IBM says remote working is great after forcing employees to work from office
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
I find this very common with managers that are scared that they are irrelevant. (they may not understand what their employees actually do) So they work hard to micro-manage the details they _do_ understand. It's sad. I'm a pretty good self-starter/motivator, and when I work from home, I typically start an hour earlier. When I'm at my desk in the building, I get distracted all day (whether by requests, or just talking to other employees) When will the tech industry learn?
It doesn't quite have that feel when you are doing that over Slack.
I would be very wary of companies that can't perform because physical attendance is mandatory every single day!
Now if you don't work on hard-to-solve problem, or projects that don't require high collaboration, why not.
Edit: I should add that I've been working fully remote (500km away of the office) for almost 3 years, and then with a team split on two different continents for one year. I so much enjoy being in the office since then, even just for having lunch and coffee with anyone, and being able to stop by anyone's desk/office to unblock an issue.
The article you linked to is about a very specific style of brainstorming that was once very popular. (Basically throw out a bunch of ideas with no filter/criticism.) It's that type of brainstorming that research has largely discredited. I don't think anyone seriously suggests that people working together on a problem in a room never works.
I have. It has (mercifully) largely fallen out of fashion but it was a very popular "ideating" approach at one time.
The secret is that you need to be fully committed to remote. If you do this you force yourself to actually find workflows that work remotely. If you just work two days a week remote you wind up isolated for two days and don't collaborate during that time.
A lot of companies that fail at remote work also fail because they have a mix of office and remote workers. This only works if you force every conversation to happen online. Otherwise you have the inner circle in the office and the outer circle that is remote.
The point is that a lot of remote work failures are simply companies that had remote workers but didn't have a workflow that was amenable to remote work.
It just works, but then again, I'm not creative, nor coding, or really collaboratively building anything that needs to brainstorm or deeply integrate with others, I'm architecting and operating.
I can't imagine going back to an office. I'm generally much happier, I feel like I'm more focused and I feel a stronger commitment to my work.
My brother once told me that most people keep their jobs simply because they show up. I didn't much believe him but having working in this business for more than a decade now I tend to agree. Maybe it's not most people, but a significant number anyway. That's not trying to be mean spirited or anything – I totally understand those who choose to wear the minimum required amount of flair. They care just enough not to get fired, maybe a little bit more but not much, and that's ok.
For me, I'm not going to lie, I've had those days where I've felt that I've done enough just by showing up. It's not been most days, but I've sure had them. But now that I'm remote I never have those days. I like showing up, because the balance in my life is so much better – I think it's because now it's mostly on my terms. Sure, I more or less have to, or at least try to make sure there's as much time overlap as possible with my co-workers, but where I work or how I work is up to me.
It wasn't always enjoyable though. Initially it was a real struggle because most people were in the office, and I'd get left out because they'd do face-to-face meetings or discuss things offline and I'd get a pretty crappy tl;dr out of it. But this is something I pointed out early on, and coupled with a growing need in the business for people to work remotely we just kind of figured it out. They're getting rid of office space because it's expensive, and rather than making people redundant that they would probably have to re-hire anyway they just have people work from home either fully or most days, and employ a desk sharing solution. I think we're up to something like 3 or 4 people per desk now. Now everything happens in emails, chat, github, etc. It's all online, it has to be or it just doesn't work.
Anyway, this is turning into a rant, so I'll stop. I just came to say I can't imagine having to work in an office again. I don't mind it from time to time, it can be nice, but I'd like it to be my choice rather than something I have to do. Again, mileage clearly varies.
On the other hand, trying to gain any influence over the larger organization was almost impossible, especially after the manager who hired me left.
The optimal results come from people working mainly at the office. Now this may be completely different for development houses, our coders are some of the most productive when working remote, IT in general is below average though.
I wonder how much your conclusions would hold for non-public-sector jobs.
