I think you’re touching on an important point though, mix of in person and in office is really challenging, because some people see each other all day while others are literally more disconnected. It creates a heterogeneous mix of work relationships, and I’m not so sure that handling mix WFH WFO is purely evident of poor team management, it’s just difficult to have a cohesive team when some are physically there and some arent

I don't know how important all this social science stuff is to be honest.

I've worked for 20 years in global teams, and written communication is very important. Having US/UK/Ireland/HK/Singapore split team isn't much different from remote. Over the years I've worked in smaller orgs with a higher % of local people.

What I can tell you is that the amount of chatter grew exponentially. One place I used to call it "bilateral communication" because A-B would side-talk then A-C, then A-D, then B-C, then B-D.. all in-person. Tremendous games of telephone constantly.

Remote is a forcing function on better written communication.

It's funny that half this site is people working on various SaaS tools that are supposed to make work collaboration better, but somehow we need to sit next to each other to be productive?

Oh and to be clear I’m less commenting on productivity, more on the soft stuff like sense of belonging to the org, enjoying time at work, and building real relationships. These things are strictly local, no one expects to form relationships with the accounting team in Ireland, and having an explicit process for interacting with them is probably more important than an explicit process for interacting with your manager.

How important is that stuff, I have no idea, but if half the team are friends at work and the rest can only be reached over slack, that doesn’t sound like much of a team

I mean I get the intention of this stuff, but some of it skates dangerously close to accidental discrimination. I am not accusing you of this, but just saying people should be mindful it can accidentally lead you down the wrong path.

Places that are very focussed on "culture fit" or if they'd "have a beer" with the person they are interviewing.. leaves a lot of people behind. Women / non native speakers / older folks generally fail these types of implicit or explicit screens.

Building a development team is something like building a baseball team. A bunch of specialists, a few generalists, and the ability to get along. Whether they'd grab a pint after a game isn't really important.

I certainly have and maintain friendships at work, some of them from before remote, some of them from after. Some of them are people whom I've never lived in the same continent or city as.

No its highly important that they will grab a pint after. If you've ever been part of a sports team you would know team morale is vitaly important to them and they socialise and party together ALL THE TIME. The military do it to. Anywhere where you need strong teams you need to have downtime with your team. Its WAY harder to do that remote. I've rarely made friendships with people 100% remote. It's not natural. And I never want to work somewhere where there aren't a decent amount of people that I would grab a pint with after work. And I'm like gay, nonbinary, and mixed race in like an predominantly straight male tech department. I love drinking with my colleagues it makes me feel like I'm not a robot and like I care about getting work done for them. Otherwise, I wouldn't give a single shit about making money for someone else.

I always thought that's kind of a bullshit thing.

I have plenty of friends outside of work. I work for a living and I'm a professional doing a job, not a kid on a play date.

The cynic in me always felt that people who emphasize this benefit of office work just can't make friends unless people are forced to hang out with them every day.

Yep, I've been bullied the whole time growing up and I didn't start making friends until I was about 20. I am friendly but I'm not good at making friends with people I might never meet again at parties. Wfh makes me want to hang myself so maybe have some empathy that not everyones a thriving social butterfly like yourself.

I am sorry for what you had to go through and I have empathy for the fact that it's not easy for everyone to make friends.

That being said, there's lots of meetups, clubs, organized sports etc etc for people looking for a structured way to continuously hang out with a group of people sharing their interests. The key thing there is that it's voluntary association though.

Being forced to hang out with coworkers who you might not even like just because they happen to have the same employer shouldn't be a substitute for putting in an effort to make friends.

I dunno man, work is most of my life so it should be an enjoyable social experience for me otherwise it's just a mind-numbing time sink. For me its really important that I find a workplace with a good culture where I can have social interaction several days a week, because it's quite draining for me to constantly go to meetups and try really hard to make friends.

There are some social spaces I try to go to regularly but the people who turn up are not always the same. A lot of the time I'll manage to connect with one person, which is hard for me, and then I will never see them again even if I keep going to the same event. Or I see them about once every couple of months at the event. Or on the one day I'm going to the event my energy levels are low and I feel overstimulated by the novel environment and I don't manage to really speak to people. Putting myself out there a lot to new people in new places is something that I find stressful because I have been rejected and made fun of for trying to connect with people for the majority of my life. Honestly, i always had an issue with this, but I became better at being sociable in uni. Being in my house most of my time has brought my XP down and I find that the more I am stuck inside the more I regress in my abilities. I find it really hard to leave the house once I become unaccustomed to it. My brain just starts to break down.

I think a sports team might be the most consistent spaces but I'm pretty dyspraxic and when I do team sports I end up getting anxious and like hitting my team members in the face. I can't do that sort of thing.

