Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees
colorado.edu
colorado.edu
> Researchers analyzed survey data from 7,704 employees at a large healthcare organization.
I’ve been remote and worked for remote companies for a long time. In my observation, the well-being is bimodal. The people who adapt well to remote thrive. There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life, and lack of externally enforced routine.
It’s really sad when the latter happens because it’s almost always someone who was hired for their great work and abilities. Then over time they get drained and you can see that the remote work wasn’t what they expected.
It’s basically impossible to predict who will fall into each category at the interview stage, or at least I can’t do it. Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
Some people just don’t want to work next to their gaming PC, completely unsupervised. Others live alone and don’t live near their friends and family. Both these groups (can) suffer from a fully remote environment.
because, as someone else i replied to in the thread points out, miserable employees perform worse.
then again i live in the UK where we actually have workers rights.
I built my first little company as remote-first before we knew what to call it. I had to be very careful who I would hire, since only a relatively small percentage of folks (around a third, by my estimate) were ready and able to be self-motivated and disciplined enough to work remotely.
And my company was built with remote work in mind from the ground up. Asynchronous comms, everything written down, very well established information systems and work process, etc.
I then worked for a company that became remote by accident. They were obviously an in-person company that never once sat down to figure out a remote-first work culture. It was the most exhausting and unproductive work of my life. Constant meetings, almost no concept of async comms, etc. That company would have worked 1,000% better as an in-person traditional company and the lack of mature process or strict guidelines could have been papered over.
My rule of thumb now is that any company that expects you to be on more than a very small handful of Zoom calls a week is not worth working for. If you need meetings to sync up work like that, you likely have horrible remote work infrastructure, tools, processes, and culture.
It seems a number of companies somehow combine the absolutely worst aspects of in-person work with the worst aspects of remote work and expect to see good results.
Now - my absolute favorite way to work - was when my little company got acquired by a larger company and I effectively ran a small division where we worked remotely, but came into the office if/when we felt like it. That worked because everyone else had to be in the office though, so it wasn't exactly fair. But man, being able to take a 15 minute train ride downtown to spend a day or two in the office each week if I felt like it after I woke up each morning was by far the best of both worlds for me. I could do different types of work in each location to sort of break up my week, and get the benefits of the in-person socialization and relationship building with the lack of scheduling stress and deep focus time remote working gives you.
Still though. I cannot stress enough how shitty Zoom calls are. Anything to do with video calls will be completely banned from any org I run should I ever get the startup itch again. At least on the engineering side of things. Either in person meetings if you must, or phone calls so people don't need to be uselessly staring at a screen for hours each day.
I've found that following an Open Source model of collaboration works well for remote companies. And it gave me a hiring pool of talent with demonstrable abilities to get shit done without needing to be in an office. No open source project is running daily standup video calls.
The people who were burning out at home would become revived and re-energized when they came into the office for something and would stay that way for a week or two.
Then they would slide back into burnout and social problems (assuming benign interactions were hostile in Slack or that people were backstabbing the. was common) the longer they were away from the office.
Some people had the self-awareness to start bringing themselves back to the office for a few days each week and would directly admit they struggled to work from home.
It’s really not uncommon and readily acknowledged in every offline remote work environment I’ve been in. It’s only on social media where you run into claims that remote works well for everyone.
For instance, I've observed dynamics like what you describe at various orgs, and what they had in common was a lack of psychological safety. If people are responding defensively to benign messages then it tends to mean they have a reason to expect hostile messages. Hostile messages are not a given.
One common way this arises: a company ostensibly offers flexible remote work, but in practice strongly prefers in-office work, and enforces this via social pressure. Remote work has a small social cost that accumulates each full day that one works remotely. These remote-oriented workers then have to periodically show up at the office primarily to ingratiate themselves to management and their peers. This is incredibly common, and might even be the default configuration for an org that permits flexible WFH.
I don't think this is intentionally malicious, BTW. It's simply what happens when you make a policy shift without considering your team culture as well so that both working styles are supported as first-class citizens.
Nothing else in my career has ever changed my opinion about a CEO as quickly and drastically as hearing them completely dismiss it as noise, when hundreds of employees explain how negatively forced RTO affects their well-being and productivity.
I started playing around with the idea of how much it costs to have a job based on location and it was interesting to see how different variables changed the final wage and how that played out against a map of the city.
Depending on the city, you could easily be looking at a 100% cost rise in rent, a few thousand on car maintenance and gasoline depending on your car a year, a few thousand on food, about ~12% reduction in wage, and a few days of lost PTO.
Yes it’s “easier” (sometimes) than working, but it’s still time I dedicate to work. Its entire purpose exists because work exists.
I used to have a really gnarly commute (1.5 hours one way, so 3 hours total, 3.5-4 if there was an accident). The level to which it affected my finances is one thing, but it absolutely demolished my quality of life. I couldn’t socialize, sleep, or even cook for myself due to the exhaustion. And spending minimum of 12 hours a day sitting destroyed my body and mental health. Not to mention traffic is not peaceful, it’s stressful. You have to constantly be “on” and paying attention. Even a single second of distraction can be an accident.
On the employee side, the solution is to ALWAYS factor in your commute time. A job that pays 20,000 dollars more a year can easily not be worth it if the commute is insane. If you have to double your rent to make it work, it's probably not worth it.
I factor in commute like I factor in other benefits, like health insurance and PTO. My salary can't necessarily replace those, so they implicitly have a higher value than money alone. It would take a really nice salary to override them. And I think that's why we see absurd salaries in places like Seattle. They know employee's are doing this calculus, they can't afford to pay 100,000 like you can in, say, Texas.
This is I think where hybrid (with weekly attendance) really makes more sense in theory than in practice, ending up as worst of both worlds depending.
With in-office you pay a premium for location that is good for commuting.
With remote you can choose a cheaper location without the commute constraint (maybe 50% off), somewhat offset by needing more space to setup a proper home office (add back 10-20%).
With hybrid you still need to be close enough that 2 days/week of commuting is tolerable and ALSO need space for a home office.
I start with the stated wage on a job description and attempt to calculate the value of any additional benefits to arrive at the hourly rate a potential employer thinks my time is worth. Vehicle cost is similarly straightforward since wear and mileage calculators are standardized and you're already budgeting for parking if you need to.
