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We had recently experiment in remote working for two months. I've been doing this one-off for couple of years but I was living with other people who were doing

by DocG 7y ago

We had recently experiment in remote working for two months. I've been doing this one-off for couple of years but I was living with other people who were doing it first time. If you throw normal office workers into remote work situation, without guidance and active management this is what we found: - if there is local issue stopping work(no electricity for example), it is taken as a chance not to work, instead of solving this issue with the best of their capabilities(keep you batteries charged, go to a cafe etc). When working remotely, it is now workers responsibility to create a work environment. - all the problems are relayed to the manager, but not the good things or done work. This creates a negative image together with next. - they rather even avoid regular communication, than try to go extra mile with communicating while working because it is hard and out of they comfort zone. - discipline to regular working is hard specially in the beginning. This impacts work.

Johnny555 7y ago
if there is local issue stopping work(no electricity for example) That seems like a better case than the same issue stopping work at the office so instead of one person out of commission, there's 100 people out of commission and even though they can all go home and work it's basically going to shut down work for an hour or so as they all pack up and head home. Our office has a generator, but it only powers some lights and elevators, the network goes offline after about 20 minutes when the UPS batteries run out. So it doesn't seem like much of an argument against remote work.
- wtracy 7y ago
  I think the implication is that if an issue blocks work in the workplace, management tends to notice and intervene. This could be by directing people to assist in resolving the issue faster, or by assigning another task not impacted by the issue. ("If you can't finish your bug fix because the test server is down, you can work on documentation instead.") There's fewer opportunities for that to happen with remote work.
  - Johnny555 7y ago
    There aren't really many failures of my home office that can't be solved with a 10 minute drive to Starbucks or my local library. Except a regional power failure or a disaster like an earthquake, but the office building would be struck by the same failure. But when 100 people at the office lose internet and are sent home, they can't all converge on Starbucks across the street.
    - wtracy 7y ago
      Okay, think less "my home internet connection went down" and more "the build server fell over" or "I need confirmation from Bob and he's not responding on Slack." It's a learning-to-work-without-direct-supervision problem, not a technical problem. Also since you raised the issue: keep in mind that some people simply don't have internet infrastructure at home that's prepared for this kind of use. Think of rural DSL lines or satellite internet. (Some old, poorly maintained phone lines drop DSL packets like crazy whenever it rains. Don't ask me why.) Or someone who has a teenager that plays Fortnite and who doesn't know how to implement traffic shaping on their home network. :-)
- ajdlinux 7y ago
  I'm a fire warden in my office that doesn't have a generator, and if the power goes out for more than about an hour or so, the building chief warden is authorised to direct an evacuation to get people out before we lose emergency lighting. In any case, at least in the Western world, at reasonably well run companies, infrastructure issues and other major obstructions to the entire team getting work done isn't really a problem for more than a few hours a year? I hope GP has better examples to illustrate this point. (And anyway, here I am, sitting in the office, wasting time commenting on HN instead of doing work. It's not like workers in the office are always 100% focused.)
- handojin 7y ago
  Well... your perspective is valid but not comprehensive. On the lawn of the building are two rather industrial sized generators. When the power goes out, they go on and they keep going. I don't work at a startup. Nor do I work at 3M. There's a lot of space in between. That space is where a lot of the world works. YMMV.
  - Johnny555 7y ago
    Yes, I'm sure there are some, maybe many offices that have redundant power, but I've worked for 20 person companies and 20,000 person companies, and they all sent people home when the power went out. Even when I briefly worked in a colocation center, I got sent home during a regional power failure as they wanted to give my desk to a large customer that needed a place to work from to keep their business running. At one company, I was in charge of IT and finally got signoff to run emergency power from the generator to the data center and IDF's to keep the network online in a power failure. Facilities put an end to that plan when they said that without HVAC, the building would quickly become uninhabitable in the summer or winter. We ended up powering the main datacenter to keep servers online, but not the rest of the network.
- DocG 7y ago
  This is mentality issue, what we found when we dropped some people into remote work. They didn't link themselves up that they are now responsible for their workplace and not employer. It is solvable, with active management and active workers, but these are the things we found that needed to be addressed.
samsonradu 7y ago
