How do you know they're flaming out/struggling/etc because of remote work issues rather than other issues like company culture etc?
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.
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.