I like to say that small meetings of 2-4 people are great for figuring out what to do, and larger meetings are great to have a discussion about the plan made by the smaller meeting. It constrains the discussion and helps to limit rat-holing.
Lots of people waste time and hide in online meetings too.
Let’s be deliberate about it - eg “hey let’s grab lunch together and then whiteboard out a few ideas”
To me, this kind of deep collaboration is a reason to be in the same physical space.
Though it only actually happens a handful of times a year - even if you sit next to the collaborators daily.
20+ years ago, it was considered good office manners to send an IM asking if someone if they were available before interrupting them with your physical presence.
Unless someone ignores IM (not even seeing notifications), sending a message is also interrupting…
Poor planning on someone else’s part shouldn’t make an emergency on your part.
You get people that are "selfish" in that regard (yes you get introverts like that too) and don't mind taking up someone else's time or interrupting them. WFH heavily favors those people, and no one is speaking up about this.
Extroverts walk around and bug random people to get their "fix". Things should be async when you're remote. If someone pings you to meet, just ignore it until you are ready to deal with it. That's impossible in the office.
Thing is, the extroverts will now do the same, they'll just do it remotely and schedule incessant '1 on 1's with their reports, who are more likely to be introverts.
Overall, it's not an easy problem to solve and optimize. But the preference then should be to do what we've always done and slowly "peek" into potential different ways of doing it, instead of dropping the bomb and saying full WFH or full Y and here is why X or Y is correct.
For reference, I manage a fully remote team and we do one real-time video meeting a week, the rest is pure text and async. We are a very high performing team that consists of people new to the industry as well as veterans.
If it’s harder for you to initiate conversations, bumping into people and common office occurrences can make it easier to start talking. But if you don’t like talking to others than bumping into people can feel intrusive.
But I am also fully remote at Google and I am never going back. Full remote is too valuable to me. I just think that it is useful to be honest about challenges that some people and teams face with remote work.
Something is lost when you give up in person collaboration. But that can be fine and perhaps it has no real impact on your team’s productivity. And even with this loss, the benefits of remote working can greatly out weigh the drawbacks. But I think it’s worth being honest with ourselves and acknowledge that it’s a balancing act, and not try to say that remote work is superior in all aspects.
I prefer coworking for the “body doubling” effect. Social pressure keeps my anti-productive tendencies in check.
As someone with ADHD, there are a lot of seeming “anti-productive distractions” I use to help me focus, but which would never be allowed in an office environment.
I’ve measured it: I’m more long-term productive at work when I’m also doing chores, talking to friends, petting my cat, watching YouTube videos, etc. at the same time. The social pressure to not be doing these things (or the impossibility of doing these things in an office), starves my brain of the input required to solve work problems. If the only thing I have to focus on is work… then I don’t.
And this here is exactly why mandates are ridiculous. Just because YOU are unable to work remotely or YOUR leader is unable to lead you effectively when you're remote doesn't mean that your coworkers or their leaders are ineffective when remote.
This does not match my experience at all. If my coworkers and managers are bad at collaborating with remote workers then I will not be as effective working remotely no matter how good I personally am at it.
Supporting remote work allows a company to attract employees from a larger pool of labor which allows them to to get higher caliber employees while paying the same or lower salaries. It also saves on office costs. I'm not surprised to see more companies doing this.
But doing so also requires adopting culture, processes, and tools across the entire organization. It's not something an individual worker can do on their own.
That one example sold me.
Perhaps it could have happened over Zoom, but my experience is that post-scheduled meeting most people drop off instantly — they’re not interested in any casual conversation. Most people say a word or two about the weather or their sports team then jump into their next Zoom call.
In person or remote, if there are other meetings I'm not hanging out, I'm off to the next one.
Videoconferencing is the wrong tool for that sort of thing. IMs are a much better tool for that.
> my experience is that post-scheduled meeting most people drop off instantly
This is my experience with in-person meetings, too. The millisecond the meeting is over, everyone goes back to work.
How much of that $1M was reflected in your paycheck?
People are different. What works for me may not work for you, your team, company culture, etc.
IME the slight extra friction of initiating a call acts as a filter which means that I am less likely to ask colleagues either something which only saves me a few seconds, or to just start a nebulous discussion. Text chat is the right medium for both of these, even when in the office, as it's asynchronous and no one else has to hear it. When I call someone I tend to have at least a clear question or request for something that will make a significant different to what I can get done today.
The other argument against the benefits of face-to-face communication is that, unless everyone in your org works in the same city (or even, on the same floor - since most people don't walk around huge offices to ask colleagues quick questions), you should be practising with the online communications and finding good ways of working with them anyway. Otherwise fully distributed teams degrade into geographic silos, and teams with only a few remote people tend to just leave them out.
When I'm in the office I get practically nothing done due to this, but the end effect is that the whole team is more efficient since others are unblocked with a clear direction. This just doesn't happen as well when we are relying on someone reaching out to setup a call where we try to talk through a problem that is better solved by actually standing around to collaborate. I also see it happen with the newer teams in other locations, we miss the small details in things that you only think to talk about when you are sitting in a meeting room over a prototype that gets passed around.
Lots of people say this, but I just don't see it. In every office I've worked in in the past 20 years none of this really happened. It was 99.9% distraction. It's trivial to hop on a meeting with close collaborators or even non-close ones to bounce ideas off of. It's a mask argument for FOMO and the desire of those who simply prefer that environment for various non-collaborative reasons.