In our team, we have some great remote workers but I had my share of some real bad ones including outright liars. I am very careful if hiring fully remote because frankly, it sets the barrier high and you need to demonstrate that you are dependable to do shit on your own. One person was most likely working 2 jobs concurrently even though I cannot prove it for sure. However, they did not deliver a single thing in 3 weeks and were hired as a senior 10+ PM. When asked why, I was told that I am "too much". Whenever we will message on slack asking a question, they would respond 10-15 mins later almost 90% of the time.
in fairness tough, i do that too sometimes, but it's because i'm in the middle of something and i don't want to lose the focus.
when i see the slack notification if it's not about an outage or something similar, i try to finish the thing i'm doing (or at least reach a state where i can commit to git) and then reply.
and by the way, remote work should exploit asynchronicity. forcing people to always reply within 15 seconds is going to burn them out (and would do the same in an office)
I thought that was really good, I was expecting more like 30 - 60 min delay on average. That chat isn't real-time communication afterall, personally I have all notifications turned off.
Well for us it is very rare that your progress would be blocked by not having a question answered, that is why we (try to) have well-specified tasks and daily meetups in the morning.
Unless it’s an emergency, an IM doesn’t require an immediate response, and I'm unsure how anyone would get focus work done with an expectation of <5 minute responses to IMs consistently.
Time management is mostly about emotion management. For example, procrastinating on asking for help overcoming a roadblock on is often a symptom of fear of appearing stupid or annoying. In-person interactions often help smooth over these sorts of problems. For example: If you are having lunch with someone, it is easier to trust him to be non-judgemental about you running into a package management error.
Were they productive in the office? It feels like "being in the office" is a form of productivity. You didn't actually have to do very much as long you were visible.
These people, for the most part, aren't any better when forced to work onsite - but it is harder for them to hide from their managers and co-workers.
It seems if you have a large number of employees who are unable or unwilling to do their job, asking everyone to work from the office isn't the optimal solution to the problem.
Like any sane manager, I don’t pick an arbitrary bucket of tasks at the beginning of each week and declare “Finish these by Friday” and not care if it takes 10 or 100 hours.
Instead, we work with the team to do things like sprint planning with input from the team’s velocity. We target a reasonable workload assuming people are at their desks for a normal workday amount of time.
The problem is that for some people, individual velocity plummets when they go remote. Their estimates skyrocket because they either know their productivity is down or they think it will be easier to get away with if nobody can physically see them.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone as I have some great remote teams, but I’ve also churned through some otherwise good engineers who were great in office but admitted that they just couldn’t focus at home.
Also, if you have anyone WFH with school age children then velocity drops come summer time like clockwork. We work around it and plan it in, but it’s another reminder that remote is hard for even the good remote workers.
Finally, not everyone’s work is 100% isolated and asynchronous. More often than not, people have to work together on things and be available to answer questions, fix things, or otherwise stay in the loop with updates. When people are disappearing for hours every day during the team’s core working time, this all gets slowed down immensely. I don’t care if two people who work together agree to work together at 3AM or noon, but the teams have to be present and available to cowork on things.
I’d say that’s your first problem. Isn’t this the whole (popular) idea of creating a sprint, then not modifying the sprint as it’s ongoing?
> velocity drops come summer time like clockwork
I don’t see how this makes things harder to measure. The very statement of it implies you have measured it and know it to be true.
> Finally, not everyone’s work is 100% isolated and asynchronous
This is true of in-person work too. If anything, someone being at a desk means that the collaborative work is probably not getting done in that scenario.
Why?
Is work getting done or isn't it? How do you tell?
For example, next time, have the iOS guy work with the Android team, and vice-versa. It'll help cross-train and promote different ways of solving problems, but also give great insight into what's actually happening. This could just as easily apply to someone from the backend team or whatever.
Another way is daily standups. Is the Android team getting stuck on something for days a time? Are they constantly blocked by another team or bad process? Are they making progress on whatever tasks they are doing?
Looking at commit and PR history is another way to judge, provided it's someone who can code who's looking and judging. Is the amount of work accomplished for the velocity of check-ins reasonable? If people are consistently only doing a couple lines a day that's a good hint something's going on -- and is worth having a discussion about. I want to emphasize though this needs to be a pattern. Some of the hardest bugs I've fixed that have taken days to narrow down are basically a single-character change (< instead of <= for example).
Depending on the situation, it might be possible to get regular demos, eg: every few days. One way to do this is break down feature work into smaller iterative chunks/stories. Beware though, it's a thin line to becoming an obnoxious micro-manager.
If you bring on a new teammate and they can do double the work of the other two, then you start asking questions.
Also, this is why managers need to be able to do work themselves. The amount of work a task is should not be a mystery, especially in retrospect.
Incidentally, another reason for managers to be capable ICs. If your manager was getting frustrated with your speed at executing, he/she could always step in and “show you how it’s done,” or at least teach you about Bluetooth details themselves to spare you from having to spend time reading the docs.
Otherwise, they don’t really have a leg to stand on and it’s just shouting into the void like Vizzini yelling at his giant to climb up the cliffs faster.
With lots of newly-minted remote workers I have seen HUGE drops in accountability and performance, including many, many folks who just seem to 'disappear' for hours and days at a time, and nobody knows that they are doing.
Yes, you can be unproductive in the office - but the temptation and opportunities to do next to nothing on a daily basis are too big a temptation for many people, and becomes a nightmare for the people that are supposed to manage the slackers.
Some people are just as productive at home, some people are more productive, but in my experience, the number of people that have become unproductive outweighs the benefit of the relatively smaller number of people who either stay the same, or are more productive.
It's unfortunate, but if you have ever had to manage large numbers of people, you know not all folks will work just as hard when nobody is watching.