If you are going to quote Jonathan Haidt, I suggest you take a look at his latest book, the Anxious Generation published in 2024. My reading is that reducing face time is definitely NOT a positive factor for happiness.
This is an extremely common problem for juniors in the mentoring program where I volunteer: They graduate college, take remote jobs, and then slide into depression while working from home. It takes a while to work with them to get to the bottom of their issues, but often they'll realize that they're much happier in the weeks following company on-site meetings, then they slowly decline again.
Remote work doesn't work for everyone. Many people struggle in remote environments, especially juniors. The way remote work gets pushed as being perfect for everyone can be very confusing for people who discover that they don't like it.
It's even harder because the internet tends to be very hostile to these people rather than supportive. The correct answer, obviously, is that some people do better at different types of jobs. Yet every time this comes up, people come out and try to criticize the person, blame it on their lack of hobbies, blame it on something else, and refuse to allow that some people need face-to-face coworkers to thrive.
It's a real phenomenon that gets downplayed on the internet.
Sure, in office works better for some people and remote makes them miserable. They're real people.
But the side suffering economic compulsion is the remote preferred people being forced back to the office against their will.
If everyone can work how they prefer then great. But that's not the world we live in and to draw a false equivalence between the dominant (at exec level) RTO view and remote workers forced into unpaid commutes and time away from families gets our hackles way up.
The problem with this is that people's work preference doesn't always match up with the environments where they actually work well.
I've managed remote and hybrid teams for years. I've done this long enough to realize that a lot of the people who struggle to be productive at home will swear up and down that they're much more productive working remote.
The reason is simple: People aren't just expressing their preference for where they work best. They're expressing their preference for where they want to be. When it comes to low performers and difficult employees, they almost universally don't want to be at the office.
That's why it's not as simple as letting everyone work according to their preference.
Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is filtering for people who can actually work remote. Many people will claim they work well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible at communicating, can't manage their own time, are constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's hard to start removing these people from the company, but it's the only way to make it work.
All of those companies that switched everyone to WFH during COVID learned the hard way that you can't just take everyone and go remote. You have to build the team for it from the start. And it takes more than just asking people what they prefer.
<< Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is filtering for people who can actually work remote. Many people will claim they work well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible at communicating, can't manage their own time, are constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's hard to start removing these people from the company, but it's the only way to make it work.
It is all true, but it points to crappy management. You want to fire people, fire them. You can't keep them motivated, you failed as a manager. I keep saying this, but management class has gotten really used to easy approach to motivation ( pizza and threat of firing ).
If you have by yourself done something you can assume they can do something else on their own. The on their own is the important pieces.
When I take a junior or mid-level on I try to make sure that we talk about remote work during one-on-ones and that I make sure they have stuff outside of work to focus on or at least that they have a handle on this type of arrangement. In the first year I started doing this in 2018 I tried spending a couple of weeks just working and not leaving my apartment and by the end of it I had gone pretty toasty.
People forget that just as individuals have to work differently to do remote work, managers have to manage differently to do it too. To truly transition will require different habits of mind and a good understanding of what we actually need as people to survive.
Is the debate wfh is worse for these juniors or these types of juniors didn't exist before and won't with the rise of llms. Why cater to them now? Aren't they a product of over inflated salaries and expanding the industry too rapidly so quality of candidate drops? Isn't that correction going on right now?
Unless we're talking remote and international, in which case that obviously wouldn't work, but I assume you wouldn't apply to those jobs anyway.
That way you can get your office and some coworkers, and others can do what is best for them, and the company doesn't have to lease a huge office space. Win-win-win?
A: What if people could choose whether they want to live in decadent West or socialist paradise? B: Problem is, we want those who want to live here and ones that don't.
And that, in a nutshell is the issue with WFH. There are people who think they know better and feel obligated to enforce that view.
I used to commute 1.5 hours each way until I got a car, then it dropped to 1 hour.
10-15 hours per week = 6-9% of my life - including time asleep.
Taking 16 hours of waking time per week, that gives me 112 hours to work with. Now that commute eats 9-13% of my conscious time.
Let's assume a standard 40 hour workweek - 35% of my waking time. Add in those compulsory daily highway joyrides, and conscious time spent on work rises up to 48%. Depressed yet? This includes the weekend. During the workweek you'll spend between (8 + 2) / 16 and (8 + 3) / 16 = 62.5-68.75% of your waking moments on work.
Now consider that car ownership + fuel + insurance could eat up to 30% of an average person's post-tax income.
Fuck all of that, a lot.
Employees can get together at quarterly / monthly off-sites, and juniors should be encouraged to get involved in community activities straight out of college. I'm not sacrificing my life and family time so you can stare at my grumpy face in the next cubicle.
Constantly the office is treated as the only existing socialization source and it really makes me wonder what people’s lives at home are out of work.