AFAIK it's typically harder to fire a public-sector worker for under-performance, than in the private sector. Perhaps that either (a) adds to the temptation to goof around at home, or (b) attracts the kinds of workers who were always more apt to goof around, given the opportunity.
Those who end up in public sector usually are those who value the job security or do it out of dedication. Which doesn't mean they're bad at their job, in my experience it was the exact opposite, but the government sector is waaaaay understaffed, and pay can't be risen to private-sector levels because of rigid union agreements.
Also, the competence problems are related more to regulations... why spend your time e.g. learning Docker when you're happy enough you can finally use Ubuntu instead of RHEL? So basically unless you lesrn it in your time off there's no motivation to learn new stuff because it will be outdated when regulation molasses finally catches up.
Now, when it comes to bugs, I'll admit, tossing it up on big screens and inviting a few co-workers is just awesome. It's like playing solitaire with someone watching... they always see things that you would not.
My take on this is people who actually "develop stuff" or to put it bluntly - get shit done - developers, architects, field consultants, release engineers, etc etc - are used to being judged by easily quantifiable metrics - repo commits, defects, system downtime etc etc - for these folks working from home is no different than going to the office with a couple of logistical adjustments.
If you don't have the baseline there are other ways of getting this figured out, not as accurate but good enough typically - instead of comparing someone's office vs. home velocity you go by the average velocity you're after and see if they can hang with that while working from home (and again, I don't see why this would be difficult to figure out).
I imagine this problem only grows with the size of the group/company.
So what do I do? Fire everyone? Don't think that's a practical solution. Try to hire people who are easier to work with? Sure, but good luck. Hard to determine that during the interview process. I don't think telling people to 'grow up' is a real solution here.
You also say to the complaining employee that you monitor all of your employees and ensure that they are being productive (any good manager should be doing this.) and that their productivity is none of their concern. Then you ask them if they are holding up the project, and how, and then you go from there.
It's just poor management. Managers are mostly incompetent, or if they are, they are afraid of backlash and unable to lead.
This isn't nuclear fusion. If this is difficult for a manager they shouldn't be a manager.
>This isn't nuclear fusion. If this is difficult for a manager they shouldn't be a manager.
That's what makes me think you don't actually have any experience here. That... or you've just been blessed with more luck in your management endeavours than I have (or maybe I am just bad, certainly a possibility.)
Ahh, so I must never have done it, if I offer a different experience. I've managed teams before-with a mix of remote and onsite. And trust me-it is not that difficult, for competent managers. Managers are too often afraid to lead. The peter principle is very true.
The fact is not offering WFH causes many people to move on as well. I've lost many team members to it. Just as low pay does. People leave. This is the new reality. Businesses want to disrupt but don't want to be disrupted. They want to commoditize workers-not be commoditized themselves.
My problem is to ensure my team's success, and my team knows what their deliverable are by their deadlines. If you don't do anything for 20 days and finish it on 21 because it's easy? Fine by me. Just get it done.
So many people have phone phobia in this field. I feel that if you want to work from home you need to make voice calls work for you.
(It usually doesn't happen more than once a week. Being reasonably acccessible on Slack reduces the need for these calls somewhat.)
(It would typically be initiated the same way, e.g. via a Slack question if they are ok talk on the phone. If there's no reply and it's blocking other stuff; yeah I am going to place an actual 20th century phone call.)
Clicking the green button on Discord or a softphone is not.
;)
I have never used a physical 'telephone handset' (and don't have a desk phone)
Phone calls are less information dense to many developers to something like slack, especially if you need to send a link, a document, etc.
Slack is also async in that I don't have to immediately answer. I can get to a nice commit point in 5 or so minutes and not have to stop in the middle of a deep thought.