However. Once you collect a handful of data points the rest of the process is entirely personal. For example, a one-hour commute each way sounds terrible unless that's the only time in the day you have to yourself, but if the traffic is never smooth or you need to switch trains three times it might be a wash.
The key point is to determine if a specific activity is solely work-related and if I get anything else out of it, and then apply the dollar value this potential employer sets on my time as above.
Now take a look at your food situation. Do you and your partner meal prep every Sunday without fail? Do you start your day at the Starbucks drive thru? Now take a look at your responsibilities. Do you have children? Do you have pets? Now take a look at your wardrobe. The list goes on and it's all situational.
The interesting part of the project was seeing how much home location + commute options + work location affect net pay by just dragging a few markers around a map of the city. I was adding average residential rent by location last time I touched this and felt like the project was turning into a map of the de facto minimum wage in my area.
To answer your question this was $20k net to me, mainly from maintaining a vehicle, eating out of the house, and keeping up my in-office appearance.
We all know networking is an important part of your career. As an introvert, networking is a lot easier when I'm in a space where people already are and I can be seen, even if I'm not always being heard. And when I am heard in the office, it's usually among small groups of people, maybe 10 or less. Having to network by being actively visible and speaking in big open channels with 2-3 different teams and a few layers of management all watching, that's terrifying as an introvert but that's also how most companies run their chat systems because otherwise everyone has hundreds of channels that they have to keep track of and remember whose in what places and copy discussions around. Since it's easier just to have massive groups of people in one channel and have everyone use the larger channels most of the time, being remote and on slack is actually far more draining to me as an introvert. I also do best keeping tabs with what's going on when I can keep one ear on the other things going on around me instead of having to stop what I'm doing and intentionally scroll through pages and pages of slack messages.
And yes, because I'm introverted, being in person with a team of people that includes extroverts means I get human social connections that I need and would otherwise not seek out because, again I'm an introvert.
I will never go back.
This used to be me but pair programming / in-call collaborative working solved 100% of all of those problems.
Even the work/life boundary was solved because as soon as I dropped off the call at the end of the day my brain immediately switched off work mode.
These days the first thing I do in a new team is try to suss out who else is a bit like this and try to work out a collaborative working pattern that works for all of us.
It's not just more fun it's almost unreasonably effective. People who work non collaboratively tend to make more mistakes, bugs and worse decisions.
Those collaborative conversations are so often fruitful in ways I don't expect.
building in an extra 30 minutes on team catchup calls just to hang out at the end. usually end up talking about some work stuff, but in a more relaxed/social way.
demo/learning sessions. how to use databricks, how to do X, how X works, this cool thing we built.
One of my coworkers in an old company set up a "slack" watercooler channel he would always pair in with an explicit invitation that anybody who wanted to drop in could at any time, even if it was just for a chat. That was cool.
(This is something I've repeatedly noticed in discussions about getting people in-office, and about open office plans vs individual offices: the same managers who push these changes through in the name of "collaboration" create a bunch of other management processes that strongly disincentivize collaborative work.)
But in environments where I've been able to do this effectively, it's always been great, far better than going of totally on my own!
this is enormously self destructive as well. when employees are stack ranked, pitted against each other, discouraged from collaborating the quality of work drops off a cliff, customers get unhappy and profits suffer.
executives are perfectly rational about this though. more profit usually doesn't matter to them anywhere near as much as having more power over their reports does.
Accommodated employees perform better. Non-accommodated employees perform worse.
For some people, an office is an accommodation - they need that not-home space with other people in it. For others, a home office is an accommodation - a very convenient/local space with very few distractions.
It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I also really reject this boomer-esque idea that in-office helps underperformers underperform less. Instead I find it helps under-performers _appear_ to underperform less because they can chat up the boss and more visibly do performative stuff like showing up early or leaving late.
remote work was a blessing for me. but turned out the ceo didn't want us remote working.
i tried repeatedly to communicate what i needed to do my best with my boss and the ceo. but the ceo fought me on all of it.
The problem I was talking about was with people who asked to work from home but struggled with it.
Some of them did start coming in to the office more when they realized what was happening. Many did not, believing that work from home was best for them.
this sounds like the WFH people might be treated the same way as the in-office people. as in you're retaining an in-office culture but people can choose to WFH. that is not the same thing as being a remote working company. the culture is completely different in an org that successfully does remote working.
as a functional example on the social side, people booking in time to just hang out and chat. even if it's work chat but just more relaxed chat. build in some social element beyond just treating it as cogs in a 9-5 machine. add an extra 30 minutes to a team update call to just have a chat with everyone -- including folks in the office.
edit -- to be clear, managers need to be doing that ^
And with RTO, it seems that wasn't even rock bottom, now that employers are straight-facedly suggesting things like "hot desking".
> It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I agree, but this required corporations to admit they're the problem in not properly accommodating employees. That is the problem: corporations would far rather blame performance on the employee than any sort of self-reflection.
(¹as accommodated by the employer. Even when I worked in an office, I did have a custom keyboard, but it's something I paid for.)
Yeah, you might. I assume you're a principled person.
In my experience, the less principled simply leave their shit all over the place for us to deal with.
I interpret the study findings not as remote workers being happier, but on-site workers being less happy in remote-oriented companies than on-site workers in on-site-oriented companies.
Now maybe my employer has reason to dislike that I’m probably like 80% of the worker I would have been if we were in office, but the 80% has been enough to exceed expectations on my performance reviews so there doesn’t seem to be a problem. He has the equivalent of an F-150 that he only ever uses to commute to the office. People seem to be into that.
Then I moved and now its a 30 min drive. Not a nice commute.
Latterly I had about a 30 minute driving commute again but I was doing so much travel that I wasn't consistently in the office that much.
And I found that going for a walk or something like that to replace the commute didn't have the same effect, for a number of reasons. There was the mental hurdle of forcing myself to try taking the walk instead of going straight from A to B since I was already there. There was the fact that while I could try to flush home concerns from my mind on the walk, coming back to my home where all those home concerns are right there for me to notice when I walk through the door meant that all that mental flushing was for naught.
