simply don’t like it. That is fine—but you should trust your employees and treat them like adults.

Although this doesn't address your point about your difficulty working with remote employees, when you're in an office.

As one example, part of my job involves writing interactive software for physically gigantic computer systems with a room-sized spatial tracking system.

We can hack away on these programs remotely on our laptops, but to be confident in the program's correctness and performance you really have to test your code in "the room".

Furthermore, If your effective times starts at 11, consider yourself lucky. 11 is at the earlier end of my natural waking time. I start getting effective 2 hours afterwards.

A good example of this:

At my company we used to have problems with people working from home accidentally being excluded from meetings because the meeting leaders would forget to set up a video conference room, or would forget to join the video conference room that had been created ahead of time. To fix this, we decided that every meeting would have a video conference room set up for it, and that the meeting leader would always join the video conference room, regardless of whether anybody in the meeting was expected to be working remotely. In other words, we always run our meetings as if there are remote workers involved. This eliminated the issue entirely.

Another benefit was that we no longer wasted time determining if we needed a video conference set up for a meeting. We just set it up in all cases. For recurring meetings, we have persistent video conference rooms.

Technical-enablement part is already well known and is quite simple: easy access to all needed information: primarily, source code, schematics, datasheets, VHDL/Verilog, servers, specifications and product roadmaps. People working on FOSS projects successfully do that every day, and proven tools and the methodologies do exist. Anything more than that will be needed just as well for non-remote work to be effective.

Culturally though, it is indeed a very different story, and there the mistrust plays its big role, the OP nailed it. Not only from direct team managers, but on all levels, from team members to (cross-team) project people.

Another big component of cultural misfit is when the efficient remote communication is simply impossible, not because it is remote but because remote working brings together people who cannot communicate efficiently, even put together in the same room. For various reasons: different timezones, different native tongues, cultures that require active face-to-face confrontation... Interestingly enough, this could actually be the predictable outcome of a company's assumed behaviour -- imagine, for example, a big company frequently acquiring small ones everywhere around the world.

In my experience flexible work hours are okay when your work is silo-ed off from the rest of the team, or if you are diligent about making sure other people can pick up the ball once you're done. When either of those things are not true it just becomes a headache for everyone.

But finding, leasing, and maintaining an office is not hard and does not require a lot of investment?

Why is it frustrating? What have you done to replace the in person? These are honest questions, and I'm not trying to be a PITA.

The reason I ask, is that I have been working with remote coworkers since the late 90s (keep in mind that you can go to an office every day and still have many of your coworkers be in different offices). Video chat did not work very well then, and we basically did entire projects over the phone and email. Video chat, group chat, project management tools, etc... have made it so much easier to work with people who do not share the same space. Even in the same office, I prefer emails to random chats.

Personally, I welcome the chance to work with a group of minds that isn't restricted by the filter of "lives within x hours of office". The world is full of amazing projects created by people around the world working together.

I think your observation is valid, but in my experience the drawbacks of remote working are dwarfed by the benefits.

I work on embedded frequently; I have way more than $20K of equipment on my desk right now. Not to mention old projects in boxes and on shelves. That's absolutely not an issue. If I need it and need exclusive access to it, in the office or on my desk is all the same.

And measuring output? Why, by performance of course. And by the value of the work done. So I can earn well on embedded work whenever that comes my way, because its not a common skill and I can do it quickly. The market sets the value; there's no mystery to this.

For 20k? That's very concerning.

Anyway, I don't think butts in the seats management deals any better with the lack of correct estimates.

Anyone who would claim this isn't the case is deluding themselves.

It's starting to feel a lot like the open-office trend in business: it's turned into a religious discussion, and folks who are proponents willfully ignore reasonable arguments to the contrary, as though a plea for moderation is somehow anathema.

Getting shit done - the actual, hands in the works, not managing or brainstorming - however, is not a collaborative activity. At some point you have to sit down and focus, and other people are a menace then.

A previous line manager of mine would never document anything, and his standard response was "I thought we talked about that". Sure we did, but you changed your mind then changed it again, then again after that. I can't remember what the final outcome was.

As a side note, I've used pretty much all of the major video conference vendors and find it extremely annoying that, even in 2017, some rather large percentage of calls will have some kind of issue during a call, if it can connect at all.

