Re:Elon Musk on Remote Work
by toss1 on Wednesday June 01, 2022 @01:03PM
(#31584815)
The "at the office" part.
The office is a complete anachronism, entirely unnecessary for knowledge work.
It is born of industrialized times before modern networked knowledge management and communications software. It is kept in place by bad managers. It was long ago studied and shown that remote work makes good managers' teams perform better and bad managers' teams perform worse (likely because good managers manage for results while bad managers just micromanage for poor indicators of work like how much time you spend in your chair looking miserable).
The commute is an utter and complete waste of time and society's resources. Simply not commuting buys 1-4 HOURS EVERY DAY. Even if not a minute of this time is given to the employer as extra work, the employee will be significantly more productive having not spent 0.5-2 hours fighting traffic just to sit in the cheap office chair.
Smart employees have figured this out and properly demand to do better work. Smart managers also know that there are huge competitive advantages to remote work.
1) Employers can now tap a talent pool as large as the country or even globe, instead of only a 2-hour commute to one of their offices.
2) Remote work is a key competitive advantage, seen as a key benefit by the best employees, and will allow for lower salary costs.
3) Remote work can dramatically reduce real-estate costs. IBM figured this out decades ago when it started doing significant remote work and having check-in portable offices.
4) Remote work will force you to have better management, who manage for objectives instead of irrelevant manager-ego-boosting indicia of work.
5) Remote work has been proved to be at least as, and in some cases more productive than office work.
So, what is egregious about it is that it is now widely known as a bad practice.
Imagine the reverse - remote work has been the norm and now managers were proposing to the boards that they build multi-billion dollar buildings, and require every employee to get up and drive in the worst traffic to this site, to sit and work in the exact same condition every day, and zero of those conditions enable better work product (i.e., the equipment is not better than what employees have at home, etc.). Both the boards approving such spending and the employees being asked to do this new waste-of-time commute would universally say
The office is a complete anachronism, entirely unnecessary for knowledge work.
It is born of industrialized times before modern networked knowledge management and communications software. It is kept in place by bad managers. It was long ago studied and shown that remote work makes good managers' teams perform better and bad managers' teams perform worse (likely because good managers manage for results while bad managers just micromanage for poor indicators of work like how much time you spend in your chair looking miserable).
The commute is an utter and complete waste of time and society's resources. Simply not commuting buys 1-4 HOURS EVERY DAY. Even if not a minute of this time is given to the employer as extra work, the employee will be significantly more productive having not spent 0.5-2 hours fighting traffic just to sit in the cheap office chair.
Smart employees have figured this out and properly demand to do better work. Smart managers also know that there are huge competitive advantages to remote work.
1) Employers can now tap a talent pool as large as the country or even globe, instead of only a 2-hour commute to one of their offices.
2) Remote work is a key competitive advantage, seen as a key benefit by the best employees, and will allow for lower salary costs.
3) Remote work can dramatically reduce real-estate costs. IBM figured this out decades ago when it started doing significant remote work and having check-in portable offices.
4) Remote work will force you to have better management, who manage for objectives instead of irrelevant manager-ego-boosting indicia of work.
5) Remote work has been proved to be at least as, and in some cases more productive than office work.
So, what is egregious about it is that it is now widely known as a bad practice.
Imagine the reverse - remote work has been the norm and now managers were proposing to the boards that they build multi-billion dollar buildings, and require every employee to get up and drive in the worst traffic to this site, to sit and work in the exact same condition every day, and zero of those conditions enable better work product (i.e., the equipment is not better than what employees have at home, etc.). Both the boards approving such spending and the employees being asked to do this new waste-of-time commute would universally say
"W T F !?!"