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>Objections to work from home fall apart Essays from workers like Jen McCown isn't going to work. What works is to have massively successful businesses that b

by jasode 9y ago

>Objections to work from home fall apart Essays from workers like Jen McCown isn't going to work. What works is to have massively successful businesses that beat the competition because their employees work remotely. Since no multi-billion dollar business has demonstrated that specific cause & effect, the idea doesn't gain traction. Yes, businesses like Basecamp and Automattic have remote workers but I'm talking about significant business successes on the scale of Google/Apple/SpaceX/etc. If a remote workforce can demonstrate unequivocal superiority, there would be endless case studies about it in Harvard Business Review and every manager would be copying it like the Six Sigma craze a few decades ago. What the WFH movement needs is evidence of massive business success instead of essays. So far, the real-world evidence just hasn't tipped the scales yet.

grp 9y ago
Can we take into account some really big open source projects?
- tyingq 9y ago
  I think that's a great point, but I'd argue that one of the reasons that works well is that the developers are (typically) also the product owners, project managers, etc.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    Didn't Google, GitHub, Valve, and some others used to pride themselves that most of the product owners/project managers/etc were also developers? That's not necessarily something that companies couldn't adopt if it turned out to be a good way to run a remoting-based organization.
Veen 9y ago
I don't follow your logic. The vast majority of businesses aren't like Google or Facebook. The vast majority of the nation's GDP isn't created by companies like Google and Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of businesses are the size of Automattic, Basecamp, or smaller. Those businesses employ the the vast majority of workers. Therefore, Basecamp and Automattic are excellent role models. Unequivocal success does not mean the same thing as Unicorn. A sustainable and profitable business of any size is an unequivocal success.
- Morgawr 9y ago
  Just as a side note, I can work from home at Google. I don't do it often, usually only when waiting for a large package to be delivered (new TV, etc) or because of other IRL necessities like people doing works at home or similar. I prefer working in the office with my workstations and my coworkers and environment that keeps me focused, but I have plenty of coworkers that regularly WFH especially on those days (like holiday period) where the office is empty and it'd just be 1 or 2 people banging at the PC, might as well stay home and work from there.
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    My overall impression that WFH is very frowned upon at Google. Sure, maybe you can use it 2 days a month. But no thanks, I get to WFH every day. Life is too short to commute.
    - Morgawr 9y ago
      From what I've seen in my team, it's very subjective. I think it's more of a "you need to have a reason to WFH", it's fine if once in a while you just stay home and work and all that matters is your deliverable, but ideally you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable. If you keep doing WFH every day then yes, that's frowned upon. I'm honestly neutral on this, I prefer when my coworkers are around me because it's easier for me to interact with them (I noticed I'm a big procrastinator with remote communications, I keep thinking "I'll message them later" or "I'll send the email later", but that's a personal thing), it's easier to have the casual chat that leads to some form of rubber duck debugging or simply just an innocent exchange of opinions that ends up solving a problem/implementing a feature. I honestly don't get that while WFH. However, some people feel the opposite of me and think they are more productive at home so I'd say leave it to the person to decide and, as the author of the article said, calibrate your employees based on deliverables, not on their presence in the office.
      - RHSeeger 9y ago
        > you need to have a reason to WFH Personally, I have reasons... I prefer it, I get more done, it cuts out the commute time (which includes a lot more than actual time in the car), it lets me work on things at night when I want to... Sure, there are negatives too, but there's a heck of a lot of positives, too. > you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable Working from home has no real impact on either of those.
dijit 9y ago
The only way this is even possible is if someone is willing to allow work from home while simultaniusly having a hugely successful business. Usually when you're on your way to being successful, you hire MBAs to do your people management and those people are the ones suually vehemently opposed to remote work. Chicken and Egg problem.
- besogne 9y ago
  > Usually when you're on your way to being successful, you hire MBAs to do your people management ... Wow. That means that the existing technical staff will be gone in no time. New hirees will have a hard time figuring out how to even just press the "build" button, let alone, add new features. Furthermore, anybody with more than one job offer will never pick the one from an MBA. Therefore, in my impression, the success won't last, because its very reason will have been destroyed.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
staticelf 9y ago
What about IBM? A lot of their workers work remotely.
- rocgf 9y ago
  Not true. The policy was that you could work from home at manager's discretion, but full time work-from-home-employees were sort of rare. Plus, they are ditching that as we speak.
  - magoon 9y ago
    In the early 2000s IBM asked a lot of people to go full-time WFH so that they could lower their real-estate footprint and consolidate offices.
- HeshamA 9y ago
  I guess not anymore. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/ibm-to-remote-workers-come-back-to-the-mothership-or-else/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/ibm-t...
  - staticelf 9y ago
    How sad lol.
petra 9y ago
But massive business success is only one way for innovations to spread. Many innovations are small, and do spread, by having enough credible positive value, and small enough negative value, for the employer, combined with the right marketing. Why is this one different and requires that much higher standard of proof ? because i'm not sure that there's much value there, at least today.
daleco 9y ago
InVision App may not be a Billion dollar company yet, I bet that they are close and they will in 2017-2018 (50 million serie D in 2016). They are an entirely remote company (at least they claim that when doing a demo at work couple weeks ago) https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/remote-worker-truths/ https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/remote-worker-truths/
k__ 9y ago
Hu? Basecamp and Automattic are basically full remote companies with world wide reach of their products. Automattic is even global marked leader with Wordpress. What else do you need?
misiti3780 9y ago
github was an example until they changed their policy - no ?
- krakensden 9y ago
  Yup. I'm still sad about that.
majani 9y ago
Automattic is absolutely in the top tier of tech companies. I'd put them in the top 10 internet brands in terms of product recognition and impact. They're also a unicorn from a valuation point of view. I think society is understandably waiting for repeated large scale remote work success before shifting their thinking.
overgard 9y ago
