5 ms·
Was in a management meeting the other week where HR mentioned they were considering implementing a more official work-from-home policy. What we're trying to get
by jefe_ 9y ago
Was in a management meeting the other week where HR mentioned they were considering implementing a more official work-from-home policy. What we're trying to get away from is hourly employees 'working from home' when really they're sick, by offering formalized remote work opportunities. Sounded great until they mentioned the 'monitoring systems' they were evaluating. I shared my very strong opposition to the proposed monitoring systems, went home and crafted a Less-Orwellian Remote Office policy. Shared the policy with HR the next day, and they really liked it, agreeing there were ways to accomplish the goals without surveillance.
Writing the policy was trickier than I expected. Started very much with a spirit of 'Hire people you trust,' but thinking about the policy, applied to specific people who have been hired, it brought some more specific guidelines to the policy. Here are the highlights:
Eligibility for Remote Work (pick 4 from: 1 year with company, management status, strong performance record or recommendation from team lead, one department-specific criteria)
Requirements for the Remote Office (minimum equipment, ample space, etc. clearly defined)
Approval Process & Remote Work Guidelines / Contract (lays out guidelines for working remotely and collects employee commitment to adhere)
Saw some commentary that the frequency of working from home shouldn't be a privilege (i.e. if you do a good job, you can work from home for a week), that it should be as routine as possible, so we're making eligibility to work remotely, on a set frequency, an attainable privilege (so it can be revoked if necessary).
For the alternatives to surveillance, we will be implementing some improved communication tools, and departments will be adopting the concept of an ultra-brief daily scrum.
Tried to keep it lean, will be interesting to see where it excels and where it can improve.
- megamindbrian 9y agoI have a very strong opinion that the "evaluation systems" should be built for EMPLOYEES to use, not middle managers. A system that provides insights in to how you spend your time would be extremely useful to me. For example, if I wanted to sum up the total hours that I spend on a project, I have kept pretty decent track in Google calendar of when I am working. I have to go to a third part and upload my calendar dump to them, they convert the ICS to an Excel spreadsheet where I can finally do some addition if the duration field is properly formatted. Modern monitoring tools are the opposite of this approach and they are all built for some ephemeral opinion of what data matters to employers who can't decide what to do even if they had all the employee data in the world.
- AlexB138 9y ago> Eligibility for Remote Work (pick 4 from: 1 year with company, management status, strong performance record or recommendation from team lead, one department-specific criteria) I'm guessing "pick 4" is a typo, since you only listed four criteria, but "management status" strikes me as odd. Assuming this means "be a manager to qualify for this option", which may be an entirely incorrect assumption, I think this is actually backwards. Managers are the people who need to be on site most. 80% of a managers job is interacting with people. Unless their entire team is remote, a manager should really be in the office to quickly handle issues as they come up and be available to their team as needed. Difficulty around effective communication is the biggest down side to remote work, in my opinion. This strikes me as favoritism towards the managerial class, rather than an actual good policy. Otherwise, sounds like an interesting way to handle it.