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> 2. You can't mix WFH with work in office. It's either one or the other. If you have a single employee working remotely - you should transform all the processe

by danans 6y ago

> 2. You can't mix WFH with work in office. It's either one or the other. If you have a single employee working remotely - you should transform all the processes to WFH-style. You don't provide the line of thinking behind this statement. Why do you think this is the case? Also, even taking your statement at face value, you can still have a setup where there are fewer days in the office and more days working from home for every employee. Basically, have flexible in-office hours, whether that means only certain days, or certain parts of certain days. This sort of flexibility could be of great benefit to the employee who has kids, or is just tired of sitting in traffic or crowded trains 5 days a week. As a bonus, it could reduce crowding on transit lines during peak hours.

rlt 6y ago
I’ve worked at companies where this was done right and wrong. From my experience, if most employees are in an office and only a minority are remote, the remote employees are at a big disadvantage, unless the company (or remote employees) actively work to make sure they’re included in as much as possible. If it’s in the company’s culture to have lots of ad-hoc in-person conversations where remote employees are unlikely to be included, they’re going to have a bad time. If those conversations mostly happen in chat or scheduled meetings with video chat, then it might work. I think it’s probably better to just have whole teams be entirely (or at least majority) remote, or entirely onsite.
jen729w 6y ago
This is what I came here to say. As usual, arguments (just in the general) are polarised: it’s either in the office 40 hours a week or work from a beach in Thailand and nothing in between. How about the sensible reality where we have an office, that we can get to, but we aren’t expected to turn up there every day just because? Where I work from home a few days a week to get that tricky stuff done – heaps harder in a distracting office – but then I go in a few days to connect with colleagues, catch up on the conversations, overhear things across the partition? This saves my sanity, money, and time, and saves my employer ~50% of their office space. Win-win, surely? (Not that I disagree with the sentiment that all processes should be made WFH-friendly. I think that’s very sensible. But it doesn’t mean that I necessarily must WFH the whole time.)
- TACIXAT 6y ago
  I believe their argument is that if you have one remote person you need to have a remote culture so that person is not left out of communications. If you rely on the office to communicate, a remote person is going to really miss out.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >saves my employer ~50% of their office space. Win-win, surely? Only if you hotel, which a lot of people don't want. In general, I agree with you. But if that's the norm it means people still need to live at least somewhat accessible to the office. For even one day per week, a 3 hour each way commute isn't really sustainable. And what if a team consists almost entirely of people who want to come in 3 or 4 days per week? They'll likely end up just ghosting the one person who will reluctantly drag themselves in 1 day per week.
SergeAx 6y ago
Sorry, I was too consumed by making a clear statements and didn't put enough effort into arguments. First of all, I am talking about teams of 20+ employees, e.g. 3 pizz-teams or more. This is a number when you definitely need two levels of management, event if one of them consists of makers-managers, e.g. teamleads. That is the scale where you can't keep all the data in one head. So the information is distributed among employees, managers and no one has a full pucture. Some people know their segments with specifics, some has a helicopter view with coarse details. Now, in office-based team you have a privilege to keep most of the data in the heads, because everyone can just walk to anyone and talk to them at the end of the day (pun intended). You have those daily stand-ups, weekly all-hands, but most of the data are still don't have a hard copies. Of course you are writing specs, maybe you are writing docs, chances are you are writing company-wide weekly updates (and wondering if anyone actually reading it). I know a lot of companies where people just changed in-person meetings to Zoom and are thinking they are fully remote now, In fact, they are just burning through data savings in their employees heads. It becomes visible rignt about now, after about 6 months of this quasi-remote. Teams are slowly turning into mess where right hand has no idea about left one. What took couple of weeks now takes month or even longer. So, managers are trying to fight it with more conference-calling, more reporting, itemized plans and Gant diagrams, putting some pressure to engineers. At the same time engineers are trying to restore horisontal communications via chats, which leads to distraction and further loss of productivity. This is because remote teams should work in a completely different manner. Great example is Gitlab, check out their handbook [0]. Mind you - that this is just a tip of the iceberg, they are incredibly transparent, but they are showing less than 5% of what they have. So, in fully remote company you should organize all processes and workflows in a manner when no one should be synchronized with anyone in real time. You should ditch conference-calling almost entirely and record remaining video meetings to be available later. You should switch from chats back to emails, yes! You have to write down everything: specs, docs, meeting protocols, decisions - both accepted and rejected. And this is just a beginning: you also should keep all those in an actual state. Do you know a lot of companies where documentation and code are 100% coherent 100% of the time? I don't. And of course most of this work is falling onto managers' shoulders: not only writing stuff by themselves, but checking that everyone else is writing stuff too. Some people (even in this thread) may say that their company is doing just fine without all this and they are just happy saving commuting time. But I am sure they are just being ineffective, which means sooner or later they will be predated by more effective competitors. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/