Now I admit that I am fortunate enough to have a commute where I'm rarely in bumper to bumper traffic, and it's less than a 30 minute drive. But at least for me, a commute is a vital part of my work routine.
I was childless and petless then though. The thought of squeezing everything in between school drop-offs, pick-ups, after-school scheduled activities, and dog walks is when things get really annoying.
That never comes up though as the dogma must survive.
Working remote during COVID sucked and felt unmoored.
Once I had a robust IRL social life and could go see some live music again, it was great.
It also depends if you live in tiny apartment or if you have a house with a dedicated space.
The same person can take to it depending on the circumstances.
(Not to mention that, in both contexts, it's very hard to pull apart being remote vs in-office from other aspects of the work and culture.)
Half of group therapy is just being in a group. Groups that require you to be rested and fit and provide a local social network orthogonal to everything else in your life include intramural sports, hiking clubs, radio repeating, crafts and markets... and they're all comfortable with nervous individuals showing up.
This was the major one for me, in addition to the other stuff you mentioned. The "always at work" feeling was reinforced by the management style of remote work being like, we expect you to be generally available to respond at any time in a 12 hour window, sometimes more (because everyone works their own schedules across multiple timezones). In an office this separation is clean, and if I'm responding to messages or working at home, it's generally accepted this is outside the norm and I'm perfectly free to just shut the laptop off until the next morning 99% of the time unless I am on-call. It's nice.
The first thing I did when I went back fully in-office was tear down my home office and turn it into a game room. I generally do not even use a computer in my home. Sometimes we have enforced WFH days due to various things or events, but I established the understanding with management that generally I will not be expected to work full days from home outside of emergencies and I take those days off.
I understand some people love it, and I have a good office environment which helps, but the downsides (general office annoyances, commuting, lunch expenses, clothing expenses, etc) way outweigh the downsides of working remote for me. I got severely depressed and burnt out very quickly.
That's not a management style, it's a 12 hour on call which needs to be compensated without appropriately higher pay and comply with work time regulations.
I often tell people that I'm unusually well suited to remote work because I've had a lot of practice. Starting in high school I was out more days than I was in owing to health problems, yet I still managed to knock out 11 AP classes because I got really serious about reading the textbook and actually studying on my own time. This was even before I discovered spaced repetition systems.
By the time I actually got to college I realized these techniques were not only more effective and enjoyable for me than sitting down in lectures, but that the vast majority of students never actually had to build these muscles to begin with. They really struggle when the courses get too big to cram into a class session, but it's not because they're dumb or anything - it's literally just an endurance sport they've never played.
I feel those same muscles are the ones I've been using in remote work, which I've had the good fortune to do my entire career in at least a 60% capacity and more often a 100% capacity. Remote work likely feels deeply unnatural at first, to people who aren't used to putting in focused sweat at a desk in their own room far beyond what traditional education typically requires.
I hope my own children develop this ability too, although I'm not really sure how to get them there.
This reminds me of a CS class I had in college with a bad professor. I knew the guy by reputation. We had like 4 tests that class, and the only time I stepped foot in the class room was to take his tests. I didn't bother with his lectures. I simply read the book and read the supplemental materials. The looks of outrage I got when it was revealed I got the highest grade in the class were priceless.
One thing I don’t see mentioned in these discussions much is that someone might be perfectly content WFH when given clear goals and autonomy to execute in a neutral political environment, but do a few unexplained mass layoffs, give muddy direction or tighten the leash with stricter policies or new monitoring software and watch paranoia and depression take root (this is true in-office as well but I think gets amplified over Slack due to a stronger prisoner’s dilemma effect).
Unfortunately due to the power differential, any disruption to output caused by these situations will still be blamed on the individual contributor.
Slack and Zoom are a massive parts of the problem. Because "my boss can read it" sure does curtail a lot of conversations.
You are left in a situation where you miss out on all sorts of hints that people just aren't putting out. A string of tepid yes's on the way to get coffee is a much different signal than a string of yes's with no context in Slack. Things may be different again on zoom because of equipment quality and connectivity and peoples willingness to be a certain way on camera (and when looking at themselves).
I have seen at least half a dozen work place kerfuffles in the last 5 years that would have been avoided entirely if people were regularly co-located.
Unless you're small enough to get away with a very open and free culture (both business and personal) then there is a lot being left on the table that requires work to be re-gained. Many organizations are still bad at this.
One thing that helps a lot is occasionally mixing in (non-recorded) video or phone calls, and having a lightweight way to initiate one.
Text chat: "quick call this afternoon?" "3pm ET?" ":thumb-up:" <call added to calendars>
For that matter, making 1-on-1 text chats mostly private reduces the chilling effect of perceived boss panopticon. The company might retain logs for various reasons, but the only access is through Legal, and only for exceptional events.
(Though, there may soon be an additional chilling effect on communication within a company: people will realize it's an individual problem if the company's third-party team communication SaaS is profiling them individually in company chats "for AI training", and using/selling that various ways. There's already a lot of SOP performative and gaming behavior in our field, especially when it comes to obtaining jobs and getting good performance evaluations and promotions, so we can extrapolate what will happen.)
I load the dishwasher and do other small chores while I have 1:1s and other non-hands on keyboard meetings. It’s amazing for my home life. Thank goodness for modern noise canceling headphones.
I don’t feel like these small social cues or in-person signals are actually that valuable when it comes to completing tasks to make the company money. It’s really easy to avoid kerfuffles: hire the right people who exude the right values and don’t care for drama. Don’t hire people who are vindictive assholes.
I was brought on to a team as WFH - there was an office, but most of the team I worked with were in different states. But a lot of folks had left 6-12 months previous. I was stepping in to a void, and just had some jira tickets.
Manager above me wasn't technical, didn't know my project, just said "get done what you can". I worked and filled out timesheet. I was pinging the ticket owner, no response. Tickets were for an external client. Asked manager to arrange meeting. Took 2 weeks. Got a meeting with the external client using the system who had put these tickets in. "That was Jeremy, he doesn't work here any more... I think he was talking to Glen". Well.. Glen left our team 6 months earlier.
