It doesn't matter if I have my laptop and a hotspot at the beach with tacos and a bucket of beers. It's an issue with a lack of effective communication on emails/slack/zoom compared with meeting with your colleagues face to face. Productivity has fallen off a cliff among everyone I've asked, and this is the reason.

>Productivity has fallen off a cliff among everyone I've asked

You're not asking but I'm here to tell you that productivity has skyrocketed for me & those that I work directly with.

At the end of the day, that comes down to the type of industry/work and whether you have effective management. Organizations that are able to make 100% remote work function properly are at a serious competitive advantage in many ways.

Were these people with "person" jobs or "thing" jobs? Person jobs are sales, marketing, maybe even business analyst, etc. Thing jobs are coders, DBAs, accountants, etc. I find it very easy to believe that people whose job primarily revolves around other people will have serious productivity issues remotely. It's harder to comprehend that jobs around code/numbers/widgets have the same problem. I'm not saying it's impossible, just harder to understand.

Things and person I guess? This is in research, but any research is about communicating ideas. People need other people to help with their research and strategize the next steps, and it's hard to properly explain your thoughts and engage people with your ideas if you aren't in the same room with zero body language and have to speak one person at a time, and are bogged down by having too many zoom meetings to make up for the lack of informal meetings to do any real deep work with the time left.

It's a two pronged effect that myself and colleagues are experiencing: the meetings themselves aren't very productive due to the lack of in person communication and need to be longer to share the same quantity of information and understanding, by having to coordinate meetings between multiple people they are perfectly interspersed such that you can't really get any deep work done until 5pm rolls around and you can start burning the midnight oil uninterrupted.

Plus there is the mental side. We are friends who work together as much as we are collegues, and losing that side of interactions is tough for everyone. If I we had been working remote full time I would have never made these friendships stemming from casual random conversations, which imo really improves productivity in the group more than anything else.

How much of your day was taken up by meetings before and is the same amount of time used for the equivalent meetings now? Do you have additional "status" meetings that were hastily put together just because?

Most of the marketing teams I work with were pretty distributed anyway. Direct sales does a lot of F2F normally but many/most don't have company offices. And there are Thing jobs that involve, e.g., working with hardware that can't really be done remotely.

Zoom, despite being better than the past software, still is fairly bad compared to talking face to face. Low bit rate video, walkie-talkie style communication due to noise cancellation, even when you all have headphones on and other issues just make it frustrating and lower quality.

Also for tight knit teams, the lack of a daily lunch with your coworkers is something else you miss.

Personally, I've been way _more_ productive during all of this. And before the pandemic, I was somewhat of an in-office advocate myself.

Same for me. My team members have all told me their productivity is up sharply without me prompting them during 1:1s. I was a strong advocate of in-office work before, but now I think we'll probably plan 2-3 days weekly from home once work returns to the office.

What are your thoughts on companies like Basecamp, Gitlab doing remote so well?

That is a really important point, but I think that it still doesn't counter the argument about the career downsides of being remote when you don't work for a 100% remote organization.

My company is pretty flexible but as a scientist/engineer I still have some duties where being in the lab is necessary. I'll probably increase my remote work for now but likely not move further away. I enjoy my bike commute in the East Bay.

People weight "career downsides" differently. A lot of folks who are further in their careers are done trying to climb the ladder and would be happy working remotely.

Two other cynical additions. Not everyone is as concerned about "productivity". Also, there's a nonzero chance that someone whose productivity drops dramatically when working from home were only ever productive because they were leeching productivity out of others. Every team seems to have someone like this, and they can be safely gotten rid of.

I used to work in N Berkeley and live in Oakland by the lake. A lifestyle where you live and work in the E Bay is simply unparalleled.

Yea but during normal times coworkers will be having face to face conversations at the water cooler which you will miss being remote. So you are missing external interaction, but on the other hand the playing field is level in a way that it won't be once people start going back to the office.

If your company is in multiple offices you miss those anyway.

This is also somewhat of a self-correcting problem too. If these conversations really matter so much and either information isn't transmitted efficiently throughout the organization or it becomes a remote vs office clique thing, management either finds a solution or you probably go back to everyone in the office.

What I do know is that a lot of businesses are functioning perfectly fine 100% remote right now and there's a lot of fat that can be cut converting to full-time remote. Those benefits are likely going to outweigh "But what if Timmy gets left out of a conversation?!?!" If 100% or majority remote work becomes a competitive advantage, businesses will find a way to fix the communication gap.

No idea of the business your in but remote work is not working for many sales people or client services and many others that need to deal with external customers.

If those who keep the sales and contracts coming in want offices then ceo's will ensure they get them.

Offices will become smaller and more regional but they will exist.

Over the years via osmosis I have learnt so much by overhearing colleagues talking. I met people I would not normally as not quite my line of business or typically we are both just cc'ed in emails. These have become contacts, friends, allies and others simply provided opportunities or put in a good word for me.

I can choose where I work and have pre Covid era worked a lot at home due to projects I had on. But was planing a lot more time in the office this year as I knew I needed to ensure I mixed more.

Chatting with very senior managers, directors and ceo's simply won't happen if remote. But does when your both some of the only people in a quiet satellite office.

No need to brown nose but being more than a name on a chart helps.

Everyone is working very effectively at the moment as in most places there is with lockdown little else distraction wise and many focused on ensuring they stay employed.

In fact for many employees I think the moment they don't have to take a video con call which runs on as the client knows they have no commute and little else to do. Many people will be happy.

Some companies and departments will go remote and thrive in the long-term and others will once things settle find they need many staff back in an office.

And guess what, having meetings with a purpose agenda and notes both reduces meetings and makes them more useful.