If it's a scheduled call once a week though, that shouldn't matter at all. Maybe they just don't like you :D j/k. A lot of devs think they communicate as well via voice
But that's not what it's about. Not even close. (Yes, to some micromanagers, that is what it means. But if your job sucks because your manager is an asshole, it's going to suck whether you're at home or at work)
I hate co-located teams. The problem is that they work. They are the best and only method I know about to have groups of people solve complex problems creatively. If your problem isn't complex or need a creative solution? Don't use them. But the more rote and simplistic the work you're doing, the more you're going to be replaced by robots. So there's that.
I get the fact that folks hate it. Like I said, I hate it also. But that doesn't change the fact that I've seen it work -- over and over again. I've also seen it horribly abused and misunderstood, but I can't help that. Under the appropriate circumstances, it's the best thing we have going right now.
>They are the best and only method I know about to have groups of people solve complex problems creatively
A vast number of open source projects, including Linux, are created by very distributed groups of people. I would find it hard to argue that none of those projects involve solving complex problems creatively.
Note that by solving complex problems creatively, I mean business problems. Not technology. We don't need a co-located team to figure out that a bubble sort is the wrong tool for this job. We need a co-located team to figure out that we're headed down the wrong road and that 3 months of coding might be replaced with two system calls. That kind of conversation can be extremely uncomfortable or impossible to make happen with ten folks meeting over a IM link twice a day.
Making appointments for the doctor, court, etc. don't require a sick day, you have more time in your life from a lack of commute (for a 30 minute commute, that's 5 hours/wk), you can schedule around your most productive hours, (later in the day for me), you can be tasked based such that if you finish all your work in 32 hours, you don't have to put in time just cause, you can exercise or go for a run during the day (many can't because of lack of shower facilities or a strict 1 hr lunch), you can eat home cooked meals without having to cook a huge serving that will last you the week and you can take a nap if you feel sleepy after lunch without worrying about optics, you don't have to be in at some specific time if you've had a hard time sleeping the night before,. I don't ever feel rushed in the morning and always eat breakfast followed by a meditation.
I find mind mapping software superior to whiteboarding when collaboration in my case because my own sketches and handwriting are nearly indecipherable to anyone but me. Also, for work I find tools like slack to be more useful because they are async, not ruining my flow and messages can be very information dense with links, images, etc.
I'm much, much more productive at home. I communicate well via slack/phone/Facetime. Also, junior devs will craft their questions in a coherent manner. In doing so, they've found that when they formally present their questions, they can often solve it on their own, making them better devs. I often only work 32-35 hrs/wk, yet I am more productive. This extra time allows me to do more self-learning. Before, the lat thing I'd want to do after driving home is deal with more code. Even if I have to work 10-15 hours more per week, it's less stressful than dealing with coming home from the office at 8pm, exhausted and not wanting to cook so I would eat unhealthy, expensive takeout food and watch some mind-numbing TV.
Most importantly I have more time and opportunities to see the people who really matter in my life...my significant other, my friends, my niece, etc. (this was the norm before the industrial revolution.)
All of what you said leads to a happier/healthier employee which more times than not leads to a more productive employee. Happier/healthier employees that are more productive make the company more $ at the end of the day.
Somehow that sounds more reasonable to me.
I'd like to work on-site, but I don't want to abuse it...
This one too, actually; you have so little control of being distracted in open office compared to working at home, and you wouldn't want to bankrupt your boss drinking the copious amounts of coffee you need to compensate, right?
Some managers seem to think: "If there are some butts and those butts are in chairs and I can see those chairs and those butts all in a row in a big room outside my office then my team is kicking ass. I'm gonna buy me some more chairs."
The level of dissonance in this is overwhelming.
In March - You need to work shoulder to shoulder "https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-tho...
In May - we have a survey and a study and a panel that proves remote working is great!
I don't envy the guy in IBM who has to sell Kenexa (https://www.ibm.com/blogs/smarter-workforce/2017/05/making-t...).
The odd thing was that for him, this happened about a year ago. I think the edict came down almost exactly one year ago; this article makes it sound more recent.
