WFH is horrible for some people in some scenarios.
WFO (work from office) is also equally terrible for some people in some scenarios. It’s just that people have generally normalized and accepted that these horrible WFO situations are required to feed yourself.
Barring jobs where you cannot function without physical presence, I’d say we need to fundamentally rethink why WFO is a default. And why we think a baseline of suffering for some people is generally OK.
IMHO, if you mix WFH and office the WFH folks will end up like internal contractors that don't have the same advancement potential as their office colleagues.
Many larger companies already are coordinating across multiple locations and timezones. One of the teams I work with has people on Eastern US time (though not all in the same office even before this) and Europe.
Another group is in two geographically separated offices in Eastern Time.
And other groups are just scattered all over.
I've worked remote when the rest of the team is in an office, and it's definitely not for all positions/teams.
The groups I'm involved with were already distributed with not much in terms of a "home base."
Personally, I believe that WFO is still the better way to function. Human collaboration is tied in closely with pre-existing conventions, using multiple modes of communication, and building camaraderie. I think its clear that conventions and ritualistic practices help a ton with social cohesion. Also we use multiple methods to communicate our ideas and feelings - verbal, non-verbal, physical, non-physical, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc. Someone punching the air when they've solved a hard problem, or some co-worker who isn't on your team that you only occasionally meet, excitedly telling you a fun story about their vacation or whatever. There is tons of communication that happens between humans in an office that is difficult if not impossible to replicate in a WFH environment. As a society, I think we'd be poorer for that if we lose it.
Past that:
-If you have kids, you often can't easily get them if they have an emergency at school, or appointments
-WFO encourages buts-in-seats management vs. productivity based management
-Background noise
-Interruptions to your workflow that break creative "flow"
-Time spent packing lunch
-Money spent on cafeteria food
Whatever benefits WFO has, it needs to cover commuting costs, loss of life (car accidents), loss of time, loss of concentration, and for the company, the expense of renting and maintaining office space before it can break even in cost-benefit.
By that logic, you could just bring your own monitor and chair and keyboard into the office.
To expand a bit on the fixed hours, early-birds tend to be fine with getting to the office early, but night owls will either get kicked out or have to deal with people vacuuming floors around them.
- an extra hour per day getting ready and travelling which increases stress and is ~250 hours per year simply wasted - many people have to waste much more.
- my office has terrible facilities. there is no natural light, heating is inconsistent and it's dusty.
- my office is attached to a factory so i have to listen to lathes running for a full 8 hours per day while i'm trying to solve problems.
- no eating area so i pretty much sit in my car for my lunch break
- people are constantly interrupting me with trivial issues that have absolutely no priority
- i don't really socialise at work much anyway so what's the point? i'm the only developer so there's no benefit from being near a team
Instead I could sit in my office at home with a superior set up, superior comfort, relaxing environment. I can go and have a lie down whenver I want. I can start and finish work at odd times if necessary. I can go to the gym on my lunch break.
It's just no contest for me personally although I must admit the quality of my office environment is certainly below average.
I usually tell people to go home if they are sick, but some of them are too proud and say "I'm fine". Since I'm not the manager, I can't force them, but I think I'll switch to home office when those scenarios happen again
Any other suggestions how to deal with those situations?
- Commuting sucks, unless you live in a nice neighborhood and can walk to work or take a leisurely ride. This doesn't exist for most people. It's especially bad in the bay area if you need to take BART. Who wants to be packed inside a train like sardines with people smoking crack. Seriously, have you ever seen a train station during commuting hours? They're 10 rows deep of people waiting to get on. That's assuming it isn't shut down for some random reasons. I should also mention wasting around 2 hours a day that you could spend on more sleep or hobbies.
- Open offices suck and are a poor excuse that they increase collaboration. Constant disruptions (both sound and visual noise), can't have any personal conversations and need to find a meeting room or hide in the hallways. Not to mention, I don't need/want to see my coworkers on facebook all day while they complain that they don't have enough time to finish their tasks.
