21 ms·

The benefits of a more asynchronous workplace

• ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  I tried sharing these studies at my ex employers in Europe hoping they'd spare me the hellish 40 minute commute in stop/start traffic and they weren't interested at all. Management there only values "butt time in seats" and the ability to come over and interrupt you by tapping you on the shoulder whenever they need something. As one of my ex CEOs put it: "If I don't see my employees stressing out at thier desks I get the impression they're not working." Until we get over this psychological attachment of management loving to visually see their slaves on the open office plantation through their private panopticon[1] offices, remote won't take off no matter how many studies get published. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
  • bogle 7y ago
    This is my experience of British management over the last quarter of a century. I am an expensive contract resource but I still get paid for turning up and not so much for providing working software. When I am working remotely, due to the organisation's inability to measure productivity, fostered by their management's "bums on seats" culture, I can't demonstrate that remote work is a benefit to them.
    • pts_ 7y ago
      In mob programming culture it's not even bum on seats but bums crowding around a seat!
      • commandlinefan 7y ago
        > mob programming Why waste one person's time when you can waste ten?
    • choonway 7y ago
      No wonder Singapore is like that too. 50+ years after independence from the British is not enough to change culture.
    • deepGem 7y ago
      Ditto in India. Though economic realities are forcing companies to give at least one work from home day per month. It is estimated that companies are losing close to $20B in traffic related stress.
  • lnsru 7y ago
    I call this “general wants to see his army”. I can read Wikipedia all day, but I must be present. Funny thing, all managers are allowed to work from home. Developers not! There is open office with small desks for 8-12 people in one space.
    • jrockway 7y ago
      I think this is because people don't understand how engineers spend their time. The stuff displayed on the screen makes no sense. Sometimes things that sound simple take weeks ("iOS Safari and Chrome behave completely differently!") and things that sound hard take an hour ("yeah that's just a flag flip"). What are "unit tests" and "code reviews"? Even with 12 years of professional programming experience, I am only beginning to have an idea of how long things are going to take in the context of a small team. If you've never programmed before, I don't know how you could possibly come up with an idea of how long something should take. So it reduces to the heuristic of "well they're at their desk, I'm sure they're doing something."
  • BigJ1211 7y ago
    > As one of my ex CEOs put it: "If I don't see my employees stressing out at thier desks I get the impression they're not working." This really hits the nail on the head, in my experience this is accurate for employers that are anti-remote, they want to be able to see people "work". I've argued that that means they are essentially paying people to be there 8 hours a day, not that they're working 8 hours a day. You see it a lot in stale offices, people are sitting at their desks appearing busy. Work doesn't get completed in the that time and they start hiring more busy drones. It's absolutely baffling to me that we can't look at the statistics at a higher level and recognise that it's a highly inefficient way of working.
    • galfarragem 7y ago
      Company's politics boil down to how the person in charge sees himself: as a boss or as a team leader. When it is like a boss, run and don't look back.
    • 2muchcoffeeman 7y ago
      I get more work done and work longer hours when I work from home. Meetings are a good reason to turn up to the office if you have an agenda. And maybe the odd guild or two. Or brainstorming on solutions with team mates. But this only requires you to be in the office a couple days a week max. They could get 20% more work out of me with no impact to my non work life but ...
    • alexis_fr 7y ago
      It’s easy when work gets completed. I would hire anyone remotely or let them play games at work if work is done. It is more difficult when we think their work in average or has a lot of defects. Then, the contract is for them to put in the required hours with decent concentration, and they have fulfilled their part in a measurable way that satisfies the manager. And truth be told, if their work were perfect, they would be promoted. So, home office for senior developers with awesome productivity only?
      • Notorious_BLT 7y ago
        Then the junior developers never get the benefit/mentorship of the best senior developers, instead they get mentored by the senior devs with poor productivity. That seems like a recipe for more unproductive developers
  • oh_sigh 7y ago
    Maybe the problem is you were trying to invalidate their e tire management worldview with those studies. Instead, a more effective strategy might have been convincing management that while their methods were generally fine, for your specific case you might buck the trend. At least, that's how I've had luck with this problem. And also reassuring(and proving through my actions) that they wouldn't need to devote special time just to managing me vs managing the horde.
    • precisioncoder 7y ago
      Logic doesn't matter, it's the ability to sell it. This goes for almost all major decisions which are usually decided based on emotional "gut feelings" rather than logic and statistics. I would suggest something like: "I've been crunching the numbers on how to increase efficiency and been pleasantly surprised at how well we're performing compared to our competition. I was thinking of trying an experiment based on this new study I've read <Link> where we leverage existing great management techniques to also allow remote work on a limited basis. If you're interested I could show you the numbers but I think with a small sample set <me and a few other good developers> we could prove that this could boost our efficiency even higher! In fact even though it's increasing our numbers we can even offer it to the team as a perk, <study> has shown that when a team gets a perk even if it boosts efficency they work even harder! We have this great new/old project <X> that would be perfect to measure the numbers with. How about I roll it out at the beginning of next month? Don't worry about the planning, I have some experience and can have a proposal on your desk by the end of the week."
      • chrisweekly 7y ago
        Mostly good advice. Along similar lines (w/ more detail of course), see DHH's book "REMOTE" which includes advice on how to sell the idea to mgmt. As a first step I'd recommend starting even smaller though, vs framing it as a new and demonstrably better way for projectS to be done in general (ie, a big change). See if you can find a way to demonstrate the benefits on a personal/individual level, without making a big deal of it. If you can start the bigger conversation (involving teams / processes / policies) already armed with evidence of success at your current workplace, you'll gain credibility and engender confidence / assuage fears of those in management who need convincing. For my part, I've been self-employed (full-time consulting), 98% remote, for about 3 years. Before that, in almost 20 years of traditional software-related jobs, about half my working days were remote. I was fortunate in being able to insist on a high degree of autonomy wrt how/where/when I got my work done, for most of my positions. Not always possible, but you'll never get the freedom if you don't look for the oppty and make the case for it.