This 100 times. There’s a big fallacy in tech circles in which everyone takes their work so seriously that they’ll be working from home just as effective as they’d have from the office. In reality though things are quite different. Having seen it first hand I can say that there are many employees I’d rather have in the office. I’m willing to bet on a productivity drop caused by the work-from-home policies that are happening now.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  I’m an employee I’d rather have in the office. At home, my productivity is either 20-30% lower or 20-50% higher than in the office. The problem is I can never predict which one it will be on any given day. My productivity in the office is much less variable than that. There are, of course, better and worse days, but I like to keep things as predictable as possible. This, coincidentally, probably makes me easier to manage than if my performance were more variable.
  - dragonsky67 7y ago
    So overall your productivity is about the same, with the benefit to you of no commute time and the benefit to the orginisation of not having to provide you with a desk.
    - darrenf 7y ago
      That seems to assume a 50% split between the two day types. I'm the same as pmiller2, and I know my unproductive days at home far outnumber by highly productive days. Furthermore I find my commute beneficial as I'm able to swap from "home head" to "work head" mode much easier than, say, going out for a walk - my local area keeps my "home head" on.
      - pmiller2 7y ago
        My impression is that I’m about the same way, except I could really do without about half the commute time. I do like being able to (mostly) not work when I’m at home (on call rotation being the main reason I open the work laptop outside the office). Overall, I think I’m less productive on a WFH day than when I’m in the office. I’m not sure if doing more WFH would improve the situation due to more practice or not.
rxhernandez 7y ago
Hopefully this doesn't sound overly critical, but, these sound like cultural issues. I say that only because it was ingrained in me that if what you're doing is not directly making/leading to net positive money for the company, there is no excuse that can mitigate that fact and they will fire you or lay you off quickly (as I saw happen to a few good engineers at a couple companies). (in case this is helpful for anyone else) W.r.t., - local issues stopping work: I've done everything in my power to make sure nothing can affect this; to the point of buying extra batteries for my laptop, buying a hotspot in case internet goes down, making sure that I have a go bag always ready in case the area I'm working in does not have the infrastructure I need (electricity/internet/health hazards), and duplicating my equipment at my parent's place in case I need to work from there. - relaying information to the manager: I was taught that keeping my manager happy is nearly equal in importance to making the company money; as long as they're the type to want to be in frequent contact (I've had one that didn't seem to want that), I basically only give them good news (as quickly as I can) or substantial roadblocks that will take me an absurd amount of time to clear on my own. - avoiding regular communication: I can't make the company money if I'm not functioning well as a team member. - discipline: Yeah this one was hard because it's not immediately apparent how much a distraction can eat away at your day or how those distractions add up. I seem to learn new ways every week to keep distractions at bay; e.g. leaving my phone "hidden" in a relatively inaccessible place in another room, disabling facebook, blocking my access to news sites, and making sure any cleaning is done in my off hours.
logicchains 7y ago
As a counterpoint, there was a study done on call centre employees at Ctrip (big Chinese travel company) that showed a significant increase in productivity: https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/raise-productivity-let-more-employees-work-home https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/raise-productivity-let.... "Employees working from home completed 13.5 per cent more calls than staff in the office — meaning Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them." So “normal office workers” can potentially benefit from WFH too, not just tech workers.
- webo 7y ago
  Interesting article. I think in this specific example call centre employees almost NEED to be remote to be successful whereas tech work don’t. >It is not so simple. There are lots of factors that could lead to such a ban, including a culture in which remote workers tend to be slacking due to low morale. Also, we were studying call-centre work, which is easily measured and easily performed remotely.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  At the company I work for (also a travel company), quite a few people in the call centre work remotely simply because the business grew faster than the building. IT had already started working remotely and after a few trials management just concluded it worked well. I'm not actually sure how many people work remotely now (I work on the other side of the planet, so I can't see them).
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > Employees working from home completed 13.5 per cent more calls than staff in the office — meaning Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them. Were they working 7 days a week? I usually wouldn't be willing to describe 13.5% as "almost 20%".
focus2020 7y ago
Our company experimented fully remote for 4 months last year and they found all it took was 3 weeks for team to become seamless and productive was higher. In all hands our CEO jokingly said although the productivity of developers were higher he had no idea what managers were doing during the experiment. Expect managers we were all laughing so hard. It's understandable the anxiety of managers but the company has to provide a sense of job security to the managers or it's hard to implement full remote work.

