My employer is reneging on its remote-work promise
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Even with a short commute, I am still so much more productive at home than at the office.
Everything I need for lunch is in a kitchen in the next room, no more going out to lunch, wasting time looking for food or cooking.
Long commutes suck energy and time out of what would otherwise be productive hours.
Even the bathroom takes longer to get to and use in an office.
This move at large by the industry makes almost no sense to me. Only way it does is if these are actually targeted layoffs, or managers have a pride/visibility necessity of being seen with their peons all together.
Edit to add: They can also let those pricey RE contracts expire, save on electricity, water, and internet and all the other subscriptions and services they were paying for by having a centralized office. That's a large chunk of expenses they get to put onto employees, and for the most part employees are ok with it!
I'd be all for remote only if all those people were fired.
It’ll be interesting to see what the productivity numbers reveal in the coming years.
I think I am in agreement with him? Results matter not appearances. EMs should be able to tell who is working productively and access logs are a poor proxy for that.
What do you think?
It's like a bad code review, or bike shedding. It's so easy to look at who's at their desk with their heads down. It's hard to look into what they're doing and how it fits into larger objectives.
Oh dear. I don't think you've seen corporate America.
However, there are ways of seeing if people are doing less work that don't require forcing everyone back into the office.
* Regular check-ins.
* Measurable objectives.
* A culture of trust.
* Asynchronous, public status boards for fostering communication.
* Lots and lots of writing.
* The expectation of frequent video calls.
I have worked at remote only companies well before the pandemic and they had different organizational structures than the in-person companies.
Meeting free days.
Yearly in-person meetups.
Leverage of online task management tools like trello.
Lots and lots of written docs and procedures.
Most of the other pieces increase time spent on communication. That is not necessarily the same thing.
Having worked remote-first for a long time and at several different places I would say the #1 thing you need to be effective is a different style of communication. You don't want to rely on large group meetings much. In fact ideally you don't want to force much real-time interaction at all. Save that for either genuinely urgent issues - which shouldn't happen often - or casual collaboration that your people set up whenever it suits everyone involved.
One big win from having people WFH - assuming they have a sensible working environment at home of course - is that they can actually do deep work for long periods of time. You don't have the constant "background noise" and casual interruptions that come with working in a crowded, open plan office. But if you want to take advantage of that then you need two things.
Firstly you need some other way of getting the useful incidental information sharing around the team. You'll be missing the casual aside when someone at the office overhears two other people on the team discussing something they used to work on that ends up saving those two people an entire day of investigation. You need ways for people to keep aware of what's generally happening that might relate to them and to make open requests for help or advice without it becoming a hassle for anyone.
Secondly you need to not keep interrupting the person trying to do deep work in new and different ways just because they're at home now. Tools like Slack and Teams might be great for giving the appearance of everyone keeping busy but they can be terrible for everyone actually being productive. Usually that happens if there is a culture of expecting everyone to be permanently online, replying instantly to messages, and updating their status whenever their response time might be more than ten seconds. Same goes for having multiple group video calls per day and insisting that tasks in a project management tool only take a few hours to do yet still require real-time status updates throughout the day so Monty Manager can "report on the team's progress" or whatever else he does to feel useful.
* Regular check-ins.
* Lots and lots of writing.
* The expectation of frequent video calls.
BTW, failing to deliver results is not always (or even, I daresay usually) due to employee maliciousness. Other reasons someone can fail to deliver:
* They don't have the training they need.
* The task is ill-defined.
* They are in the wrong job.
* They don't have the resources they need to do the task.
* They are overwhelmed.
* They are stuck.
You could say "well, employees should be raising the red flag when this occurs" but I have found that some people don't do that, preferring to dig in and try to solve it themselves. That works sometimes, but other times much pain and time can be avoided if someone checks in and offers help/connections/knowledge.
I kind of feel like this is the only item on this list that actually matters. If you don't know what people are meant to be achieving and whether they're achieving it then either (a) they don't report to you, (b) they aren't needed and should be let go, or (c) you aren't needed and you should be let go.
Which, when I put it that way, kind of explains why some middle managers hate remote work.
