I think the best balance is at least a couple days per week in the office and the rest remote.
Being able to talk to others in person and quickly is certainly useful, but its a double edged sword as that quite often results in your stream of thoughts being disrupted and focus gone in a flash. This is one of the reasons I love WFH as a developer. I can get right into my zone and focus on solving problems or being creative without someone walking up to my desk to ask if I read the email they sent me.
I've been 'remote' for... 12 years now, but do travel to offices sometimes, and do enjoy being able to do some face to face time with folks, even sometimes for multiple days or weeks at a stretch. The core matter is who decides when I need to be in an office. If it's me or mostly me, it's great. If it's solely at the discretion of others, that's where problems often are (regardless of whether it's full time or not).
Yep. It's the autonomy part that is the problem in nearly all cases. Choosing your own spot on that spectrum is the key part. And your spot may have to change over time, based on other parts of your life. Being forced to spot X is where all the contention comes in, it seems.
I did miss occasional lunches, dinners, break room chats with folks, but now run a coworking spot in town. I have most of the socialization aspects I missed, without them being tied to work (no office politics with these folks, just... socialization).
If you’re 50% WFH, you can structure your parental life around the remote days. It’s not that you work less on those days, but the time you would otherwise spend commuting is time you can spend on weekday family things.
Another scenario I’ve seen is people who want a "remote home.” Fed up with the prices for living in a major metropolitan area, or perhaps because they prefer a smaller town and/or living in a rural area, they buy a place with double their usual commute.
That can be brutal, but if you only do that a couple of days of the week, and can structure your F2F work on those days, the total number of hours commuting isn’t so bad.
On your days at home, you can be just as productive as a day in the office without spending a full eight hours locked in your home office space.
Sure, it doesn't allow other things like working from a beach somewhere in Spain. But it's a compromise that keeps many benefits from both solutions.
My post-vaccine plan is to have a "mulmen day" where I set the expectation with my teammates and stakeholders that I am in the office and a "float" day where I come in to align with someone else's day who I need to work with face-to-face for whatever reason. If everyone works this way then we can meet most scheduling needs. If we expand this to two float days a week then it is trivial.
There's no reason for the whole team to be colocated on the same day on a regular basis. Those kind of team-wide meetings never benefit from whiteboarding or any other in-person process. In fact the limitations of remote work make that kind of collaboration better because you have to actually prepare your thoughts and material.
Even pre-covid getting calendar time required a week of notice. Office hours were once-a-week and required at least 24 hours notice. Personally my office hours are on Wednesday. If someone books a session I come in, if not I don't. Nothing changes.
In Covid times I have had the most productive period of my career while my team grew by 50%. I have no problem getting coworker time ad-hoc, even remote. Communication is not difficult. We got better at using tooling to write documents and draw diagrams. We don't use whiteboard analogies.
I honestly see no downside to the remote work and a long list of personal, professional and environmental benefits.
If it's all the same days that'd be great but doesn't seem like it's work for everyone. I know certain days/times where I can't have meetings at home because the space is otherwise occupied and I need to keep quiet etc.
Maybe also by waiting to start the meeting we're enabling it all too?
I find it all too much to keep track of, so perhaps simplifying it to "meeting starts at X, be there or be square" is all that's needed and behaviour will adjust accordingly?
Food for thought.
I've seen some comments that WFH and it's variations (full remote vs partial) are a skill like anything else and need to be developed. I'm not strictly speaking a fan of it all really, but that's just me, and I think the "more productive vs less productive" debate is actually a ruse and that the real argument we're all getting into is "this makes me feel better vs this makes me feel worse" which you simply can't logic your way out of, so I get that it truly does suit some people.
I think I just need to take the mindset that it's a skill I need to develop a little further and some of my gripes with it will ease or melt away.
Seems like, at least in my neck of the woods, 2 days WFH is becoming a standard benefit touted by companies to attract candidates now.
When everyone is fully remote, you should always reach them quickly by dropping a chat, but when they are offline they tend to be stuck in meetings