It could also mean they actually have sufficient social skills that they're able to make full use of the higher bandwidth available face-to-face, and aren't willing to suffer thru the markedly inferior communications that are all that's possible over the 'net.
To be frank, people using IM to communicate with me disrupt my flow a lot more. They start a thread/conversation/request, and then are slow to respond, or disappear. You can't do that face to face.
Face to face (or even telephone) forces people to prepare. Rarely do I see people work that way with IM. People tend to realize that they are interrupting someone if it's a face to face. In my experience, many (most?) workers don't view IM as a significant interruption to the other party. So they feel much more free in using it.
That's the primary benefit of qorking remotely IMO. Not having to immediately stop everything im doing allows me to stay in flow state. It also improves the quality of my responses and solutions since i can let the request percolate in my head. Usually, I come up better answers when Im not actively thinking
Conversely, I’ve seen plenty of “mandatory meetings” in remote work as well. Neither paradigm seems particularly advantageous.
Good managers ask when they actually need something and they expect those working for them to accommodate such requests immediately. That is why, after all, they are managers.
2. Good managers set direction and exist to acquire resources for the team and eliminate barriers out of the way of the team when they are headed in that direction. Their role is not to interrupt the team so that they can answer a question from upper management.
3. Most of half of urgent manager requests are due to lack of planning either on their part or on their manager's part. They knew they needed this information a few days ago, but felt "it's OK to interrupt the team when I really need it".
4. Most of the other half are due to their inability to push back.
5. There will be times when the managers do need information urgently. It is then their responsibility to accept the hit in productivity that it incurs.
I've worked with both good and bad managers. The good ones have these qualities.
That's why they are managers and not low level developers. Developer does not like it? Well, a developer can migrate to writing less code and caring more about business related stuff. It is not like those who can write serializer cannot figure if a certain fire drill is required based on the amount of $$ coming in from a customer who is affected by a bug/wants something.
You missed the part where the manager has to evaluate and push back if needed. If their primary role is merely to do what their bosses tell them to, then they are not doing any managing.
99% of the companies can replace 75% of the managers with supervisors ( foreman in constructions/manufacturing ) and get a better result. Most of the "teams" inside organizations dont need managers - they need supervisors as organization does not need to have mini fiefdoms.
You are missing the point of what a manager is.
Good managers know how to ship products by knowing how to manage knowledge workers and removing friction in the communication inside and outside the team.
>Not having to immediately stop everything im doing allows me to stay in flow state.
So is it OK in remote work for me to turn off IM for 2-4 hours to remain in flow state? If not, then there will be no flow state for me.
Yes. Having managed remote teams and being a remote dev, it's all about response time. If someone slacks you, the response should be as quick as if it were verbal in the office. If it takes 2 hours to get a response out of someone - then they are not participating correctly on a remote team. The team should work in a way they can all be online at the same time so communication can flow freely. If someone is interrupting you and you need concentration just explain it to them - like you would in the office.
Immediate responses is a remote team. Day long responses is contract work. Week long responses is open source projects and government work.
Two-minute responses on Slack absolutely is a model that can work, and perhaps it's the easiest transition for people who've been working in a "teamy"/open-plan on-site setup. But I'm also convinced that it's not the only viable setup.
Likewise, if everyone knows that due to people's different time zones, schedules, etc. that 24hrs is a typical response window via email, there should be no complaints if responses aren't received more immediately.
While this can work for some people, such "interruptible anytime" mentality may not be good for many workers. For example, when I am most productive I need to minimize, and ideally eliminate, disruptions. Such periods are short (2 hours at most for me), but I could do 90% of day's technical work in those 2 hours. If someone wants something, unless it is a blocker for a large team, I will put it away and get back to it later.
This has nothing to do with being remote or local, this is just the mode at which I am productive. I try to treat folks who work for me the same way: we can still meet daily in the morning I try to give them enough structure so I do not need to preempt them every hour. Things happen, there are failed systems that need to be fixed now and other fire drills, but I find most people in technology development more productive when on an async comm channel. I am.
Maybe I am just old and you youngsters do not need to do it this way :)
It takes significantly more discipline for a PM to run things this way, but the reward is often better productivity and happier, less frazzled developers.
Doesn't work when people just write "@here, making nachoes" all day.
`@here` should really be yellow. Only direct communications red. Or something other than the current system.
