https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264341436138270720
It might be different for Quora given that their CEO and SLT will be remote.
But I still believe that whenever you have an office you are creating a community of employees who will have a different relationship to those who are working remotely.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Inherent system dynamics in the mirror are larger than they appear.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/06/cd/22/06cd223f6b942dc74d85c93f0...
Fully concur. Senior leadership needs to lead by example, whether it be remote work, taking paternity leave, or using a healthy amount of vacation. As some have pointed out, remote work as some companies has the potential to become the new "Unlimited Vacation"-- i.e. technically the policy but employees worried about advancement are unlikely to take advantage.
Props to Quora leadership for leading by example.
I was having dinner with a friend of mine who is a senior manager at a well-known SV company that has "unlimited vacation." He was telling me that the CEO absolutely sets an example of taking unplugged vacations. In fact, he told me that they had a PR person a while back who just couldn't deal with the CEO being out of pocket for an extended time to the point where they just quit.
Now it would be great to know, in what aspects a leading person can act in certain ways, that I can copy while doing my job. It also needs to be things, that I don't already do. That would be even more constructive criticism.
You got a point though, and I will think about what those things could be, that someone in a leading position does, that I could copy as behaviors, that are ethically good and also good for the job.
My first question after someone mentions unlimited vacation is "how much vacation did the boss use last year?". If it's less than 4 weeks, I would view that company as being dishonest about their vacation policy.
The same thing applies to the number of hours worked. I value work-life balance and so if my boss is working 60 hours a week, I will know that company is not for me, because the boss would view me and my insistence on working 40 hours or less as uncommitted to company goals.
We strongly encourage employees to keep discussions in 'public' slack rooms rather than private messages. This can be noisy but allows for inclusivity. Team members are free to choose which channels to join and are encouraged configure alerting to manage the noise. Only takes a few minutes to set up.
Performance needs to be measured by work output rather than time in the office, but companies should be doing that regardless.
Face-to-face on-boarding and intros to the team are preferable so we would fly in new-hires wherever possible for the first couple weeks. Beneficial but not required.
As someone who is mostly remote, I never had too much of a problem with hybrid meetings. People in a conference room are pretty respectful that there are people on the phone in my experience. That said, the current situation where everyone is dialing in individually is something of a meeting upgrade overall. People have also gotten better at collaboratively edited agendas etc. not that they were bad to start with.
Seems pretty extreme to require everyone to dial-in even if they are present in the office.
Btw, I'm also a big fan of remote working, but no matter how good your communication skills are, you're left behind on the longer term within an hybrid team. You just can't build all these relationships with smalltalk etc. that's another problem
Even with over 500 employees, the lack of a career ladder as such meant there's little to gain by being the loudest in the room or trying to work the room. Perhaps that's also an ingredient - it might be easier to minimise others' egos when you're also in the room?
That's also one reason why many people on autistic spectrum prefer video conferences over physical meeting - responses have to be given more explicit.
In think the opinions of a lot of people here are shaped by small companies where everyone is on a floor or two of a building. At global companies, the reality is that people are pretty distributed and you have late night and early morning phone calls.
West Coast to Europe is tough for day-to-day synchronous communications. We don't have many people on the West Coast and are pretty much East Coast-centric (and Europe to a lesser degree). And that coordination works fairly well.
The single most important thing is that everyone has the option. You don't really need to sell the office to make it work, but that everyone from the CEO to even (perhaps surprisingly, the front of house team) has the same freedom to work from wherever suits.
If no competitive edge is present, it is wasted spending that could be redirected into more fruitful efforts: growing R&D, etc.
Does the office team ever turn into second class citizens?
If you are not invited to the VIP zoom meeting you are also second class no matter where you are
Personally, I don't see this as a big problem. I never considered being promoted the way up in the (admittedly, just a few) companies I worked in. Mostly because I don't feel like working at the same place for a long time and because switching jobs will most likely give you a better pay too.
Obviously, this is coming from someone in his mid twenties that has only worked in 2 places and then went freelance and mostly remote for businesses in The Netherlands. So maybe people do disagree at other places.
What's an SLT?
Which makes it sound like a bad thing. I would turn that around and say that remote work changes the relationship an employee has with their family and neighbourhood.
Now what sounds better? I think it’s time we revived our relationships outside of work and started building communities to live in, not just to work in.
In several organizations, there are a range of middle management layers who only do communications and lights on work. These people will be laid off in as little as a year when their positions start becoming obsolete. Really once the brokers get separated from party the culling will be ruthless. To me the biggest opposition will come from middle management layers. The obvious reason cited will be 'collaboration','productivity' etc, but the real reason will be saving their own jobs.
There is also an added problem of work being easily shipped out to foreign lands. Outsourcing is likely to increase and that will invite more backlash. New hire onboarding is one more area of problem, mostly because of the absence of face to face initial assistance in getting onboard. This is true for big companies given the range of in house systems and tech some one needs to be aware of before starting to contribute.
Lastly, I feel even at individual levels this will effect us all bad. Most programmers are bad at exercise and sitting at home will only amplify unhealthy lifestyles and eating habits. I expect such people will get worse off over time, obesity and diseases will increase. Absence of peer pressure/influence on skill gaining is one area I suspect will suffer in the absence of an office.