This resonates very strongly with me. A "wfh" day for me means I get half as much done. My home is where I keep all my distractions!
> You can put together a logical argument, a coherent or strawman proposal, and discuss things at length point by point. It's much higher bandwidth. But too few people read long emails
My trick for this: I write the email, then I go back to the to start and write a 3-4 sentence summary of the rest of it. Often doing that leads me to delete the rest of the email entirely. Always check: are you writing at length to help someone else, or just to clarify your own thoughts?
I also label sections as to who they target (ex, when something is a technical explanation that not everyone needs) and add footnotes (with raw data and the like) when it's appropriate.
I'm a serial long-emailer, but I've learned how to interact with normal society ;)
I completely understand your point of view and I think working from home is not for everyone. But many people do have the ability to delineate without that geographical reinforcement. I think the title of the post should be: "Employer Let Your Employees Work From Home If They Prefer" since its not a zero sum proposal.
>"The biggest secondary one is influence on the business. Simply being present when decisions are being made, whether they're technical or business, means you have a chance to speak up and help set direction"
This issues also exists though when a company has two offices that everyone is required to work from, one in London and one in SF for example. Relying on chat and informal lunch meetings is equally problematic for work form home as it is for employees of different offices. It seems like solving the communication issue for one solves it for both and companies seem to have no issues with having multiple offices.
I completely agree with you about email, I feel like we are losing the will to compose proper arguments and counter points or parse them in the context of email.
A while back, while working in a relatively large but sparsely filled open-plan setup, I had a tendency to hide in the far corner of the building when I had code to write. My manager at the time once complained "I start walking over to see you, but when I'm half way there I decide it's not important". I think he did, at least, pretty quickly realise what he was saying.
Having a (low-ish, but meaningful) transactional cost to "quick questions" is a good thing.
Whether it's headphones, or making it clear what a context switch looks like, trivial questions are definitely cut down.
One can have lengthy and substantive conversations over chat — and I do — but it's definitely an uphill battle, both against the medium and against the prevalent psychological, and intellectual cognitive characteristics of the people who favour it. I frequently get the feeling that I'm not using chat the way I'm "supposed" to, which is to write in short sentences and traffic in reductive sound-bites.
I've worked at two different remote companies over the past 5 years. One was failing the other is succeeding and growing. Chat played little role in either case, it was simply one of the chosen methods of communication. One method in a tool box that also included email and video chat.
In both companies, chat functioned very well as the stand in for most office conversations. We only fall back on video chat when we find ourselves talking past each other in chat and need the higher bandwidth of voice communication to clear up the confusion. We almost never use email in either case.
I've also used it in several non-profit organizations I've served on the board of and as an organizing tool among local activists. In all cases, it has served me well, allowing conversations that could span from exchanges of long, in depth arguments or explanations to quick exchanges of information or Q&As.
Chat is a tool. It doesn't favor or dictate anything. It's all in how you use it.
If you find yourself continuously having low value conversations over chat, I think that says far more about you than it does about chat.
I've never understood why private news servers and groups never caught on. Company newsgroups on a company news server seem to me to often make a lot more sense than company mailing lists on a company mail server or company forums on phpBBB or similar.
News readers generally do a much better job than mail client of organizing discussions into threads, and the hierarchical structure of the newsgroup namespace fits well with the way most companies and projects are organized.
Nowadays the argument for NNTP is weak because the decline of Usenet has, I believe, reduced the number of good, maintained NNTP clients. But I don't understand why NNTP wasn't the first choice for these things 15-20 years ago.
Believe it or not, the issue wasn't as much the servers not being maintained any more, it was the clients. Various clients, especially email clients, stopped providing NNTP support alongside POP3/SMTP/IMAP.
I am never trash-talking people who prefer working on-site. Quite the contrary, I respect them just like any other valued colleague.
Working from home is a learned skill. I am so good at it these days that the moment I close my second Chrome instance (the one with all my work accounts) and shut down my VMs, my mindset immediately changes to "chill and leisure mode".
If you can't do it, that's fine. It's different strokes for different people. As the article says, both options must exist.
That is why it is hard to do decisions by email. Also, poor thread representation by email clients doesn't help.
Chat has the potential of being used efficiently, where arguments are stripped of their emotion and converge faster to a point without rambling. To your point, chat can be made high-bandwidth, with multi-sentence points made in a single message, or they can be a verbose rambling that consumes time and focus.
It really comes down to the professionalism of the team you're working with. Some people are a lot more cognizant about minimizing the waste of other people's time, and get to the point instantly. Others just type whatever is going through their mind—and I should point out that they are equally good at wasting time in in-person meetings.
So then it's not about the communication medium or whether people are physically present; it's about how we use each other's time.
Full disclosure: I work in the BU that makes Cisco Spark, a chat/collab tool. :)
PS: I agree with your other points about home/work context separation. We solve that by explicitely "checking in" / "checking out" of chats. There's an expectation that people are NOT always-on (except for a few rare operations chats). Notifications are adjusted accordingly, so as to not be disturbed during family time.
So does face-to-face conversation. If your coworkers manage to put away all personal feelings, emotions and opinions when behind a keyboard, I salute you - mine, myself included, do not, and instead of actually making your feelings clear through signals our brains have been optimized to understand for millennia, we either have to explicitly specify things, or just guess what the other person means beyond the ascii.
I worked with a guy once who'd been WFH in a previous job. He would get up, shower, put on a suit and tie, unlock the door to his home office, hang the suit jacket on a peg in the office, and sit down to work. At the end of the day he'd reverse the procedure, locking the office. He said he had to do it to keep things separate.
It is hard, after a time, to not be around people. If you WFH, make sure to spend some time in a cafe or something.
No matter how good the team is at communicating, you're still going to miss those hallway conversations. Just know this and accept it. When you realize you have missed something, get the team to fill you in immediately and document what you've missed.
Which brings me to...
Whether you WFH or not, always follow up with a persistent[0] communication form for important bits of information.
[0] Email, Bug tracker, whatever. If you've had a conversation about it, make sure it is documented. Otherwise it never happened.
There's a few reasons to prefer working in the office. The single biggest one is the hard delimiting of the work day; when I'm not in the office, I'm not working, I'm not available on email or chat, and unless it's an exceptional situation, nobody will phone me either. My evenings belong to me and my loved ones only. That's precious. It's far too tempting to let one thing bleed into the other when working from home.
The biggest secondary one is influence on the business. Simply being present when decisions are being made, whether they're technical or business, means you have a chance to speak up and help set direction. Stuff that emanates over remoteable media like chat, email, project planning tools tends to be after the meeting, not before or instead of the meeting. This doesn't change for a company until most / all of the workforce is remote, and that's simply not true for most companies. If you're interested in a career, turning up is a significant boost for most people.
The final one is bandwidth and transaction costs. Chat is a dreadful medium for remote communication - if you've ever had to sit there waiting for a reply, and wonder whether it would be more efficient to switch back to what you were doing - it's almost impossible to come to a decision in good time in chat. I've seen 5 minute conversations take half an hour. Starting a video chat is far better, but it has a big barrier to entry; it's not like talking to someone a few desks over. Try and do it with 4 or more people, and it turns into a coordination problem, people dropping in and out, someone eating while not on mute, synchronization for startup, etc.
Frankly, I prefer email. You can put together a logical argument, a coherent or strawman proposal, and discuss things at length point by point. It's much higher bandwidth. But too few people read long emails, and even fewer respond correctly with inline replies. The days when people were trained on newsgroup netiquette are long gone.