I know this is the popular sentiment pushed by remote work fans, but in offline contexts I hear the polar opposite: Productivity struggles are ubiquitous during COVID WFH.
Even the most pro-remote people are quick to admit that COVID WFH is not like normal WFH. Some places even had school closures which meant parents were juggling kids schooling and their jobs. Maybe you worked in a company that didn’t have a lot of employees with these problems, but it has been a significant challenge for many people and companies in the past year and a half.
I managed remote teams long before COVID and even I wouldn’t ever suggest that remote has no effect on productivity. Remote is hard and I’d even say that most people aren’t cut out for it, at least not without significant mentoring and additional management attention.
Certain phases of work and types of teams do alright remotely - typically a team with a lot of senior engineers in mid-project flow with few external dependencies. But a team with a significant number of juniors, faced with multiple blockers or external dependencies will underperform badly compared to in-person working.
Whole days will go missing because of a lack of effective communication - the simple ability to lean over and check or ask how someone is doing. Not to mention the inability of learners to just pick up information through incidental conversation and overhearing other people talking.
A friend in the construction industry has been dealing with this since COVID WFH started. He works with a lot of different architects, designers, suppliers, and so on that have to coordinate work. He also has to track the costs of mistakes and extra time lost due to drawing issues, errors, missed change orders and so on.
As soon as COVID WFH started, the rate of errors spiked upward. It didn’t decline until companies brought their employees back into the office. He now goes out of his way to work with companies that have gone back to in-office work because it’s the simplest and most predictable way to reduce the amount of money he loses to simple errors.
So, like every corporation.
Juniors need seniors more than they need docs.
It’s very possible to just shoot the juniors a DM asking how they’re doing. or having an active team channel where people can ask for help or offer direction.
The screen context switching is a killer.
over chat i have the opportunity to take a minute to wrap up what i’m doing. I also walk away with a written record, so if ive asked for help, i have reference to go back to. which can then serve as a starting point for documentation. or others in the chat can read and passively absorb information. or contribute to the conversation.
Is that a personal observation of yours, or has this now become "fact"? The reason I ask is that I would like to find studies - not just surveys or anecdotal evidence - that attempt to quantify the quality and productivity of WFH since the recently pandemic changes.
At work, we've had countless discussions about this and the jury is still out. The introverts claim to be no less than twice as productive, the extroverts claim they are lying and they really miss leaving work early on Fridays to go to the pub - somehow that makes them better employees. Management hate not being able to peer over your shoulder (although they have recently installed "security" software on everyone's laptops for "security purposes"). But I have nothing to point to other than my own experience managing a remote team of devs.
I've yet to come to a solid conclusion as to how it works for others. I only know that my productivity and depth of work has never been greater. So if there are any resources you could point me to I'd be grateful.
Early in the pandemic ( Mar 2020 ) -> no one knows how to WFH as a team. There is insanity in the world and work takes a backburner for most people.
Mid-Pandemic (Fall 2020) -> Companies push workers to get back to productivity and deliver. Workers are used to the remote world and productivity returns to normal.
Current ( Fall 2021) -> Workers just seem tired. Retention is through the floor, leadership is skiddish of pushing new projects in case people leave.
I'm not sure where we'll be in Summer 2022, but my suspicion is that workers aren't getting something they used to have in the office. Personally, I'm probably signing up for a co-working space in the new year to have something vibrant to look forward too and hopefully some other engineers to chat tech with on occasion.
I do miss the whiteboard and "bouncing idea" conversations.
I agree with most of your assessment. I particularly like the focus on fatigue. I think this tiredness (in oh so many ways) has yet to be fully understood - not to mention, addressed. If I may be so bold, I'll go one step further: something has got to give! People can't be tired all the time. Something has to (and will) change. Here's hoping that in 2022 it'll be largely for the better.
As for the whiteboard, I humbly offer our team's answer: https://sharetheboard.com We too couldn't bear to be whiteboard-less and have come up with at least a partial solution. If you have time to kick the tires on it, I'd love some feedback.
All the best in the New Year!
0) What data is shared through your servers?
1) What video conference tools does this support?
2) Can I use a mobile phone to capture the whiteboard?
0 is the most important part for my current employer as we can't use any tools which share any data with third parties without a lengthy approval process. If there is a guarantee that the app doesn't share data with a third party then it can more easily be tested at a team level (somewhat of a unique requirement for large tech companies).
Feedback on the experience: I tested out the tool from my personal linux machine (Razer blade 15) using a hand written note pad.
0) The experience is really promising
1) I can't hold a notepad steady enough for the video to capture the text appropriately, flipping the notepad around to write more text removes the existing text from the space.
2) I had to hold the notepad within ~6 inches of the laptop camera to have the pen/handwritten text appear clearly. This could be due to the quality of the laptop camera - which is certainly inferior to my iphone 12 pro's camera, and my work machines MBP 16 inch camera.
