You can't lure employees back to the office
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When there was a long period of 100% remote during Covid, there were some issues:
- Spontaneous interactions: Someone complaining over the lunch about issues with some library, just as a small talk. Someone else says, "hey, have you tried X instead?". Someone joking about product feature that actually ends up being a good idea. Ask for some feedback on what you're working. Discuss some issues over the lunch. In remote-only setting, everything requires setting up a meeting. That often formalizes everything, and less things end up being discussed.
- Morale : Working with everyone in the office is somehow good for team building. Maybe Morale was lower just because Covid was bad for everyone, but most people would admit they experienced it.
- Developing team connections: If you know someone in person, it feels easier to ask them for help, etc. Some ideas posted online, like shared board game via zoom is really far away from in-person interactions.
- Some people are quite good at focusing at home. It varies person by person. We have some people, who are great at fully remote work. In my case, when I am at work, I am working. When I am at home, I much often end up doing stuff like reading HN.
I am not saying it's not possible to work around those somehow. We tried several ideas posted online, in some books like REMOTE: Office Not Required, but it didn't work for us.
I'm going to paraphrase:
>> Some are allowed to work from home, others aren't
I'm guessing the people who insist they continue working from home, if they bring in enough money to the company, they are allowed to and the ones who you feel needs to be managed, by a manager, old-school way, until they become such a valuable, income bringing member of your team, aren't.
I at least hope this will become old-school. I know that for me, I'm not going back to the open, life-crushing and money-saving open-office, ever. Yes, yes, I'm a privileged piece of this and that and I should be thankful that I have a job and all that. But on the other hand, since I'm once of those sought after persons, since I'm both a dev AND I've experience, I don't quite buy into that.
But this is just my personal feelings on the matter. Maybe I'm being selfish and I'm taking advantage of the situation, but so are you, I feel.
I hope to live long enough to see lots of change in the work place and I hope and believe you will enjoy them as much as I will.
I think that most people, who are strongly against hybrid work just have to live in a miserable place like SF for their good software engineering job. It's unfortunate that so many software companies are in the Bay Area with one of the worst real estate markets in the world, horrible commute times and drug/homelessness crisis. I used to work there for a few years and if I still did I also would probably advocate hard for the fully-remote work.
Most of people in our company are happily living close to the office for other reasons that just the job, so coming to the office is not an issue.
My friend, who still works in SF recently came to visit Warsaw, Poland (where our engineering office is located) and jokingly said "funnily coming from SF to Warsaw feels like coming from a third world country to a first world country".
That's great to hear.
>> In remote-only setting, everything requires setting up a meeting. That often formalizes everything, and less things end up being discussed.
That is something that can be worked on though, don't you think? We should be able to improve that bit of the "remote working" thing, I feel.
I'm currently with a client that has the type of problems that pretty much demands of me that I, or the PM in my team, responds to their chats within the minute. That means I have to keep an eye on the notifications all the time. That takes a bit of a toll on me, I have to say. But it's manageable.
Perhaps a devastating failure happens in production that we need to resolve as quickly as possible. First the client chats me up. Then we realize we need more info so we invite another person into the chat. Then we go video. We all turn our cameras on and we talk freely until we realize, we need top dog to approve emergency deployment of Very Important Patch, so we invite them and get their clearance and then we rock'n'roll.
I think we just simply need to become very good at remote communication, for this new world (that I day dream about) to become reality.
And that's not easy. But just because it's not easy shouldn't be enough to scare us away from it.
Woah there, if you’re not actually from SF please lay off repeating third hand tropes.
Just like hybrid work is great for some, I’m a fan, but others do best with wfh, Some people love sf and it’s nowhere near as bad as the stereotypes claim. (Except the tenderloin and immediate vicinity)
There’s a reason people would live SF and take buses an hour south to Silicon Valley rather than living in Sunnyvale or Mountain View. Personally I’m actually moving to SF despite my ability to wfh, I’d rather do hybrid and live in sf.
