A major reason for a lack of WFH is due to a manager's inability to manage WFH - these are people that have only been taught how to keep people on task, and have to physically view your body in order to know what you are thinking and doing.

Many of us are well acquainted with the indirect communication from ticket systems, email, and other sources of social noise. We're used to managers who can take a collection of tickets and email, and deduce what their reports are doing. But many people are unable to do this, or untrained.

And since they are taught to be suspicious that you're stealing from the company (as all mediocre managers are) they mistrust the tickets, email, and other documentation you create.

This isn't even WFH, the person just wanted to drop their son and come to office around 5 minutes late. If you can't handle 5 minutes of delay in some one coming to office, I would deduce you must be super bad in building long lasting relationships with people. Who takes some one to task on coming a few minutes late?

This lies at the heart of the problems plaguing our Industry. The people doing the direction and management are nothing more than glorified email routers. Often who got lucky, and got promoted and now simply try to maintain their positions through command and control.

This stuff is chronic in service, many production, and similar, mostly hourly, jobs.

They really don't do relationships with people. They just want the cogs to mesh, the stuff to get done, etc...

This assumes that the managers know the details of the employee's jobs too. This gets less true when you become a general manager. But there's a big difference between "I'm managing your time" and "I'm managing your result" which the General Manager is on the hook for.

If you don't know the details of your employees jobs, you know their skillset and their ability to deliver results even if you don't know the techniques they use. If you're even slightly clever about communication styles it can work fine, although it does mean that motivation must be treated as a thing that should rarely waver. The more mature and skilled the person is and the more trust you have the less likely it is to cause issues.

Then why bother with an office at all? We have discussions here about remote work and private offices disrupting team communication, but if your team isn't all in the office at the same time I don't see how that is any better.

I like coming in the office to be honest. I prefer face to face communication and also usually am much more productive at work than at home. I think it's just easier to get into the mood when I'm at my desk at work.

Also, even though not everyone comes in at the same time usually there are "core hours" where everyone is expected to be in the office. At my last job this was from 10-3. I don't think it's too unreasonable for a team to be able to find some time when everyone can be in the office, especially when it's only a few hours long.

Of course, this could all be simulated as well if people had work environments. Still, I find face to face interaction much better than trying to communicate online, even with video chat. Maybe it's just about finding the right software to help, but I find being able to talk at the white board invaluable.

> Also, even though not everyone comes in at the same time usually there are "core hours" where everyone is expected to be in the office. At my last job this was from 10-3. I don't think it's too unreasonable for a team to be able to find some time when everyone can be in the office, especially when it's only a few hours long.

I don't think it's unreasonable, either. In fact, I think it's necessary to run a successful business with more than one person. However, it's not "absurd" to have some definition of late or to expect some consistency in when particular people arrive. That said, the original described case is overly and unnecessarily rigid.

Physical presence is still valuable. But strict times for creative jobs are less so.

There's a lot of space between "Don't be 5 mins late" and anarchy. My firm is "10-5 is encouraged, but there's some flexibility, and be available early morning or late night to accommodate customers and employees in other locations."

"Come when you want" sounds pretty close to anarchy to me.

You're assuming that people prioritize anything above work. I work at a "come when you want" company and I always aim to have at least four hours of overlap with my team, even though we have a seven hour time difference.

I think you mean "prioritize everything". I am not making that assumption. I am doubting the general ability of teams to self-organize as you describe, even though some teams can do it.

Teams certainly need the flexibility to adjust their organization in order to best accomplish their goals. Most of the problems with large corporate bureaucracy come because someone up the chain wants to impose control by dictating how every group organizes.

However, at some level there needs to be a team of people working together to accomplish goals, and that team needs a program to get with. Now, if all that is meant by "come when you want" is that each team is free to determine what their own program is, then I misunderstood the point being made and my original comment on it does not apply. There does need to be some sort of accountability, though, or the team dynamic collapses. In the context of a company, this has to be integrated with whatever policies the company as a whole has.

In my experience, teams will figure their programs out very quickly by themselves, so this hasn't been as big a problem in practice for me as one would think.

I'm pretty sure that would result in people coming sooner and leaving later, because they dont want to be seen as "that guy that abuses the system"

Same issue with unlimited vacation time.

As a contrarian view, I kinda like the strict schedule. Lets face it, you're going to have to suffer thru primate dominance rituals. This particular dominance ritual is well understood and easily worked around and isn't all that painful and usually isn't very punishing. What I'm getting at is the alternatives for the boss to throw some weight around and show who's boss are generally worse than a mere schedule.

"Oh, so that's your game. Well, I know it, can play it, can play it well. Bring it on."

Of all the situations to invoke the famous quote "Thank you Sir may I have another" I feel the best with a simple schedule.

Calling an Industrial Age invention a primate dominance ritual is insane.

I don't think that's the parents meaning.

There always have been and will be dominance rituals. Some would have been physical fights, but in modern office culture punching subordinates is seen as unacceptable - but some people still need some dominance rituals - and picking a fight over "do as I tell you and turn up on time, thus demonstrating I am the dominant one" is pretty tame stuff compared to a silver back ripping your ear off.

Making the argument that those two behaviors, management insisting on punctuality and violent bodily mutilation, are commensurable is the exact kind of insane thinking that I am criticizing.

It's the motivation that is the same. If you haven't seen it in action you're either very lucky, or not very observant.

Yes, but going back to the parent's point, while you may think it's instinctive to have a dominance trait, the "come on time" rule is only there probably because the manager's superordinate instilled it in him. I guarantee you we are not going back to our primate roots when we wake up and get to office, and OP might be thinking this in too much of a literal sense.

No. It's not the same motivation. Human hierarchical social behavior is not the same as other primates. It's much more complicated and in most human situations social status is based on a constellation of intangibles rather than who can literally rip the other's face off.

> "Come when you want".

Except for anyone who does daily standups first thing in the morning.

We do that. And attending via Skype is perfectly OK.