Emily at the client I was talking to had no idea what this was for, cause she only started 2 months earlier. Another week later she said "I don't think we need any of this - whoever asked for it is gone, and I have no info".
I had recorded... probably 130 hours on a few of these tickets mostly just trying to get stuff to build. Emily couldn't update tickets because it was tied to Jeremy who had left.
2 weeks later I had some department head at our company about 4 levels above me call me on my personal phone and start yelling at me telling me I'd put the project way over budget, I was 6 months behind schedule, and was jeopardizing the entire client relationship, and she was threatening to fire me. Apparently the whole budget for the project was 60 hours - I'd more than doubled that plus whatever people before me had done, etc. But... the client contacts I had had no idea what it was for, or really even who wanted it in the first place. I remember this woman saying "the budget was only 60 hours - you blew it up!" I said "I never gave those estimates in the first place, and there's no one here who even knows what this code is to even ask". "None of that matters, we may lose this client because of your incompetence...."
That was pure insanity. I left shortly after - already had something else lined up, but was on the fence about leaving (devil you know vs devil you don't). At that point, I knew I'd had enough of this devil. I left for another remote/WFH position.
This was also ... towards the end of 2020 - depths of covid, lockdowns, etc. Crazy times indeed.
Yep - that was similar to this. Not a moment of "oh... hang on... let me dig deeper". It was just an explosion. And FWIW, I've exploded on to other people a couple of times in my career - it's not fun. But I also can recognize it's a symptom of something deeper than just the issue being yelled about, and usually very unrelated to the topic at hand.
I personally don't have less paranoia now I am in the office 3 days a week (and probably won't have less when I will soon be forced to come in 5 days a week either), but I only talk to "my" team via Teams no matter if I'm at home or in the office, because they're spread over several locations (and no, it doesn't make sense to do RTO in these conditions, but that just reinforces my certainty that all the talk about "increasing efficiency" is just BS and they simply hope to get rid of people, no matter how competent they are). In the meantime, I don't really care one way or the other, but if they want to get rid of me, they should at least offer me some money for it, I won't do them the favor of just leaving voluntarily (especially not in this economy).
In most workplaces before ~2020 individual teams had designated desks/islands - all team members were sitting next to each other, actually every individual had their own permanent desk.
And you could have a quick chat, pair program, and even adhoc whole team meeting by just removing your noise-cancelling headphones and talking to each other.
Though of course bigger/longer meetings would still be better in a meeting room because of big screen, not being nuisance to other people ...etc.
Most workplaces now do some variant of flexi-desks. At best a group of teams is allocated some specific area/desks, at worst it's completely random which desk you get.
And to have a chat/meeting you often need to still do it via conference call, or get into a meeting room.
Between that, and usually having some people from the team still WFH on that day (many workplaces don't even have enough work desks or cafeteria - for everyone to come into office on the same day) - you now need more meeting rooms than before.
And for some reason they didn't add more meeting rooms, even when redesigning office buildings.
It is easy to imagine that the ER staff might report lower well-being than someone on the admin staff who works from home on their laptop all day.
It also requires you to be a self-starter.
I've been working remotely since 2007. Thew few times I've had client visits reminds me all over again why I hated working in an office.
Remote work was a godsend. I started working remote in 2015 and never looked back.
By the end of the COVID lockdowns, I was ready to RTO, at least as least hybrid. Just to get out of the house and see people other than my wife and dog during the work week.
But, half of my team (plus my direct boss) is remote and couldn't come in even if they wanted. So, all meetings are still on Zoom. But, at least for the half who are here, I can get some water-cooler gossip and face-to-face 1-on-1s.
I am now one of the millions out of work techies yet Im starting a new job and career in healthcare soon. Definitely am missing remote work but i need to pay my bills. Further, IT especially web design and development is a dying field especially with the upcoming voice Internet paradigm shift I see and in which Open AI is working on now (wrote about such here https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/openais-rumored-speaker-bel...)
Not everyone is as well suited to it because you have to implement your own boundaries and discipline. I used to get a majority of my social interaction at work, now I have to make sure I get out with friends, or even just to the store, to make sure I'm not just in my house all day toggling between work and personal life.
But any downside I have to manage like that is more than offset by being at home, with the temperature how I like it (I always froze in offices), with my dogs, able to go pick up my kids from school, and with an ideal desk setup (43" monitor, quiet uninterrupted space, able to use voice mode on Codex without disrupting others) that I couldn't have in an office.
I'm the opposite. I avoided remote work, figuring I'd hate it. Then COVID forced it upon me. And now I won't even consider a job unless it's remote-first. I'd allow for remote-friendly definitions of hybrid though.
I work remote when and how I want, it's great.
But there's days and even weeks where "I just want to go in" and that's helpful with meetings, work, socialization.
Different people like different modes and even at different times.
I know a number of folks that work remote, and they are on Zoom, all day.
That would drive me nuts! [actually, it's not really a drive; more of a short putt -Ed.]
I use Zoom frequently, but always find it to be exhausting. I guess that's just me, though.
But I'm also retired, and really leaning into not ever going back into the office again.
It's definitely not just you. It's the "camera on" portion that exhausts me. I do frequent Teams audio calls throughout the day as my team is across a very large area. When I interview candidates, it's generally camera on and I can only do 1-2 day.
When I was playing around with remote work, (before the pandemic and before it was cool) - I figured most of this can be offset by just going to a coworking place - and even better - friendships you form from there seem stronger, because people are less anchored to the company and more to the “place” - more open to friendships. Plus you can pick and switch your “office” as desired for your mode of travel and preferences (or even switch cities, travel around)
I am not looking for a job, just trying to figure out what would be sufficient to convince you of good remote work skills. I am happy where I am at (a full remote company, yes)
The best is remote with an option to come into the office.
This way you are maximizing flexibility and allowing workers to self select into their preferred way of working.
Anything else is suboptimal.
I always strive to do my best at work and make a good impression. But I have absolutely 0 interest in the product, the mission, the culture, the personal or collective aspirations of owners, shareholders, leaders or "leadership", or who they are as people. I generally like my coworkers and we get along, but that's not worth a 2 hour round trip in the car, or using a public washroom, or eating in a cafeteria, or sitting uncomfortably at a desk all day, or listening to everyone's boring stories.