  • throwaway9301 7y ago
    The interesting question is: "why?". David Graeber's book "Bullsh*t Jobs" is about that. These companies main priority is not efficiency and productivity. If it was, they could hire less people to do the same work and that would foster unemployment. They have a political and social role: hire as many people as possible. Keep them employed and busy and keep an eye on them. Become too big to fail and you'll be rewarded with overbudgeted contracts (and even bailouts, sometimes).
    • chucksmash 7y ago
      > These companies main priority is not efficiency and productivity. Still with you here... > They have a political and social role: hire as many people as possible. You lose me here. Most companies are out to make as much money as possible now or in the near future. I spent the first three years of my career in QA at a total BS Jobs company (120k+ employees, lots of government contract and enterprise software work). So many people coasted, nothing ever really got done, etc. Even in a totally dysfunctional organization like that, hiring was either about backfilling attrition losses or hiring people that were expected to directly or indirectly contribute to revenue growth. Never attribute to a vast socio-political conspiracy that which can be explained by the emergent incompetence of a large organization.
      • shantly 7y ago
        > Most companies are out to make as much money as possible now or in the near future. The company in the abstract, sure. Not managers and VPs and such. Not even the C-suite, necessarily, or at least they likely have other concerns in addition to just the company making money. It's the principal agent problem plus the management version of résumé-driven-development, basically.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  • esotericn 7y ago
    I personally just do it. It's then empirically obvious that I get more done and am happier. If they don't like it, they can sack me. I earn more than twice minimum wage, ergo I can work half the year and get by. It's never happened yet because it turns out actually people like people who get stuff done. Who knew? Behind this monitor I'm looking out at the river, watching Winter roll in as I eat lunch. :)
  • nabdab 7y ago
    It’s a valid concern. If you don’t have transparency into ongoing work, then you aren’t ready for remote workers. If the only method for your manager to know what people are working on is to tap people on shoulders, then doing that isn’t a “bad behavior” for the manager, it’s necessary behavior. Of cause a better solution is to have trust and plans. (Agile, scrum, waterfall, napkin sketches or whatever it doesn’t matter as long as people align during planning and have transparency into the plan). But in the absence you still need to have management in sync with what is going on. Naturally the best pathway forwards is to look into changing your system to include all these value adding elements. But enabling remote work while management is critically dependent on physical presence to continue operation is not a good idea. And the solution is not just for managers to “give up the mindset” of knowing what’s going on below them. Trust is great when it works, and toxic when it doesn’t. The agile mantra of increasing trust is not just supposed to advocate blind trust. It’s about building a framework and working routine where we are validated in trusting each other.
    • 100100010001 7y ago
      I disagree with the “tapping on the shoulder isn’t a bad behavior”. It is counterproductive as illustrated by the linked cartoon. https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-a-programmer/ https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...
      • vidarh 7y ago
        They weren't saying it isn't a bad behavior in general, but that in the absence of visibility into what staff is doing it is a necessity. It's far worse than having proper visibility, but until/unless you have that visibility, it's a lowest-effort way of getting some visibility. Of course the right thing to do is to work to get proper visibility, and when you have that, then the "tap" is pointless interruption.
        • auiya 7y ago
          Managers who tap aren't interested in work visibility. That can be achieved via a simple email. Managers who tap are only interested in hearing themselves talk at others.
  • otabdeveloper4 7y ago
    > interrupt you by tapping you on the shoulder whenever they need something Well, yes, that's what you're being paid for. The alternative is hard KPI's and getting fired for not meeting them, which is not something you really want.
    • Merrill 7y ago
      I know one person who works remotely in transcribing and one in editing. They have specific numbers to meet in terms of lines and pages. In fact the transcriber is paid by quantity.
      • noarchy 7y ago
        We're getting perilously close to seeing software developers reduced to those kinds of measurements again. People stuck working in "Agile" shops are putting up with "velocity" metrics. And with the spread of GitPrime, for instance, they're even seeing lines of code per day used as part of their metrics; something that used to be considered a relic of the past.
      • jve 7y ago
        Probably works for them. But don't measure code like that. Bill Gates: Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight And then, how do you measure someone refactoring code and ending up with -1kLOC? Or someone thinking hard for a few days to come up with an elegant algorithm?
  • tyfon 7y ago
    Personally I work remotely in Norway with a similar commute, but I do travel into the office for some face to face meetings. Most is done via slack or something similar though and my productivity is vastly higher. I also don't need to waste 2 hours every day of my personal time that I can instead spend with my wife and children. They also save on office space.. I don't see how this is not a win win for everyone either. Your ex CEO sounds like a psychopath.
    • ChuckNorris89 7y ago
      That's South/Central Europe for you. Not everywhere is as evolved as Norway.
      • atomwaffel 7y ago
        Eh, I work in Norway and while I can work remotely on request, my inquiry about doing so regularly one day a week was met with “what if shit hits the fan and we need you here urgently” from my manager (my house is a ten minute walk from the office) and “if we allow one person to work remotely, everyone will want to” from HR.
        • tyfon 7y ago
          You should tell HR that would be great, one seat at the office costs a lot. They have a huge savings potential :)
          • atomwaffel 7y ago
            Yes, but think of all the meetings you can’t have if people aren’t at the office!
  • BurningFrog 7y ago
    Unless your work output is very easy to measure, demanding you show up to work in one of the only ways to ensure you're at least putting in an effort for your employer. Of course, one of the hardest professions to measure output for is software engineers. I once worked with a guy who, it was discovered after a long time, actually had two Silicon Valley jobs. That he actually showed up at! He walked/drove between them a few times a day, and managed to keep the illusion up for quite a while. I'm guessing he has 4 "remote" jobs now :)
    • bitL 7y ago
      I used to have 3 remote dev jobs at once. It was exhausting but doable; my problem before was that no company was utilizing me at more than 30% of what I could sustain and I was upset I was wasting my time. So I had one web dev, one Java and one Deep Learning gig in parallel. The only issue was with conflicting times of meetings. I didn't tell either company I was working for another but had a prior agreement that they wouldn't mind if I did unrelated work elsewhere as well if it didn't affect deliveries for them. I used the extra money I got to pay off my Top 10 MS in ML and MBA.
    • 8note 7y ago
      having multiple start up jobs makes some sense, really. you as an employee are making an investment in terms of time in exchange for shares of the business. the VCs aren't putting all their eggs in one basket with startups, so why should the workers?