by DocG 7y ago

Johnny555 7y ago

if there is local issue stopping work(no electricity for example) That seems like a better case than the same issue stopping work at the office so instead of one person out of commission, there's 100 people out of commission and even though they can all go home and work it's basically going to shut down work for an hour or so as they all pack up and head home. Our office has a generator, but it only powers some lights and elevators, the network goes offline after about 20 minutes when the UPS batteries run out. So it doesn't seem like much of an argument against remote work.

wtracy 7y ago
I think the implication is that if an issue blocks work in the workplace, management tends to notice and intervene. This could be by directing people to assist in resolving the issue faster, or by assigning another task not impacted by the issue. ("If you can't finish your bug fix because the test server is down, you can work on documentation instead.") There's fewer opportunities for that to happen with remote work.
- Johnny555 7y ago
  There aren't really many failures of my home office that can't be solved with a 10 minute drive to Starbucks or my local library. Except a regional power failure or a disaster like an earthquake, but the office building would be struck by the same failure. But when 100 people at the office lose internet and are sent home, they can't all converge on Starbucks across the street.
  - wtracy 7y ago
    Okay, think less "my home internet connection went down" and more "the build server fell over" or "I need confirmation from Bob and he's not responding on Slack." It's a learning-to-work-without-direct-supervision problem, not a technical problem. Also since you raised the issue: keep in mind that some people simply don't have internet infrastructure at home that's prepared for this kind of use. Think of rural DSL lines or satellite internet. (Some old, poorly maintained phone lines drop DSL packets like crazy whenever it rains. Don't ask me why.) Or someone who has a teenager that plays Fortnite and who doesn't know how to implement traffic shaping on their home network. :-)
ajdlinux 7y ago
I'm a fire warden in my office that doesn't have a generator, and if the power goes out for more than about an hour or so, the building chief warden is authorised to direct an evacuation to get people out before we lose emergency lighting. In any case, at least in the Western world, at reasonably well run companies, infrastructure issues and other major obstructions to the entire team getting work done isn't really a problem for more than a few hours a year? I hope GP has better examples to illustrate this point. (And anyway, here I am, sitting in the office, wasting time commenting on HN instead of doing work. It's not like workers in the office are always 100% focused.)
handojin 7y ago
Well... your perspective is valid but not comprehensive. On the lawn of the building are two rather industrial sized generators. When the power goes out, they go on and they keep going. I don't work at a startup. Nor do I work at 3M. There's a lot of space in between. That space is where a lot of the world works. YMMV.
- Johnny555 7y ago
  Yes, I'm sure there are some, maybe many offices that have redundant power, but I've worked for 20 person companies and 20,000 person companies, and they all sent people home when the power went out. Even when I briefly worked in a colocation center, I got sent home during a regional power failure as they wanted to give my desk to a large customer that needed a place to work from to keep their business running. At one company, I was in charge of IT and finally got signoff to run emergency power from the generator to the data center and IDF's to keep the network online in a power failure. Facilities put an end to that plan when they said that without HVAC, the building would quickly become uninhabitable in the summer or winter. We ended up powering the main datacenter to keep servers online, but not the rest of the network.
DocG 7y ago
This is mentality issue, what we found when we dropped some people into remote work. They didn't link themselves up that they are now responsible for their workplace and not employer. It is solvable, with active management and active workers, but these are the things we found that needed to be addressed.

samsonradu 7y ago

This 100 times. There’s a big fallacy in tech circles in which everyone takes their work so seriously that they’ll be working from home just as effective as they’d have from the office. In reality though things are quite different. Having seen it first hand I can say that there are many employees I’d rather have in the office. I’m willing to bet on a productivity drop caused by the work-from-home policies that are happening now.

