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Comment by twh270 | Hacker News Reader

Can you expand on "[The executives have] seen enough they don't like about full WFH"? I'm trying to gather enough anecdotal and "research-y" data to make decisions around this for myself and friends/co-workers.

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Despite all the individual cases of people claiming WFH makes them more productive, in the aggregate employees are not. In the particular data I've seen, new employees and more junior employees suffer significantly, even while more senior engineers hold steady or improve, perhaps because their responsibilities shift to more easily quantifiable metrics than knowledge sharing, mentoring, and onboarding.

Protip, the people doing more work would have been doing everyone else's work in the office. They are the ones that get stuff done and often get no attention for it, because doing everyone else's work is hard to quantify.

In my more agile clients during the pandemic, I've seen a sharp shift to tracking time spent on those soft metrics, and acknowledging the space they take up on time per day. This led to explicit C-level support for more meeting discipline, and explicit No-Meeting-Day block-outs on calendars with the sole exception of production outages and specific meetings for specific projects with direct oversight from management 2 layers down from C-level. These clients' leadership have been very pleased with the overall productivity gain during the pandemic. The visibility into what people are working on and accomplishing, what planning captures, what planning does not capture (and importantly, who is responsible for most of the unplanned work so more planning assistance can be directed towards their areas of oversight) has pleasantly increased. A key tactic that has helped is explicitly setting aside entire planning weeks throughout the year, and making a conscious decision to trade off go-go-gains-all-the-time for more predictable delivery results so the business can plan around the deliveries.

It'd be hard to do so without getting a little too specific but I will add two pieces of context:

1) The company has a small technical corner, but is mostly a non-technical org.

2) The average age of the company is quite a bit older than one more focused on technology might stereotypically be and, at the risk of sounding ageist, has proven to be far less interested in engaging with modern technologies that would make WFH smooth/productive.

Walmartlabs?

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