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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

> Executives who are pushing employees to come back to the office are most likely to succeed if they can make a convincing case for why coming back to the office benefits employees and the organisation. The typical explanation that coming back to the office is important for the culture of the organisation is unfounded at best, and hogwash at worse.

Maybe big organizations are bad at communicating RTO reasons, but isn’t it pretty obvious to everyone who has done both that the biggest advantage of working in person is high-bandwidth communication? I feel like the quality and quantity of information exchanged with my colleagues is much higher on days we work in person than remote. There’s a reason why even fully remote companies usually do some sort of recurring offsite.

That’s not to say that the benefits of RTO always outweigh the costs, but I find the trope that RTO is just some pointy-haired boss whim to be silly.

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In my last job (10,000ish employees at a UK financial services organisation) we worked at home for the whole of the Covid period... apart from one small team in the whole organisation (which soon got dealt with as they were basically just slacking), productivity went up.

After Covid, we went into the office one day a month and didn't really achieve anything additional at all, if anything those days were less productive due to the heavy socialising that went on.

In my current job, pan-European financial services organisation, I am the only person in my team in London, everyone else is in Brussels. I've never physically met most of them. The one day a week I'm required to spend in the London office is a complete waste of time and money and usually involves me sitting on Teams meetings all day as I very rarely need to interact with anyone else in London. It's my least productive day of the week.

I'm also not in a "mostly lone producer" role like developer, I'm a project/programme manager and my job is interacting with people all day.

I think it just depends if people are able to refocus their mind into a new way of doing things.

I think that few days in office, especially as few as one per month, should really be about socialising.

Maybe start with a team meeting for a general update then smaller face-to-face discussions on topics best suited for in-person interaction. Then break for a team lunch and spend the rest of the afternoon on whatever people want to.

> The one day a week I'm required to spend in the London office is a complete waste of time and money and usually involves me sitting on Teams meetings all day as I very rarely need to interact with anyone else in London

Yes, same here. A mandate to be in office one-two days a week with no thought about the aim, and no planning for others to be there at the same time is a total waste of time and money.

> I think that few days in office, especially as few as one per month, should really be about socialising.

Came here to agree with this.

Personally (and there is a heavy personal opinion to this as some people also do prefer the office life) I think a majority work from home but with the occasional mandated office day specifically for socialising is a good hybrid. I acknowledge that more extreme (for lack of a better word) introverts would like to avoid the office all together though.

I'm not sure it's an introvert thing... I've no desire or need to go to the office, I have many friends not at work and have no need for the false "socialising" you get in the office environment

It's not about making 'friends', it's about getting to know the people you work with to create a personal connection and rapport.

But some people demonstrated they could achieve that without physically meeting over Covid... mandating it as a "sheep dipping" approach is old fashioned and thoughtless.

For me I don't need it, and I've proven that again working for a Belgium team from London. To tell me I need it to build rapport is ridiculous and a waste of my time and money.

> high-bandwidth communication

This just sounds like some sort of buzzwordy justification for hauling people back to the office.

My experience, is that communication propagates better in group-chat environments like Slack, that meetings are faster and more productive on Meet, that my work-focus is magnitudes better in the quiet of my home, and that (if absolutely needed - which is pretty much never) a get-together is more creative and productive if it doesn't happen at the office - but is at another venue altogether.

> My experience, is that communication propagates better in group-chat environments like Slack, that meetings are faster and more productive on Meet, that my work-focus is magnitudes better in the quiet of my home

I think this is super dependent on the person and circumstances.

I found "meetings" which are just doc reviews or low involvement group updates are better via slack or meet. Active discussions from a few participants are better in person (esp. if using a whiteboard). I think this speaks to the waste of "this meeting could have been an email" culture more than anything.

I found that some people are better able to "focus" by ignoring junior employees when WFH, increasing their own productivity at the expense of the junior's productivity and growth. Some of my most "productive" coworkers are also the least helpful to the team, and the least active on chat too.

> I think this is super dependent on the person and circumstances.

Precisely, which is why this[1] comment from the GP isn't accurate. I think we should try to create less polarizing statements and try to sum up the entire human experience ("everyone") about how they feel about WFH.