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • bitL 7y ago
    The worst thing is that Europeans take this attitude with them when they move to USA and then enforce it everywhere. They just can't imagine somebody working remotely properly and have the need to micromanage over IM, i.e. employees getting messaged immediately when one's status switches to "away" or similar.
  • fizx 7y ago
    As someone who has gone to the dark side, there's an interesting tradeoff here. There's basically three scenarios: (1) all employees are trusted and unmeasured, but you have to tap people on the shoulder every once in a while to confirm that they're on track. Naturally, this is easier if everyone is on-site. (2) everyone is accountable for producing of tickets, and you can check that everyone is at least doing some work. Check-ins can happen via comments in tickets. (3) Everyone just does whatever they think they're supposed to be doing, and the manager only finds out something is wrong when the employee volunteers the information or the project isn't delivered on-time. (1) is the common case, (2) requires time and skills many managers don't have (and creates @#$% Jira commentary form the peanut gallery), (3) requires building an excellent team with years of mutual trust between them, and still goes wrong all the time. Seeing you at your desk working, and asking a casual question or two at the water cooler is by far the easiest (laziest?) way to make sure things don't go too far sideways.
    • JimboOmega 7y ago
      "I just stare at my desk. But it looks like I'm working!" - Office Space
    • baron_harkonnen 7y ago
      In the many jobs I've had I've never seen "things go side ways" because those tricky employees have finally found a way to not do any work! By and large the vast majority of workers have the capitalist cultural logic deeply ingrained in their psyche and personally feel value only when they produce meaningful work. Most people are not trying to get away with doing less, and, at least in my experience, feel the most satisfied and secure when they are working hard and creating visible products of their labor. When I've seen "things go side ways" it's almost exclusively at higher levels of management when politics create goals other than "create an amazing product". Anyone who has worked both in a large company and a small startups has likely seen the difference between "my boss's goal is for us to create a best in class product" vs "my boss's goal is for him to get L_current +1 promotion". There are no companies that have failed because the workers have finally figured out how to sneak their way out of doing work. But workers do have a hard time being productive when "productivity" is some weird game that no one will really explain the rules to. But the logic of blaming workers who get "off track" is a huge part of the culture we need to get rid of to have successful remote work.
  • commandlinefan 7y ago
    Remember, we live in a corporate culture where people who have offices with doors that close praise the “collaboration” of the open office that the rest of us serfs suffer under. You’re dreaming if you think productivity is actually the goal: power is the goal (their power over you). If you manage to produce anything in spite of management’s best efforts to thwart you, that’s entirely accidental.
    • dashscript 7y ago
      > power is the goal (their power over you) working remotely gives too much power to workers because interviewing elsewhere becomes so inexpensive. In fact I'd argue most remote devs that are not already at the top of their potential compensation/status (say, someone working in the linux kernel team) are interviewing constantly. Most companies not aiming for top tallent are better off taking on contractors than remote full time developers.
  • _pmf_ 7y ago
    Businesses optimize for low middle management quality (being able to keep track of attendance == good enough), not for good grunt quality.
  • tima101 7y ago
    I believe a change must come from bottom up and not from top down. Management won't change since they have little incentive to do so. Employees who are not happy with synchronous office work with a lot of interruptions should quit and start small successful companies that are asynchronous and remote. To help this movement, we built open source SaaS boilerplate. We also built Async, an asynchronous team communication tool designed specifically for small teams of software engineers.
  • dmix 7y ago
    > the ability to come over and interrupt you by tapping you on the shoulder whenever they need something. Yeah, the answer to the OP articles question about why the remote studies work out that way isn't a big mystery. The first thing you learn working from home is self-motivation and training yourself to get "in the zone". Then try doing the same at an office, where interruptions are far more often. But that said not all offices are like this. A lot of companies work to 'protect' their creatives/engineers from disruption from the extroverts/talkers. Either by isolating them in separate closed office rooms or having rules like headphones on = don't bother them.
    • disgruntledphd2 7y ago
      What if I'm both a creative/engineer (DS, actually), and an extrovert/talker? Do I need to ignore myself when I have headphones on?
      • dmix 7y ago
        It's a generalization, fall back on common sense and work with people who fit your personality/work style.
        • disgruntledphd2 7y ago
          Clearly :) It was a (terrible) joke.
          • dmix 7y ago
            Oh mb.
  • JDiculous 7y ago
    If there's anything I've learned working office jobs at corporations, it's that you can't change the culture around "butt in seats" management because it's almost like one of the core identities of the leadership. There's always a non-technical C-level executive at the top who values "butt in seats" management, and remote work isn't one of those things that anybody will speak out to defend, particularly against the superior(s) at the top of the food hierarchy. It's kind of like how legalizing prostitution makes way more sense especially for the sex workers, but nobody ever talks of legalizing it because nobody wants to be the guy to bring it up or challenge the status quo. Just leave and get a job at any remote-friendly company. The grass is really greener.
    • Rapzid 7y ago
      It takes a LOT of influence to directly affect culture at a company. If you don't have the amount of influence the best you can hope to do is spread and promote the ideas; just like in society. Except, it's a bit easier to change jobs than to change the society you live in :)
  • mnm1 7y ago
    Remote has already taken off. Some people will always be stuck in the slave master mentality by choice, not because they don't know any better. They just love to control others and make others' lives miserable. Many managers literally have no other skills or purpose in this world other than that. Fuck them. The rest of us will be productive remotely while the master and slaves will work in open offices where the idiot executives actually believe that random sharing of bullshit is what writes code, fills in the accounting books, and in general does actual work. As long as those morons are making money though, their idiocy will live on. And how can you not make money in advertising these days? So it's a long uphill battle for the rest of us who prefer to get things done and do non work stuff afterwards than the moronic control freaks who think collaboration is the key and somehow the code or article writes itself. The alternative is starting that fifth game of foosball before lunch and getting to actual work sometime in the afternoon, continuing at home, and maybe finishing by two to three am if you're lucky. No wonder people work so many hours with such little efficiency.