Things I'd happily pay for right now:

- for people to stop "collaborating" in the office I sit in; even over-the-ear headphones and loud music aren't enough to cancel that out

- for people to stop standing behind me and having (work-related) conversations

- for the guy working next to me to actually sit on his damn ass and not move around the office every 10 minutes

In general, I absolutely hate feeling presence and attention of other people when I'm trying to focus. With each new day I spend in a modern workplace, I more and more understand why cubicles are a fucking awesome idea.

One day I swear I'll build myself one out of pizza boxes.

We use it exclusively for remote work.

Self-hosted, too.

You can't have your cake and eat it to. You are either are remote team or a local team, there is no in-between. You have remote people, so you are a remote team and you need ALL team interaction to be online. So absolutely no in-person meetings unless you fly your remote people in.

speakerphone, anyone ?

I'm not saying there aren't benefits to working in an office with fixed hours (e.g. despite the advent of email and IM communication is often better in person).

But:

1. At jobs with fixed hours I often spend a couple of them a day effectively doing nothing because I'm burnt out that day. And conversely I will go home at home time even if I'm being given really productive at that time.

2. I often work more effectively at home due to lack of distractions and precisely because I'm not expected to be looking like I'm doing some all of the time. For example, sometimes it can really help to get out of the house, go for a walk, and think for a bit. Doing this for 20 minutes can be more productive than 6 hours of sitting at a desk trying to work on the same problem while looking at the a computer screen. But you can't really do that in an office.

I've only used these in an academic setting and I don't know how much they cost but I think it's exactly what you're asking for.

For business types, it absolutely does. I've had to answer the question before "if people are working at home, how will we know they are working?" My response is "how do you know they are working at work? The same way."

Seriously, what's the point of mentioning their ethnicity and gender, exactly? I'm thankful that I'm not your co-worker.

Were there other employees who were abusing the system? What was the consequence of this abuse? Missed tickets? Pagers unattended? Meetings missed? How large was your organization? Is seven a small or a huge number relative to the number of employees in your org?

> To that degree, the statement, "If you don't trust your employees to work remotely you shouldn't have hired them" can perhaps come across as a bit racist.

Explain. In a statement that says nothing about race, just an employee-employer relationship, how would you perceive that as racist?

It seems like the sentiment is "you have to come to where _I_ am to do work, just like _I_ do", which smacks of wanting the world to revolve around you. Who has childish expectations in this scenario?

> The threat of your manager sticking their head round the corner is a stick that keeps on-site employees grinding along.

I would appreciate it if you'd share your current company/team, I'd imagine some other hner's would appreciate the heads up too, so they can avoid it.

Working from home removes a lot of the accountability of their time management and also removes a lot of the 'you don't look busy, got time for something else?' that can happen with working at the office.

I think the danger is that if I get deep into refactoring the nightmare module that no one wants to touch, I might be tempted to waste time getting to a sane stopping point before switching to whatever "change the font of this GUI label to be Comic Sans, bold" task I might be assigned next.

If I could work remotely, and weren't specifically barred from having other employers by company policy, I could probably work 2 other full time jobs just like this one, and still have time for HN.

I had a boss once who tried to do that with his team. He presented his presence as a threat, and I would physically flinch every time he asked "how's it going?". This same guy had never been in a management position before, was in his mid-to-late 20s with very little professional experience, couldn't handle stress, and whenever he got stressed he would take it out on his employees by either screaming at us or talking down to us like we were children.

I am so glad I quit that job. That company was abusive in so many ways, but his attitude was the last straw. A couple of days after I put in my notice, I overheard him shouting at a couple of my co-workers in the most condescending tone, and I just felt sorry for them (and one of them was a friend of his from college, too).

Every other boss I've had, at every other company I've worked at, was an actual leader who I've felt honored to work with.

When working remotely it is very easy to not communicate. It's very easy to lose track of what's important. It's harder for a team hierarchy to quickly throw things around. It's easy for people who need motivation to become distracted.

That's really what I mean. Just a visual reminder that "you're at work" makes the difference to some people. It probably works in the opposite direction for some others but in almost 20 years of doing remote work, that's never been my experience. Maybe it's because it's technical web stuff. Maybe we have a demographic of easily-distracted layabouts.

You can be technically excellent, and perfect for an on-site role, and still be rubbish at self-motivation. You shouldn't avoid hiring somebody for an on-site role based on their off-site performance. Or get better at managing that sort of person.

I guess what I'm really saying is the article is still wrong: you should never have to trust you employees. You should have enough contact with them to know what they're doing, how they're doing and what their goals are. That doesn't mean pinning them to the ground with a chair and torturing them, just some effective communication.

I agree with the title - if you don't trust me, then you shouldn't have hired me.