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I'm as big of a remote work supporter as you'll find. I'm often crucified for how anti-office I am. Having said that, a hybrid model is absolutely not remote wo

I'm as big of a remote work supporter as you'll find. I'm often crucified for how anti-office I am. Having said that, a hybrid model is absolutely not remote work. It's not distributed. It's a nightmare. Every single person in the company, including executives, needs to be remote.

aeternum 6y ago
My company has made the hybrid model work. We've had a mix of fully remote along with two physical offices. It's really not all that complex, conference rooms have to have a video conference system that is added by default to all meetings. Ad-hoc meetings can start video with a single button press and a short code/url sent over slack. We strongly encourage employees to keep discussions in 'public' slack rooms rather than private messages. This can be noisy but allows for inclusivity. Team members are free to choose which channels to join and are encouraged configure alerting to manage the noise. Only takes a few minutes to set up. Performance needs to be measured by work output rather than time in the office, but companies should be doing that regardless. Face-to-face on-boarding and intros to the team are preferable so we would fly in new-hires wherever possible for the first couple weeks. Beneficial but not required.
- hoka 6y ago
  And what is the breakdown of executives, managers, etc between on-prem and remote?
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Ar my company, which is (normally) a mixture of on-prem (at many different offices) and remote/WFH, I'm sure all of the senior leadership team have offices somewhere. But many/most of their reports and other people they coordinate with are in different offices/remote and most of them are traveling most of the time anyway. In think the opinions of a lot of people here are shaped by small companies where everyone is on a floor or two of a building. At global companies, the reality is that people are pretty distributed and you have late night and early morning phone calls. West Coast to Europe is tough for day-to-day synchronous communications. We don't have many people on the West Coast and are pretty much East Coast-centric (and Europe to a lesser degree). And that coordination works fairly well.
- hawaiianbrah 6y ago
  Meetings where some/most of the people are in a room and some are dialing in suck for those dialing in. We started requiring everyone to dial in, even if one person was, and it levels the communication playing field immensely.
  - aeternum 6y ago
    Why does it suck? We try to ensure that everyone's voice is heard plus remote members have some advantage in that people in the room can see them unmute as an indicator that they have something to say. Some also use the text chat attached to the meeting allowing them to raise a point without verbally interrupting the person speaking (although this is more rare). Seems pretty extreme to require everyone to dial-in even if they are present in the office.
    - WinstonSmith84 6y ago
      The dynamic is just different for those dialling in. People are simply not on the same level than those on site who have a clear advantage. I saw this working relatively well when the person remote is some senior person coming with a lot of experience to insert himself in the conversation. It's maybe even better because others may now have the chance to say something (lol) Generally speaking, this works well, when the main persons of the meeting are not all on site so that the videoconference becomes the primary communication. Otherwise, it's just that those who don't say that much will say even less (or nothing). Btw, I'm also a big fan of remote working, but no matter how good your communication skills are, you're left behind on the longer term within an hybrid team. You just can't build all these relationships with smalltalk etc. that's another problem
      - wastedhours 6y ago
        I guess it also depends on the company and the style of the employees you work with - in my old organisation we made it work because it was embedded, but also everyone was just genuinely nice and not trying to score little political points here and there. Even with over 500 employees, the lack of a career ladder as such meant there's little to gain by being the loudest in the room or trying to work the room. Perhaps that's also an ingredient - it might be easier to minimise others' egos when you're also in the room?
- tome 6y ago
  Are you one of those working fully remote or in the physical office?
  - aeternum 6y ago
    I worked fully remote for a couple years, then spent a year or so in the physical office, and now back to remote due to covid.
wastedhours 6y ago
I used to work somewhere where you could work wherever you wanted to, but we had an office. Most people rolled in and out several days per week - you solved for it by creating habits and systems. The single most important thing is that everyone has the option. You don't really need to sell the office to make it work, but that everyone from the CEO to even (perhaps surprisingly, the front of house team) has the same freedom to work from wherever suits.

aeternum 6y ago

My company has made the hybrid model work. We've had a mix of fully remote along with two physical offices. It's really not all that complex, conference rooms have to have a video conference system that is added by default to all meetings. Ad-hoc meetings can start video with a single button press and a short code/url sent over slack. We strongly encourage employees to keep discussions in 'public' slack rooms rather than private messages. This can be noisy but allows for inclusivity. Team members are free to choose which channels to join and are encouraged configure alerting to manage the noise. Only takes a few minutes to set up. Performance needs to be measured by work output rather than time in the office, but companies should be doing that regardless. Face-to-face on-boarding and intros to the team are preferable so we would fly in new-hires wherever possible for the first couple weeks. Beneficial but not required.

hoka 6y ago
And what is the breakdown of executives, managers, etc between on-prem and remote?
- ghaff 6y ago
  Ar my company, which is (normally) a mixture of on-prem (at many different offices) and remote/WFH, I'm sure all of the senior leadership team have offices somewhere. But many/most of their reports and other people they coordinate with are in different offices/remote and most of them are traveling most of the time anyway. In think the opinions of a lot of people here are shaped by small companies where everyone is on a floor or two of a building. At global companies, the reality is that people are pretty distributed and you have late night and early morning phone calls. West Coast to Europe is tough for day-to-day synchronous communications. We don't have many people on the West Coast and are pretty much East Coast-centric (and Europe to a lesser degree). And that coordination works fairly well.
hawaiianbrah 6y ago
Meetings where some/most of the people are in a room and some are dialing in suck for those dialing in. We started requiring everyone to dial in, even if one person was, and it levels the communication playing field immensely.
- aeternum 6y ago
  Why does it suck? We try to ensure that everyone's voice is heard plus remote members have some advantage in that people in the room can see them unmute as an indicator that they have something to say. Some also use the text chat attached to the meeting allowing them to raise a point without verbally interrupting the person speaking (although this is more rare). Seems pretty extreme to require everyone to dial-in even if they are present in the office.
  - WinstonSmith84 6y ago
    The dynamic is just different for those dialling in. People are simply not on the same level than those on site who have a clear advantage. I saw this working relatively well when the person remote is some senior person coming with a lot of experience to insert himself in the conversation. It's maybe even better because others may now have the chance to say something (lol) Generally speaking, this works well, when the main persons of the meeting are not all on site so that the videoconference becomes the primary communication. Otherwise, it's just that those who don't say that much will say even less (or nothing). Btw, I'm also a big fan of remote working, but no matter how good your communication skills are, you're left behind on the longer term within an hybrid team. You just can't build all these relationships with smalltalk etc. that's another problem
    - wastedhours 6y ago
      I guess it also depends on the company and the style of the employees you work with - in my old organisation we made it work because it was embedded, but also everyone was just genuinely nice and not trying to score little political points here and there. Even with over 500 employees, the lack of a career ladder as such meant there's little to gain by being the loudest in the room or trying to work the room. Perhaps that's also an ingredient - it might be easier to minimise others' egos when you're also in the room?
tome 6y ago
Are you one of those working fully remote or in the physical office?
- aeternum 6y ago
  I worked fully remote for a couple years, then spent a year or so in the physical office, and now back to remote due to covid.

wastedhours 6y ago

I used to work somewhere where you could work wherever you wanted to, but we had an office. Most people rolled in and out several days per week - you solved for it by creating habits and systems. The single most important thing is that everyone has the option. You don't really need to sell the office to make it work, but that everyone from the CEO to even (perhaps surprisingly, the front of house team) has the same freedom to work from wherever suits.