• mscasts 7y ago
  I work remotely for about 80% of the workweek. I am most effective at home. At work people talk to me and interrupt me quite often. You get interrupted by people walking by etc or just striking up a conversation. At home this obviously never happens for me. The only distraction I have is Slack and my dog that reminds me that it's time for a walk. So I can attest to this.
  • dagw 7y ago
    I could work from home 80% of the time if I wanted, but actually prefer working at an office because I find it less distracting. The office is a 'clean' space where I'm only surrounded by work related thing. I have my work computer on my work desk with my work setup, and nothing else. There is pretty much nothing else to do here other than work. Home is cluttered and I'm surrounded by all kinds of 'distraction' not related to working.
    • keymon-o 7y ago
      Remote work boosting is becoming a company shaming trend for not allowing workers to escape company rules, routines and procedures. Sure, remote work should be promoted, but in a way to give companies useful resources on how to analyze the neccessity and implement in their workflow. Instead of writing arguments how remote work is just awesome, it would be more useful to have statistics on how many people are actually capable and accountable to work from home, and what do people really want out of their workspaces or by asking for remote work.
  • lazyjones 7y ago
    > At home this obviously never happens for me. Interesting, you never get phone calls, texts, Amazon deliveries etc.?
    • mscasts 7y ago
      Rarely. I get some texts from the GF most of the time. Amazon doesn't really exist in my country anyway.
  • 7y ago
• TheThickOfIt 7y ago
  Anecdotal but I'm the opposite. I hate working from home and love having a team around me, sharing goals and ideas and hyping each other. Different strokes etc.
  • dspillett 7y ago
    I'm similar, but perhaps for less positive reasons. Being able to work from home if I need to is nice, and I sometimes take advantage of it, but generally I like to be in the office so I can have a better idea of what is going on. This is partly paranoia due to astonishingly (often deliberately) terrible communication under a previous regime where for instance I discovered my own line manager was leaving two days before he did by overhearing it mentioned in a conversation between people who worked on a completely different project, though even now under a much better environment I feel being in the office keeps me better abreast of things I need to know, before it becomes an emergency that I don't know them. It also creates opportunities for unplanned collaboration whereby I hear a problem that I can help with, saving others time banging their heads against it, and sometimes works the other way around for me too. And contrary to many of the other anecdotes here, I have far more attractive distractions at home than my colleagues could hope/fear to provide for me! Though maybe that speaks more about my will-power than it days about my work & home environments...
  • rimliu 7y ago
    "sharing goals and ideas and hyping each other" I will be cynical but this does not sound like some work is being done there. Reminds me of the guys of the gym who spend 90% time here just talking.
    • anbotero 7y ago
      To me it sounded like the other 10%. While the 90% will be there and not all will necessarily interrupt on purpose (they can be guided to increase the 10%), you focus your most productive interactions with the 10%. From time to time you work with the other 90%, and that helps everybody up the game. I prefer to work/live alone, but to deny the benefits of camaraderie and relationships with a high-performing team? Absurd.
• Tade0 7y ago
  Except for the occasional visit to the office to give a few high fives and have some chit-chat I work remotely. Until recently we used Toggl to track work time and the guidance was to have "6h of focused work daily". I'm managing 5h 15min-ish, but only when working remotely. When I'm in the office that number organically drops to around 3h 40min. Only person really doing those hours(and above) is one guy who's not into chit-chat.
  • graeme 7y ago
    How did you find the 6h target system. I've wondered if I should do something similar. I am, however, bad at time tracking by disposition, and haven't made a full system yet.
    • Tade0 7y ago
      I didn't participate in any of the decisions, but I assume that given a 8h workday less than one hour was reserved for lunch and the rest for stuff like going to the bathroom and socializing with your co-workers. It actually was dropped not that long ago, because clients complained that we "weren't working full time". Little do they know that those 6h were honest, focused work and the requested 8h won't be, because there are limits to what can be achieved on any given day.
      • graeme 7y ago
        Oh, I mean did you find it personally effective at boosting your own output. I work for myself, so if I can improve my efficiency within a given timespan, it's all win.
        • Tade0 7y ago
          I did write a lot of low-quality code if that's what you're asking. It was a lot like preparing for an exam after you skipped classes the whole semester. You don't wonder off and you don't stop and think about the direction you're going.
  • 7y ago
• jrockway 7y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if the underlying issue is that there isn't enough actual work for people to do. I worry that I'm about to sound super out of touch, but hear me out; I'm not making a value judgement about anyone's job. It is assumed that everyone needs to do exactly 40 hours of work per week, but ask yourself this: for every person in your company, what do their next 40 hours look like? 40 hours worth of HR policies need to be created. 40 hours worth of sales calls need to be made. 40 hours worth of snacks need to be ordered for the office. 40 hours worth of website text updates need to be made. 40 hours worth of UIs need to be designed. 40 hours worth of code needs to be typed in. Isn't it strange that all these vastly different tasks take the same number of hours to complete in a week? My guess is that chattin' is what takes up whatever time remains; people are required to pretend that they do 40 hours of work every week, so they come up with their own way of filling the time. Planning is always valued (and a good idea!), so if you report "yeah I spent the week planning for our Q3 XXX" then it sounds like the money spent on your salary was worth it, and it continues to pay. As a software engineer, I've never had the problem of not having enough work to do. Tasks are always added to the backlog at a faster rate than they are removed from the backlog. But I feel like a lot of other jobs aren't like this, and the "there is infinite work forever!" thing is most prevalent in fields like engineering, design, art, fabrication, etc. Meanwhile, most of the people in your average office aren't doing any of those things. To some extent, they're on retainer, waiting for their skills to be needed. And, trying to optimize this is perilous. If you get employee utilization up to 100%, people complain loudly (Amazon fulfillment center workers aren't sending 1000 Slack messages a day). If you try to not pay people for the time periods where they're not being utilized, you just get the "gig economy" which is awful. I dunno, it all makes very little sense to me. Sometimes I wonder what percentage of the US economy is about doing work that doesn't need to be done, and how many people would not have jobs if we decided "we're not paying for this anymore". I think I'm scared about it, though.
  • hrbf 7y ago
    You’ll probably be interested to read about Bullshit Jobs. The authors’ name escapes me currently.
