> "Right now I'm managing people in 8 cities spread across 5 time zones. What possible reason do I have to be in an office?"
taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. How did we get here?
taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. How did we get here?
Why?
(I've been managed distributed teams for 25yrs)
Its a fucking mess, most of the time its ok, we can meet in the early morning here which is late at night there and do most work offline, but when deadlines are looming or issues crop and we have to talk back and forth over stuff urgently it basically cuts the useful time in the day down to like 3 hours at most, and even that results in at least one of us working very unsociable hours.
Remote work I like, I'm very happy working from home and can do so fairly productively, but timezones are a big issue. My example is with two people working in two timezones, if you've got a bunch of people working in different timezones (the person above mentioned 5!) it can quickly become very messy.
It only takes accepting that the work has to be mostly asynchronous, then build processes around that.
If deadlines loom and you have to talk urgently, that means the processes were inadequate - that is all.
All those "hybrid/flexible" schemes are doomed to fail. Remote work isn't office work at all, it's quite different. This is also what drives management nuts in my opinion - they feel that stuff has to be changed significantly and they don't know how, or if they are now in fact redundant.
Like we're doing maths that no one in the world has done before, and which is objectively kinda hard. When we notice a mistake a few days before a big conference deadline (which is actually what happened around the end of last year) its hard to imagine any process could be adequate to stop that happening.
Mistakes get found even in peer reviewed papers all the time, admittedly usually innocuous ones. You seem to be suggesting processes for vetting our internal stuff which are more stringent than actual peer review.
A lot more work than you think can be done remotely though, especially if you can get people together 2-3 times per year. You need good people, but then you always did.
The market is less competitive in a lot of places, which means that you can get much better people than you could otherwise afford.
That being said, it is much much much less effective for mentoring and training junior people, which is a massive concern for full remote.