What works for me is having a consistent space where I can slowly build up relationships with people over time. This is sort of how things have worked for the whole of human history. Work, school, uni, sports teams. This is where people make most of their friends. Always has been, always will be. And again, if I have to be working for most of my waking hours, I don't want to do it alone in my little box. It's not enjoyable. And saying that I must meet all of my social needs from concerted effort outside of work on top of all the other responsibilities I have is insane to me.

When I have a workplace that i know i can go into and see people a couple times a week, my mental health and energy levels are better and my social XP is stronger and I can actually enjoy socialising. Last year i was mostly remote, this year I've found a company with compulsory 2-3 days a week and lots of other young people. Its amazing. I finally feel okay. And yeah if I was working somewhere where I hated everyone and I didn't get any benefits other than money I would LEAVE. Don't stay at a place like that. Your mental health is too valuable and work should enhance your life otherwise you're literally ruining 80% of your waking moments.

Edit: on the point of leaving, yes i know some people have kids and can't move around like that. but this is why i'm pro mandatory hybrid not 100% in office. workplaces should be okay with you needing to stay home when your kids need sth or you coming 2 days if you live past a certain distance instead of 3 days. My office accomodates this. I come in 3, others come in 2 because they have long commutes. Everyone is fine with it. 100% wfh just punishes anyone who doesn't have kids.

Sorry to hear about your personal issues, but this statement "100% wfh just punishes anyone who doesn't have kids." is you projecting.

I work at a 100% remote company, and most of us are married (no kids) or single. We, or at least my specific r&d team have social lives outside of work and live in urban areas. Some of us even do a weekend dnd session online.

Hybrid mostly doesn't work from an economic pov. If the company employees can do their work 2-3 days from home, it's likely they could do their entire job from home, and a company just can't afford to spend money on expensive commercial real estate if it can avoid it.

If you're married that helps too. I live in London, not the middle of nowhere, but I find it pretty hard to make friends here who aren't just closed off to new people and hard to get to know below the surface unless you are sort of around them for a long time. I dunno maybe the American culture of friendliness helps too. British people take months of consistency to get past the small-talk stage with.

Edit: Also I now work at a company that has a 3 day office policy, which is one of the top reasons I chose the job. I think they're doing fine and they have no intention fo changing. It's not impossible.

In my experience, remote takes already-inefficient and error-prone workplace communication cultures that manage to muddle by with in-office workers at "merely" a significant productivity cost, and makes it totally unworkable.

The obvious solution is to fix your very-noticeably fucked up communication culture, since that would also improve in-person work.

Some orgs and managers seem to have decided, comically incorrectly, that WFH is the problem element in the above scenario, however.

You mean having 3 layers of management do a drive-by at developer desks in the space of a day, with conflicting asks is bad?

Or having the universe revolve around Jira, berating devs for lack of story progress in standup, and shouting about velocity in sprint ceremonies.. while also doing the above said verbal drive-bys? Who is causing all this churn?? Where is our focus? Where are people spending their time??

It's unknowable.

I sometimes wonder if all the time spent inputing and tracking various not-naturally-generated "metrics" is worth it. Manager and executive hours analyzing this stuff and devising systems for it and arguing over which systems to use and crafting mandates and plans, can be extremely expensive. Expensive ICs like programmers can easily lose 10-20% of their time to task-tracking and time-tracking and shepherding various things along that only exist for better tracking. Like, if we just didn't do those things at all... would productivity go down? Or up?

The cost of doing all this measuring and evaluating and preparing-to-measure certainly isn't being measured, though, so we'll never know.

Yes, and often the management instituting such granular tracking systems are also the people who want to go outside it for their own "quick asks".

It's entirely possible to construct beautiful metrics, amazing velocity charts, etc and have a terrible product with miserable users. Many such cases.

Some of this metrics stuff is like "expressed vs revealed preferences". Users who complain about your product and demand new features more quickly don't want a beautiful burndown chart. They want you to improve your product. You may actually need to slowdown to speedup. It's likely you need to do some R&D, and lots of experiments that will look bad on metrics.

You see this a lot when you quantize teams into little buckets like operations vs new features vs customer success vs core engineering teams. It's possible for a team run by a bad actor to have nice metrics while being a net drag on the other parts of the org.

IMHO, each team does something poorly, and it doesn't mean you go on a fishing expedition to find everything else they're doing poorly. Rather, you focus on what they're doing great, and incentivize/reward them for that. As a manager this has what has worked for me over the years, but YMMV.

It has to be a mix. If I only encouraged my employees at what their good at, and never pushed them to get better in areas they're lacking, things would go down-hill over time.

It can't be an everyone gets a gold star situation. Encouragement/reward is good when warranted, and encouraging everyone to recognize their strengths and weaknesses is required.

Well my style works for me, and your style seems like its working for you. Its quite possible we're managing completely different set of personalities. For many of the people I work with a job is just means to an end, and the concept of continuous improvement is alien to them.