    • 7y ago
• PunchTornado 7y ago
  I don't get it why the workplace is viewed as only a place to work. We spend 8h of the day there. That would be a sad life if you only worked in those 8h. The workplace is actually a place to socialize, to do the things that you love, chat with your friends, have fun. I bet most people from those 8h work a maximum 4. The rest is chatting and socializing. I like it.
  • dkersten 7y ago
    > The rest is chatting and socializing. I like it. The problem I have with this is that I don't really get to choose who I can chat and socialize with -- I like my work colleagues, but they're not my main social circle and never will be because I find it unhealthy if your colleagues are your core friends since if you ever want or need to leave (or get fired), it makes it all the more painful and makes an already stressful situation even more stressful. I'm a firm believer that you should enjoy the company of the people you work with, but that you should have a strong social life outside of work too so that you don't feel socially trapped in that job.
    • PunchTornado 7y ago
      depends on the type of work. if you're in tech and you change jobs every 3 years, yes that's harder. but in medical people stay much much longer, 20-30 years. Most of my team has been here over 10 years. It's seems stupid not to create strong friendships.
• UserIsUnused 7y ago
  Their tool Twist is the result of their own problems while developing their app (Todoist) , and they use it internally. Usual tools made by companies that use it (dogfooding) use to be better.
• settsu 7y ago
  The issue I often have with discussions of remote work vs. on-site, is how much confirmation bias tends to be incorporated into the conclusions made. After about 16 years of on-site work (at various jobs), I did almost 5 years of remote work (for a single company), having just recently returned to an in-office role (despite focusing on landing another remote position, the best opportunity wasn’t.) And, frankly, I find neither inherently, categorically superior. It has far more to do with a number of unique variables, among them: culture, software tools, and the people themselves. So while I do largely agree with the core argument of the linked post (roughly summarized: asynchronous communication helps facilitate productivity for knowledge workers), I also feel too much emphasis is placed on working remotely as inherent in part of the solution. How about we just teach and incentivize people to, for example, not interrupt others unnecessarily, how to recognize when someone may be deeply focused on a task, how to indicate such an effort is currently underway, plus to recognize when it may be appropriate, necessary, and healthy to stop the “deep work“ and address communal, biological, and psychological needs? All regardless of the exact mode of the work.
  • bogle 7y ago
    I would like to see an improvement in the culture, too, and I've seen organisations experiment with "Do Not Disturb" desks, with very limited success. Every office I've been in has been open-plan. If it's full of developers it will mainly be quiet and conducive to work. Put just one person in there who needs to talk, especially Sales and Marketing, and it's all going to fall apart.
  • bananatron 7y ago
    Great points, the pendulum is still swinging so I expect more and more pro-remote content in the coming years. I personally prefer mostly remote work, but I think it's much harder to pull off - there are no play books on how to do it and if you don't do it from the start it becomes exponentially more difficulty to execute correctly.
  • mkolodny 7y ago
    While "remote workers are more productive" is in the article's title, I disagree that the author is suggesting that working remotely is a necessary part of the solution. The article's subtitle is "Async isn’t just for remote teams". I think the post makes it clear to that office workers could benefit a ton from async communication. And I agree completely. Sync communication at my previous job was such a drain on my productivity. For me, Slack made communication easier, but it made focus more difficult and work more stressful. I think you're right that software tools can make a big difference. The author seems to be promoting its product - Twist - as a great Slack alternative. And I think it looks solid.
• kmlx 7y ago
  my office is hell to work in. everyone simply shows up next to your screen and starts talking. that is why async comms from remote locations has been a blessing for me. i can simply queue the non important messages for later. once they've realised that i won't answer for a couple of hours they started being a lot more aware of what messages they're sending. thus comms improved greatly once everyone started working from home. the occasion call takes care of any face2face situations. overall major win
  • siffland 7y ago
    I have this issue as well. People will show up at my desk to get something done. Yes it should be in some sort of ticket, but then they are in a queue and might get another admin, so if they just show up they will probably get their stuff done so they will leave me alone and i can get onto other work (it is not that i don't want to see people, but i have lots of work usually).
• joshuakarjala 7y ago
  (promo) - For builders we have created https://www.yourtempo.co https://www.yourtempo.co to help you manage e-mail and only process / reply once or twice a day.
• vkaku 7y ago
  It works very well when you need a clear documented interface for communication. It will not work on a culture which demands more facetime. And more often, the answer is somewhere in between, and it's hard to generalize.
• everdrive 7y ago
  If a boss needs to see you in your seat to "know" you're working, it's very likely that said boss cannot actually tell which employees are effective or talented, either.
• mattoxic 7y ago
  Oh it's quite simple, I don't get interrupted. At work I might get 15 minutes of work done before there is someone at my desk, and headphones are the international sign of "hey lets bother that guy".
• yason 7y ago
  Productivity depends on the phase of work. Simplisticly put there are two phases of mental work such as programming: i/o bound and brain bound. If you're in the i/o bound phase remoting is often hard. You need to talk to people, pull answers from them, communicate, coordinate, reach agreements and nail down development plans. You can't do anything anyway unless you agree on the next steps first. Conversely if you're brain bound all you want is a laptop and being alone at home because it's way more efficient to focus on a problem when you can forget about everything else. You can't plan ahead anyway unless you dig down in the code and see for yourself first what will work and what needs to change. These phases alternate in worklife, maybe based on projects, time of the month, the whatever happenstances take place in the progress of development. Usually when you're stuck in one phase you really need to spend time in the other phase for a while. This is normal. This has consequences. People working remotely tend to maximise their time on what they're efficient at, i.e. brain bound programming. At the office it's easier to invite people to meetings through the week to get work done that way because you can't really be brain bound at the office anyway. Thus remote types and office types tend to inflate their favourite phase as much as possible. This inflation happens because these two phases are inherently incompatible with each other, and crossing the gap to switch phases is tedious. But if you only ever work i/o bound you begin to wonder how could people work remotely at all. After all, everything happens in the office anyway so maybe working from home could work if only we add enough meetings to keep the remote people more tightly in the loop... And people working steadily from home begin to fathom, in time, whether it's possible at all to work at the office as all you have is constant breaks, meetings, people coming to ask about stuff and you can't ultimately get any real work done. Different things begin to become important for people who don't alternate. So there's a slight confirmation bias in how people flock to the position and environment that maximises the kind of work they're really good at. But the caveat is that in doing this that you could be comfort-siloing yourself. So natural and healthy alternating between phases is what keeps you open and able to adjust to changes in work life and work projects. On the other hand, people who alternate too often begin to get nothing done. You need to allocate batches of time for both phases in some moderate proportion. How to balance that is more of an art than anything else. Sounds familiar, anyone? This is a dynamic I've observed in my own work life over and over again.
