What one executive wishes they could tell employees about return-to-office plans
time.com
time.com
Tell people it's inappropriate to go to a museum during work or that they're underperforming.
Seems like we've got solutions to these issues
When I was a junior programmer, I ate lunch every day with junior and senior programmers. I developed a trust that let me easily ask one of them to “walk me through how a variable of char * and char[256] are related” or show me some trick in the debugger or help me get unstuck.
It’s not that you can’t do any of those things remotely. It’s that the social constructs are vastly different in the absence of repeated casual interactions.
In a remote-mostly world, a junior programmer is likely to struggle longer solo on any given issue (which brings along some benefits, of course), but once they get into a spot where they’re underwater, they don’t have an easy, low-stakes, smooth way to recover as “asking one of the 10 people you’ve eaten lunch with 100 times.”
Because it is broadly true, as the nonsensical, obfuscated-with-bullshit layoff announcements prove - and there is always someone waiting in the hacker news comments to bleat about how corporations must be this way because of “shareholder value”.
Executives need to learn that they can’t have it both ways.
So no, fuckers. There’s no trust.
The fact that they are remote or not actually says little about the communication patterns except that it is not physically face-to-face.
If mentorship is important then rather than relying on the physical distance between the new person's desk and the senior, you make it a policy that they need to do mentorship. And provide tools, structure and time for that.
If the senior or junior by virtue of the fact that they are not sitting in the same space cannot or will not work together, then either you have not got the tooling in place or you don't have control over your employees.
Learn to use internet software, set firm policies about communication and collaboration and availability to the degree it is actually necessary. If people don't comply then fire them.
The fact that they are physically in the same space or not is a minor detail for most of these jobs. Absolutely incredible how little understanding there is of that fact.
Learn to use an online white board, screen share, write an email, or open a video or voice chat.
If you think that the complaining workers WANT to go to workplace socials and aren't just feeling obliged, they do not feel grateful. They feel blackmailed.
This wash about consensus is irrelevant. Your culture is only valuable if the workers actually indicate they value it. Listen. To. The. Individual.
If I got a bad reaction from a potential employer over an honest conversation on what my and their expectations should be, I'd be out and on to the next.
The thing is though, I don't give a shit. I am generally not rewarded for being productive.
Employees might be more inclined to think like owners if they actually reaped the benefits of ownership. Benefits like a share of profits or any semblance of decision making power for important decisions. All of this stuff is doable.
Until then, work from home sounds good because it's all upside for employees.
1. remote being best suited for those who have pre-built in-person networks
2. lack of osmotic information transfer for inexperienced staff
3. decline of social cohesion, especially for new joiners who never had in-person experience
I suspect that we will end up with many different flavours of working mode, we are in the pre-Cambrian explosion for working culture practices. The diversity should lead to self sorting along the way
Organizing social events on Zoom very contrived and awkward. Chatting for 5 min at a water cooler was better to actually get to know someone and build trust. Of course, the company has no budget for physically bringing people together.
Fully remote doesn’t work and I am willing to bet on companies with some in-office presence beating fully remote companies in the long run.
Seems like the underlings and management are on the same page now.
Doing any of the above with my current team seems unimaginable - not because I don't like them, but because we've never had the opportunity to break that trust barrier over Teams or Zoom.
A friend is someone I can expect to be there when I ask for or need personal help (and vice versa), not someone who shares their beer or hobby preferences over a Zoom 1:1. Deep bonds are forged in meaningful shared struggle (see military bootcamp for an example, where you are broken down and built back up together), not ephemeral employment.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jul/09/when-it...
Work should be transactional. It is a transaction. Labor is exchanged for money.
Full remote frees us from all the bullshit and let's us focus on just doing the work we're getting paid for. "Deep culture" = bad work/life balance.
