The cynical answer to that question is ”you don’t need to be in the office to do your work, but your manager does need you in the office to do his work”.
I disagree with it though, I manage a distributed team and I can do my work fine without the team being in the office.
I think the serendipity arguments for on-site are much stronger than “manager doesn't trust team member to be productive on their own” which the entire world discovered was bullshit during the corona lockdowns.
The serendipity thing is real. We have less of it. We have many other benefits and we think it’s worth it, but to think remote doesn’t have downsides is a bit short sighted IMO.
When performing recent post-mortems it also became clear that when the whole studio was unexpectedly forced to work remotely, productivity overall slightly increased despite some initial concerns about adapting our workflows and communication channels.
Also, no need to sit there staring at the screen trying to look like you’re doing something useful after your brain has hit its limit on contiguous productive hours. You can instead get up and go do chores or go on a walk or something, give your head some breathing room, and then come back with something of a second wind in your sails which carries you through the end of the work day.
So go ahead and fire them. What is the issue exactly?
When we talk about some of the tangible things that we might actually want this "serendipity" for, these are the ones that I constantly see pop up:
- Spontaneously detecting and addressing small issues with the product
- Spontaneously coming up with and implementing ideas for the product
- Spontaneously coming up with and implementing workflow improvements
These are all things that should be addressed as part of day-to-day work. The reason they're not addressed is often overzealous prioritization of shiny things to the detriment of everything else. Or, in other words, bad management.
That's all this "serendipity" is actually for: a release valve for the pressure imposed by bad management, which helps mask the effects of bad management.
All you actually need to do, in order to reap the benefits of "serendipity" without locking hundreds of people in the same room together, is incentivize the necessary interactions, provide people with the necessary time to act on their urges, and get out of the way.
Here's some free ideas that I've seen work in real life:
- Have a Slack room for people to share user feedback, and explicitly encourage negative user feedback (maybe a different room for positive and negative, to avoid dampening good moods)
- Encourage employees to suggest improvements to the product and the workflow, and to publicly (yet politely) vent about the current processes that bother them. Don't make a "feature request" JIRA form that dumps it into an endless backlog, never to be seen again. Instead, have people discuss the issue publicly in a Slack room, which allows feedback and potential improvements to be considered and taken into account, then have them create an issue once they understand what it's actually about.
- Your planning should aim to drive around half of the actual work that gets done, under the acknowledgement that the other half will be organically filled with work that needs to be done. It's always easy to pick the next task if you're done earlier than expected and there's nothing else to do. It's a lot harder to sideline planned work that you've explicitly been told to do in order to do something that's actually important instead.
Basically all orgs need something that acts as a random mixing function so that connections between areas can form and strengthen. Working in the same building can provide that, if the building layout allows for it, but it's far from the only option.
The problem is that managers, particularly those with a strongly hierarchical, Taylorist mindset, won't necessarily appreciate the value of lateral connections between teams. They end up benefiting from serendipity by accident because when they force people into the office those lateral connections form anyway.
edit: I am also commenting to retrieve it in the future.
If you're an experienced individual contributor, the shift to remote work was great. You got less oversight at work and more free time in your personal life. This category is a lot of the hacker news audience, so remote work is popular here.
It was less good if you were a new contributor. You might find yourself with less development and struggling to break into existing cliques within the organization. You may not have built good practices in personal time management. None of this is malicious, it is just failures that are easier to have happen when working remote and not being careful.
Managers have an even harder time. Good managers work by building strong relationships with their team members, not with carrots or sticks. That's harder in a remote environment, due to the default-private nature of most remote communication. The lack of relationships hurts individual contributors too, who become even more like cogs in a machine.
Overall, I think the ability to retain experienced employees and hire from a wide range of locations outweighs these costs of remote work, but they are real and significant. For Big Tech, where acquiring talent is relatively easier due to salaries and name recognition, you can see why they might prioritize in-office work.
So you are saying that those "other managers" will have to actually become competent in projects they are managing instead of measuring the time butts spent in the seats and trying to sneak on employees who are reading reddit at work? Good!
But agreed, it's really shitty and I wish nobody would be in a situation where they feel like they are effectively ordered. I feel it's a result of your country's (US or India, right?) lack of unions and employee protecting labor laws.
It wasn't until I broke my toe and was told by the doctor to minimise my walking they they allowed me to (technically temporarily) work from home...
They need you around to fall back on. Honestly, this is at least 75% of the reason behind the pushback on Remote.