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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

This seems like the root problem, which frankly doesn't require one to think of VPs or execs as villains.

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.

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> * Measurable objectives.

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.

How about trusting your employees first? Most of the items on that lists are just busy works to give paranoid higher-ups peace of mind which actually has negative effects on employees that are actually doing work.

There is arguably 1 item on that list which is strictly busy work, not many. Every other piece seems either good for communication or at worst neutral.

Every other piece seems either good for communication or at worst neutral.

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.

To me all these are busy works. I'm an adult. Not a child that need to constantly be checked-in or monitored to see if I'm actually working.

* Regular check-ins.

* Lots and lots of writing.

* The expectation of frequent video calls.

I'm all for trusting employees, but employees need to also show progress and deliver results. Otherwise, they aren't, well, doing their job.

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.

What were the differences in organizational structure?

These come to mind:

Meeting free days.

Yearly in-person meetups.

Leverage of online task management tools like trello.

Lots and lots of written docs and procedures.

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