The best part though, is no team building nonsense, no company BBQs or pizza days, no casual Fridays, no boss dropping in for a one on one, no psychos trying to get the energy level up with a "LETS GOOOO TEAM!!"
Just doing a good job for good pay and being treated like an adult. I didn't know working could be like this when I was starting out.
personal relationships are very important, arguably more important that your raw performance.
but sure there are enough exceptions to turn up once in a blue moon to have drinks with the new peeps who seem nice on slack.
Not everyone is like that. It's not cynicism but a fact of life that some people do not get on with people you find in tech companies, IT departments, offices, etc or do not enjoy the environment.
You should examine your own narrow view of this and realize that there are many types of people out there other than people like you. That someone else experiences life in a different way isn't a personal failing.
> Meanwhile some of them have personal lives so bad or they're so afraid of being alone that they genuinely do like it.
One of the definitions of cynical is "bitterly or sneeringly distrustful, contemptuous, or pessimistic". I'm not trying to argue that my way is the only way, I'm just pointing out that some people (me) have fulfilling personal lives AND enjoy chit-chatting with coworkers in-person sometimes.
I think we can all agree that remote work is great for some people. And we should be able to agree that some people genuinely enjoy things about working in an office too.
Friendships often form out of shared experiences. Work is one kind of shared experience. So is joining a club, or going to a concert.
I think a lot of people don’t do those things, because they’re so tired from work. Which is understandable, but then you have to make friends at work. And that’s really not ideal.
Why is it a problem for you that they don't enjoy eating in canteens? Why does working with you mean signing up to be your best friend?
WFH people want to do work, take meetings, and just overall get things done. Sure they also want to be at home so they can use a 15 min break between meetings to start laundry.
RTO people want to do work, take meetings, and overall get things done while there are others around them working. RTO people need other people around them constantly.
This is the conflict. WFHers are happy without forcing RTOers to work in the same manner. RTOers are only happy when they force WFHers into the office.
WFHers want to be left alone to do their jobs. RTOers need others to be around them to do their job.
It’s pretty simple, in my opinion.
They want both the specific job and the ability to work from home.
There is a zero sum element to it.
The best solution is for workplaces to be up front and consistent in their policies and let people select in or out.
other people grew up with healthy, cooperative relationships
Separately, why do some commenters think that their personal experience is representative of Everyone? It's so mysterious to me. Not everyone who wants to WFH or RTO have the same needs, perspectives, trade-offs, living situations, working styles, etc. The world has nuance.
Without unsolicited personal opinions, there wouldn't be much conversation. And what then, have only people state verifiable truths? Only permit the exchange of pure fact?
> WFHers want to be left alone to do their jobs. RTOers need others to be around them to do their job.
This is just not true. It makes a sweeping statement about two groups of people with certain preferences, then assertions about how they work / what they want.
People can express opinions, while investigating (or at least leaving room for) nuance.
If you work from home and I work from the office, you're forcing me to collaborate with you using remote tools, which is just remote work with a longer commute. In this sense, (some) WFHers are only happy when they force RTOers into Microsoft Teams.
Of course, there's a much better compromise available to us. I could be on an in-office team with others like me, you could be on a WFH team with others like you, and we'd all be happy.
Your conclusion is exactly my point. People should work on teams that fit their work habits. Where that falls down is when management hires for WFH but then asks those workers to RTO.
You're completely leaving out that WFHers are forcing the RTOers to work in a completely different (and in my opinion worse) way to accommodate the WFHers.
> WFHers want to be left alone to do their jobs. RTOers need others to be around them to do their job.
Or RTOers want to be able to collaborate with their co-workers while WFHers want to sneak away to do laundry and make it impossible to communicate with them in an efficient manner? I don't need them around just to work, I need them around so that I can have a dialogue with them, instead of sending a message that may or may not be answered this week because I have no idea if they are even "at work". I'm exaggerating, but I hope you were too.
Second, if WFHers aren’t available and responsive, they should be put on a PIP and then let go if they don’t improve. WFH is not an excuse to not work. With my team, everyone responds quickly. If they don’t, they don’t last very long.
Debatable. They take issue with getting dressed and acting appropriately in an office, I can't imagine they're particularly hard working people given a commute is a hard no for them. You'll complain you haven't got time to do the work next
And if you're job can be done without anyone needing to speak to you, or you to them, it's probably not that important and ripe for AI to take off your hands, so enjoy it while you can autist
The WFH team I manage is one of the most capable and hardest working teams I’ve ever been on. You can take that outdated attitude elsewhere, thank you.
We collaborate all day long on teams. Various work focused and non work focused chats are constantly happening.
I love how you couldn't think of an example of work other than a teams meeting lol is that all you do WFH then?
That reminds me of a sign I saw in a handicapped parking spot: "Being an asshole is not a disability".
If someone does their work properly, and you're upset at their lack of sociability, you're the problem.
I’ve seen so many contractors who think they’re so smart for being contractors and not loyal to any kind of company… turns out they do the same shit an employee does just gets paid 5x less, and when they’re booted no one really gives gives a shit about them. Okay…
Reminds me of the folks I tell I work in "IT", and they think I fix printers all day.
Nah you also come on comment sections to brag about a wage you got decades ago. Times have changed old man
But sure, take offence and presume I'm bragging. I imagine you're a lot of fun to be around.
How can you be fine with having 0 interest in a job but commuting is some kind of deal breaker? You managed to man up about the rest of the stuff but not the commute?
No wonder America is fucked. My friend visited an office over there once and EVERY SINGLE PERSON in there was morbidly obese, single finger typing. I'm not surprised they complain about having to drive, next they'll be complaining about the actual work and how it doesn't fulfill them the peasants
I work 8 hours a day for $X in pay. And it takes 2 hours in the car to get there, so it's really $X for 10 hours of my time plus some gasoline (unless I drive an electric).
Then Covid happens, and work from home becomes a real possibility. Now the deal is $X for 8 hours, not 10, because I don't have to drive to the office and back. I like that deal better, because I get two hours of my life back every day.
Now you want me to go back to the office every day, losing that two hours, for no more money? And the reason you give me is that I get to hang out with my coworkers? No, I don't like them that much.
