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I usually appreciate a good semantic argument, but not really sure what it adds in this context? I think the root of every conversation on "remote", "distribute

I usually appreciate a good semantic argument, but not really sure what it adds in this context? I think the root of every conversation on "remote", "distributed", or "agile" working is not how it's perceived from a nomenclature perspective, but that it's something that has to be open to everyone. You need to work somewhere where the default is non-location, only-core-hours specific, otherwise it falls down. Am fortunate to work in a place that offers "agile" working (it's not a developer focused environment, so that word isn't loaded for us). You go where you need to to get the job done, within a set of core hours work how you need to. You can work from home independently for days or weeks on end, or you can turn up to a desk every day, or you can collaborate in a meeting room, on Skype, or in a cafe. We have an HQ, but not enough desks for everyone to turn up every day, so there's an expectation of being fluid in how you work. Every meeting has a video conference link, and very few decisions are made by the proverbial watercooler. It takes time and discipline to make it work, but that's spread by default and expected across the entire workforce.

sk1pper 8y ago
It set up the clickbait title pretty nicely, at least.
chrismeller 8y ago
I think you just summed up the article in a much more concise and significantly less annoying and pedantic way.
pavlov 8y ago
> "We have an HQ, but not enough desks for everyone to turn up every day" Management by musical chairs?
- wastedhours 8y ago
  Saves a lot of money - why have individual desks if you're giving every employee a laptop anyway and we might only turn up once or twice a week? Only need to pay for 60% of the floorspace you otherwise would have to, and you get the benefits of in-person collaboration, as well as reasonable cost savings of remote working. There's no hierarchy to seating, and although it's an open office, disturbances are quite well contained.
  - pc86 8y ago
    But the problem occurs when you only have 60 real seats and 65 people show up expecting or needing to work colocated. It's easy to say that some people would just leave then, or a few people would work in a conference room, or something like that, but it's a legitimate problem if I show up to work because I have to be there for something, and now I need to leave for the morning and hope the situation resolves itself.
    - ubersoldat2k7 8y ago
      Using a scheduling tool like the one used for conference rooms might be the solution.
    - wastedhours 8y ago
      We have around 300 people in our HQ, and in 3 years I've never encountered that issue. I appreciate it's an issue to think about, but if you have a laptop and plenty of breakout spaces, combined with the expectation you're not going to turn up every day - it rarely pans out.
      - wolco 8y ago
        We have quarterly meetings with everyone in person and this always happens.
        wastedhours 8y ago
        > We have quarterly meetings with everyone in person and this always happens. Well, yeah... if you've designed your office to deliberately not hold all employees, then having a regularly in-person event in the office for all employees is evidently going to be a problem. But either don't hold all-hands meetings in your general workspace where every employee will need a desk, or for 4 days a year where it's an issue, vs 250-or-so where it's not, work around it? I'm definitely not attached to my employer, but based on the balance of pros and cons by embracing this approach across all staff, I'd find it hard to rationalise moving back to a different environment.
bunderbunder 8y ago
As a long time remote worker, I've found that what seems like a hair-splitty difference can actually be a deep insight into the company's culture, and how it will affect your work experience. Distributed teams develop a culture of communication that does not rely on frequent face-to-face contact. I personally suspect that they tend to be even more productive than completely co-located teams, because, based on a sample size of one, I've seen that the communication methods they develop will require fewer person-hours to share more information at higher fidelity. "Remote" tends to imply a large chunk of the team is co-located, and one or more of the members are not. My experience here is that the remote people tend to not get the memo, or people fail to invite them to meetings because they don't want to bother with the conference room's videoconferencing equipment, or they do invite the remote folks but then the first 15 minutes of the meeting is devoted to figuring out how to work the Polycom system, etc. I had the pleasure of working on a distributed team that became a team with remote workers as a result of being acquired by a company that decided to only hire new people to work in their home office. It was impressive how quickly things fell apart after that. (Edit: This isn't to say that P's team isn't working well with a flexible approach, but it sounds like there's a big difference between it and many other non-distributed teams that have remote work: Everyone is in it together.)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- virgilp 8y ago
  I've seen it even within teams in the same corporation: some are used to working distributed, for whatever reasons (e.g. working on truly open-source projects/ with external collaborators); others highlight the "efficiency" of co-location, and try to get everybody working on the same project in the same office. In my experience, the former is far more effective, for a very simple reason: informal communication channels quickly break down. In the latter approach - you have decisions discussed between some people, with others not informed, not documented properly, forgotten after a while, shifting agreements etc. Because the team can be more "agile" it's less structured, and while on the short term it may seem to be a good thing, on the long term it really hurts it (working on the wrong things/ on things that are not needed anymore, constant overhead for on-boarding new people, loss of team knowledge with every "old" team member that leaves, etc). I'd say the distinction between "remote" and "distributed" workers is on how serious the team is about enabling remote work. If it treats remote workers as a secondary, "extension team" - things don't work well. If that's the primary mode of operation - things actually end up working _better_ than in co-located teams, in most situations(read: as soon as the team/product grows big enough).
logfromblammo 8y ago
It seems a bit more like a rebranding to me. The name matters when deep understanding does not. When the major employers in your industry turn aside from "remote work", because their management culture can't make it work for them, there may be strategic value in saying "We don't have remote workers; we have a distributed team." It's a way of distancing yourself from the failures of companies that tried remote without actually committing to it. You signal that you're all in on remote, and structure your leases such that moving back to co-location is impractical, at the least. You have to do that, because no one in their right mind will believe that they are valued equally when the company has 90 co-located employees and 10 remote employees. No, this is not the "remote work" you may have been burned by before. This is different. This actually works.
dpkonofa 8y ago
I think it's only worth having the semantic argument, in this case, because of the established equity (whether negative or positive) of the term "remote". There are a lot of implications that go along with that word and, as someone who's struggling to get the rest of my organization to adopt this paradigm shift, my team gets a bad rap from people because we're all branded as "millennials" (in a very negative sense) simply because we're able to perform and do all of our work fluidly. We don't have requirements that people have to work from the office or work remotely so everyone has the choice to do whatever works for them. Some people prefer coming into the office because it's less distracting and others "need" that mental separation from their home life and that's fine. For others in our org, though, there's this negative perception that surrounds it as if there's no accountability and that we're all just too lazy or unmotivated to actually come into the office or, worse yet, that we're all somehow afraid of face-to-face interaction. People seem to think that you lose interpersonal connection with people when "remote" work is part of the strategy so I think framing this as "distributed" work is really just to try and remove the way the work is done from people's (mostly older, non-agile people) perceptions of what they think is actually happening.

