I guess one good thing of this panic is that a lot of companies will realize they can do a lot more remote work than they were doing, which is a great thing for the planet.
- if there is local issue stopping work(no electricity for example), it is taken as a chance not to work, instead of solving this issue with the best of their capabilities(keep you batteries charged, go to a cafe etc). When working remotely, it is now workers responsibility to create a work environment.
- all the problems are relayed to the manager, but not the good things or done work. This creates a negative image together with next.
- they rather even avoid regular communication, than try to go extra mile with communicating while working because it is hard and out of they comfort zone.
- discipline to regular working is hard specially in the beginning. This impacts work.
That seems like a better case than the same issue stopping work at the office so instead of one person out of commission, there's 100 people out of commission and even though they can all go home and work it's basically going to shut down work for an hour or so as they all pack up and head home. Our office has a generator, but it only powers some lights and elevators, the network goes offline after about 20 minutes when the UPS batteries run out.
So it doesn't seem like much of an argument against remote work.
There's fewer opportunities for that to happen with remote work.
But when 100 people at the office lose internet and are sent home, they can't all converge on Starbucks across the street.
Also since you raised the issue: keep in mind that some people simply don't have internet infrastructure at home that's prepared for this kind of use.
Think of rural DSL lines or satellite internet. (Some old, poorly maintained phone lines drop DSL packets like crazy whenever it rains. Don't ask me why.)
Or someone who has a teenager that plays Fortnite and who doesn't know how to implement traffic shaping on their home network. :-)
In any case, at least in the Western world, at reasonably well run companies, infrastructure issues and other major obstructions to the entire team getting work done isn't really a problem for more than a few hours a year? I hope GP has better examples to illustrate this point. (And anyway, here I am, sitting in the office, wasting time commenting on HN instead of doing work. It's not like workers in the office are always 100% focused.)
At one company, I was in charge of IT and finally got signoff to run emergency power from the generator to the data center and IDF's to keep the network online in a power failure. Facilities put an end to that plan when they said that without HVAC, the building would quickly become uninhabitable in the summer or winter. We ended up powering the main datacenter to keep servers online, but not the rest of the network.
It is solvable, with active management and active workers, but these are the things we found that needed to be addressed.
In reality though things are quite different. Having seen it first hand I can say that there are many employees I’d rather have in the office.
I’m willing to bet on a productivity drop caused by the work-from-home policies that are happening now.
(in case this is helpful for anyone else) W.r.t.,
- local issues stopping work: I've done everything in my power to make sure nothing can affect this; to the point of buying extra batteries for my laptop, buying a hotspot in case internet goes down, making sure that I have a go bag always ready in case the area I'm working in does not have the infrastructure I need (electricity/internet/health hazards), and duplicating my equipment at my parent's place in case I need to work from there.
- relaying information to the manager: I was taught that keeping my manager happy is nearly equal in importance to making the company money; as long as they're the type to want to be in frequent contact (I've had one that didn't seem to want that), I basically only give them good news (as quickly as I can) or substantial roadblocks that will take me an absurd amount of time to clear on my own.
- avoiding regular communication: I can't make the company money if I'm not functioning well as a team member.
- discipline: Yeah this one was hard because it's not immediately apparent how much a distraction can eat away at your day or how those distractions add up. I seem to learn new ways every week to keep distractions at bay; e.g. leaving my phone "hidden" in a relatively inaccessible place in another room, disabling facebook, blocking my access to news sites, and making sure any cleaning is done in my off hours.
>It is not so simple. There are lots of factors that could lead to such a ban, including a culture in which remote workers tend to be slacking due to low morale. Also, we were studying call-centre work, which is easily measured and easily performed remotely.
Were they working 7 days a week? I usually wouldn't be willing to describe 13.5% as "almost 20%".
Employees, young or old, that lack initiative and drive - they will make poor remote workers. Don't let the cool thing of 2020's, i.e. going remote, fool you. The hype these days is digital nomads and all-remote companies (such as Gitlab) but there are disadvantages, you like it or not, it is a fact.
Human bonds get stronger when we're physically present with each other, team dynamics improves and morale improves. I personally cannot do remote-only work and I am an introvert in every sense of the word. No amount of video/VR chat will replace that.
Just sharing as a perspective on why some people may feel that work from home may not be a great idea.
I mean think about it. If people were less productive then to do the same work you'd need them to work more hours, not fewer, right?
And it's even worse if your metrics do something silly like measure by lines of code or time spent typing. If someone spends an hour walking in a park figuring out how to implement something and then five minutes when they get home to type it into a computer, it's obviously bad accounting to call that an hour of leisure and five minutes of working.
Imagine, suddenly having many times the bandwidth usage from VPNs and video conferencing. I'm wondering if the whole U.S. does this, if our national ISP infrastructure can hold up.
I'd be more concerned with bandwidth from people watching Netflix at 4k while at home, despite their Open Connect Appliance.
Any worker with young kids is going to see their productivity plummet to zero. Especially if the schools close and the kids are home all day.
I believe I am well-liked at work and things are going smoothly. That said, if I were required to come into the office I would probably quit.
https://blog.webex.com/video-conferencing/cisco-webex-suppor...
Companies without these processes will likely not consider sudden remote work a successful experiment.