If that's the choice probably not, but fuck me, just move or get a closer job if you hate the commute. Sounds like you live somewhere with no jobs, which is an adjacent issue, not every job is miles away.
I'm not saying it's not better than working in an office.... Clearly not having to smile, have clothes on, be polite to anyone are all benefits but a job isn't meant to fulfill you. If you had skills that were in demand youd be calling the shots, but as like me youre just a peon, you take what you can get. Wage slavery is shit full stop, why would anyone want to work for a living when there's this option called being rich and not having to lift a finger?
Complaining about the fucking commute just gets to me. Your grandparents probably worked twelve hour shifts six days a week and would get the sack for being legitimately ill, our slog doesn't even compare
They didn’t control for occupation, pay, managerial status etc.. An on-site physical job like nurse, facilities, or technician was compared to predominantly remote administrative jobs.
60+ minute commute times are very common where I live. If you are anywhere outside of the downtown area you either pay for parking (expensive) and have a shorter commute, or you use public transit (cheap) and have a long commute.
When I used to commute to an office it was easily an hour to an hour and a half each way every day. I hated it
In the poor rural area my hometown is located, 1-3h+ commutes aren't unusual, partially out of necessity (there aren't enough jobs nearby to sustain the population).
One answer to the parent's question is that I owned/own a house which was a pretty manageable 25 minute suburban commute which I wasn't going to sell just because I got a new job. (Which didn't last that long anyway.)
A lot of the people I know who went remote after COVID took remote jobs at new companies (remember “the great resignation”?) or moved to a new house because they thought they were done with commuting. Then their companies said they wanted everyone back.
You're on a board full of technologists. Many are in SF or Seattle or NYC. A 10minute commute means you live in a 5-20 Million dollar home in SF. Not sure how realistic that is.
I work in NYC. The salary doesnt support having a home in the city. Yes, it can support a 1br apt, perhaps a 2br with roommates. Definitely not accomodations for a family.
Laptop professionals who make enough money to own and buy a nice house in the suburbs but not FU money to buy in the city. I count myself in this category.
If you don't make enough to consider buying, you might as well rent close. If you are super rich, you can buy in the city or don't have to worry about building home equity.
You get to skip the commute and reap the benefits all day long. Even your diet improves. You can cook fresh or have delivered whatever you want. Your hygiene improves since nothing is preventing you from taking another shower or committing to more involved skincare. You clean your home more often. You're more likely to exercise throughout the day for natural stress relief. If you have any minor medical issues that need upkeep, you're already in the privacy of your own home.
This is not just a list of annoyances or frivolous luxuries for highly sensitive people. These are the basic building blocks for a better quality of life. These used to be the forever-deferred items at the bottom of my todo list stressing me out. Now they are integrated with my life and effortless. I'm no longer trapped in a cube and put on display. I can live like a human being and do whatever whenever wherever I want. My life is no longer oriented around running errands or physical presence.
I enjoy working in the office at my current place of employment... nice office space, small company, everyone who works there is great and the office is only 15 minutes away if there is no traffic.
But I live in Southern California, so when there is traffic that 15 minute commute balloons to 45-60 minutes.
So I work from home most of the time. I still go in a couple of times a week (voluntarily, not required) but there are no expectations of a set schedule so it is very easy for me to avoid heavy traffic commute times.
I'd have to get paid a lot more to sacrifice an additional 10 hours a week commuting. You can't just tack an additional ten hours worth of pay on, and even if the pay was excellent, I can't imagine this is something I can do long term. Losing three hours a day for a commute eats into so much social and sleep time.
Last sometimes commute (I traveled a lot) to a suburban office was much more manageable but the office shutdown at some point during COVID because of low use.
Zoom out. Being full remote means I don't even need a car. I can live in a walkable city with passenger rail in a low cost of living location. I can reduce my living expense to just food and utilities with a paid off house and no automobiles.
- WFH for high performers: fewer distractions because you can control your environment, less time wasted on commute, less time on non-work communication, etc. More flexibility, better control of your time and space.
- WFH for poor performers: No oversight so you choose to work less. You control your environment so you can add distractions - Meetings, TV, social media chores, family, leaving to go do stuff.
- Office for high performers: Constant series of distractions you can't control - social conversations, meetings, etc... keeping you from doing work.
- Office for low performers: Constant series of distractions you can't control letting you avoid work without repercussion. Meetings, Social time with coworkers, etc
But for team building—which, in very early stage companies is huge—and quick identification and resolution, in-person can be much better, in my experience. (Not always! Person, team, role, etc. dependent.)
There's a HUGE difference between in-person meetings and over Zoom. Teams in person—again, my experience—can move much faster because you can process social cues, body language, attention right there. There's zero latency.
This isn't to discount the distractions you're talking about, or the trade-offs of commute and cost-of-living to be near an office, etc. Very real.
But saying that high performers are better WFH and potatos are better in-office is not a universal truth.
Leadership left and there was a few years where no one else in the office was in the same teams or reporting chains. The majority of people were in a single office in another company. I found it very difficult to participate and was left out of most decisions. Then covid hit and everything changed. With everyone working from home remote networking opportunities were built, I was an equal part of every discussion. Now I am in a large fortune 500 organization with a mix of working arrangements and I don't have any issues networking. I like to think we do a pretty good job with junior participation as well. The main thing I'm missing is the rumour mill and the pulse on what unrelated roles like sales/finance are saying on the ground.
Maybe it depends on the nature of your work, but I think remote working revealed to everyone how much office "networking" was always kinda delusional.
For sure, networking is important, but I have never found opportunities talking to the same people in my fishbowl. It was almost impossible to talk to the right people within the organization in person, and cornering them is not a great first impression. Reaching out to them on Teams is a whole different ball game, and one that I think more people are good at. Getting the right attention from the right people is also easier in large group chats.
Apart from that, working remote is not strictly at home. There's a whole wide world out there to meet people and find opportunity.
I think different people benefit from it differently. Most people regardless of remote or in-office, put on their headphones and barely talk to anyone else all day, and being in the office has zero if not negative networking benefit for them.