sk1pper 8y ago

It set up the clickbait title pretty nicely, at least.

chrismeller 8y ago

I think you just summed up the article in a much more concise and significantly less annoying and pedantic way.

pavlov 8y ago

> "We have an HQ, but not enough desks for everyone to turn up every day" Management by musical chairs?

wastedhours 8y ago
Saves a lot of money - why have individual desks if you're giving every employee a laptop anyway and we might only turn up once or twice a week? Only need to pay for 60% of the floorspace you otherwise would have to, and you get the benefits of in-person collaboration, as well as reasonable cost savings of remote working. There's no hierarchy to seating, and although it's an open office, disturbances are quite well contained.
- pc86 8y ago
  But the problem occurs when you only have 60 real seats and 65 people show up expecting or needing to work colocated. It's easy to say that some people would just leave then, or a few people would work in a conference room, or something like that, but it's a legitimate problem if I show up to work because I have to be there for something, and now I need to leave for the morning and hope the situation resolves itself.
  - ubersoldat2k7 8y ago
    Using a scheduling tool like the one used for conference rooms might be the solution.
  - wastedhours 8y ago
    We have around 300 people in our HQ, and in 3 years I've never encountered that issue. I appreciate it's an issue to think about, but if you have a laptop and plenty of breakout spaces, combined with the expectation you're not going to turn up every day - it rarely pans out.
    - wolco 8y ago
      We have quarterly meetings with everyone in person and this always happens.
      - wastedhours 8y ago
        > We have quarterly meetings with everyone in person and this always happens. Well, yeah... if you've designed your office to deliberately not hold all employees, then having a regularly in-person event in the office for all employees is evidently going to be a problem. But either don't hold all-hands meetings in your general workspace where every employee will need a desk, or for 4 days a year where it's an issue, vs 250-or-so where it's not, work around it? I'm definitely not attached to my employer, but based on the balance of pros and cons by embracing this approach across all staff, I'd find it hard to rationalise moving back to a different environment.

