If you need handholding, you're hiring and working with B-players. Not everyone is going to be able to hold its own initially, but after a few weeks on a team, you should be independent enough that people don't need to look over your shoulder.
And man, if your new employees need 6 months of hand-holding, you're hiring the wrong employees.
The point being, we are a successful startup that has made the lack of a central office a part of our culture. This is my first foray into a virtual company like this, and it's been eye-opening.
There are several efficiencies that come with remote work:
1. Our team members are thrilled. We have folks in basically every stage of their working lives. From fresh college graduates to parents of kids in college.. and everything in between. Everyone has expressed satisfaction with how our setup has given them the ability to easily balance their personal lives with work.
I know that for me, simply eliminating the commute I have an extra hour or two in my day to spend time with my family. That alone makes me intensely loyal to the company.
2. It's the best hiring hack ever. Did you know that there are insanely talented engineers living in Boise Idaho? Milwaukee? Conway Arkansas? It turns out that when you are allowed to cast a very wide hiring net, the level of talent available to you simply goes through the roof. Instead of sniping talent from local companies and participating in the hiring arms-race you're seeing in the valley and in other startup hubs, we get to hire amazing people that those companies simply never consider.
3. We save real money. Since we don't have an office, we save on one of the biggest expenses a company can have. We do pay for co-working spaces, but most of our employees choose to work at home. It leaves money in the budget for us to have amazing quarterly meet-ups. Every three months we get together and work on the company, but we get to have an amazing time while doing so.
4. Management efficiencies abound as well. You learn to really trust other people when you can't look over their shoulder all of the time. Which creates a brilliant culture of self-managing teams.
There are challenges. When do you have standup (DO you do standups)? How do you communicate? Thankfully tools like Google Hangouts, hipchat, and a variety of others help us cross that gap. I think the most surprising thing to me has been that our virtual company operates more like a traditional officed one than I would have thought. We still have meetings when necessary. We still collaborate. Hell we still whiteboard things out. Just the venue has changed and the manner in which we do things slightly altered.
tldr; It can most definitely work.
I know we want every one of the 1000 employees to work 100% even when working remotely, but anecdotes don't necessarily translate into what actually works efficiently.
"we want every one of the 1000 employees to work 100% "
What you're confused about is that you equate being at work with working. I hate to break it to you, but none of your 1000 employees are not working at 100 capacity, even if you can see that they are sitting in their ugly little cubicle. It doens't mean they're working, or that they're productive.
>I'm just saying it doesn't work for everyone and it's harder even for motivated people like me
>for many I'm sure there's a noticeable difference between productivity in the office (due to a variety of factors) vs. working from home.
So the only anecdotes you'll entertain are the ones that support the decision you've already made. Got it.
Snark aside, I strongly believe the parent was right - people should be judged on the results they bring to the company, not how effective they are at turning the office's oxygen into carbon dioxide and their merit at weighing down their company assigned chair.
Even if a company with one thousand employees doesn't have all A-players, why should we assume that even the B or C players can't effectively bring their B or C game outside the office? Shouldn't we structure the companies policies around the assumption that your employees are trustworthy and deserving of flexibility, and if they aren't maybe they shouldn't be an employee?
I often see great remote employees, I just think it's important to note that we often view things in too binary a way. As in remote = good and we should hate everyone who doesn't allow it. If someone's not pulling their weight then they shouldn't be on the team. But when I work in an office, there are conversations I have that would have never happened if I worked remotely.
Not everything is so black and white and I honestly think in tech there are many roles that would suffer without the collaboration of an office environment. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have remote employees when the context is right and it helps getting A players who don't want to work in an office, but I don't think we should put remote as the holy grail of things like I often see on HN.
I think this is a very fair point to make.
>Not everything is so black and white and I honestly think in tech there are many roles that would suffer without the collaboration of an office environment.
This one too, but I think there's a big caveat there - these are roles that would suffer if the company doesn't adapt.
I can't speak for every company, but the ones I've seen & have experience with that have adopted some form of pro-"work from home" policy all fall into two groups: companies that adopt the policy in order to save money on infrastructure, and companies that want to encourage employee flexibility.
I've never seen the first group try to adapt: meetings are still held in conference rooms between the hours of 9:30 and 4:30, most discussion happens in hallways, managers judge employees on presence...
I think it's very possible for companies to design roles to encourage collaboration outside of offices; that said it's not necessarily easy or inexpensive. There are absolutely trade-offs that must be made.
But I fear that if you look at remote work only through the lens of saving money on office space -- or attracting top talent -- your company probably won't be one of the ones that does it well.