Then there are a few "social butterflies" who know everyone in every department, and they benefit in various ways internally and externally. Internally maybe they can move a difficult cross-department project because they have friends there, which then comes back as praise and rewards. Externally maybe one of their friends get a better position somewhere else and poach them, etc. etc.
It's rare to see someone just walk into a business as a total outsider and charm their way in. See how well they handle unfamiliar people. Most of them will stay in their bubble. When you and your unfamiliar people are all nerds, you're actually in the best position to figure them out. They try to take the easy way out with flattery. Something like: "Oh, you all are so smart I couldn't possibly comment." before running back to their people. Does that really seem like a "social butterfly" to you?
Networking is one thing, but nepotism is another. I don't like working with people who can drag everyone else down. Small businesses are more vulnerable than anywhere else, yet that's where you see it most often.
Countryside, villages, islands would revive, less traffic, pollution, less unnecessary company and personal costs, more happy people and families, more opportunities globally, etc.
But no, some property owners in the centre are more important than this and we have to live in overcrowded cities. Kudos
I'm a big fan of flexibility, and certainly think companies should do their best to treat their employees as adults and let them do what works best for them and their teams. But it is really weird to me to watch an industry that has spent years trying to convince companies that hiring off-shore remote workers had all sorts of negative externalities on team cohesion and the development process suddenly fall head over heals in love with the idea of all companies going all in on "off-shore remote workers".
Just did a quick check and the Shoreline Costco to Pike Place at 9 on a Tuesday morning is 35m-65m according to Google Maps.
Before my team got a back to office order we had weekly meetings there.
Considering how malls are suffering I don't understand why they are not offering more options like this.
I guess if your office is really awful or your commute is ridiculously long it might be better. But all the talk you see about why working at an office is so bad for people's productivity cite the noise, distractions, unrelated chatter etc. Co-working spaces filled with people who aren't even on your team, coffee shops filled with angry customers and stay at home parents toting their toddlers and parks full of barking dogs and biting insects seem like they would all be their own cacophony of distractions and noises to rival even some of the worst open office plans.
Also at least around where I am, co-working spaces cost between $100-500 / month, and the coffee at the coffee shops while better than what is at the office is also $3-5 a cup. The parks are admittedly free, but the ergonomics of the tree trunk and root system leave a little to be desired. I'm sure it works for some people, but if I'm not spending my day working on my front porch in the sun with my dog, I think I'd rather be in the office instead of in the corner of a local coffee shop.
I can't believe people need studies to see that. All you need is some common sense.
With that said, I'm grateful to have made the transition to remote working, because I got to be there for my daughter's early years.
Now I still work remote, but on my own terms, as an independent consultant. The difference is night and day.
What I learned is that remote vs hybrid vs in-office doesn't matter nearly as much as feeling engaged and effective in your role. If you feel that, it doesn't matter where you are.
That's time to run errands, learn a skill, exercise, sleep, read, do nothing... it's almost as though our time is valuable and we don't like wasting it.
The downside of going remote is there can be a lot of project momentum lost in coordination issues. More chat based meetings, and less actual product out the door. =3
Ikigai:
https://myzenpath.com/purpose-meaning/ikigai-reason-for-bein...
In my opinion that's the crux of this debate: social needs vs social remedies.
If you have high social needs but don't have a strong personal social network, then an office is a great remedy. It solves the problem for you by default.
Remote only seems to work for the inverse. Lower social needs, or a strong social network outside of work, or some mix of the two.
I'm fairly extroverted (as far as engineers go) and I'm grateful to have a social network I've cultivated personally. So remote has fit well for me. I can get my work done to a high standard without the obligation, then turn around and spend purposeful time with friends and family.
It's perfect for me, but not for everybody, and you can see that in the comments here.
What remote really did was expose how many people were relying on office culture to meet their social needs. That's not a bad thing. It just surfaced something that went under-noticed for a long time.
Also worth noting: Frontiers in Psychology is a low-impact journal.
"These findings challenge assumptions that remote work undermines connection and retention. Instead, they suggest that remote work can support well-being and that well-being, not proximity, is a key factor in employee retention."
What is interesting to me here is the conflict between well-being and corporate interests. It is high time that well-being is being mentioned and considered as the definitive measure of employee retention.
If you already juggle multiple dependencies in your life (small children and/or in school, elder care, other dependents and special situations, dual study), or simply have too many interests, hobbies and love to do more things outside your work, remote work just feels revolutionary, to the point you just resent going to the office.
In the same vein, the office is now high-pressure because of economic anxiety. It's one thing to hear about someone getting fired who was only ever a head on a screen versus someone getting fired that you knew in person. The current US administration has been hostile to the background of many of my respected colleagues and this creates fear in the office. It also creates anti-competitive incentives.
Additionally, The University of Colorado Boulder profits from online degrees and this link was more a marketing tactic than an academic piece. I think fully remote work works for some, and not for others. Even still, an online program may be the best way to find out.
Aww! All this while, I didn't know RTO came from a place of genuine worry and care about your workers. There I was thinking, that RTO was more about control and domination. Forgive me master, for I knew not.
If you're remote and there's an "upgrade" remote job, there's very little friction to switch beyond the usual onboarding. You don't have to find a local job for your spouse, sell your house, switch your kids' schools, etc. You just mail your old laptop in and wait for a new one to arrive. Maybe you have to get up early or work later to match the local time zone if you have many in-office coworkers.
And, if you work at a big company that pays well, it can also let you get off the hamster wheel early and "leave your job" for retirement by moving to a medium- or low cost of living area while continuing to get paid an outsized amount for the area.
Remote work benefits are much bigger than a paycheck
All that to say, like everything in life, remote work is a trade off.
Meetings depend on the company, my team gets a lot of information transferred quickly whether it's on a call, in person, or async over teams messages.
Spyware - definitely sucks, I luckily have a pretty lax IT group (I'm part of them) but we're not super concerned unless something is malicious.
I think to some, remote work is a trade off. To others, remote work is a gigantic benefit. I would take remote work over a 25% raise, for example. Others might not.
To each their own, but for me - not putting miles on my. vehicles, getting 2+ hours of the day back, and being able to hit laundry / other chores over lunch is amazing for my work/life balance.