Our team scheduled a daily half-hour meeting early in the morning with no set agenda, to try to replace all these casual interactions until we can go back to hybrid. It's not perfect, but it helped.
What we do now is to encourage calling each other and also to encourage showing up for meetings early - if we want.
For all its warts, this is a thing I like about MS Teams: it shows a notification whenever someone else first enters a scheduled meeting so if someone enters a meeting 5, 15 or even 20 minutes ahead of time I know they want to talk and can join if I want to talk.
Talk before meetings can be anything both work and weather, but work has priority (I think).
We also have a voluntary meeting sometime after lunch where we aren't allowed to talk about work : )
I wonder how much of the benefits you describe could be gained by instead flying everyone out for two weeks to work together in an office, maybe 3 or 4 times every year.
That'll leave you with a few 10x staff, too lazy to leave, but capable, and a lot of ballast.
YMMV.
I will say though thinking back to those times I was younger and more naive. I was a slave to that employer, often there until 8-9 at night. My life revolved around them. It wasn't healthy.
1. That 20% number. What if it's 40%? 50%?
2. How easy/quick is it to replace the people you will lose who don't prefer this work style?
3. What percentage of your current workforce likes the environment as described? Maybe hiring off the street is 20%, but you've already selected for 80% through other selection factors.
Basically, at what point does the value gained from the in person work / setup overtake the loss of potential workforce? You're making an argument for why some people won't want to work there, but so long as the environment is not discriminating on things like race/gender/ability, a partial in person setup may actually be the right call for some teams/companies, without any "luring" needed.
I say all this as someone who primarily prefers to work at home now, but goes into the office once a week or so without any requirement to do so. I agree with OP's initial points a lot, though I think I would lean less towards requirements and more towards guides.
I see that as a total misapplication then, as it actually assumes way worse - that 100% of the people would not like this work condition described, which is evidently false as OP has a company of people working in that. The question still remains though: what percentage of people would choose to stay / join this environment?
Before Covid he was great. During the isolation he developed mental health issues. We tried to help, offered paid sick leave for a while, but eventually we couldn't help. He is unemployed for last few months. I meet with him sometimes, but he is still unfit to work. I can't think of something I could do now.
Personally, I don't think having to do that would improve anything for me either. I love being full remote and after having gotten used to it even mandatory mondays seems like they would be an unnecessary burden... but all teams are created different.
I am really good at focusing at home NOW but it took lots of training to be good at.
People are taught to read and write or ride a bicycle but are expected to be productive working from home from day 1.
I find this sort of policy fascinating. You say people are required to be on site every Monday, but what would happen if they said no? Would you fire them and go through the pain and expense of replacing them? Or is it "required" in the "we'll say it in the hope no one actually questions it" sense?
If they wouldn't then it's not a requirement.
If they would then I suspect many people at that company are job hunting right now.
Not for me. Best 2 years of my life.
No commute, no (horrible) office. More time with family and new babies.
The article has stats about what we’re all assuming, namely employees want wfh and employers don’t. But in no way does it attempt to answer/justify the thought provoking question asked in the title.
How would I be lured back into the office? As a late 20s male in the USA I mostly miss the social aspect of work. I always had friends at work (despite what the grumpy people says about coworkers being friends), and I miss that. I left a job four years ago and still hang out all the time with those old coworkers.
I’d also like to not be held to specific hours or days. Breakfast and lunch would lure me in, along with high quality coffee. I don’t mind open floor plans, but do know most people don’t like them.
It was a reasonable suggestion based on the situation given and their experience. I have another - if one likes their coworkers that much then arrange to meet up with them, either to work together or simply to hang out.
You might try joining a local tech meeting. I often (or used to, prior to the pandemic) see people arrange to meet up in a cafe or coworking space, even if they're not working together or on similar kinds of projects, just to be able to get some input and camaraderie while working.
However, I have found fellow developers to be among the most fearful/risk-averse people during the pandemic (sadly, without much (good) justification) so it may be difficult.