When Mr. Exec wants a status update, and he wants it RIGHT FUCKING NOW. I'm not going to E-mail you and hope that your inbox doesn't have 10,000 other unread messages, or text you and hope you respond. I have to physically hoof it over to where you sit, apologize for interrupting, and get the info Mr. Exec needs. That's hard to do remotely.
If I know in advance I need a response about some topic, sure, try async first. If the deadline's a day out, E-mail, if it's an hour out, text or IM. But, after that if you don't respond, I've got to be the bad guy, break your concentration, and call you. And, if you don't pick up, I'm headed to where you are physically.
If your company culture embraces remote work it also must embrace responsiveness and a communication style that clearly conveys when responses are needed.
This is pretty much why I don' want to work remotely.
At the office, when busy, I can turn my email and IM off. If people need something, they are welcome to come to me and I'll engage with them. I do not want to deal with urgent issues over any kind of IM. If you are not physically present, then call me and we'll have a voice chat.
My frustration is that IM is used for both urgent requests, as well as non-urgent ones. It's used as an alternative both to phones (immediate need - synchronous) and to email (no rush - asynchronous).
My fear in working remote is that I'll get too many non-urgent interrupts using IM. I cannot see a good reason to use textual IM over a voice chat. If it's not urgent, just use email.
So while I agree that response time can be important, there should be clear policies on the medium used for it. If the team mostly had policies that match my preferences, I could do remote work. But I suspect most teams will disagree with them. Hence I get my way in the office.
Taking 2 hours for a response is often fine at the office, BTW. It all depends on the context.
>Immediate responses is a remote team. Day long responses is contract work. Week long responses is open source projects and government work.
There are very few jobs that really fit this categorization. At my work (in the office), we often respond to things the same day. On the flip side, today I plan to respond to something that had been requested a week ago. I don't work in OS or for the government.
If someone wants a quick response, they have to explain the need for it in the email. If it's open ended, it goes to the bottom of the queue. I'm willing to bet that since they haven't bugged me about it, they either no longer need the information, or it is low priority for them.
It's droll that Slack is the name of the service chaining you to notifications. I wonder if that was deliberate.
Is it more important to actually get stuff done or to be available for every distracting slack message that comes through?
If you need people to respond within 2 minutes to every message, that is lack of organization imo unless it is an emergency.
Good remote teams are very organized, prioritize documentation, have weekly and sometimes daily kick off meetings and then for the most part get out of the way for their team to get stuff done.
With all that (plus what you said), most individual employees will prefer the office over remote access. So remote would only work if you moved everyone from the office to remote access at a single point in time.
Colleagues on the same level that hang out and discuss the latest new TV series seems that's good, but I don't think the bonds that builds are always strong.
I suspect that a workplace where work discussions happen only in form of formal meetings would be rather unproductive.
1. All work-related discussion should take place in formal meetings.
and
2. No non-work-related discussions should ever happen in the workplace.
?
If you are having a discussion with your boss don't bother him when he is on a break, book a meeting.
I agree with parent poster in large orgs but in orgs where the founder eats lunch with you that level of formalness is awkward
"I'll grab a donut from the store across the street. Does anyone else want something?" - "No, we don't because YOU'RE FIRED."
There also seems to be a lack of properly planning tasks and as such this lack of planning is papered over with the sort of serendipitous spontaneous communication that happens when you have to walk over to someone and ask them what on earth is going on.
A focused remote worker can be orders of magnitude more productive than the typical office worker who is simply doing "busy work".
The driver of this lack of trust is the rise of managers (e.g. MBAs) who have limited expertise in the fields which they manage.
For jobs where there are measures of performance that are accurate and not gameable (e.g. certain call center workers) and/or it is a job executives probably reckon that they could do themselves, they are generally happy to let employees work from home.
IMO this is why Github and Mozilla are remote-first - by and large they're managed by developers.
Your boss doens't need to know how to do your job.
We also had a lot of slowdown because we were stuck on a shitty off-the-shelf program he bought. He went for this one instead of the more usable competitor because it was cheaper. If he could get developers to build a working tool in the cheap product by holding them 'accountable' in his Excel sheet, he could push for the product to replace the more expensive competitor and gain some reputation in the corporation.
In the end, most of the project was a horrific failure. His best employees left, and control of the project was transferred to another manager inside of a year or two.
I think a lot of this could have been avoided if my boss had any idea about what he was managing.
Do not allow your experience with a bad boss to clutter your thinking about how a good boss would handle things.