  • 7y ago
• atilaneves 7y ago
  Been working 100% remotely for 3 years now. My biggest fear is having to go back to an office at some point in my career. I hope it never happens.
• tomasGiden 7y ago
  It is easy to make a case for either synchronous or asynchronous communication just as easily as making cases for on collocation or remote work or office landscapes or individual rooms. But what is most often missing us the context. And it is quite naive to believe one way is always better than the other. I can recommend the work on Dynamic work design by Nelson P. Repenning to make a case for both in what context either is best but even more importantly, when and how to move back and forth between different work modes. Here is a good introduction: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-new-approach-to-designing-work/ https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-new-approach-to-design...
• jillesvangurp 7y ago
  An important point about asynchronous vs. synchronous is that it's not just about the communication but about the work processeses. What enables people to work more effectively is removing synchronization bottlenecks in processes. Any kind of synchronization point causes people to do silly things like wait for that to happen, delay activities until after they've happened, or try to organize meetings around these points. The more synchronization points you have, the slower things get. Usually we call this bureaucracy. Any kind of meeting is a synchronization bottleneck. People synchronize their workday around these. Workdays and office hours are synchronization points as well. They create bottlenecks in our traffic system even where literally everybody is trying to get to work at the same time just so they can be at a standup meeting. Treat it as a technical problem and get rid of unnecessary blocking activities and things run smoother. It's true for software, it's true for logistics, and it is true for work processes. The same principles apply and you can use similar design patterns (queues, events, etc.). A side effect of non blocking processes is that people can work more effectively without waiting for people to talk to them or meetings to happen. It enables remote work but is just as effective when used on site. Git was invented to support asynchronous development where independent groups of developers work on their own branches and exchange patches or pull requests when they want to synchronize. Works great for OSS but it is now also common in non remote software teams. Create a ticket, assign it, create a branch for it, do some work, create a pr, pr gets reviewed, ci builds trigger and if you figured out deployment automation, ultimately the change goes to production as well. It's all orchestrated via events that trigger somebody or something to pick up the work for the next thing. It's great. It replaced a work process where people were bottle-necked on central version repositories that required a lot of ceremony around branching and merging because it was so tedious; which in turn made commits a big deal and necessitated commit freezes and lots of communication overhead, meetings, and delays. Git got rid of most of that.
• yodsanklai 7y ago
  I work remotely. I've noticed that one thing that make me work harder than in an office, is that I feel that I need to earn the trust that my employer gives me. In an office, sometimes I feel that just being there is enough to justify my salary, even if I'm just chatting with colleagues or browsing the web. I discipline myself better when I work remotely. Another thing that makes a difference for me: I suffer from back pain when sitting in a chair for too long. At my place, I can lie down if needed. On the downside, I suffer from being far from where decisions are taken, and I sometimes miss important information.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • BurningFrog 7y ago
    > On the downside, I suffer from being far from where decisions are taken And your employer suffers from your lack of input in those decisions.
    • tick_tock_tick 7y ago
      That may or may not have consequences for them but almost always will hurt the employee's career.
  • silviot 7y ago
    My personal experience with lying down to work is that it feels good in the short term, but causes problems in the long term (increased pain). I have no data to back this claim, but I can provide this single data point. I completely agree with both your other points about trust/discipline and important decisions though.
    • thisisnico 7y ago
      I believe there are many studies, even posted here that lying down < Sitting < Standing < Walking. Lying down for long periods of time is worse for you. (sleeping excluded). Less activity with the body = worse for the body.
• Udik 7y ago
  The article starts by simply assuming its conclusion in a complete non-sequitur: that all the listed benefits of remote working stem from asynchronous communication. Sharing the space with your children or partner? Asynchronous communication. Being able to take short breaks in your own space? Asynchronous communication. Not being distracted by people chatting about their weekend? Asynchronous communication. One of the major benefits of remote working, for me, is just not having other people around. It's not much a matter of communication but simply of the relax and focus I get when I don't have to be aware of others.
• atoav 7y ago
  A thing to consider is that these remote methods are not bound to remote workers. I had a job were I had two choices when a certain situation occured that stopped me from finishing work: 1. Find the person involved, talk to them and try to resolve it right away 2. Write a mail to them, print it out, clamp it to the related paper and hang it on the wall. We were a very tiny 7-person company with rooms in the same building and still the approach outlined in point 1 rarely was more productive than just waiting for them to reply. For situations that happened more often I created email templates so there was even less work. Another advantage of method 2 is that unresolved work in the end of the day is already taken care of and if you are working in shifts the handover is easier then.
• greggman2 7y ago
  Since remote work seems to be the topic this article on async communication spawned I wanted to throw this out there for reactions. First off let me acknowledge that some people prefer remote work and also say up front I do not. I recent YouAreNotSoSmart podcast interviewed Laurie Santos from Yale and if I understood her research basically claims we often both individually and as a society choose things we think will make us happy but actually don't. Examples seemed to include anything that takes you away from people. One example was the ATM machine. It's more convenient than a bank teller but interacting with the teller adds to your quota of needed interaction for happiness. Things like the fact that you can order a Starbucks coffee on your phone and pick it up with no interaction as another tiny example. I'm sure those were minor examples but she was basically claiming we're often inadvertently choosing things that actually make us less happy. For me I prefer in office work because I want to be around other people. I want them to interrupt me too. Not 100% of the time but I enjoy the camaraderie, the conversations, going over solutions together, etc... So in that context, is it possible the push for remote work fits in that line? We think it will make us happy but it for many people it will have the unintended consequence of isolating them and actually make them less happy. I'm not saying you shouldn't be given the choice. Maybe you are different. Maybe you have special needs (someone you need to take care of for example) or maybe you're remote location has family or friends around. But, if Laurie Santos is correct then maybe a large percent of people are actually making a bad choice? PS: I don't know if I trust her research. I'm only passing on my interpretation what I though she said in the interview.