You could make this argument about any benefit, and it would be equally silly. "Blog posts about company provided snacks arent going to move the needle, we need a company that is massively successful because of free snacks before people take notice!"
- jasode 9y ago
  >You could make this argument about any benefit, and it would be equally silly. You misunderstand my explanation. To be clearer, one can argue the "work-from-home" from 2 perspectives: (1) WFH as a nice employee benefit -- such as ping pong tables, massage chairs, and free food. (2) WFH as a non-negotiable employer business requirement to be the best most profitable company that crushes the competition. If you don't implement WFH, your business will be extinct. Regarding (1)... if one only thinks of WFH as part of a "benefits package", the adoption of it will be sporadic and inconsistent among businesses. E.g. "free food" is implemented at Google & Facebook but not at Amazon & Microsoft. Yes, for arbitrary employee benefits, the bar of evidence is much lower (or none) in this case. All of those companies are profitable. I think a lot of people are more ambitious about WFH and position it as (2). This would be similar to repeated demonstrated evidence of superiority similar to Henry Ford's "assembly line" manufacturing, JIT just-in-time inventory control, software engineering "source revision control", etc. If WFH wants to accumulate respect in this bucket, there needs to be amazing business success that points directly to remote workers as the cause & effect. The author of the essay had some citations promoting the "business productivity" angle which attempts perspective (2) but they are unconvincing for business leaders. In contrast, all 4 companies Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft implement "source code management" and it's an absolute requirement to be productive and competitive. It would be better if WFH was elevated to the importance of "source code management" than to let it get grouped in with "free food".
  - overgard 9y ago
    Maybe a better example would be health insurance. Health insurance won't directly change productivity, but good luck recruiting skilled people if you dont offer it. Same with WFH in my opinion. A company that offers WFH isnt going to magically become more productive, but it will help to attract top tier talent. I know a lot of people that factor that heavily into their decision making over gimmicks like ping pong tables and free lunches. I dont see working from home as being a paradigm shifting productivity enhancement but I do see it as something that has been shown to be workable, and companies that refuse to offer it will be at a disadvantage attracting skilled employees that can get that benefit elsewhere.
Mz 9y ago
So, my first thought was Textbroker. But then I searched and couldn't even find a Wikipedia article profiling them, though I did find this: https://techcrunch.com/2010/10/24/textbroker-raises-multi-million-euro-round-for-content-marketplace/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/10/24/textbroker-raises-multi-mi... And then it occurred to me that their thousands of writers are not employees. They are 1099 contract positions. And then I remembered the awful stuff that went down when the Fortune 500 company I worked for created WFH positions for my exact job. It was a big fat nope for me for reasons that boiled down to the company invading my home and trying to control my life in ways I found highly objectionable. And then thing got worse as it went along because they put your quota 30% higher if you worked from home for no real reason. This was literally a figure pulled out of thin air by a person high up in the department. When they found that people were working 11 hours a day and this was a violation of the law on their end, rather than lower the quota, they just got psycho controlling about how many hours a day you could be logged in. So I guess at that point people needed to log off to go pee in order to preserve the 8 hours a day of work time they were allotted. This has me thinking that there may be deeper systemic issues with the very concept of a WFH employee than just "Well, it is new and different and weird and it just needs good PR." Perhaps the (apparent) Textbroker model is the actual sane thing: If you want to work from home, you get a contract position and are not classified as an employee.
- overgard 9y ago
  It sounds more like you just had dysfunctional management, not that the concept is bad.
  - Mz 9y ago
    I am aware they did some really crappy things. Unsurprisingly, the company has shrunk in recent years. I left in part because I was having nightmares that I was on a sinking ship. None of that precludes the possibility that WFH arrangements may be inherently poorly suited to an employee contract and may be better suited to a freelance type situation. I thought it was worth tossing the idea out there.
solatic 9y ago
Imagine if this strategy was applied to anything outside of business. Let's take the civil rights movement, and argue that the reason why a country isn't ending slavery and then racism and the sexism etc. is because no other country has managed to empirically prove that protecting civil rights is the foundation to national prosperity. And we just utterly dismissed out of hand everybody sitting in and marching and being civilly disobedient in the name of ending injustice. What the WFH movement needs isn't proof, because you're not going to get proof without first having activists. And if companies like Basecamp and Automattic aren't wildly sucessful, is not evidence against WFH, because clearly WFH is not the sole determinant of business growth and success.
eip 9y ago
Intel not big enough for you?
wonder_er 9y ago
I think what works is companies losing employees to other companies who have realistic WFH policies. So, the business success piece doesn't matter. Losing key employees will turn things around quite quickly. Or it wont, and the business suffers, and maybe eventually fails, maybe eventually doesn't.
jbverschoor 9y ago
Why do companies keep comparing themselves with the big guys? I guess it's why "bigdata" is so popular with all these small firms
pdimitar 9y ago
What matters for the manager is if the remote employees are bringing the same value and productivity compared to when they were working on-site. They don't have to prove anything else beyond that. You're talking about business succeeding because their employees work remote. Sounds like you mean "cofounders", not "employees" however. Employees are often times not directly related to the company's bottom line. Sure if I finish this project on time the company might win over a customer, which is good. But from then on, my employer's income from the customer comes from support, PR, upselling, business negotiations etc. All things I can't even remotely touch while I am in a corporation.
brazzledazzle 9y ago
I think the problem is that lots of companies/managers hire filler. People to run inference or take on the most tedious work. Or just show some semblance of progress. These people need hand holding or constant direction. The worst managers are the ones that don't see this dynamic so everyone gets treated like they need to be micro-managed. I don't think anyone but the unicorns can afford to have a standard where everyone is a rockstar. So companies/managers that can't hire to that standard feel like they can't allow things like WFH because they don't know how or don't want to provide different perks for different people. They know that the ones that do need hand holding will be upset. We already provide disparate compensation in the form of salary but I think the hidden/taboo nature of that makes it more tolerable (at least until it leaks).