- WFH can contribute to a more flexible schedule. Most people cannot focus non-stop for hours on end. It's healthy to take breaks but you can't do much beyond walking around your office (if it's in a safe location) if you're tied to the office.
- many more but I got tired of typing.
I've been able to spend significantly less energy on work, while being more productive. The commute, the open office and the useless meetings, really are murder.
So I think it's hard to say anything like you're trying to. We actually did research on it, because we're a 10,000 employee organisation, and the only groups who have reported a negative effect are managers. Productivity is up as well. That's still too general to say anything though.
The real trick will be figuring out how to create an environment where some people work more from home than others. Which isn't actually easy, because you kind of gotta schedule it so that people don't take turns being alone in the office.
This is going to be one of the problems. Some people who desperately want to come back to the office do so and discover that most of their co-workers haven't. And some of those co-workers have, with management blessing, moved outside the easy "drop in for one day a week" radius.
I expect office/remote workstyles are going to be popular questions in interviews over at least the next few years.
One is people who want to be in-person with their team all day.
People who want clear work-life separation (and who may not have space like a dedicated office at home).
Co-working spaces can solve for the latter but not the former.
I can’t for the sake of it focus on work in my apartment.
Yeah, this is one of the things that keeps coming up in this discussion that bugs me. There's working from home, and then there's working from home during a global pandemic that has shut down large swathes of the economy.
I wish everyone writing these articles or trying to analyze wfh performance data would acknowledge that "not being in the office" isn't the high-impact change: "having to take care of children while doing my full time job" is.
If we brought everybody working from home back into the office, but also had them bring their kids along and try to help them through zoom class and make their lunches and stuff, it would be chaos.
This doesn’t match my experience joining a fully distributed company straight out of college. I think, as always, this has much more to do with company culture.
In distributed companies with strong communication cultures, it isn’t difficult to prove yourself a go-getter. There are easy avenues for asking lots of questions, and there are always lots of unsolved problems. In a culture which promotes learning and helpfulness, it’s easy to get an answer from a more experienced individual by pinging them directly.
I would even suggest that if you have a strong async communication system on top of something like Slack, it is even easier to prove yourself than in person. Anyone and everyone has the ability to create posts and spark discussions which are very visible. You can, for example, write a post about a deep dive you did into X system, and post it for all devs to read internally. People will notice your efforts!
This depends on having a great culture and good systems in place, of course. Many places don’t, which is why I think the focus ought to be more on remote culture and practices for distributed work.
What's great about WFH is that everyone is equally reachable, so you don't fall prey to proximity bias.
* a post-standup, periodic “coffee time” meeting my team has
* multiple random channels my team and also company has, with such topics as ‘allow developers to yell, all messages here must be in all-caps-rage’ as well as a literal regular random channel that has lots of memes
* an open, inclusive and encouraging culture where people promoting ideas at a team or department and possibly even company level is commonplace and encouraged.
We haven’t had much of a lack of culture and idea generation. I’m sorry you’re suggesting you’re not experiencing this.
In the real world, however...
Isn't this the worst case outcome? How are those young go-getters supposed to turn into the senior engineer who can actually thrive in the work-from-home world?
It's why we use an always on RTC thing so it's easy for crew to ping me ad-hoc for guidance.
Of course, the employer's wishes for the (hard to measure) productivity of the employees lead to->Employers profitability->Employee salaries+opportunities.
I think in your list of types of roles, the only one who may be helped by WFH is the developer who works on concrete tickets. The lack of cohesion, creativity, etc by these all remote teams is palpable to me.
-- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea?
-- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible.
-- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to move greatly in his/her career, WFH might be great.
-- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great.
-- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible.
There's a huge variability in what WFH means, depending on what you want from the situation.
For some people, remote working is really not good.
And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote. Jobs and job qualifications (and competition) may change...