Re:Remote Work Is the Future
by bencollier49 on Sunday March 31, 2019 @04:09AM
(#19534455)
Conversely, if the only value you add can be codified and delivered as work packages without physical contact with your peers, what makes you think that you have more value than someone offshore / a robot?
If you're doing real, creative, problem solving work, then daily physical contact with your colleagues is essential. The bandwidth of knowledge transfer is vastly in excess of anything that can be done remotely, and quickly bouncing ideas off other people will get you through problems and blockers far more effectively than anything else. We still don't have any collaboration software which can replicate this experience.
"If you're doing real, creative, problem solving work, then daily physical contact with your colleagues is essential. The bandwidth of knowledge transfer is vastly in excess of anything that can be done remotely, and quickly bouncing ideas off other people will get you through problems and blockers far more effectively than anything else. We still don't have any collaboration software which can replicate this experience."
This looks alot like the argument that was initially used to push open offices, which turned out to be not so right.
Remote work is not difficult to implement, remote management on the other hand, is disruptive. It is so new we haven't aggregated the best practices into some basic theory to train managers with, so it's going to be patchy. Arguably, most managers are not educated to manage in the first place, and an increasing majority seem to just sense the wind direction and muddle through.
A significant percentage of remote employees might be a signal that they are creating so much value that it offsets the managerial risks associated with it. A butts-in-seats grind culture could suggest the marginal value employees create is so small it needs to be ground out of them.
I don't think current companies will switch to remote, but I do think new ones will start with the question of whether a role justifies the overheads of an on-prem requirement.