3) Overall I'd give it a proper test with my coworkers if not for the data sharing/video conference requirements of my current employer.
Thanks for taking the time to test out the app. Really appreciate the thoughtful feedback. In answer to your questions:
0) In short, unless you volunteer to share data - to get a discount or to use the free version - no data is shared (for your company test, simply use a Trial of the Starter version and you should be good to go).
We do track (anonymous) UI clicks, essentially to make sure the app is working. If this is prohibiting you from a broader pilot, contact me and we'll figure something out.
1) "Integration" with video conferencing currently relies on screen sharing: so.. it supports all tools! We are working on a few platform-specific integrations and would love your feedback here.
2) The primary use case is board (whiteboard, blackboard, flipchart, etc.) sharing - usually via a laptop or some external camera. We will be supporting a mobile version but to do it justice we'll need to release some apps. The amount of real-time processing going on already is quite ambitious; adding a useful image stabilization or surface detection to be executed in a browser has proven too heavy for most devices. That said, we may release a thinned-down version for mobile capturing before we do the apps (waiting on some POCs to inform this).
To sum up, for your broader test, I'd recommend: - using the Trial (of the Starter version) - using a laptop (or external cam) pointed at a whiteboard
And contact me at "marcin" [at] sharetheboard.com if you have any special requests or follow-ups. Would love to get feedback from your team!
Lockdown has certainly damaged some industries, but it has also taught a generation of people tech things they probably would have retired without learning, and the value of that may exceed everything else long term. It is very difficult to isolate things like this, and we wont get another sample, even if we get another pandemic later. I totally get its been good for some, but it was bad time for me, though people are terrible at self evaluating stuff like this.
I know that students at my university did worse the past two years than they did the year before. And by worse I mean substantially beyond the typical variance. This is in terms of student results like course completion and grades. As well as mental health metrics such as surveys on stress etc, and in terms of the number who seek aid through uni services. But there are confounders everywhere. The way they did worse differs in character more than magnituide as well. It looks like the majority did just about normal, with what looks like a small minority doing very badly. However, this is just one uni and it will be another few years before it gets collated, anonymized further, and published. It also may not apply to real work.
Leadership overall seem to be somewhere between cautiously neutral and rather pessimistic in the organisations where I have insight which is a bad sign, as except for the ones who personally wanted to work from home, no one seems to be happy with it, including showing up in management stress level surveys. The snooping management meme does not apply. Most of us researchers had permission to work from home before we started too.
I used to have this when I was employed (about 20 years ago). Somehow my personal take was that it gets tiring pretty fast. I've had enough friends outside of employment and wit the very rare exception would very much prefer to socialize with them rather than coworkers.
I then went on my own and have never looked back. The fact that I am doing quite ok means that I am productive. I design and implement new software products for my own company or for clients.
This might be over-estimating the numeracy and relative risk-judgment of people.
(I am commenting outside of the constraints of the pandemic. Covid obviously makes it much harder.)
It does really boil down to if your company has a culture of documentation, reading and writing, before needing to interface with someone in real-time.
Anyone who’s contributed to open source software understands this style of “remote” working, as that’s the default.
Over here in France, most French companies (as opposed to US companies operating here) have to be dragged kicking and screaming into WfH arrangements.
Ever since the pandemic started picking back up steam this autumn, the government was "encouraging" companies to allow people to work from home, but there were no firm directives.
Most companies figured having their employees pile up in the metro (yay covid!) and congest the highways (yay pollution!) wasn't that big of an issue.
They also asked companies to try to stagger arrival / departure times to reduce the number of people in the metro. Didn't work any better.
In my opinion, if OP is living in France (or willing to relocate here), it should be extremely easy to find in-office jobs.
This may be true, but the issue I usually have is that they seem to not do anything about it. Not "rocking the boat" and "yessir" are quite common approaches here, to the point that a lot of people are under very high amounts of stress.
Disclaimer: I've never worked outside of France, so I don't know how people here actually compare to other places.
I'm kind of wondering are half of these comments from an alternate universe. Most tech companies either are planning to reopen their offices or have already reopened their offices. There are a few companies going remote-only, which I suppose is nice if you like that sort of thing (I would quit immediately) but most companies do plan to go back to the office, albeit likely with more flexibility and some permanent-remote employees.
I think for a good percentage the option might be forever except some once in a while gathering in some local bar / event place / rent a temp workspace / whatever else can substitute
Depending on your job function and industry. For tech, yes, those days are over for at least for another 5 to 10 years, is my guess. COVID has generally proven to both employers and employees that productivity doesn't drop that much. It will also weed out bad people managers who need to "see" people physically who need to "get a feel" as a management metric.
The only major factor that would swing the pendulum back into offices, is when future diseases get under control much more quickly - whether that's corona virus or the next version of it, H1N1, avian flu, MERS, covid-19, etc. When the population is smart enough to win those battles quickly, and that there's a company where in-person teams outperform remote teams by a large margin, that's when in-person will be back and the pendulum swing again.