Without intimate knowledge of the tasks you do they have no idea of what you are asked to do is intrinsically hard or you are simply doing it badly.
The above assumes a single developer. If you have a team of developers it quickly becomes obvious. In fact a boss who knows nothing about programming is probably better able to judge if someone is doing a poor job in these cases: those who know the new guy see him trying to get up to speed, while the boss sees a bigger picture by comparing to others. (a good developer will be making useful contributions on the second day, while a bad one will flounder for a couple weeks before the others will give up on teaching him the project)
I've been on such teams and that isn't what happens. This is:
* Team mates do not like badmouthing their coworkers unless they do not like them. Hence, if a coworker complains about another coworkers' performance its as likely to be due to a personal problem as it is performance. Most coworkers also won't know each others' wages so they are in an even poorer position to judge relative performance.
* Managers without technical chops are incapable of distinguishing hard tasks from tasks that are being done badly or easy tasks and tasks that are being done well. They are incapable of distinguishing quality engineering from hackjobs that will blow up in 6 months. They will either default to just assuming every developer is more or less equally productive or use terrible proxies for productivity (like how late each developer stays at work or their scrum 'velocity').
* Good performers who do not have their achievements recognized will leave for better paid positions, leaving mediocre and poor developers. The quality of the product takes a dive. Profitability may also take a dive as a result if the industry is competitive and the quality of the software matters.
I doubt that the government will allow any remote work any time soon because most of the people here have never heard of a VPN or even know what a secure password is.
We live in a post Snowden world. It only takes one mistake to have all your data out in the wild.
I think attributing changes away from trusting employees to simply "bad management" and ignoring issues like employee malfeasance... is overly simplistic and dilutes complicated issue conversations.
There needs to be a balance between trust and security. It's easy to take it too far in either direction.
(I love working at the cafe and shared work spaces, but that isn’t the same.)
You speak of cargo cult, but your entire comment reeks of it. Ok, we understand, you like being able to isolate yourself. That's nice, and I'm glad you found a niche, but it's not the same for the vast majority of jobs and people. You call other people lazy, but I think perhaps that's just you. Social interaction and moving above an intermediate level where you can isolate yourself is hard work. Don't be so dismissive of others that strive for more.
Working remotely is great for the unambitious and the antisocial. Please stop trying to put those who do more down though.
I think you touched on a sad aspect of tech. For anyone to be "ambitious" or to "move above an intermediate level" they essentially have to become managers, which means less technical work. The likelihood of you joining the VP/higher ranks and still working on low level issues, as a respected technical fellow, are low to nill (Google, FB, MS have some positions but otherwise you're filtered into a manager to "move up.").
Your comment about "striving for more" is disrespectful to most developers/engineers.
How are people who spend their entire work days talking to others, but not actually working, "doing more?" I've seen more talkative/social people not getting work done than "antisocial" workers being "unambitious" or stagnant.
I think these are both true and would advocate for a work solution that allows amble work from home but encourages common face to face time especially if a team is tackling a complex issue. Maybe two or three days per week remote?
Remote vs face to face debate is about the interplay of folks trying to earn a living, providing value to an organization, living life, and companies making profits. In this regard, it looks like a balance of remote to face to face could increase productivity, happiness, and ability to work on complex tasks.
Let's say you're right and people are to blame for being lazy. How would you address this?
This isn't all that different from what in larger organisations is nowadays called agile transformation. How often do we hear "Yeah, that whole agile thing is nice but it doesn't work for us."?
The reason why 'agile' (or any other new approach for that matter) doesn't work in these cases often is that people are only used to doing things a certain way and are too lazy or otherwise unwilling to let go of that way and try a different approach.
Bringing about change on that scale is a long and often painful process. It's not that people are inherently lazy or stupid. It just can take considerable effort to unlearn habits you've gotten used to over a long time.
The crucial difference - at least so far - between the adoption of remote work and that of agile methods is that the latter for better or for worse nowadays seem to be largely accepted as the common approach for organising work (in the software industry at least).
As for remote work on the other hand there's no large-scale buy-in by (middle-)managers. I think this points to a larger issue at play here: Implementing remote work can surface shortcomings and waste.
If remote work requires workers to proactively communicate amongst themselves anyway what do you need traditional facilitators like middle-management for? With agile software development methods there are at least still roles like Scrum master or product owner that to some extent still resemble those traditional roles.