bunderbunder 8y ago

As a long time remote worker, I've found that what seems like a hair-splitty difference can actually be a deep insight into the company's culture, and how it will affect your work experience. Distributed teams develop a culture of communication that does not rely on frequent face-to-face contact. I personally suspect that they tend to be even more productive than completely co-located teams, because, based on a sample size of one, I've seen that the communication methods they develop will require fewer person-hours to share more information at higher fidelity. "Remote" tends to imply a large chunk of the team is co-located, and one or more of the members are not. My experience here is that the remote people tend to not get the memo, or people fail to invite them to meetings because they don't want to bother with the conference room's videoconferencing equipment, or they do invite the remote folks but then the first 15 minutes of the meeting is devoted to figuring out how to work the Polycom system, etc. I had the pleasure of working on a distributed team that became a team with remote workers as a result of being acquired by a company that decided to only hire new people to work in their home office. It was impressive how quickly things fell apart after that. (Edit: This isn't to say that P's team isn't working well with a flexible approach, but it sounds like there's a big difference between it and many other non-distributed teams that have remote work: Everyone is in it together.)

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
virgilp 8y ago
I've seen it even within teams in the same corporation: some are used to working distributed, for whatever reasons (e.g. working on truly open-source projects/ with external collaborators); others highlight the "efficiency" of co-location, and try to get everybody working on the same project in the same office. In my experience, the former is far more effective, for a very simple reason: informal communication channels quickly break down. In the latter approach - you have decisions discussed between some people, with others not informed, not documented properly, forgotten after a while, shifting agreements etc. Because the team can be more "agile" it's less structured, and while on the short term it may seem to be a good thing, on the long term it really hurts it (working on the wrong things/ on things that are not needed anymore, constant overhead for on-boarding new people, loss of team knowledge with every "old" team member that leaves, etc). I'd say the distinction between "remote" and "distributed" workers is on how serious the team is about enabling remote work. If it treats remote workers as a secondary, "extension team" - things don't work well. If that's the primary mode of operation - things actually end up working _better_ than in co-located teams, in most situations(read: as soon as the team/product grows big enough).

logfromblammo 8y ago

It seems a bit more like a rebranding to me. The name matters when deep understanding does not. When the major employers in your industry turn aside from "remote work", because their management culture can't make it work for them, there may be strategic value in saying "We don't have remote workers; we have a distributed team." It's a way of distancing yourself from the failures of companies that tried remote without actually committing to it. You signal that you're all in on remote, and structure your leases such that moving back to co-location is impractical, at the least. You have to do that, because no one in their right mind will believe that they are valued equally when the company has 90 co-located employees and 10 remote employees. No, this is not the "remote work" you may have been burned by before. This is different. This actually works.

dpkonofa 8y ago

I think it's only worth having the semantic argument, in this case, because of the established equity (whether negative or positive) of the term "remote". There are a lot of implications that go along with that word and, as someone who's struggling to get the rest of my organization to adopt this paradigm shift, my team gets a bad rap from people because we're all branded as "millennials" (in a very negative sense) simply because we're able to perform and do all of our work fluidly. We don't have requirements that people have to work from the office or work remotely so everyone has the choice to do whatever works for them. Some people prefer coming into the office because it's less distracting and others "need" that mental separation from their home life and that's fine. For others in our org, though, there's this negative perception that surrounds it as if there's no accountability and that we're all just too lazy or unmotivated to actually come into the office or, worse yet, that we're all somehow afraid of face-to-face interaction. People seem to think that you lose interpersonal connection with people when "remote" work is part of the strategy so I think framing this as "distributed" work is really just to try and remove the way the work is done from people's (mostly older, non-agile people) perceptions of what they think is actually happening.