What you are missing when you work from home

bloomberg.com

7 points·johan_larson··3 comments

Meh. Lots of interesting assertions accompanied by no evidence. From where I'm sitting, it appears there are existence proofs that distributed teams can work quite well (see: most open source projects, as well as many companies).

That's not to say that some of the things the author of the TFA refers to aren't legitimate concerns. But I don't see any reason to treat any of those things as the "be all, end all" in the discussion. Everything has tradeoffs and advantages and disadvantages. Workers working remotely get less "sub communication" (disadvantage) but are more productive due to lack of disruptions (advantage). Which one wins out on balance? Hard to say. But I'd want to see more than a bunch of unsupported assertions and some vague narrative before accepting that remote work isn't a good option.

In fairness, an "open source project" is not a business, and the same considerations are not in play.

When I work from home I accept there's a tradeoff. On balance, it's better for me and my productivity, but overall to the company the wins are less clear.

I'd say it's clear that it is possible to have some offsite workers in an enterprise. People have been doing that for a long time, often hiring the outsiders as consultants or what-not. But with 85% of the staff in the office, there's still a core or backbone of each team to hold things together and explain things to the 15% out-riders when they didn't get the memo (figuratively).

What's less clear is whether you can run an substantial enterprise that's really distributed, without a real HQ. What happens when everyone, including the line managers, are distributed? I don't think anyone really knows.

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