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Over the past 5 or 6 years I've gone from working from home a couple days a week to working from home 100% of the time to working remotely on a distributed team

Over the past 5 or 6 years I've gone from working from home a couple days a week to working from home 100% of the time to working remotely on a distributed team and, most recently, to working from an open plan office every day. And I have to grudgingly admit something: The people who are trying to dial back on the working from home have a point. I maintain that I absolutely work harder and am less distracted when I'm working from home, and by a pretty darn appreciable margin at that. If we're only considering me in isolation then my opinion on the subject has not wavered. But over the past few years I've come to see the forest for the trees a bit more, and I'm realizing that while all the individual components of a distributed team might be higher-performing, the overall system wasn't running very efficiently. A lot of time was lost to redundant efforts, efforts at cross purposes with each other, stuff like that. I'm not prepared to throw the baby out with the bathwater - I still think there is a place for working from home and working remotely. But I'm also prepared to concede that it's not all kittens and lollipops, and that there are valid reasons why a company might decide that co-location better suits its needs. Full disclosure: I still ended up leaving my job over it. Among other reasons (none of which were really about the office itself), that daily commute would have eventually ground my sanity into nothingness.

Mithaldu 11y ago
I've observed the same issue of remote teams being not very efficient at times. However this is almost always the result of sub-optimal team management, for example things like using only a bug tracker, or using a bug tracker software for both that purpose AND for task planning. In other words: Yes, it may become an issue, but is easily solved by using the right tools and policies.
- unabst 11y ago
  Any tools you can recommend?
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    Depends entirely on what you're doing. However the most important part is this. Depending on your company needs you need at least one or more of these, and they should not be coopted to serve in place of any of their others: - customer support solution (to talk to people external to the company) - task tracker (plans the future of when which tasks will be started/done) - bug tracker (keeps history of problems and their solutions) - group chat (to address the whole company, or task groups in it at once (IRC + friends), as well as brainstorm on things) Which exact softwares are best for these depends on your needs and budget. Important is that you deliberate well, choose on quality and don't mix things. Important is also that you make clear that using those is mandatory. People side-stepping the task/bug tracker and resorting to emails/phone calls is toxic. People not having the group chat installed as well.
15thandwhatever 11y ago
let's face it, the primary argument against working from home is not wanting to adjust communication styles. if you are part of a team that tends not to put communication in writing or text (email, IM, etc), and does more of the shuffling-from-desk-to-desk thing, you are going to fail with folks who work from home, folks who work in a different office, and folks who work on the road. a few years ago, i managed a team of 6: 5 in new york, 1 in california. first, i started out using the conference room for team meetings, and like clockwork, everyone would break out into mini-conversations, or not talk loud enough for the speakerphone, so the california guy would essentially check out. when it came time for scheduled work to be done, the new york team has already left for the day, and california guy wouldn't have enough details to complete it successfully. so he'd bail on the change, or wake up someone on the east coast. i didn't realize what could be the root cause until i flew out to california to spend some days with him, and i got to experience how damn frustrating it was to talk with the rest of my team back in new york. so i started an experiment -- we would no longer meet in the conference room and dial him in, but instead, we would all dial in from our desks into the same conference bridge. there was definitely a learning curve, but things improved. the welcome side effect is everyone learned how to use mute button on their phones appropriately (keep it muted unless you are talking, no one wants to hear echoing coworkers, or your darth vader breathing). what happened next surprised me: the mini-conversations didn't go away, they instead either turned into full blown voice conversations on the bridge or it became a conversation on our internal irc server (either privmsg, or our team channel). everyone learned to share details even if they thought it was irrelevant, and started to respect each other's time -- california guy no longer felt like he was left holding the bag, and the new york team would go out of their way to provide enough detail so that could avoid getting a call at odd hours (due to the combination of change window scheduling and pacific time vs. eastern time) working from home is the excuse, when learning how to effectively communicate is the actual problem. not addressing that is what leads to the redundant efforts, or being too "heads down" in something but going down the wrong path. additionally, in every work from home failure story or success story, no one has ever addressed the challenges of migrating from face-to-face to remote -- it's really, really, hard. you're fighting with people who have "being doing it this way forever". you're juggling with people who feel more and more disconnected from the company. eventually, everyone feels offended and things break down, either temporarily or permanently. working from home is not something to be taken lightly, you either commit to supporting it in your work environment, or don't bother.

Mithaldu 11y ago

I've observed the same issue of remote teams being not very efficient at times. However this is almost always the result of sub-optimal team management, for example things like using only a bug tracker, or using a bug tracker software for both that purpose AND for task planning. In other words: Yes, it may become an issue, but is easily solved by using the right tools and policies.

unabst 11y ago
Any tools you can recommend?
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  Depends entirely on what you're doing. However the most important part is this. Depending on your company needs you need at least one or more of these, and they should not be coopted to serve in place of any of their others: - customer support solution (to talk to people external to the company) - task tracker (plans the future of when which tasks will be started/done) - bug tracker (keeps history of problems and their solutions) - group chat (to address the whole company, or task groups in it at once (IRC + friends), as well as brainstorm on things) Which exact softwares are best for these depends on your needs and budget. Important is that you deliberate well, choose on quality and don't mix things. Important is also that you make clear that using those is mandatory. People side-stepping the task/bug tracker and resorting to emails/phone calls is toxic. People not having the group chat installed as well.

15thandwhatever 11y ago

let's face it, the primary argument against working from home is not wanting to adjust communication styles. if you are part of a team that tends not to put communication in writing or text (email, IM, etc), and does more of the shuffling-from-desk-to-desk thing, you are going to fail with folks who work from home, folks who work in a different office, and folks who work on the road. a few years ago, i managed a team of 6: 5 in new york, 1 in california. first, i started out using the conference room for team meetings, and like clockwork, everyone would break out into mini-conversations, or not talk loud enough for the speakerphone, so the california guy would essentially check out. when it came time for scheduled work to be done, the new york team has already left for the day, and california guy wouldn't have enough details to complete it successfully. so he'd bail on the change, or wake up someone on the east coast. i didn't realize what could be the root cause until i flew out to california to spend some days with him, and i got to experience how damn frustrating it was to talk with the rest of my team back in new york. so i started an experiment -- we would no longer meet in the conference room and dial him in, but instead, we would all dial in from our desks into the same conference bridge. there was definitely a learning curve, but things improved. the welcome side effect is everyone learned how to use mute button on their phones appropriately (keep it muted unless you are talking, no one wants to hear echoing coworkers, or your darth vader breathing). what happened next surprised me: the mini-conversations didn't go away, they instead either turned into full blown voice conversations on the bridge or it became a conversation on our internal irc server (either privmsg, or our team channel). everyone learned to share details even if they thought it was irrelevant, and started to respect each other's time -- california guy no longer felt like he was left holding the bag, and the new york team would go out of their way to provide enough detail so that could avoid getting a call at odd hours (due to the combination of change window scheduling and pacific time vs. eastern time) working from home is the excuse, when learning how to effectively communicate is the actual problem. not addressing that is what leads to the redundant efforts, or being too "heads down" in something but going down the wrong path. additionally, in every work from home failure story or success story, no one has ever addressed the challenges of migrating from face-to-face to remote -- it's really, really, hard. you're fighting with people who have "being doing it this way forever". you're juggling with people who feel more and more disconnected from the company. eventually, everyone feels offended and things break down, either temporarily or permanently. working from home is not something to be taken lightly, you either commit to supporting it in your work environment, or don't bother.