With remote work implemented properly we could very well arrive at a point where those roles aren't needed at all anymore.
But seriously... I would expect there to be examples of both - Good remote teams. Good office teams. Bad remote teams. Bad office teams.
And every shade in between.
I'd, personally, prefer a mix? Couple days in the office... couple days remote. Time to "schmooze" with the team. Time to be in a quiet place to concentrate.
Why does it have to be one or the other? Anyone that claims one extreme is better or worse generally misses the truth: The best option is generally somewhere in the middle of the extremes.
I can either put a lot of time and effort into remote communication, or I can work closely with people in a space that supports direct communication, putting that time and effort into whatever we're actually trying to do.
I freely grant that most office setups are shitty, so that for many people they waste time commuting and then waste plenty of time dealing with a bad office space and bad office culture. But that doesn't mean that offices can't be great places to work.
If I have my choice, it will always be working in close physical proximity with a team, just as long as we have a good space for that and a culture that supports actually getting things done. I like writing and am good at remote communication, but I'd rather save that energy for actual productive work.
But regardless you need to put in the same effort documenting in person. Being able to talk over a solution doesn't help anyone when you've left the company.
There are extensive sets of studies that show all of that it generally doesn't, where it especially doesn't, and why it doesn't (which the article mentions.)
Data > anecdote.
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers...
http://www.cosocloud.com/press-release/connectsolutions-surv...
https://www.zenefits.com/blog/remote-employees-happier-and-m...
Speaking as someone who has worked in three different remote companies of varying sizes, I have not found any evidence that remote teams achieve this any more frequently than conventional ones do.
> - an atmosphere of trust rather than petty control freaks who need to constantly keep an eye on their subordinates in order to know they're still 'working'
Again, I have not seen that remote teams make this any easier than conventional ones. Moreover, I think proponents of remote work in general are unaware of, or vastly underestimate, how many remote coworkers fudge their productive time because they can get away with it.
You can just as easily establish a culture of trust in a conventional office environment.
> - adapting to different forms of communication
Sure, but it’s unrealistic you’ll appeal to everyone’s favorite mode of communication, and many people don’t really care to adapt because they don’t need to. It is just as unreasonable to expect in-office coworkers to adapt to remote workers as it is to expect remote workers to come into an office for face-to-face communication.
I agree with you that remote teams can be effective in communication and productivity; however, I think your comment does more to support the position you’re arguing against than it does to negate it. Listen to what you’re saying here:
> Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn't just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen.
This is fundamentally why most companies do not have remote teams. It’s attractive to remote workers and to teams that are entirely remote, but most people don’t really want to work remotely most or all of the time. What you are stating evidences this friction, because you keep reiterating that remote teams can be just as good if they put in the work, but that’s precisely the point - most people and teams really don’t want to put in the work because it’s an extra hassle.
You started your comment by attacking the idea that face-to-face interaction is important, but it quite demonstrably is important. By your own comment (and my experience, as well), remote teams need to invest a significant amount of “cooperative machinery” to make communication and productivity as seamless as it is in face-to-face interaction. That’s obviously not to say it cannot happen, or that it shouldn’t be a goal, but my point here is that this is an additional hurdle that companies considering remote teams need to be work on, which is frankly unattractive.
Some people are disciplined and motivated enough to work productively in any environment, and that’s fantastic. Some people are not intrinsically so, but they become that way in the environment of an office. And some people are simply never optimally productive! Also consider that while a very vocal minority of people want to work remotely, this does not typically jive with people who are in-office and who then have to deal with an additional friction to communicate with some subset of coworkers.
I guess to put my point more succinctly: yes, of course remote work can be wonderful and properly engaging for optimal productivity if the majority of your coworkers are intrinsically motivated and really want to work remotely. But that’s not the world we live in, and it’s not reasonable to put the effort of achieving that ideal on companies that have already established a culture that works for them through face-to-face interaction in the office.
There are plenty of examples that show that working remotely without daily face-to-face interaction can work very well.
What's markedly different about environments that successfully adopted remote work are aspects like:
- a lack of cargo cult work organisation and office politics
- an atmosphere of trust rather than petty control freaks who need to constantly keep an eye on their subordinates in order to know they're still 'working'
- adapting to different forms of communication
When people say that they can't communicate as well with someone who isn't in the same room that doesn't necessarily mean that a remote setup doesn't work. It could simply mean they're just lazy and not willing to adjust to a different kind of work environment.
Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn't just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen.