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I think there's going to be a bit of a disconnect between worker retention and new hiring. Companies are going to want existing workers to go back to the office

by simonh 5y ago

I think there's going to be a bit of a disconnect between worker retention and new hiring. Companies are going to want existing workers to go back to the office. Yes I think most will accommodate an increased proportion of working from home, but they're going to want to hold the line that if they want you in the office they have the right to insist. On the other hand when they're hiring new workers they're going to have to face up to the fact that a lot of workers are going to want to work from home, or do so for a substantial part of their working time. They're going to need to meet that expectation to be competitive for talent. It's not as if 95% of workers are going to be able to just walk into 100% wfh roles. The roughly 95% of companies these workers currently work for are also the ones hiring people. So this is going to take a while to work itself out as each company or worker figures out their best way to navigate through this transition, but the transition is going to happen.

HelloNurse 5y ago
WFH-friendly employers will lose less staff AND hire more easily than places that insist on returning people to office for no perceived good reason. But competition isn't the strong point of badly managed companies.
- bluGill 5y ago
  But in person companies believe that personal interactions will make the people they can hire better than the WFH companies so it works out. WFH is hard to manage. A lot of things that get shared in "hallway communication" become formal meetings. I make no claim as to who is right, but there are downsides to everything.
  - bregma 5y ago
    It's hard to have a hallway conversation when you're constantly being watched to make you keep your bottom in your seat.
    - jq-r 5y ago
      To add two points to that. First, people here always point out about the boss looking over the peons in their open space office. That may be true for a lot of situations, but what is also depressing is that even if there is no boss/manager/whatever overlooking the employees, those will watch each other. Second, I can second the hallway conversations, those never happened at the places I've worked. If anything, it was more akin to "send me an e-mail/message" about it.
      - simonh 5y ago
        At most of my employers useful conversations in hallways, at the kitchen, or just dropping by someone’s desk happened all the time. It’s an incredibly valuable opportunity. In the last year there are many people I used to talk to regularly I’ve either not talked to, or only talked to once or twice that otherwise I’d have checked in with on an almost weekly basis. I really miss those chats and I know I’m poorer for not having them. Having said that, I used to work for a big international bank and apart from a few people in my direct team, most if the other people I worked with were in other countries, let alone other offices. They had outstanding collaboration and communications software and infrastructure though. By far the best of any company I’d worked for. They were very well set up for remote collaboration and I learned lessons there I’ve found very useful in the last year. You work with what you have.
        bregma 5y ago
        I used to work for an all-remote company in which hallway conversations happened all the time over chat. In fact, people would often hold several hallway conversations at the same time using separate chat windows for each. The organization was set up for remote work and had chosen appropriate technology. Where I work currently, we had a no-remote policy although our team is spread across two continents. The rationale for in-person-only-sort-of was that the organization could extract greater value from employees through the benefits of hallway conversations (except between team members in different offices). Hallway conversations just didn't happen; neither in-team or between teams. They happened in formal meetings where half the attendees just looked down at their phones. When we went temporarily remote-only in March of 2020, we were not given any adequate technology (and in fact the required VPN technology prevented many from doing their jobs so it was often hacked). Eventually, many of the employees discovered there was a chat service and people who had never spoken before started communicating. Hallway conversations were had (initially mostly focused on hacking the VPN). Formal meetings were still run by the same people with similar output, but over-all productivity began to climb and we pushed out releases on time and on budget. It turns out at least our segment of the larger organization worked better remotely despite the lack of support and the official policies. Recently it was announced that the entire organization would be returning to in-office only, 100% of the time. The errant chat service would be shut down. We would return to exactly the way it was two years ago because that is the only way that works, according to the CEO. We will return in the fall to no hallway conversations, head down at our desks focused on our assigned tasks, communication trickled down from the top as it should be.

by simonh 5y ago

HelloNurse 5y ago

WFH-friendly employers will lose less staff AND hire more easily than places that insist on returning people to office for no perceived good reason. But competition isn't the strong point of badly managed companies.

bluGill 5y ago
But in person companies believe that personal interactions will make the people they can hire better than the WFH companies so it works out. WFH is hard to manage. A lot of things that get shared in "hallway communication" become formal meetings. I make no claim as to who is right, but there are downsides to everything.
- bregma 5y ago
  It's hard to have a hallway conversation when you're constantly being watched to make you keep your bottom in your seat.
  - jq-r 5y ago
    To add two points to that. First, people here always point out about the boss looking over the peons in their open space office. That may be true for a lot of situations, but what is also depressing is that even if there is no boss/manager/whatever overlooking the employees, those will watch each other. Second, I can second the hallway conversations, those never happened at the places I've worked. If anything, it was more akin to "send me an e-mail/message" about it.
    - simonh 5y ago
      At most of my employers useful conversations in hallways, at the kitchen, or just dropping by someone’s desk happened all the time. It’s an incredibly valuable opportunity. In the last year there are many people I used to talk to regularly I’ve either not talked to, or only talked to once or twice that otherwise I’d have checked in with on an almost weekly basis. I really miss those chats and I know I’m poorer for not having them. Having said that, I used to work for a big international bank and apart from a few people in my direct team, most if the other people I worked with were in other countries, let alone other offices. They had outstanding collaboration and communications software and infrastructure though. By far the best of any company I’d worked for. They were very well set up for remote collaboration and I learned lessons there I’ve found very useful in the last year. You work with what you have.
      - bregma 5y ago
        I used to work for an all-remote company in which hallway conversations happened all the time over chat. In fact, people would often hold several hallway conversations at the same time using separate chat windows for each. The organization was set up for remote work and had chosen appropriate technology. Where I work currently, we had a no-remote policy although our team is spread across two continents. The rationale for in-person-only-sort-of was that the organization could extract greater value from employees through the benefits of hallway conversations (except between team members in different offices). Hallway conversations just didn't happen; neither in-team or between teams. They happened in formal meetings where half the attendees just looked down at their phones. When we went temporarily remote-only in March of 2020, we were not given any adequate technology (and in fact the required VPN technology prevented many from doing their jobs so it was often hacked). Eventually, many of the employees discovered there was a chat service and people who had never spoken before started communicating. Hallway conversations were had (initially mostly focused on hacking the VPN). Formal meetings were still run by the same people with similar output, but over-all productivity began to climb and we pushed out releases on time and on budget. It turns out at least our segment of the larger organization worked better remotely despite the lack of support and the official policies. Recently it was announced that the entire organization would be returning to in-office only, 100% of the time. The errant chat service would be shut down. We would return to exactly the way it was two years ago because that is the only way that works, according to the CEO. We will return in the fall to no hallway conversations, head down at our desks focused on our assigned tasks, communication trickled down from the top as it should be.