by jasode 9y ago

grp 9y ago

Can we take into account some really big open source projects?

tyingq 9y ago
I think that's a great point, but I'd argue that one of the reasons that works well is that the developers are (typically) also the product owners, project managers, etc.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  Didn't Google, GitHub, Valve, and some others used to pride themselves that most of the product owners/project managers/etc were also developers? That's not necessarily something that companies couldn't adopt if it turned out to be a good way to run a remoting-based organization.

Veen 9y ago

I don't follow your logic. The vast majority of businesses aren't like Google or Facebook. The vast majority of the nation's GDP isn't created by companies like Google and Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of businesses are the size of Automattic, Basecamp, or smaller. Those businesses employ the the vast majority of workers. Therefore, Basecamp and Automattic are excellent role models. Unequivocal success does not mean the same thing as Unicorn. A sustainable and profitable business of any size is an unequivocal success.

Morgawr 9y ago
Just as a side note, I can work from home at Google. I don't do it often, usually only when waiting for a large package to be delivered (new TV, etc) or because of other IRL necessities like people doing works at home or similar. I prefer working in the office with my workstations and my coworkers and environment that keeps me focused, but I have plenty of coworkers that regularly WFH especially on those days (like holiday period) where the office is empty and it'd just be 1 or 2 people banging at the PC, might as well stay home and work from there.
- brianwawok 9y ago
  My overall impression that WFH is very frowned upon at Google. Sure, maybe you can use it 2 days a month. But no thanks, I get to WFH every day. Life is too short to commute.
  - Morgawr 9y ago
    From what I've seen in my team, it's very subjective. I think it's more of a "you need to have a reason to WFH", it's fine if once in a while you just stay home and work and all that matters is your deliverable, but ideally you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable. If you keep doing WFH every day then yes, that's frowned upon. I'm honestly neutral on this, I prefer when my coworkers are around me because it's easier for me to interact with them (I noticed I'm a big procrastinator with remote communications, I keep thinking "I'll message them later" or "I'll send the email later", but that's a personal thing), it's easier to have the casual chat that leads to some form of rubber duck debugging or simply just an innocent exchange of opinions that ends up solving a problem/implementing a feature. I honestly don't get that while WFH. However, some people feel the opposite of me and think they are more productive at home so I'd say leave it to the person to decide and, as the author of the article said, calibrate your employees based on deliverables, not on their presence in the office.
    - RHSeeger 9y ago
      > you need to have a reason to WFH Personally, I have reasons... I prefer it, I get more done, it cuts out the commute time (which includes a lot more than actual time in the car), it lets me work on things at night when I want to... Sure, there are negatives too, but there's a heck of a lot of positives, too. > you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable Working from home has no real impact on either of those.