The people who don't want to socialize at work will find themselves being socialized with. I understand the feeling somewhat, and I imagine a lot of others might, as well. Everyone's had situations where they've felt compelled to feign friendliness with others who they had no interest speaking with.
That seems to be the mismatch in many WFH vs. WFO vs. "do what you want" arguments.
The people that want WFO need the majority of their coworkers to also WFO to get whatever benefit they derive from WFO.
In a flexible setting where you can choose to WFO or WFH, what happens to the WFO person when the majority of their coworkers choose to WFH?
On the other hand, the WFH person could care less if their coworkers are WFO or WFH.
Why are Americans so hostile to the idea of being friends with coworkers? In Denmark it's pretty common to have a beer with coworkers on Fridays and have an annual "Christmas dinner" in December or January. Many workplaces also have an annual company party.
Personally I've gone fully remote but that's what I was effectively (though not officially) pre-pandemic. I just never bothered to request a status change in the system.
* (I've observed the vast majority of people that work in Manhattan do not live in Manhattan)
In Tokyo it was provided from the company, you said what your home station was and where your work was, bought the pass at the station, and were reimbursed.
Every single station in between was essentially free to go to and you got the discounted rates to other stations. It was pretty great when I worked in a Roppongi office my last year for going out on the weekends.
In Chicago it's a benefit of being able to pay before taxes so there's a slight discount, not as great but the passes here open up the entire system. When you're commuting it makes no sense to not to have the pass, so all your errands and weekend travel is covered.
I would gladly offer to work 4 additional hours per day if it meant I could avoid the commute.
So when techies were called into our shiny new meetings-office (which is very nice, actually - happy to come in ... maybe every couple of months), they were immediately asking "so commute time is work time, right?" and "who's paying for my train ticket?"
The UK has absolutely proven that work from home is just fine and companies can still do super-well.
The big push over here for going back to the office is not from the companies - it's from commercial landlords, putting puff pieces in the newspapers. The actual companies can do arithmetic just fine, and realise that offices on the scale they were are just a losing proposition.
My old company (bank) has a huge UK presence. They are adamantly anti-WFH whether you're in the US or UK or Asia, etc. My understanding is most banks and other financial services companies are likewise, and aren't a large number of UK SWEs working in finance?
I'd be interested in how those banks are actually handling 2020-2021 here in practice, however anti-WFH they were previously.
We had a townhall where the CTO first congratulated everyone for making 2020 a very productive year - with no loss of productivity from WFH. Then concluded by saying we would return to 100% work from office ASAP because it is scientifically proven by data that working from the office is more productive.
This is absolutely not any time soon.
> because it is scientifically proven by data that working from the office is more productive.
lol, love to see that data
This is what happened to me, no adjustments.
I guess the only people who don't like remote is middle management, their career depends on dumb meetings and other such meaningless things. At home, at least we can mute ourselves and do something useful.
I guess the only people who don't like remote is middle management, their career depends on dumb meetings and other such meaningless things. At home, at least we can mute ourselves and do something useful. "
This is the height of foolishness; to dismiss all those experienced managers out of hand. If someone far more experienced than you has taken a position, you should try to understand why a smart person could think that way, before calling them 'dumb'.
Also, you're assuming those "experienced" managers are taking a position that is beneficial to everyone. At least in my experience, this is not often true. They're doing what they need to do, to further their own careers (not faulting them, just pointing it out).
I didn't call the managers dumb, I called their meetings dumb. One can be super smart and still force dumb meetings, if that helps his/her career.
I'd be interested to learn more about what types of projects you've worked on.
I've had some great middle managers, but I've had far more (and even some of the good ones) that the company's and my own productivity wouldn't have suffered if that entire layer in the organization had never existed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
On average, sure. There's not really such a thing as an entry level engineering manager.
But in FAANG the majority of managers manage at least one SWE with more experience than them.
I am flat out refusing non-remote jobs (I was remote even before covid) even though I am just an average engineer. One recruiter argued with me - she was like "remote workers should be paid less", lol. In my opinion, remote workers should be paid more, as companies aren't spending on their office space, electricity etc.