Take a haircut for instance, it is transactional (you exchange money for a haircut) but often people stick with the same hairdresser for years - e.g. because they have a relationship, have built trust, and often have built a friendship e.t.c. and similarly hairdressers seem to enjoy having these bonds both with their repeat customers and their coworkers. Hairdressers could always work in silence in single-customer booths on their own, but they always seem to be together and chat to each other and customers in the open. This isn't purely transactional - there is a formed culture here "i.e. 'the way we do things is that we chat and have fun while we cut hair'"
In a work context:
The best performing companies and teams typically have a deep sense of culture and shared-purpose. There is a reason why corporate vision/mission/values are created - because they are effective tools to drive large organizations together in a cohesive way.
I personally find that there is a huge personal difference working on a team that has great bonds and a great culture vs a team that doesn't. Working on a team without a sense of belonging and without great relationships with my coworkers sucks for me personally.
Now someone might say "well you can still form relationships with coworkers remotely" - in which case that IS culture and something more than transactional, the argument is just that this is much more difficult to form with everyone being remote.
I would absolutely give repeat business to any barber shop whose selling point was “we won’t try to talk to you about last night’s game (you didn’t see) of a sport you don’t care about”.
The would be a substantial improvement on the status quo.
As for why tenured engineers left, they all had spent 3-5 years in this company and it was time to move on just like any other shop in tech. That seems in line with overall tech sector.
And it is borderline impossible to build camaraderie or a well bonded team purely online without any in person interaction for months or years. If you think you have seen that, please share further details about what worked and the name of the company. I am very much interested in learning how to build great teams online. So far, outcomes from even the best practices don’t seem to hold a candle when compared against the in-office experience.
If you want to bond with your employees, find one who’s into MMORPGs or used to be - shouldn’t be too hard in this industry. They have hours and hours of stories to tell you about.
If you can’t asychronously tell whether a project you’re purportedly responsible for is advancing, why are you being paid?
It seems you have never built any complex software which needed a lot of whiteboarding, intense design discussions with lots of nuances to hash out, lots of unanticipated tiny cases which were solved by a quick 2-min chat or other aspects which are far better addressed in person vs via Zoom.
That sounds good. But my company has no budget to gather the clans. So what is the alternative?
Can you elaborate on why you think this? It doesn't seem very obvious to me that this is the case. I've worked remote on a ton of projects and never really struggled to hash out these nuances via email, text message, video call, whatever.
In this business, in code and in management, Async is god. If it can be done async, it will be better done async plus or minus the social considerations.
> How do you build a compelling culture remotely?
> the majority of people seem to want to be remote when we survey them. But are they as engaged? Will they stay? ... how sustainable is that?
> How do you make those people [out of state] still feel like they are part of everything?
> Are people working as hard?
> there’s still just a lot of empty space right now. When I’m in the office, there’s not a lot of people.
> I recently attended an in-person meeting and I loved it. It was great. There are still things that are fun to talk about in-person and we were doing a lot of brainstorming. The time went by like that, and on a Zoom call, it just doesn’t.
Q: did the other people like it, or did they wish they were at home on a Zoom call and that the meeting was dragging on and should have been shorter?
> But I can’t get away from the inescapable reality that there’s still a hit to productivity. It was so scary the first six months of the pandemic and everybody just wanted to keep their job. Now, people are multitasking too much.
Seems this could be measured, and if it's just a problem for the exec internally and not an "inescapable reality", he needs to get over it. If productivity hasn't taken a hit, "people are not multitasking too much": they are able to do the same amount of work more efficiently away from the office, and that allows them to do more other things that may not be work related.
> [On working 4 days vs 5:] We’re not even in a space where you tell me you are just so good and efficient at your job, and you’re willing to work longer days for four days to have a fifth day off. That’s not the situation. I can keep my mind open to that.
In other words, if a smart worker can get their work done in 4 days, the exec expects them to do 25% more work without extra pay.
> Boundaries are being tested all over the place... the workplace was probably out of whack and companies did have too much power... There’s a level of distrust that employees have for their organizations, almost like an old dated image of like fat cats sitting around counting their money
I don't think it's dated considering that the gap between executive compensation and average worker compensation has only increased:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/07/us-wage-gap-...
It took me a while but I just did the complex analysis including some long division. It turns out the right thing by the employees is the thing they are freely choosing to do. So it appears the right thing is to give them that freedom, unless of course the premise is flawed.