dijit 9y ago

The only way this is even possible is if someone is willing to allow work from home while simultaniusly having a hugely successful business. Usually when you're on your way to being successful, you hire MBAs to do your people management and those people are the ones suually vehemently opposed to remote work. Chicken and Egg problem.

besogne 9y ago
> Usually when you're on your way to being successful, you hire MBAs to do your people management ... Wow. That means that the existing technical staff will be gone in no time. New hirees will have a hard time figuring out how to even just press the "build" button, let alone, add new features. Furthermore, anybody with more than one job offer will never pick the one from an MBA. Therefore, in my impression, the success won't last, because its very reason will have been destroyed.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

staticelf 9y ago

What about IBM? A lot of their workers work remotely.

rocgf 9y ago
Not true. The policy was that you could work from home at manager's discretion, but full time work-from-home-employees were sort of rare. Plus, they are ditching that as we speak.
- magoon 9y ago
  In the early 2000s IBM asked a lot of people to go full-time WFH so that they could lower their real-estate footprint and consolidate offices.
HeshamA 9y ago
I guess not anymore. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/ibm-to-remote-workers-come-back-to-the-mothership-or-else/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/ibm-t...
- staticelf 9y ago
  How sad lol.

petra 9y ago

But massive business success is only one way for innovations to spread. Many innovations are small, and do spread, by having enough credible positive value, and small enough negative value, for the employer, combined with the right marketing. Why is this one different and requires that much higher standard of proof ? because i'm not sure that there's much value there, at least today.

daleco 9y ago

InVision App may not be a Billion dollar company yet, I bet that they are close and they will in 2017-2018 (50 million serie D in 2016). They are an entirely remote company (at least they claim that when doing a demo at work couple weeks ago) https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/remote-worker-truths/ https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/remote-worker-truths/

k__ 9y ago

Hu? Basecamp and Automattic are basically full remote companies with world wide reach of their products. Automattic is even global marked leader with Wordpress. What else do you need?

misiti3780 9y ago

github was an example until they changed their policy - no ?

krakensden 9y ago
Yup. I'm still sad about that.

majani 9y ago

Automattic is absolutely in the top tier of tech companies. I'd put them in the top 10 internet brands in terms of product recognition and impact. They're also a unicorn from a valuation point of view. I think society is understandably waiting for repeated large scale remote work success before shifting their thinking.

overgard 9y ago

You could make this argument about any benefit, and it would be equally silly. "Blog posts about company provided snacks arent going to move the needle, we need a company that is massively successful because of free snacks before people take notice!"

jasode 9y ago
>You could make this argument about any benefit, and it would be equally silly. You misunderstand my explanation. To be clearer, one can argue the "work-from-home" from 2 perspectives: (1) WFH as a nice employee benefit -- such as ping pong tables, massage chairs, and free food. (2) WFH as a non-negotiable employer business requirement to be the best most profitable company that crushes the competition. If you don't implement WFH, your business will be extinct. Regarding (1)... if one only thinks of WFH as part of a "benefits package", the adoption of it will be sporadic and inconsistent among businesses. E.g. "free food" is implemented at Google & Facebook but not at Amazon & Microsoft. Yes, for arbitrary employee benefits, the bar of evidence is much lower (or none) in this case. All of those companies are profitable. I think a lot of people are more ambitious about WFH and position it as (2). This would be similar to repeated demonstrated evidence of superiority similar to Henry Ford's "assembly line" manufacturing, JIT just-in-time inventory control, software engineering "source revision control", etc. If WFH wants to accumulate respect in this bucket, there needs to be amazing business success that points directly to remote workers as the cause & effect. The author of the essay had some citations promoting the "business productivity" angle which attempts perspective (2) but they are unconvincing for business leaders. In contrast, all 4 companies Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft implement "source code management" and it's an absolute requirement to be productive and competitive. It would be better if WFH was elevated to the importance of "source code management" than to let it get grouped in with "free food".
- overgard 9y ago
  Maybe a better example would be health insurance. Health insurance won't directly change productivity, but good luck recruiting skilled people if you dont offer it. Same with WFH in my opinion. A company that offers WFH isnt going to magically become more productive, but it will help to attract top tier talent. I know a lot of people that factor that heavily into their decision making over gimmicks like ping pong tables and free lunches. I dont see working from home as being a paradigm shifting productivity enhancement but I do see it as something that has been shown to be workable, and companies that refuse to offer it will be at a disadvantage attracting skilled employees that can get that benefit elsewhere.