  • jekrb 7y ago
    Was there any mention about how virtual interactions might add to the quota? I'm curious if daily social video calls with your remote co-workers would be helpful in that regard.
  • starvingbear 7y ago
    I think it's absolutely true that most people will prefer an office or at least a community to work in most the time in person. I've done both and normally prefer an office. However most offices nowadays are very badly run and promote open layout and daily scrums etc. If offices weren't effectively sabotaged this way they would be much better. Every office critique in the OP article was made as well by my father in convo. He isn't in tech but ran a small biz his whole life. Not unique problems to tech we just have a weird culture atm. So my thought is the breakout companies that are learning how to respect engineering and get away from the hokey practices of current middle management will be the only ones attracting senior talent. Things will shift eventually and the office can maybe make a comeback.
• WomanCanCode 7y ago
  Management here doesn't like remote employees because they cant order them around like they do us. Also they don't like the fact that those employees don't stay in the office longer and are not bonding with other people here.
• ninkendo 7y ago
  This article hits on a lot of good points to me, because I often see people treat chat like it's a stand-in for an IRL conversation. People will start conversations with just "Hello", and wait for me to respond, as if we're talking on the phone or something. This, to me, fundamentally misses out on the benefits of online communication: You don't need to wait to establish a conversation with me to ask me your question; you can just come out with it. And your question/problem can become just another item on my TODO list, which I can prioritize throughout the day: - If it's something I can answer/address right away, I can do so - If it's something that will take some investigation, I can start investigating it (and let you know how much time I'll need, etc) - If it's something clearly low-priority, I can wait until later when I'm not as busy to address it - If it's something that doesn't really make sense, or there are things I can explain to you to help point you in the right direction, I can spend a moment to help dig up some information for you. If you just say "Hello" (or "Ping", etc) you're taking away my ability to prioritize your question/problem, and are asking me to agree to spend time on something before I know what it is. If instead you begin the conversation with the question/problem that needs addressing, you're adding an item to my TODO queue, which can be re-sorted/re-prioritized continuously throughout the day, and allows me to be more effective. I can get to your question when it makes sense for me to do so. I have my status permanently set to http://nohello.com http://nohello.com to hopefully drive this point home with people, and anecdotally I've seen a lot less drive-by "Hello" messages on Slack. Additionally I've just stopped responding to people when they say "Hello". I just hope that doesn't come off as me being a jerk, though...
• monkeydust 7y ago
  Personally I think flexibility is the future. Allow employees to decide or work inhouse or remotely. I work in a very large financial services technology company. I value to closeness to colleges and the quick, sharp interactions that can happen with that - but - there are times when I am wokring on something larger I would be more effective at home or a remote location where sales etc can physically come to my desk and suck my time.
  • xfitm3 7y ago
    I hope flexibility is the future. I take advantage of this a lot, but unfortunately, my company has a lot of new managers. They LOVE meetings. I really cant stand it.
  • anbotero 7y ago
    I think this is key, but it costs a lot from companies (and also people), culturally, economically, and sometimes constrained by law. Should you keep all seats even when 20% of your workforce prefers to work remote? What do you do with those seats when they are empty? It's possible, and it's great when it's there, just not as simple as choosing one option or the other. I happen to prefer to work alone, but I recognize those times when meetings or pair programming are truly valuable and needed, and I jump to it at once when needed. It's about recognizing the pros and cons of each approach, and minimize the impact of the cons as much as you can.
• gm 7y ago
  "No expectation of immediate reply"? HA! I SO wish. Slack kills any async expectation. Specially if you install it on your cellphone. Then you're on the clock 24/7. I guess the article also assumes different time zones when working remotely? I filed the article under the "rubbish bin". I've worked remotely for several years, and maybe I live in a different planet, because "async" and remote work do NOT go hand in hand for me. If anything, Slack means people can reach me even when I'm taking a dump, and I'm expected to reply at that moment.
  • mewpmewp 7y ago
    How do you know people expect you to answer immediately? I haven't noticed that expectation.
    • gm 7y ago
      They ask questions which imply "I'm sitting on my hands until you answer me".
      • wool_gather 7y ago
        Not to put too fine a point on it, but if that's happening to the same person(s) all the time, they need to find a different solution than expecting you to immediately bail them out on request.
      • 0xffff2 7y ago
        Is that your problem? Why?
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
  • gherkinnn 7y ago
    Why would you install Slack on your Phone? Your phone is with you at all times. Work should not be.
• MarkMc 7y ago
  If remote workers are more productive, why aren't most office jobs remote?
• dunkelheit 7y ago
  I think I am not really well-adapted for async communication. I can't really do "fire and forget" messaging. When I ask something I want the reply to arrive as quickly as possible because I don't want to lose the context that I have in my mind right now and load it again later when I receive a reply. On an async channel this results in compulsive checking for replies which of course kills productivity. Almost-sync channels like Slack are the worst - who didn't experience the frustration of their chat partner suddenly disappearing without a word in the middle of a discussion? On a related note I very much prefer a focused half-hour meeting to a whole day of async back-and-forths. Inbound messages are problematic too because they provide the same kind of addictive random gratification that social media is infamous for. Any tips for dealing with these problems?
  • kbsletten 7y ago
    Nobody is adapted to asynchronous communication, it's always going to make you less productive. The key is that your immediate request is forcing someone else to put down their thing to help you, the same way that other people interrupt you when they message you. In optimizing for team performance, we don't get individual maximums. Mostly, try to reduce switchyness. Not all input is blocking, sometimes you can put a question out early and have hours/ days/ weeks before you need an answer. Work on identifying potential hangups early and often. Try to handle your communication in batches. Respond to urgent messages faster, but spend time between deep tasks or in the lame duck part of the day doing email.