Look, if you already offer work from home, forget about taking it away. That will just piss people off, make people unhappy, hate management, and be less productive.
When we were acquired there were lots of people we encountered who worked from home. Some more effectively than others. We also encountered buildings like the Almaden research center with long narrow hallways with offices on either side. That were apparently 'classic IBM' office space.
When I left, more and more people were being asked to work at the office, and the new offices were open plan, quite literally shoulder to shoulder, rows and rows of desks. I felt both choices were untenable for long term stability.
And as with most organizations the implementation is always at the manager level and I know that at least one manager had pretty much told their people that folks could work from home if they didn't want to make the long trek into the office, regardless of what the current policy was.
So where did that leave you? If left you with the real estate services guys following one set of rules, and managers making up their own rules to preserve morale. Not a recipe for success.
I found it very hard to engage the right people to talk about the disconnect.
> work-from-home talent tended to be “more engaged, have stronger trust in leadership and much stronger intention to stay.”
Stronger intention to stay is a problem if you're trying to shrink the workforce!
http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/plano-tx/torrance-c...
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/business/2014/04/29/toyo...
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-toyota-move-2014...
The opposing "hands" in this case are "company's Smarter Workforce branch", whatever that is, and "Chief Marketing Officer" in a message addressed only to his subordinates.
But sure, both can be classified as "The IBM", no matter how stretching or misleading that may be.
Some people excel just by being in a location with a bunch of highly talented and capable individuals. Others can work mostly on their own and may excel with more authority over their work space to make themselves more conducive to flow and deep work.
There are many legit criticisms of remote work and it's not for everyone or every organization, but neither are open office plans, flat structures, open-ended vacation policies, flexible work hours, etc.
Personally, I'm able to work and study more deeply and creatively when I'm on my own because I don't have any visual or auditory distractions.
If you're identifying/brainstorming a problem, I find that in-person is typically superior... this tends to be longer form, and includes more discussion (which is a bit tougher to manage remotely)... but when you're actually working on it, I could not care less about where the team is.
It also helps if you can ease into flex time. You know I'm almost never here on Friday, but if you need me I always come thru remotely? Yeah, its gonna be like that Mon-Thur now too.
It helps if all your coworkers work at other offices around the country. If you have a position where you mostly work with other teams all over the country, remote is perfect. I have three main "internal customers" each about 1000 miles apart. I don't even know what planet some of my coworkers are on much less if they're in an official office or not. If you have a position where you mostly work with a local team that meets in exactly one office, that's gonna be a huge problem.
The import of this nuance would soon become clear. Management then told us, after moving everyone into a brand new office, that it didn't want any technical work done "remotely." And to aid in the transition? Why, hire a developer located in India, of course!
The new owner literally added two genuinely remote people to our team in the name of not being remote. Prior to the acquisition, we all worked within a 50m radius.
Apparently, acqui-firing was such a habit for CSC that disgruntled former employees founded National Registered Agents, Inc. (NRAI), which became one of their major competitors. At some point NRAI and CT, the primary of CSC's competitors, were fused together, along with BizFilings, under Wolters Kluwer. I think the current registered agent market share is about 60% CT and 40% CSC. It takes a special kind of management genius to motivate the people you fired into forming a business from scratch to compete with you, take some of your market share, then merge with your archenemy.
And the thing that makes all this worse is that a nationwide registered agent business must necessarily have more than 50 offices that are not the corporate headquarters. So some companies hate "remote" so much that they can't even stand to have certain employees working together as a team in a satellite office, one that they have to keep open anyway! (But outsourcing to India is still okay.)
Still not the worst-managed company I ever worked for.
That's just part of the story that taught me that it doesn't matter how much you like your job, or how good you are at doing it, if some rich asshole can buy it and throw it into the garbage--or move it beyond your reach, or give it to a cousin, or alter it beyond recognition. That was the last job that I actually liked.
