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> Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier. > If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (manageme

> Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier. > If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence. Maybe I'm not enough of a smartphone-enabled digital native for the 21st century, but there are actually social benefits to seeing and interacting with people in-person. Work is a social activity. > Chances are not only will your employees be happier but you'll also uncover potential for optimisation. No, I really doubt it. Maybe it would make a few people happier, but I really doubt it would be general. I've worked remotely with people and they never feel fully-fleshed out vs. the coworkers I regularly interact with in person. It would kinda be nightmarish for my entire workday to be like that. The "optimization" aspect is probably even more unappealing, and reeks of the kind of narrow and aloof thinking that lead to Soviet continuous production weeks [1], which made it difficult for workers to maintain a social life. I'm not saying that remote work should be totally banned. I think the flexibility offered by allowing people to do it occasionally is very humane, and perhaps it could help people who have some kind of condition that makes it hard for them to interact directly with others. However, it just doesn't seem wise to have remote work be the default. [1] http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/Soviet_revolutionary_calendar http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/Soviet_revolutionary_calenda...

hosh 10y ago
I strongly prefer remote over in-person. There are pros and cons to either. One of the interesting things that comes up in remote is confronting the conflation people have between work and a job. Work and a job are not the same thing. A lot of people conflate the two and rely on external things to enforce a work ethic and self-discipline, but a lot of that structure is no longer there when working remote. If anything, your internal motivation and drive has to be strong. Related is that, when working on a distributed team as a remote worker, what feels like over-communicating to the point of harassment is probably the right amount of communication. One interesting consequence though is when both partners in a marriage work from home. In a situation where one or both partners work outside of home, some of the stress that comes with intensely being together all the time is not there. When both partners work from home, though, that can get interesting. I know this because my wife also works from home. I don't think the general populace is quite ready for that yet (you won't see advice for this yet on the self-help section of the bookstore), though it is something that can still be worked out.
- DashRattlesnake 10y ago
  > Related is that, when working on a distributed team as a remote worker, what feels like over-communicating to the point of harassment is probably the right amount of communication. Which gets at another problem of remote work: communication that feels effortless in-person becomes something that requires what feels like "harassment" (in your words) to be effective remotely. When I was working on a geographically split team, it felt like two gigabit LANs joined by a dial-up WAN link, since the in-person communication was so much more effective. Humans have literally spent at least hundreds of thousands of years talking to each other in person. That software has probably had more effort and refinement put into it than Slack, Skype, and Outlook put together.
  - hosh 10y ago
    That's a perceptual bias. There's a tendency for humans to resist changes just because they don't feel normal. Humans might have spent at least hundreds of thousands of years talking to each other in person, but only a fraction of that commuting by cars, or even having the notion of jobs, or even the notion of "productivity". Further, the same arguments you made are the same arguments made in any given era. I do think it is mentally healthier to not be so addicted to technology, to have 1-on-1 personal communications. But generally-speaking, the sense of self-worth, validation, etc. for the vast majority of people at their jobs is suspect. The quality of 1-on-1, personal communication has more to do with what mindfulness meditators call "presence": how much your awareness is in the presence in the here-and-now, and less to do with whether you are intermediating that communication through technology. Much of the social communication tend to be on the superficial side, even without technology. Being present is either the most difficult thing you will ever do, or the most effortless. Tangent: Buckminster Fuller once characterized words and language as human's first technology. One that follows the ephemeralization pattern such that it disappeared (we are no longer generally conscious of language as a technology).
    - DashRattlesnake 10y ago
      > Further, the same arguments you made are the same arguments made in any given era. Communication is a mental process, transportation is not, so they're not really comparable areas of change. I'm not making some kind of Luddite argument for the way things were. The point I'm getting at is that remote work partisans often have a over-simplified model that misses the benefits of in-person presence. Human beings have a lot of support for communicating with each other in-person, verbally, non-verbally, unintentionally, etc. which often doesn't translate well to remote work scenarios. Many of the social aspects translate even more poorly. I'm just going to skip the philosophical stuff about worth and meditation because it doesn't really have anything to do with what I was talking about.

hosh 10y ago

I strongly prefer remote over in-person. There are pros and cons to either. One of the interesting things that comes up in remote is confronting the conflation people have between work and a job. Work and a job are not the same thing. A lot of people conflate the two and rely on external things to enforce a work ethic and self-discipline, but a lot of that structure is no longer there when working remote. If anything, your internal motivation and drive has to be strong. Related is that, when working on a distributed team as a remote worker, what feels like over-communicating to the point of harassment is probably the right amount of communication. One interesting consequence though is when both partners in a marriage work from home. In a situation where one or both partners work outside of home, some of the stress that comes with intensely being together all the time is not there. When both partners work from home, though, that can get interesting. I know this because my wife also works from home. I don't think the general populace is quite ready for that yet (you won't see advice for this yet on the self-help section of the bookstore), though it is something that can still be worked out.

DashRattlesnake 10y ago
> Related is that, when working on a distributed team as a remote worker, what feels like over-communicating to the point of harassment is probably the right amount of communication. Which gets at another problem of remote work: communication that feels effortless in-person becomes something that requires what feels like "harassment" (in your words) to be effective remotely. When I was working on a geographically split team, it felt like two gigabit LANs joined by a dial-up WAN link, since the in-person communication was so much more effective. Humans have literally spent at least hundreds of thousands of years talking to each other in person. That software has probably had more effort and refinement put into it than Slack, Skype, and Outlook put together.
- hosh 10y ago
  That's a perceptual bias. There's a tendency for humans to resist changes just because they don't feel normal. Humans might have spent at least hundreds of thousands of years talking to each other in person, but only a fraction of that commuting by cars, or even having the notion of jobs, or even the notion of "productivity". Further, the same arguments you made are the same arguments made in any given era. I do think it is mentally healthier to not be so addicted to technology, to have 1-on-1 personal communications. But generally-speaking, the sense of self-worth, validation, etc. for the vast majority of people at their jobs is suspect. The quality of 1-on-1, personal communication has more to do with what mindfulness meditators call "presence": how much your awareness is in the presence in the here-and-now, and less to do with whether you are intermediating that communication through technology. Much of the social communication tend to be on the superficial side, even without technology. Being present is either the most difficult thing you will ever do, or the most effortless. Tangent: Buckminster Fuller once characterized words and language as human's first technology. One that follows the ephemeralization pattern such that it disappeared (we are no longer generally conscious of language as a technology).
  - DashRattlesnake 10y ago
    > Further, the same arguments you made are the same arguments made in any given era. Communication is a mental process, transportation is not, so they're not really comparable areas of change. I'm not making some kind of Luddite argument for the way things were. The point I'm getting at is that remote work partisans often have a over-simplified model that misses the benefits of in-person presence. Human beings have a lot of support for communicating with each other in-person, verbally, non-verbally, unintentionally, etc. which often doesn't translate well to remote work scenarios. Many of the social aspects translate even more poorly. I'm just going to skip the philosophical stuff about worth and meditation because it doesn't really have anything to do with what I was talking about.