by danans 6y ago

rlt 6y ago

I’ve worked at companies where this was done right and wrong. From my experience, if most employees are in an office and only a minority are remote, the remote employees are at a big disadvantage, unless the company (or remote employees) actively work to make sure they’re included in as much as possible. If it’s in the company’s culture to have lots of ad-hoc in-person conversations where remote employees are unlikely to be included, they’re going to have a bad time. If those conversations mostly happen in chat or scheduled meetings with video chat, then it might work. I think it’s probably better to just have whole teams be entirely (or at least majority) remote, or entirely onsite.

jen729w 6y ago

This is what I came here to say. As usual, arguments (just in the general) are polarised: it’s either in the office 40 hours a week or work from a beach in Thailand and nothing in between. How about the sensible reality where we have an office, that we can get to, but we aren’t expected to turn up there every day just because? Where I work from home a few days a week to get that tricky stuff done – heaps harder in a distracting office – but then I go in a few days to connect with colleagues, catch up on the conversations, overhear things across the partition? This saves my sanity, money, and time, and saves my employer ~50% of their office space. Win-win, surely? (Not that I disagree with the sentiment that all processes should be made WFH-friendly. I think that’s very sensible. But it doesn’t mean that I necessarily must WFH the whole time.)

TACIXAT 6y ago
I believe their argument is that if you have one remote person you need to have a remote culture so that person is not left out of communications. If you rely on the office to communicate, a remote person is going to really miss out.
ghaff 6y ago
>saves my employer ~50% of their office space. Win-win, surely? Only if you hotel, which a lot of people don't want. In general, I agree with you. But if that's the norm it means people still need to live at least somewhat accessible to the office. For even one day per week, a 3 hour each way commute isn't really sustainable. And what if a team consists almost entirely of people who want to come in 3 or 4 days per week? They'll likely end up just ghosting the one person who will reluctantly drag themselves in 1 day per week.

SergeAx 6y ago

Sorry, I was too consumed by making a clear statements and didn't put enough effort into arguments. First of all, I am talking about teams of 20+ employees, e.g. 3 pizz-teams or more. This is a number when you definitely need two levels of management, event if one of them consists of makers-managers, e.g. teamleads. That is the scale where you can't keep all the data in one head. So the information is distributed among employees, managers and no one has a full pucture. Some people know their segments with specifics, some has a helicopter view with coarse details. Now, in office-based team you have a privilege to keep most of the data in the heads, because everyone can just walk to anyone and talk to them at the end of the day (pun intended). You have those daily stand-ups, weekly all-hands, but most of the data are still don't have a hard copies. Of course you are writing specs, maybe you are writing docs, chances are you are writing company-wide weekly updates (and wondering if anyone actually reading it). I know a lot of companies where people just changed in-person meetings to Zoom and are thinking they are fully remote now, In fact, they are just burning through data savings in their employees heads. It becomes visible rignt about now, after about 6 months of this quasi-remote. Teams are slowly turning into mess where right hand has no idea about left one. What took couple of weeks now takes month or even longer. So, managers are trying to fight it with more conference-calling, more reporting, itemized plans and Gant diagrams, putting some pressure to engineers. At the same time engineers are trying to restore horisontal communications via chats, which leads to distraction and further loss of productivity. This is because remote teams should work in a completely different manner. Great example is Gitlab, check out their handbook [0]. Mind you - that this is just a tip of the iceberg, they are incredibly transparent, but they are showing less than 5% of what they have. So, in fully remote company you should organize all processes and workflows in a manner when no one should be synchronized with anyone in real time. You should ditch conference-calling almost entirely and record remaining video meetings to be available later. You should switch from chats back to emails, yes! You have to write down everything: specs, docs, meeting protocols, decisions - both accepted and rejected. And this is just a beginning: you also should keep all those in an actual state. Do you know a lot of companies where documentation and code are 100% coherent 100% of the time? I don't. And of course most of this work is falling onto managers' shoulders: not only writing stuff by themselves, but checking that everyone else is writing stuff too. Some people (even in this thread) may say that their company is doing just fine without all this and they are just happy saving commuting time. But I am sure they are just being ineffective, which means sooner or later they will be predated by more effective competitors. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/