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There's a great deal of cultural and technical enablement that needs to happen to allow remote work to be effective. A great employee won't be as productive if

by basseq 10y ago

There's a great deal of cultural and technical enablement that needs to happen to allow remote work to be effective. A great employee won't be as productive if your environment isn't set up for them to succeed in a remote capacity. I absolutely applaud companies who have this figured out, or who enable very flexible arrangements. But if you as an individual (like the author) "need" a different work environment, go seek it out, don't lambast the company as "non-trustworthy".

oftenwrong 10y ago
>There's a great deal of cultural and technical enablement that needs to happen to allow remote work to be effective. A great employee won't be as productive if your environment isn't set up for them to succeed in a remote capacity. A good example of this: At my company we used to have problems with people working from home accidentally being excluded from meetings because the meeting leaders would forget to set up a video conference room, or would forget to join the video conference room that had been created ahead of time. To fix this, we decided that every meeting would have a video conference room set up for it, and that the meeting leader would always join the video conference room, regardless of whether anybody in the meeting was expected to be working remotely. In other words, we always run our meetings as if there are remote workers involved. This eliminated the issue entirely. Another benefit was that we no longer wasted time determining if we needed a video conference set up for a meeting. We just set it up in all cases. For recurring meetings, we have persistent video conference rooms.
minipci1321 10y ago
> There's a great deal of cultural and technical enablement that needs to happen to allow remote work to be effective. Technical-enablement part is already well known and is quite simple: easy access to all needed information: primarily, source code, schematics, datasheets, VHDL/Verilog, servers, specifications and product roadmaps. People working on FOSS projects successfully do that every day, and proven tools and the methodologies do exist. Anything more than that will be needed just as well for non-remote work to be effective. Culturally though, it is indeed a very different story, and there the mistrust plays its big role, the OP nailed it. Not only from direct team managers, but on all levels, from team members to (cross-team) project people. Another big component of cultural misfit is when the efficient remote communication is simply impossible, not because it is remote but because remote working brings together people who cannot communicate efficiently, even put together in the same room. For various reasons: different timezones, different native tongues, cultures that require active face-to-face confrontation... Interestingly enough, this could actually be the predictable outcome of a company's assumed behaviour -- imagine, for example, a big company frequently acquiring small ones everywhere around the world.

by basseq 10y ago

oftenwrong 10y ago

>There's a great deal of cultural and technical enablement that needs to happen to allow remote work to be effective. A great employee won't be as productive if your environment isn't set up for them to succeed in a remote capacity. A good example of this: At my company we used to have problems with people working from home accidentally being excluded from meetings because the meeting leaders would forget to set up a video conference room, or would forget to join the video conference room that had been created ahead of time. To fix this, we decided that every meeting would have a video conference room set up for it, and that the meeting leader would always join the video conference room, regardless of whether anybody in the meeting was expected to be working remotely. In other words, we always run our meetings as if there are remote workers involved. This eliminated the issue entirely. Another benefit was that we no longer wasted time determining if we needed a video conference set up for a meeting. We just set it up in all cases. For recurring meetings, we have persistent video conference rooms.

minipci1321 10y ago

> There's a great deal of cultural and technical enablement that needs to happen to allow remote work to be effective. Technical-enablement part is already well known and is quite simple: easy access to all needed information: primarily, source code, schematics, datasheets, VHDL/Verilog, servers, specifications and product roadmaps. People working on FOSS projects successfully do that every day, and proven tools and the methodologies do exist. Anything more than that will be needed just as well for non-remote work to be effective. Culturally though, it is indeed a very different story, and there the mistrust plays its big role, the OP nailed it. Not only from direct team managers, but on all levels, from team members to (cross-team) project people. Another big component of cultural misfit is when the efficient remote communication is simply impossible, not because it is remote but because remote working brings together people who cannot communicate efficiently, even put together in the same room. For various reasons: different timezones, different native tongues, cultures that require active face-to-face confrontation... Interestingly enough, this could actually be the predictable outcome of a company's assumed behaviour -- imagine, for example, a big company frequently acquiring small ones everywhere around the world.