If our species survives for another 100 or more years, future generations will look at our cubicles and laugh. There is absolutely no reason for digital workers to go to office (with very few exceptions).
The one (only?) good thing that came out of COVID is people are realizing a lot of bullshit they have been fed all these years about work and are pushing back, though slowly - one of them being remote working.
Even food can be delivered to the body via a series of tubes.
- Entry Level employees who have never worked remote and need a lot of training/guidance. Their chance of failure goes up significantly if they have to wfh.
- Some people prefer to work from office as their home situation is not conducive for remote work. Lot of young people or even families literally live in shitty/tiny apartments where they hardly have space for desk.
- Some people just prefer to work from dedicated office even though they CAN work from home (I am one of those). Social animals. Whatever you wanna call them. I love interacting with my team, co workers etc.
- Some people actually enjoy a reasonable commute on a train/subway/bike etc. Yes, shocking right ? It allows them to get out of their house, get fresh air and take their minds off their house a little.
I keep saying this and will say it. This is not a binary thing. The best option is Hybrid where it should be a combination and people should have flexibility. Keyword is flexibility. I am however getting tired of this "100% remote is the future blah blah" crowd.
Meanwhile the WFH person is not dependent on their coworkers being WFO or WFH.
What happens to the WFO person when a company/team offers the flexibility to WFH or WFO, but the majority of the team choose to WFH?
Having one other person in the office is great when they are also the one person I need to talk to, and pretty useless otherwise. Having 50% of people are in the office is useful around 50% of the time, and so on.
And then there are meetings. IMO, meetings suck if even one person is remote, because we basically all have to gather around the camera instead of sitting around a table and facing each other like normal human beings. This might be better at big companies that can afford fancy conference room camera setups; I wouldn't know.
That is quite a bold claim to make with no citation. Just because something is "intuitive" to you does not make it so, as history shows. Please cite your sources for this claim.
That said collaboration and socialization are a great part of working. My dream is satellite offices, it would be cheap to have 10-20 5000 square foot offices spread throughout the bay area instead of one giant 50000sf mega office in the heart of downtown San Francisco.
I would like to know how something like this would even work with the limited space in large cities. There's a reason they build up and not out.
On top of that - small offices tend to have less amenities as well. So now there’s no gym, maybe no kitchen, and very little benefits to the office overall because everyone is still distributed and now you have a super shitty micro office that clutters up a suburban hellscape.
Awesome…
Spent a few minutes and made an image of what I was thinking: https://imgur.com/gallery/3ybeBDE
I want the ability to go to the office most days, while having the opportunity to take a couple of days a week from home.
If it wasn't for open floor plans, I'd prefer to go to the office every day.
So does going into an office 5 days a week, or even 2-3, for jobs that don't need to be in office, but no one says that. Maybe we could all agree that this will take a decade or more to shake out, and not just take the (little c) conservative view that we need to immediately cease remote work because of small issues of coordination? Eventually, something in the middle will become the new normal, but for now let's not try to force one thing or the other.
Depends on the circumstances but, sure, I'll say that. I do think never wanting to see your co-workers--even, say, a couple times a year is atypical.
For me what works is 1-2 days per week in the office to get all the admin done, and the rest at home getting real work done.
Who knows! But it’s not extreme.
Please don’t act like someone who claims to be extroverted but suddenly is like - “yeah, my colleagues? Fuck those dudes. I hope I never see them in person! Thank baby Jesus!” Short of working at only toxic companies - this is really abnormal behavior.
No one I know who is extroverted, isn’t live or die by FIRE, and works with good people wants to be WFH forever and never see a colleague in person again. “Ah, yeah, I spend 40+ hours a week with these people and they’re great people and I love people but fuuuuuuck them.” Nope - doesn’t add up. Try again!
Now imagine if you and I happened to work for the same company, and had cubicles next to each other.
Wouldn’t it be nicer to spend those 40 hours working next to the people you love? Why forced socialization with people you don’t get to pick?
