So, my question to them, "So, when do you work?"
Video Calls / Meetings should be the last resort. Working remotely (WFH) is not bringing the office work at home, it is an entirely different experience and should be approached thus.
Besides the many other advice floating around, some cores ones that works are;
- Communicate, communicate, over-communicate, mostly via email or other long-form writing).
- If you do the above (writing), it helps in the key element of working remotely - asynchronous. The day you can work asynchronous with your team, is the day you won in working remotely. If you write, then you can also share it anytime, to anyone.
This isn't just a technology problem; you also have to take the psychology into consideration.
I'm not a biologist, but I don't think primates are herd animals. We're more attuned to hierarchies than flat groups.
Even if you tell them "it's just as fine".
As you point out, the main difference I noticed was the regularity and frequency of video calls/meetings throughout the day, every day. And that's the expected norm with some (maybe the majority) of the people I've worked with, especially in corporate environments.
Often it's a struggle for me to adapt to the office culture, but I try to push back for a compromise, so that most of the communication is done in long-form writing. I find the asynchronous nature of email to be more suitable for in-depth discussions, allowing time to organize our thoughts - rather than the ad-hoc back-and-forth of chats. Sure, there's a time for that too, but it's highly distracting for my workflow.
Are you really, though?
And it’s still pretty terrible.
There are advantages, but at least for me my productivity is miles higher in an office environment.
This event is going to taint WFH for years to come.
From a pollution perspective though, the preferable choice is fairly obvious.
You need to give this stuff time and probably re-establish a lot of your companies culture to fit remote work, or yeah, you will probably have a pretty crap experience.
Edit: Add link to a good and very recent podcast on this topic by Sam Harris and Matt Mullenweg: https://samharris.org/podcasts/194-new-future-work/
I can say my work schedule has gotten a lot busier without even taking on new projects or clients, my clients just seem to have a lot more time to work than they did before.
I have a feeling, though, that after this, many people will be less willing to travel for meetings. Video conferences may be poor compared to walking to a conference room in the same building, but they may also compare favourably to travelling by airplane to a similar conference room in a similar faceless building in a different city. And many, many people are getting VC practice now.
The good news is: everyone has learned a lot and if they want to do it again it might be easier.
Working from home when I can go to the gym at lunch, the doctors office at 9, pick up X and Y hour, etc, is a lot different than what we're dealing with now - which is: "you're WFH but can't do anything else."
Not everyone should work from home. A lot of people don't like it. A lot of people need the in face connections. Working from home has lots of downsides that have been covered on here and everywhere many, many hundreds/thousands of times.
But a lot of people don't need to go into an office, at least not every working hour of every day. A lot of positions don't. A lot of people thrive fully working from home, some working part time from home and other times in the office, or a cafe, or whatever.
But how these discussions always go is the no-work-from-home crowd effectively saying that no one should work from home because they personally don't enjoy it.
For example, if you could do a 4 day home 1 day at the office schedule and were willing to do a 90 minute commute each way on your office day, that would be enough to let you work in downtown San Francisco and live in Modesto. There you can have a 3 bedroom 2 bath 1400 sq ft house on a 7000 sq ft lot with a two car garage for $300-500k. Many in that price range will even have a pool.
People’s homes aren’t organized around work now, but prior to the industrial era, they were, and people complained about working in factories and offices.