[1]: > pretty obvious to everyone who has done both that the biggest advantage of working in person is high-bandwidth communication

>biggest advantage of working in person is high-bandwidth communication

Wrong, it's the tax breaks:

>JPMorgan Chase & Co. and RBC Capital Markets are among more than 100 firms that have negotiated billions of dollars worth of agreements under New Jersey’s pre-pandemic programs. None have yet applied for the waiver, Sullivan said, meaning if they want their tax breaks, they’ll have to prove the jobs are being done on site at least three days a week. JPMorgan and RBC declined to comment.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...

Also cutting staff without ending up in the newspaper for laying people off.

High bandwidth does not equal high quality.

I much prefer a well thought out text message rather than someone spamming their thoughts at me through speech.

That being said, for discussion points and fast iterations I agree that in-person is hard-to-beat, but for a lot of work this is the minority and doesn't justify forcing people to be there at all times just in case this is needed.

>spamming their thoughts at me through speech

Funny way of saying 'talking to me'. I'm going to work this into my vocabulary for fun and profit.

No, it's not. There's useful communication and there's spam. Those exist on every media.

Spoken spam is a really bad problem with offices.

> high-bandwidth communication?

For me, absolutely no. I want high quality not high bandwidth. I don't want everyone interrupting me all the time with, relevant or not, questions. I want you to write me an email or message in the chat and I'll check it and answer in due time. I don't want to be interrupted to go to the cafeteria or "for a smoke" every 15min by a different person, or to have people standing besides me talking about their weekend or their kids. It's very invasive because I get distracted easily, even with good quality headphones, and it's hard to get back on focus.

With this said I don't mind going to the office where I can chat with people and socialize but I want to allocate time for that, not be forced into it. I feel that WFH allows me to balance the time I need to work and the time I need to socialize much better.

This is my experience in very small companies (think a <10 person startup). The value of everyone knowing a lot of what's going on from immersion is immense. You can have very little processes around information sharing (which takes time to set up and fine tune!), very little time to convince people what needs to be done (it's obvious from the conversation the other side of the room is having), and all the nuance of in-person communication is kept.

Once a company gets a little bit bigger, the processes around information sharing, planning and other communication has to be in place anyway. Teams need to collaborate, work needs to be tracked, there has to be meetings for planning. Once you're already doing that you might not lose anything by going remote.

This. If your company is on two floors, you have a remote company anyway.

In my experience, it's not _entirely_ that simple though. For some people, chatting and video calls feel super awkward and makes them avoid communication. For other people, in-person is super awkward and has the same effect. There are a lot of nuances. I suspect RTO happens in companies run by the former type, and remote happens in companies run by the latter. As a CTO (did that for more than a decade), I always tried to give the team what they need. But even then, when in doubt, I suppose I often went for what I would need, if I was them.

In my experience, meeting people in person at the coffee machine or at lunch creates way more social cohesion compared to exclusively using mail, chat, and video conferencing.

This is important even in bigger organizations, because you want to catch errors early on. It helps if people bounce ideas off colleagues to see if there is anything they missed.

With people you barely know, if it is not your responsibility to comment, why bother? Better to get get some work done, then to read the chat all day.

Personally, I think about two days per week at the office is best for this purpose. But that may very from person to person.

I am in a big company >100k employees and I don't care what the other million people do, because obvious reasons. I work for remote clients and my team is scattered all over the world, so there's no high bandwidth input possible from them. My local colleagues work in totally unrelated projects so beyond a bit of fun there's no shared information needed or required. I still go in the office for this banter like once a week, but I guarantee you my productivity is like the half - there's always somebody walking around with a coffee interrupting me for some "high bandwidth information exchange". Morals? Please stop assuming everybody works like you.

High bandwidth communicating is also a firehose of noise, though.

You may find that the extra capacity to communicate is detrimental as people spend their time talking about marginal issues.

If your communication is limited, you will use your time on the most important things.

> That’s not to say that the benefits of RTO always outweigh the costs, but I find the trope that RTO is just some pointy-haired boss whim to be silly.

Exactly. I prefer to WFH like everybody else, but I accept that I am less valuable to my employer when I do and expect to negotiate accordingly.