pmiller2 7y ago
I’m an employee I’d rather have in the office. At home, my productivity is either 20-30% lower or 20-50% higher than in the office. The problem is I can never predict which one it will be on any given day. My productivity in the office is much less variable than that. There are, of course, better and worse days, but I like to keep things as predictable as possible. This, coincidentally, probably makes me easier to manage than if my performance were more variable.
- dragonsky67 7y ago
  So overall your productivity is about the same, with the benefit to you of no commute time and the benefit to the orginisation of not having to provide you with a desk.
  - darrenf 7y ago
    That seems to assume a 50% split between the two day types. I'm the same as pmiller2, and I know my unproductive days at home far outnumber by highly productive days. Furthermore I find my commute beneficial as I'm able to swap from "home head" to "work head" mode much easier than, say, going out for a walk - my local area keeps my "home head" on.
    - pmiller2 7y ago
      My impression is that I’m about the same way, except I could really do without about half the commute time. I do like being able to (mostly) not work when I’m at home (on call rotation being the main reason I open the work laptop outside the office). Overall, I think I’m less productive on a WFH day than when I’m in the office. I’m not sure if doing more WFH would improve the situation due to more practice or not.

rxhernandez 7y ago

Hopefully this doesn't sound overly critical, but, these sound like cultural issues. I say that only because it was ingrained in me that if what you're doing is not directly making/leading to net positive money for the company, there is no excuse that can mitigate that fact and they will fire you or lay you off quickly (as I saw happen to a few good engineers at a couple companies). (in case this is helpful for anyone else) W.r.t., - local issues stopping work: I've done everything in my power to make sure nothing can affect this; to the point of buying extra batteries for my laptop, buying a hotspot in case internet goes down, making sure that I have a go bag always ready in case the area I'm working in does not have the infrastructure I need (electricity/internet/health hazards), and duplicating my equipment at my parent's place in case I need to work from there. - relaying information to the manager: I was taught that keeping my manager happy is nearly equal in importance to making the company money; as long as they're the type to want to be in frequent contact (I've had one that didn't seem to want that), I basically only give them good news (as quickly as I can) or substantial roadblocks that will take me an absurd amount of time to clear on my own. - avoiding regular communication: I can't make the company money if I'm not functioning well as a team member. - discipline: Yeah this one was hard because it's not immediately apparent how much a distraction can eat away at your day or how those distractions add up. I seem to learn new ways every week to keep distractions at bay; e.g. leaving my phone "hidden" in a relatively inaccessible place in another room, disabling facebook, blocking my access to news sites, and making sure any cleaning is done in my off hours.

logicchains 7y ago

As a counterpoint, there was a study done on call centre employees at Ctrip (big Chinese travel company) that showed a significant increase in productivity: https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/raise-productivity-let-more-employees-work-home https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/raise-productivity-let.... "Employees working from home completed 13.5 per cent more calls than staff in the office — meaning Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them." So “normal office workers” can potentially benefit from WFH too, not just tech workers.

webo 7y ago
Interesting article. I think in this specific example call centre employees almost NEED to be remote to be successful whereas tech work don’t. >It is not so simple. There are lots of factors that could lead to such a ban, including a culture in which remote workers tend to be slacking due to low morale. Also, we were studying call-centre work, which is easily measured and easily performed remotely.
mikekchar 7y ago
At the company I work for (also a travel company), quite a few people in the call centre work remotely simply because the business grew faster than the building. IT had already started working remotely and after a few trials management just concluded it worked well. I'm not actually sure how many people work remotely now (I work on the other side of the planet, so I can't see them).
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> Employees working from home completed 13.5 per cent more calls than staff in the office — meaning Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them. Were they working 7 days a week? I usually wouldn't be willing to describe 13.5% as "almost 20%".

focus2020 7y ago

Our company experimented fully remote for 4 months last year and they found all it took was 3 weeks for team to become seamless and productive was higher. In all hands our CEO jokingly said although the productivity of developers were higher he had no idea what managers were doing during the experiment. Expect managers we were all laughing so hard. It's understandable the anxiety of managers but the company has to provide a sense of job security to the managers or it's hard to implement full remote work.