Why haven't they been? If your company's entire management structure hasn't noticed that there are a lot of people not contributing anything for a long time - or worse they've noticed and not responded to that situation - doesn't that just mean your company has incompetent management?
I've been amazed by some of the stories I've seen about the "overemployment" trend where people are taking on two or even three full time jobs at the same time while working remotely. I've worked mostly remote-first for a long time but I can't think of anywhere I've ever worked where someone who was only contributing at 50% or even 33% of what they should be wouldn't have been called out within days.
If nothing else a good employer that looks after its people would want to know if there was a legitimate and probably unfortunate reason for sustained poor performance. It could be a medical issue or maybe a bad family situation. Providing some kind of official support might be appropriate.
Of course if it really was deliberate abuse then management has to deal with that situation decisively as well. Given the dishonesty involved with secret overemployment the reaction is likely to be swift and brutal. If it's someone who just can't be bothered to do the job properly working from home then that's more of a disciplinary but not terminal matter. But one way or another management has to step in and do its own job if something isn't working.
I’ve worked at 50% or less capacity at every place I worked at. I’d say as low as 25% even. Haven’t gotten called out, remote or not.
In a sane world: The CEO makes it clear to those department heads that their future depends on their teams working, and the department heads come down on the managers. People get written up quickly for not being online working, and maybe the worst few are fired. Both the workers and the managers (who should have been watching this all along) get their heads straight.
In the real world: The CEO ordered 100% of employees back to office (still during COVID), to avoid hurting anyone's feelings by calling them out for not doing their jobs.
If you look through my post history, you'll see I'm generally not on the side of administration, but this is one case where I'm a bit sympathetic. When things are going well it's easy to stay calm. But when things are going poorly, it's hard to shake the feeling that there's a solution you're missing because you're not there to see it.
But ultimately I think going back in person is bad for everyone, both employers and empoyees.
My current team manager is also an IC and is the first manager I had this last two years who understand that code review and mentorship were harder and less efficient onprem and that our non-remote days should be dedicated to informal meetings about architecture and design decisions. And eating together.
First time I have less than 3 hours of meeting a week too (the rule he enforce is no more than 5 hours, even the tech lead/architect), everything else should be 1:1. First time I've been this productive (and I'm only two months in).
Yes. Typically, those were very junior ones in their first job, who were still learning the ropes. Ramping up on a complicated codebase in a remote setup was very hard for them. Also some senior ICs who wanted to design nuances of a complex system. Amount of work we got done in a few hours with a whiteboard was much more than what we achieved over a few weeks of remote "collaboration".
I'd like to work from home one day but it's not possible in my current circumstances.
It's like a whisper campaign... One person says it to another, then to another, until the first person hears it second hand again and believes the story they made up.
With all fair play to (some of) the hardware development portions of those businesses.
Even with a long commute, I am still so much more productive at office than at home.
Everything I need for lunch and snacks is provided by my employer, no more having to figure out what to cook or order, wasting time cooking and cleaning.
Commutes are a good way to enforce separation between work and personal life, also a great way to catch up on podcasts and audibles.
And forget about productivity when kids and family are at home.
This move at large by the industry makes almost no sense to me.
The companies would have a much harder time telling productive employees to get fucked and come to the office with some collective bargaining.
It also can take your organization out of the market for highly capable but younger prospects.
I've been in unionized workplaces (Europe). There's been a minimum but never a maximum and the sliding scale is not driven by seniority with the or union as you say.
I'm afraid you might extrapolating from things you've heard about factory type unions.
I used to adjudicate unemployment claims, and a significant change in working conditions is considered a valid reason to quit, as long as you don't, like, go along with it for a year and then decide it's untenable.
If you quit once the change is actually required, especially if you have documentation saying the role you agreed to definitely had the condition of being permanently remote, you can still receive benefits even though you quit.
The documentation about the anxiety and/or OCD would also help. It establishes, "See? I'm doing my best to work and not depend on the government, and I thought I had found a job I could actually do, but then they changed it and now I can't anymore."
There was no written agreement. The judge focused on the fact I was on their schedule, and concluded I abandoned the position.