  • damontal 7y ago
    i have a personal kanban type page in ms onenote. one section is Waiting For... where I add things I'm waiting for like responses to questions I've emailed out. I can scan that in the morning to see who hasn't responded to what questions and send out follow ups or schedule calls, etc
  • maximente 7y ago
    thanks for your honesty; i think it takes some adjusting both personally and culturally from the company so not entirely your fault. i would broach the subject with the team to the extent possible. i think it requires buy in from others to the extent that if you're getting stuck with regularity, then those with whom you work don't seem to be empowering you with either the autonomy or information you need to work async. so, the company needs to resolve that either via empowering you (=> individuals), or get their knowledge/discussion norms set up to empower async/remote type stuff, to include such things as escalation guidelines (e.g. can use phone call for urgent matters, but gitlab issue is 24hr turn around), project planning, decision provenance/knowledge storage, etc.
• zarro 7y ago
  The reason people don't like remote workers by instinct isn't because they don't realize that they people COULD be more productive at home. Its because they worry that it creates incentives that could lead to a decrease in productivity over time. I think the root of it really is the first line Management. These guys need to be really good at their job in order for WFH FT to be more productive. If these aren't all that efficient to begin with, that will make it much more visible in a WFH situation. I think all parties intuitively feel this.
• travisoneill1 7y ago
  I think there is a component of selection bias here. Only productive workers will be allowed by their bosses to work from home.
• BeetleB 7y ago
  This is amusing. Not long ago I was in a thread about how to do remote work well and the top complaint amongst remote workers was "not responding quickly to IM" (between remote workers). And the general sentiment was the expectation to respond quickly is greater in remote work. That alone made me not want to take remote jobs. At my current work place, my IM status says that whoever IM's me should not expect a response and that if their query is urgent, they should simply walk over to my cube and talk (I don't mind). If not urgent, they should email. The other thing that came out of that thread was "If you're remote and don't respond quickly enough, people assume you're slacking off - while in the office people visibly slack off all the time and it's considered OK".
  • k__ 7y ago
    I worked with both types of people. Funny thing is, when I am a freelancer, who gets paid much more money per hour than an employee, people valued my time and would send me mails or text messages and wait hours or days for an answer,. When I was an remote employee, people paid me less and called me three times before 10am. Somehow, many employers have the perception to own every minute their employees are awake. I would never go back to such a work culture.
    • jdright 7y ago
      > Somehow, many employers have the perception to own every minute their employees are awake. This is increasingly true from my perspective as well. Not sure if I was willingly unaware or what.
    • BeetleB 7y ago
      > Somehow, many employers have the perception to own every minute their employees are awake. The disconnect is that their expectations are higher for remote than on-site. If I go for a short walk, and my boss comes to my cube and doesn't see me there, he assumes I went for a walk, or to the cafeteria, or whatever. He'll just try again or send me an email asking me to drop by once I'm back. It's not a problem. But what I've heard from remote employees: If their manager tries to ping them and don't get a response, then it's "OMG these remote workers slack off too much!"
• xtat 7y ago
  How do I upvote this harder!
• auiya 7y ago
  > It leads to lower quality discussions and suboptimal solutions. When you have to respond immediately, people don’t have time to think through key issues thoroughly and provide thoughtful responses. Your first response to any given situation is often not your best response. I feel like this is the main benefit.
• k__ 7y ago
  20-40% of the stuff you do at work are considered "real work", this is totally normal on-prem, but not remote. Where do I get the best ideas to solve a problem? Not when I'm sitting in front of it for 8h a day. I get them when I stand up, buy groceries, do my laundry, shower, etc. Does this provide huge value to the company I work for? Totally Does the people at the company think I cheat them? Many do Would they feel better if I sat in their office for 8h, have worse ideas, provide lower value and generally feel worse? Somehow many do too
• iblaine 7y ago
  This article conveniently overlooks problems when remote workers need supervision to keep them in line with expectations. I’ve had both good and bad experiences managing remote teams. The difference seems to be the quality of the remote workers. The quality of a remote persons work is inversely proportional to the supervision they require.
• helpPeople 7y ago
  I wonder where they get productivity data. An owner of a company I'm close with found her employee was abusing work from home. This same employee was formerly a Superstar or so we thought. Maybe bad management, but I found myself calling a 7 hour work from home day 8 hours too.
  • whatshisface 7y ago
    For the same pay, would you rather have one person get a lot done in 6 hours or another person get little done in 9 hours? If an employee was underperforming for 10 hours a day, would your friend keep them on? Truthfully, the only things that matter from the company's perspective are the output and the price. It's wrong to misrepresent your hours worked, just as it's wrong to lie about the color of your pants, but a rational company wouldn't ask about either.
• buboard 7y ago
  good old email is King when working remotely. I think most IM apps are used as monitoring tools. Maybe there is a better solution for that
• bryanmgreen 7y ago
  I think an asynchronous workplace (remote or not) is mostly a good one as people tend to be more effective without interruption. Anyways, I think a big barrier to this dream are the tools that can promote and sustain asynchronicity. It's really hard to keep communication open and job responsibilities/deliverables clear without being mircomanage-y. Lots of leaders will have to give up control - which is going to be really hard, to say the least. Software tools will need to be security-blankets for managers as much as performance trackers for employees. Give them a little pat on the head that "it's all ok". That's going to be hard to accomplish.
• jpincheira 7y ago
  The benefits you get from implementing asynchronous communication with your organization are huge. This is exactly why I felt the need to resign from my job last year to go build a platform that is designed from the ground up to support this. As a remote team, implementing the async communication style will allow you to never have to depend on fixed calendar meetings. No need to have to organize everybody together in a room, at a specific time, to just make a decision. I wrote a bit about how to do this within a remote team, which is a guideline into how to set a basic async comm process for a remote team. Hope you find it helpful: https://standups.io/blog/a-basic-guideline-for-async-communication/ https://standups.io/blog/a-basic-guideline-for-async-communi...
  • detaro 7y ago
    > I wrote a bit about how to do this within a remote team, which is a guideline into how to set a basic async comm process for a remote team. Hope you find it helpful: > I wrote a bit about how to do this within a remote team, which is a guideline into how to set a basic async comm process for remote teams. Hope you find it helpful. > I wrote a bit about how to do this within a remote team, which is a guideline into how to set a basic async comm process for remote teams. Hope you find it helpful: Joke about async communication or copy-paste error?