Subsequent stories have only reinforced the lesson. Those incidents are why, despite the glaring and obvious flaws of labor unions, I support unions for technical skilled labor unconditionally and without hesitation.
It isn't even about money. I really would have liked to be able to tell the boss at my last job that packing the entire development team and test team around the walls of his corner office while everyone takes turns justifying their existence for a total of at least 45 minutes daily, starting at 8:45 AM, is not a "stand-up meeting". It's not even a status meeting. It's a pointless show of dominance.
I would really like to be able to, if not stop, at least discourage such idiotic behavior, rather than just looking for other jobs and rolling the dice yet again on a different manager that might possibly be less like the high priest of a cargo cult. It would have been nice if voicing my concerns did not paint a target on my back.
IBM is still on Notes and Sametime, these tools are fine for small groups i.e less than five but the experience degraded with the size of the group.
I'm specifically referring to group conference calls with shared desktop sessions. Email is fine.
Generally most of the communication tools were archaic and getting rid of them has been difficult as most current business processes relied on them (ie Notes databases not showing up in Verse)
Working remote needs quality tools across the org.
You're often expected to be 'on' 24/7 (as in, not always working, but ready/able to work if need be), but also have to be physically at a location during certain hours. "Vacation" time may be the exception, as long as it doesn't interfere too much with everyone else's work schedules.
I've seen some counterexamples, but they're rare enough in my circles to be the exception vs the rule.
Even if I'm slightly less focused when I'm working from home the time that I am focusing on work is 10x more productive due to the environment being set up how I like it.
Efficient teleworking can be had for healthy orgs that practice careful planning and communication. But that does not imply IBM has healthy orgs that practice careful planning and communication.
- A legacy style executive comes in and cannot "see" people working therefore they are not working
- There is rampant abuse in the model
- Productivity is measurably down (e.g., when Best Buy removed work from home they were in talks to be taken private)
- People can't get a hold of each other when everyone works from home. Communication issues.
When I was working at Best Buy and the policy was rescinded, you had MANY people habitually abusing it. They would block off entire days of their calendar and say "I'm working from home, I don't accept meetings on X day." Usually a Friday, imagine that. It was obvious what people were doing. Some people even drove in with their boat on the trailer and said "I'm working from home after lunch".
However, as more and more companies become global, it's harder to enforce "butt in seat". For instance I get up early in the morning to talk to people in CZ, others go home and sit on calls with India teams. Then they're expected to be in the office next morning. That's not a sustainable model.
There are many pros and cons to both sides of the argument. I personally tend to find myself more productive in the office than I do at home most days, so I come in. However is it nice to have flexibility? Absolutely.
However people have to understand underneath the corporate BS and HR BS, there is likely a real perceived problem that either nobody understands how else to solve, or employees aren't being very honest with themselves that causes this kind of backlash.
The last point I'll make, is that some people that work from home all day are just downright impossible to communicate with sometimes. It's hard to have one part of the workforce that works from home, and may be gone for a period of time mix with another side of the same workforce that is at the office for a determined amount of time.
So this isn't the first time IBM has done this sort of thing.
When I ran www.ibm.com we had a mix of local (NYC) and remote staff, mostly doing sysadmin tasks, not so much programming. Everyone hung out on our internal IRC channel. We'd do daily checkins and document everything that happened in a Notes db (ugly but the advantage that we could keep a reference copy on our laptops).
IBM revenue is declining every quarter for last 5 years and I think lot of remote work jobs in IBM are off-site consulting. Since these people are not at client site they might as well work from home instead of showing up at IBM office. But now those consulting revenues are falling and IBM really needs to bring those people to offices to see where they can be redeployed.
See, that's how words get diluted. If everyone is a talent, we end up with new hyperboles, i.e. 10x developer. If everyone is an associate, where are the employees? Too many chiefs, not enough Indians...