This biggest issue is that new and middle managers are only trained to manage, not to lead. They feel that they must be able to reach out and touch someone to manage, hence RTO.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFZpJ9mWwAEfdhv?format=jpg&name=...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIjqR2aWMAErm9E?format=jpg&name=...
Of course I am going to score higher in the well being department. :)
I love the freedom.
Do often think about working out of our camper but it never really happens. Cheaper and warmer to sit in the home made office I put up in 2017...
But I do envy a good van setup.
My role (eng director) consists basically of 50-60 half hour meetings a week, back to back, with people all over the country/world. It wouldn't be tenable in an open office and it wouldn't even be tenable if I had to physically move across a campus in between meetings. Did people just work/manage across fewer projects and teams?
That's how all engineering leaders I have worked with have worked.
Not to mention the number of times that I would end up taking a “meeting” in my boss’s office while he was on a call that he wasn’t listening to
So this is comparing jobs that can be remote (IT/clerical etc) with those that can't (janitors, medical staff, night security).
There are probably more differences in well-being between those roles than if they are remote or not.
Isn't there kind of an inherit bias here where on-site healthcare workers would have vastly different job requirements than remote workers?
This can easily translate to a 50-80% higher salary after housing costs, which for sure would translate into better wellbeing for most people anyway. For some EU companies, this can mean not even having to live in the same country, so wildly different cost of living.
Just having to live somewhere you can reasonably commute to an office, even just 2 days a week, is massively limiting in terms of where and how you can afford to live on any salary. For a daily in office work it's even worse.
Then the commute costs; easily 5-10k GBP per year for 'commutable to London' towns in the countryside.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
IME this is how it used to be in many companies. You earn trust for a few years then petition to go remote. There was usually a lot of process involved (I remember having my request go up the chain to a VP for approval) but as long as you were a high performer and okay with a mild pay cut, it generally went through.
Then post-COVID many companies had trouble luring people back when being in-office was purely optional. That's when you started seeing the RTO mandates and the refusal to allow anyone to switch to remote regardless of performance.
This is a bigger thing I think than most people realize. Before the pandemic I worked for a company that had a flexible policy of allowing people to work from home for the sake of work life balance (e.g. contractors, kid's recitals etc), but not an official "hybrid" policy for a fixed number of days remote. When the pandemic first hit, made it very clear when they sent everyone home that they wanted to get us back to the office as soon as it was safe to do so. When things started to open up again, they asked people to start voluntarily coming in to the office 2-3 days a week. And yet, the entire time they had that ask in place, every time I was in the office, I could probably have counted on one hand the number of people in the office on my floor and from everyone else I talked to who came in, it was the same every day. And I fully admit to being a part of that problem. But since people didn't do what was asked of them for a hybrid system, it seems obvious then that the company would insist then that everyone come back to the office full time. I really do believe that we would have ended with a hybrid system had people actually showed up on a fairly regular basis, but without people showing up, it became a negative feedback loop where people would show up less and less because every time they did, it was just remote work, but from the office.
It also probably didn't help that we had so many people all over every social media network (including HN here) bragging about how much they were doing during their work hours that was anything other than the work they were being paid to do. If you start broadcasting to the world how you're only giving your employer 4 hours a day out of the 8 hours they're paying you for when you're working from home, it should be unsurprising that they decide they can't trust people to work from home and insist they come back to the office.
It's nice to be face-to-face with people, but I don't need that every day (and frankly don't want it neither), but all the benefits in quality of life overwhelming favor remote work for me to the point I will put up with way more shenanigans just to keep this benefit.
1. People who work remotely are more likely to have asked for it, and people who are in a situation that asked for are more likely to be happy about it.
2. People working remotely tend to fight for it, which makes them less likely to say bad things about it (such as, that they’re not happy with their work)
3. As another comment mentioned it, there might be a bias due to the fact that some jobs can’t be done remotely (e.g. housekeepers)
Here’s the app: micro-time.com
Compared to the situation today with Slack, AI, and remote culture, almost every company IMO has a much worse work life balance than Amazon did 15 years ago.
It's noisy, lunch is rarely below 20 dollars (no, I don't have time nor will I cook a big pot of 4 meals Sunday night), the lights are too bright, the commute is crowded and causes anxiety, and my housing costs are very high so the commute is less than 45m.
I hate RTO - and I'm in leadership. Anyone who's working from home and whining about it should be ashamed of the privilege. You're incredibly lucky.
Now maybe not so much if you're underpaid.
I wonder how much dislike around working in offices is less because working in an office is such a terrible experience vs working in a specific office for a company that doesn't care about their employee work environment is a terrible experience. I worked at a place for a brief window that made Initech look like a 5 star hotel, and if I had to work there every day, I might hate RTO too even though I found during the pandemic I didn't like WFH nearly as much as I thought I would.
So maybe "Anyone who's in leadership and wanting their employees to RTO should be ashamed of the fact that anyone could produce a list of grievances that long about working in their office"
- home office is bad and this link only has one sample so its automatically invalid and does not take any type of combination and occupation under the sun into account
- home office is a prison because you dont talk to people
and now the humans:
- saving commute time is good (less traffic, pollution, less unnecessary company and personal costs)
- having more time for children
- remote work != home office, you can work anywhere btw
- don't have to pretend to look busy
You know these were just the first 10 comments I read, you make up your mind now
The only circumstance where an office is actually fun is when a company is small (pre-HR), there are nerf guns, beer and a vibe of "we are fucking doing this!"
Once all that stops and things get sterile it is annoying. Open offices, less privacy in the bathroom, constant distractions and smells so some buffoon in leadership can feel lordly while watching the peasants work.
I have also noticed some are trying to portray remote as “woke”, I don’t even know the relationship between both
i feel an immense sense of security
This is a funny thing to study though, I'm really curious what they hope to gain from this 'knowledge'.
so. works for many people, but not for others
However most companies who insist on full RTO are often the latter but claim they are the former.
Remote employees are also in demand enough to negotiate / find a role with remote work. They probably then are experienced, senior, and better compensated than their peers.
It could be that the underlying cause is being more in-demand in a position to negotiate remote work, not remote work by itself.
Where am I wrong?