Remote work is not a silver bullet that magically waives all the workspace problems away. It is much harder to do right, both in terms of productivity, and in terms of keeping people motivated and mentally healthy.
My experience with badly designed remote:
- it may improve personal productivity, but decreases team productivity
- it decreases transparency across the org
- it reduces personal connections inside of a team
- it reduces touch points between different teams
- any problems with personal performance are now very tricky to ‘debug’ and solve
You may even find yourself working more and doing overtimes to keep up because overall productivity of your org has plummeted (despite “self reported productivity gains” that all these articles preach).
I go to a WeWork alone just to simulate the ecosystem.
Among people who I bucket into the top 15% of people I have worked with wfh preference has been right down the middle.
Among the bottom 15% it’s been exclusively wfh preference.
But ultimately people who can do so will just have to find situations that work for them.
that does not sound like a ‘team’ at all
Not every field is as nebulous as dev.
That's what I would expect to be true if the vast majority of people have a strong preference for working from home. The previous anecdote is more surprising, though I guess I would explain it as people who work really hard wanting to be seen working really hard. Or, maybe people who are very good at their job get pulled in to a lot of meetings, and find it easier to do that in person. In any case, I think the tentative consensus is that there's some overall productivity increases from working from home[1].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_work#Productivity_and_e...
When I was working away I spent two hours everyday on my car commuting breathing the toxic air of traffic jams of big cities. That exhausted me and was very expensive in time, energy and money.
I can interact with humans I love on my own terms now much more time than that every day. I can do exercise outside for an hour on the Wild, a luxury impossible before.
Are you an adult or a child? Are you a slave or a serf?
It looks like you have some kind of education that make you powerless when nobody tells you what to do every second.
That even in your own house you are not the master, but someone else is.
I recommend the first thing you do is work on your mindset:
You are the master of your life and can take ownership and responsibility for it.
Everyone has their own personal level of acceptable risk taking.
Maybe there is a reason why so many more people in leadership positions are willing to return to the office compared to lower-ranking employees. They see a serious problem with productivity that doesn't show up in self-oriented surveys.
a) You don't need to because for a lot of work office isn't necessary, but you have to approach many things very different in a remote only/first context on the long term. (Like don't think replacing in-person meetings with digital ones is all what is needed.)
b) You don't need to as long as your office has good conditions part of them will come back. Which can be "good enough" for quite many use cases where you sometimes need people in place.
Home office is not all flowers, and weather it's better or worse depends on many individual factors. The spectrum is so wide that for some people staying at home is a major health risk while for others going to work is. And I'm speaking about a situation where both places have reasonable good working conditions.
(Home-office only is good for people in a well working relation ship with many social contact and a stable life and mind. It can be outright poisonous for people with chronic depression which life alone and are social rather isolated. To name one example.)
This seems to be controversial, and I don't quite understand why. It takes all sorts to make the world, but there is such a thing as culture fit.
No, I don't necessarily think people should be able to switch where they work and keep their current job at the same time. Office work is pointless unless you also have team members in the office—the more the better—and frankly home work is less-than-ideal if everyone else is sitting in an office together. Figure out which you prefer, then apply for jobs accordingly, just like anything else in life.
But, as someone who has experienced full time work in a couple of different places, let me start by saying it is hard to get right. A ton of process has been built up in a sync world, like, most of your agile process recommendations. So you have to approach async with a constant experimentation, and question all the "best practices" of the past.
A few observations that work well:
1. Slack workflows are your friends for stuff like status checks, or cross-team communication. 2. Have meetings regularly (like, daily), but, have a clear agenda.
If you ever have a meeting that's a "round robin" sort of thing, that's a giant red flag for me. Every time I've gotten people used to a daily Slack thread for "my status" it's gone really well. And any other meeting it just makes it better to offload that kind of thing.
At the same time, meetings are useful, if they have a good agenda. Managing a regular meeting agenda is tricky. What I've found that works well is to have some kind of kanban-like tool where anyone can propose a topic. Then you just go through any of the open topics until you're out of time. We usually pair the kanban board with a meeting notes document that we can cross link to for each topic. Then, any follow ups or whatever can just be tracked.