This year they have suddenly decided to mandate 5 days a month in the office. Our people are split across continents, we spend all day on WebEx calls. We are being gaslit that being physically together with a few of our colleagues will make this work even better.
We just lost two members of our 12 person team, including a particularly brilliant one due to the new mandatory office days requirement.
Insane.
Fast forward two years and they rolled back the remote working rules. All employees now have to come to the office at least three times a week - Team leaders even more as they are considered "role models". Means the guys being located 400km away in Berlin need to figure out how to commute. Obviously they have to pay for their trips themselves. No help offered by the company.
This surely counts as a material change of the employment contract, which cannot be imposed unilaterally.
Most employment contracts all either party to terminate at any time.
Edit: European countries tend to have more legal protection against companies being able to fire workers at will. I wonder if this is why so many of my European friends that have corporate jobs seem to have a hard time convincing their employers to let them work remotely.
A colleague (infosec engineer) took a remote job. I told them to bake into the offer letter it was fully remote. Employer agreed after strongly pushing back, desperate for talent. Employer told them it was no longer remote. Employment attorney called their counsel by way of HR regarding the change in employment terms and constructive dismissal. Role remained remote. Financial services employer. Get it in writing, trust no one’s word, companies are not your friend.
Your location was here, and now it’s here.
One more reason to for tech workers to start organizing.
When companies are fat and happy with growing revenue and employees are hard to find, accommodations are made. But that never lasts forever.
When revenue gets squeezed and people get laid off, its easy for companies to say “either come into the office or find another job”.
My guess is that very few workers will end up with fully remote roles.
More than before covid, but not much more.
The company has no loyalty to you. You owe it none either.
Er, citation needed on that one. Having digital nomads can also wreak havoc on small desirable places. Like this case: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/economics/remote-workers-le...
There is also the other way to to spin your point, what about all the small towns they've helped https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizfarmer/2021/09/15/the-small-...
Corporations are not your friend. They are not actually family, despite what HR platitudes you might heat.
They will do the cost effect thing, end of story. If the cost of exceptions is $5million, and the cost of lawsuits will total $4.9million, they WILL chose the lawsuits.
Especially at the C level, where they can and will be fired and sued for not increasing shareholder value.
Remote work is still here to stay, not because anyone gives a rat's ass what the employee wants, but because it just makes sense.
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
Sure businesses are supposed to be cruel uncaring bean counting machines. But they're corrupted by all these damn apes that make all the decisions. There's no law of economics that that's that humans have to act in a perfectly rational self interest. It's an assumption that many economic theories make, for various reasons but it's far from inviolable.
But there is a rational reason for it. It reduces risk and makes output more predictable. If you have a 10x developer who is actually producing 10x, how do you plan for that? What if he leaves? If you reduce him to 2x or so, it’s much more likely he can be replaced.
Managers can't tell what employees are doing when they work from home. They have more difficult time coordinating effort between different individual contributors therefore, when everyone works from home.
Managers are the one signing the paychecks.
No one signs paychecks who is not a manager.
Therefore in the long term all employers will gravitate toward working in the office.
Is this a chat-GPT response? No offense, I'm just confused by the line of reasoning.
I did and the answer was yes.
I'm just annoyed when people make this argument so complicated.
In general, it's quite simple and well-studied: remote work makes individual workers more productive but makes the coordination between individuals more difficult. As coordination is the primary function of managers, their job becomes more difficult. No one seems to understand this (or want to).
But once it is accepted that managers' jobs are harder when everyone is remote, the conclusion that remote work will soon experience massive decline (within the next decade) is obvious.
It will remain in varying degrees. The more coordination is needed, the more remote work will be discouraged. Workers needing more concentration but requiring less coordination, where the job is well understood, will continue to work from home. Even before the pandemic for example, call center workers commonly worked from home.
Start-ups are already very much against remote work in the large. Corporations will soon follow suit.
And no matter how much we don't like it they're the ones signing the paychecks.
This would only be the case if every employer was somehow part of an OPEC like organization and would all simultaneously require commuting.
What will end up happening is some of the best and brightest will make "remote work" a required perquisite for the next job search, and since they've got the technical chops, if a company can't meet that demand the employee can easily find work somewhere else that will offer remote as a benefit.