For people who refuse to believe this, I think you can just link to the history of MIT Building 20 and pretty much drop the mic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20#:~:text=In%201998%....

We come together with remote colleagues to work. I can confidently say that high-bandwidth wears off pretty quickly. High-bandwidth is not essential 90% of the time, and it's easy to compensate the remaining 10% simply by taking more time. In my experience, bandwidth of remote work has been increasing, as people keep organizing themselves around it better. So, the difference will only get smaller.

Most important benefit of RTO is the social aspect, in my experience. And, even that wears off rather quickly. Whether there's a “benefit” depends a lot on one's colleagues, in the first place.

You can have some of the social remotely too. I’ll often open our weekly engineering meeting on Slack with a few minutes of people talking about their weekend or related stuff. It happens in chats as well. Of course we’re a small team who have worked together for years.

Definitely. I've become close friends with a colleague without meeting once in real life. That being said, physical presence brings a different dimension to social relations.

agreed, it absolutely does

What happens with communication "in person" is that people talk at the same time. This doesn't fly in remote meetings, so they kind of enforce good meeting hygiene in this regard. Not enough to make meetings great overall but it helps.

Management in many corporations want the employees to feel like they are friends, which they typically are not (do you regularly visit co-workers in their homes? no? then you probably aren't actually friends). It's one of many strategies to foster unfounded loyalty to the employer and enabling of corporate hierarchies.

I hate when people throw corporate bullshit using words like "family".

It might be true for small <15 employees companies, never for bigger ones.

> the biggest advantage of working in person is high-bandwidth communication?

Pointless meetings, constant interruptions, overhead noise, watercooler talk? Those types of things have zero advantage.

We have to contend with working with people who are sometimes very hard to work with. Watercooler talk gives you the opportunity to remember that the guy who keeps filing badly written tickets has a wife and kids and hobbies, and is likely filing badly written tickets because he's extremely overworked and doesn't have time to write better tickets.

We're social creatures, and having unstructured social interactions greases the wheels when we work together.

I'm sure this also depends on the kind of organization you work at, but I find that being on-site makes a huge difference. Yes, even in the quality of the work.

> high-bandwidth communication

> quality and quantity of information exchanged with my colleagues

Can you elaborate? What do you need to exchange throughout the day? I've worked as an IC and as a manager both with remote-first, async-first and very local, traditional enterprise structures. The quality of communication on the former has been excellent most of the time, while in the latter there's always been a 30%-50% loss rate.

> I feel like the quality and quantity of information exchanged with my colleagues is much higher on days we work in person than remote.

Keyword: “feel”

Sounds like a skill issue.

> but isn’t it pretty obvious to everyone who has done both that the biggest advantage of working in person is high-bandwidth communication?

High-bandwidth is some forms of communication. While the office environment harms severely other forms of communication.

Personally, I've noticed those make for a small share of my work needs. Overall, I communicate much better remotely.

That only works for companies that have a single office. Once you are multiple offices, that argument is moot for the most part.

Also I think you are mistaking high bandwith with low latency. You can certainly do high bandwith remotely. What you lose is on latency because remote work involve some form of async communication.

In every organisation I've ever worked in, from military to SAR to healthcare to software, the issue has never been bandwidth. More often the issue is lack of concise communication. All higher bandwidth provides is more noise to signal.

In office isn't higher bandwidth, but it is more fun! I love going traveling to the office and hanging out with people. Hardly any work gets done, but being around people is really entertaining. Bonds definitely form better - whether that is good or bad for business I haven't been able to figure out yet. However, it is better for my social life.

All I know is that if I see someone WFH I know they are getting more work done than if I see them in office. 80% of top performers WFH the majority of the time or are remote.

Also, being remote and traveling into the office for week-long visits the past 3 years, I can say I almost never see people whiteboarding. I've done it once while in office in a meeting and it wasn't needed at all. People using online diagramming tools during zoom meetings? Definitely.

I really miss the social aspects of being in office, but the benefits to Remote work just outweigh those aspects, sadly.

Ultimately, what happens to RTO really depends on the market. If the job market heats back up again, RTO will largely go away. If the job market tightens, then it will dominate. That's because the vast majority of executives and owners want to be in office around their domain. What's the fun of being a billionaire and having to be on zoom all the time?

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