If you smooth out the communication like this, a lot of the interpersonal connnections, morale and spontaneous interaction problems get fixed. The dynamic will never be like having everyone together, but, I've noticed that the meetings I attend are actually useful. Which is 99% of the reason I will never, ever, join a company that wants me physically located again.
What's still not clear to me is exactly how to build broader cross-team connections. I suspect the right way to do this is to actually just move teams every 12-24 months.
This is probably gonna be the biggest issue with fully-remote/WFH setups. Like small team communication can definitely work (even better, sometimes), but it's really really hard to meet people organically in a remote/WFH setup, which leads to a decrease in weak ties, which tend to be the most useful in retaining company culture and forging bonds that make things happen.
> I think there is a particular aspect of social interaction that gets fulfilled at work. Talking about some small things, not for too long. Meeting people face to face whom you've enjoyed working with. Sharing work related anecdotes. These have a special place which don't quite get fulfilled elsewhere. And all the while having a clear line which doesn't get crossed is a relief and one which we take for granted.
In my case a lot of good technical work I have seen/done during 2005-2015 is now replaced with commercial/OSS assembly which requires a lot less design/architecture work. Now for businesses it maybe absolutely delightful or reasonable change. But for me this new model where every little thing is broken into 50 JIRA tickets, office now seems extraneous. So WFH saves me few hours per day, help me take care of my unwell kid and avoid general dreariness of office environment.
All good things that I remember from past about office like great discussions, watercooler talks, discussions with managers about upcoming projects and so on does not happen nowadays. Work flows through project management tools. By the time it reaches me interesting parts are taken care of and all that is left if marking JIRA complete and filling timesheets against it.
This is the part where I personally experienced the most friction between the management/lifestyle/trend bubble and "boots on the ground" people/devs.
All of a sudden blog posts and news posts popped up that claimed how open space is better, everybody loves it and everyone should be able to look every coworker in the eye and on his monitor, 0 barriers etc. Meanwhile I have yet to meet a coworker in real life that prefers or even likes this trend, personally I hate it. Makes it hard to focus, turns the distractions and noises up to 11 and makes overall for a terrible workplace. It was a major reason to quit my last job, and I am much happier with my current one.
Similarly I believe that homeoffice has probably sensitized many people to terrible workplace environments.
The coolest work I've had outside my personal office was in rented house and room per team.
Although having office in city centre has it's perks that you could have lunch, beer, meet somewhere after work with collegues and I enjoyed that - but I feel it only worked as I had mostly same age, childless peers there.
Still commuting kills most of joy. I would move to village outide of city if only I could cook. Maybe some tourist place in the mountains will work.
I don't think it's the floor plan.
I just don't believe this. I would say a good 2/3rd of employee's at every job I've worked at preferred the open floor plan. The only way I could possibly see not a single, not even one, person you've worked with preferring it is if you front run the conversation with such a vicious condemnation of it that they didn't feel comfortable sharing with you.
> Similarly I believe that homeoffice has probably sensitized many people to terrible workplace environments.
I'll take a guess that you have extra space and no kids or some combination? The feedback I've seen is the exact opposite with people realizing how poorly their home setup is and how little ability they have to make better.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying "people realize that homeoffice is better", I'm just saying people are sensitized to poor environments. And homeoffice can come with the problem you describe and still be better than the workplace.
I did not express my personal opinion on homeoffice vs. workplace. But your guess is still wrong.
When coupled with surprise meetings that don’t pertain directly to my projects and the inability to multitask, I think that the home office is a net positive.
- You get plenty of personal space
- My cubicle got both a whiteboard and a bulletin board, a locker, two trash bins, and enough desk space to comfortably fit a co-worker for short sessions of working together
- high walls discourage conversations, so it is actually quiet
The biggest disadvantage is artificial lighting - my cubicle was quite removed from the windows.