Mz 9y ago

So, my first thought was Textbroker. But then I searched and couldn't even find a Wikipedia article profiling them, though I did find this: https://techcrunch.com/2010/10/24/textbroker-raises-multi-million-euro-round-for-content-marketplace/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/10/24/textbroker-raises-multi-mi... And then it occurred to me that their thousands of writers are not employees. They are 1099 contract positions. And then I remembered the awful stuff that went down when the Fortune 500 company I worked for created WFH positions for my exact job. It was a big fat nope for me for reasons that boiled down to the company invading my home and trying to control my life in ways I found highly objectionable. And then thing got worse as it went along because they put your quota 30% higher if you worked from home for no real reason. This was literally a figure pulled out of thin air by a person high up in the department. When they found that people were working 11 hours a day and this was a violation of the law on their end, rather than lower the quota, they just got psycho controlling about how many hours a day you could be logged in. So I guess at that point people needed to log off to go pee in order to preserve the 8 hours a day of work time they were allotted. This has me thinking that there may be deeper systemic issues with the very concept of a WFH employee than just "Well, it is new and different and weird and it just needs good PR." Perhaps the (apparent) Textbroker model is the actual sane thing: If you want to work from home, you get a contract position and are not classified as an employee.

overgard 9y ago
It sounds more like you just had dysfunctional management, not that the concept is bad.
- Mz 9y ago
  I am aware they did some really crappy things. Unsurprisingly, the company has shrunk in recent years. I left in part because I was having nightmares that I was on a sinking ship. None of that precludes the possibility that WFH arrangements may be inherently poorly suited to an employee contract and may be better suited to a freelance type situation. I thought it was worth tossing the idea out there.

solatic 9y ago

Imagine if this strategy was applied to anything outside of business. Let's take the civil rights movement, and argue that the reason why a country isn't ending slavery and then racism and the sexism etc. is because no other country has managed to empirically prove that protecting civil rights is the foundation to national prosperity. And we just utterly dismissed out of hand everybody sitting in and marching and being civilly disobedient in the name of ending injustice. What the WFH movement needs isn't proof, because you're not going to get proof without first having activists. And if companies like Basecamp and Automattic aren't wildly sucessful, is not evidence against WFH, because clearly WFH is not the sole determinant of business growth and success.

eip 9y ago

Intel not big enough for you?

wonder_er 9y ago

I think what works is companies losing employees to other companies who have realistic WFH policies. So, the business success piece doesn't matter. Losing key employees will turn things around quite quickly. Or it wont, and the business suffers, and maybe eventually fails, maybe eventually doesn't.

jbverschoor 9y ago

Why do companies keep comparing themselves with the big guys? I guess it's why "bigdata" is so popular with all these small firms

pdimitar 9y ago

What matters for the manager is if the remote employees are bringing the same value and productivity compared to when they were working on-site. They don't have to prove anything else beyond that. You're talking about business succeeding because their employees work remote. Sounds like you mean "cofounders", not "employees" however. Employees are often times not directly related to the company's bottom line. Sure if I finish this project on time the company might win over a customer, which is good. But from then on, my employer's income from the customer comes from support, PR, upselling, business negotiations etc. All things I can't even remotely touch while I am in a corporation.

brazzledazzle 9y ago

I think the problem is that lots of companies/managers hire filler. People to run inference or take on the most tedious work. Or just show some semblance of progress. These people need hand holding or constant direction. The worst managers are the ones that don't see this dynamic so everyone gets treated like they need to be micro-managed. I don't think anyone but the unicorns can afford to have a standard where everyone is a rockstar. So companies/managers that can't hire to that standard feel like they can't allow things like WFH because they don't know how or don't want to provide different perks for different people. They know that the ones that do need hand holding will be upset. We already provide disparate compensation in the form of salary but I think the hidden/taboo nature of that makes it more tolerable (at least until it leaks).