Ironically enough, I do have a door at home.
That's because (up until this shift) they have been forced to live in close proximity to offices. For the price of a downtown apartment, you can live in a suburb or rural area with more space that you could need. The longer this forced shift (pandemic) goes on, the more people will move away from the poor quality of life cities. Once they get the taste of a life without tiny overpriced apartments and time sucking commutes, they will only go back if they are forced - i.e. don't have the skills to easily jump ship.
You can have your preferences but there still exists an amount of compensation at which the average employee's preferences are offset.
I’ll possibly start another company at some point, and here’s a remote work policy I’ve thinking about:
- Employees live wherever they want
- People need to commit to being reachable a certain number of hours per day, overlapping with a selected USA time zone
- Company maintains an office in an accessible-but-affordable location capable of housing the entire company at one time
- Require in-person attendance for one week every X weeks — where X might be small early in the company’s life (like 4, so one week/month) when iteration must be fast and X might be higher (like one week every 6, 8 or 12 weeks) in later stages.
- The in-person attendance week would be for the whole company, and everyone would be there at the same time. The selected week would be announced with sufficient advance notice so people can plan their lives
- Provide limited in-office perks, instead focusing on wellbeing subsidies for gyms, outdoor activities, and other self-care, etc that can be used anywhere
- Provide a per-day stipend to *every employee in the company* for each day that the whole company is required to be in office. For example if in a month there are 5 “in office days”, maybe everyone gets $100-150/day = $500-750 added to their pay check. No expensing for the travel beyond the stipend
- No location-based pay adjustments, just market rate for remote roles (including attractive to Bay Area/NYC talent)
Reasoning:
- Work that gets done is the important measure. How it gets done is the employee's choice.
- The stipend aligns company incentives with employee incentives -- more days in office costs the company more
- Try to not favor either local or remote employees with pay, perks, etc
- Reason for stipend instead of expensing: level the playing field for location; if an employee wants to live close to the office and save the money, that’s their choice. If they want to live in a hard-to-get-to location but pay more for travel, that’s also their choice.
This is based on my beliefs that: - Full in-office is too limiting — we all know that much work can be done from home much of the time, people want to live in different places, etc. I certainly enjoy the flexibility myself
- Fully remote all the time does reduce iteration speed and collaboration that’s crucial for innovation (especially in an early stage company). There’s still no substitute for a whiteboarding session. It also does reduce social bonding, team culture, etc. But that doesn't mean it needs to be every day. Periodic in-person sessions followed by a few weeks to "get stuff done" seems to balance the objectives.
- The “Hybrid” plans many companies propose (a few times in office per week) don’t make sense. They still force people to live near a particular office, within commuting distance, and with a routine that mostly looks like a full in-office one. And even if the days are synchronized, these policies still seem more like “butts in seats” pseudo-management than actively trying to promote collaboration with an intentional goal of getting stuff done
I'm still thinking on this; any feedback would be welcome
- HR exists to mitigate legal risks to the company
- The company cannot manage health and safety risks at your home
- HR is going to insist that WFH ends with implementation of the OSHA vaccine mandate
- The lawyers are coming to destroy your WFH comfy slippers and sweatpants
The best part of college is the college campus. I don't know why companies don't want to try to replicate that. It would definitely be more appealing to younger employees, and I be it would get them to stick around much longer.
Imagine being able to walk to work, and having most of your coworkers live close by as well. The social bonds you would form with people would be much stronger. And moving to that campus to start at the company would be less scary knowing that you'd quickly get to know and build good relationships with coworkers/neighbors.
Yeah, it would mean earning more money might not actually get you a nicer living arrangement, since you might not have many choices and pretty much everything would be provided for you. I guess you'd want to try to figure out the correct mixture (maybe 40% on campus 60% off).
I'd also not like the idea that my life revolves around work - and this sounds exactly like that.
A lot of people also don't care about owning a house (at least right now). A lot of people care about forming good relationships, but don't have good ways to do so.
But I can ask you this: what happens to the significant others of people in the military?