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The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers
- maxclark 5y ago“Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to acquire and share new information across the network.” Remote is hard and not every company is going to adapt to this long term. I’m happy that remote is now an accepted structure but I worry that full time remote employees will miss out simply because they aren’t present.
- domepro 5y agomaybe that's the price they're willing to pay for whatever benefits they get from remote work, and maybe they're missing out on what they consider bad things more than good, everyone is different.
- mc32 5y agoAn issue is remote people may be at a disadvantage because they are remote and therefore may suffer consequences of not being in the office (visibility, chit chat, camaraderie, etc.) but they (we, or some portion) may feel they are unfairly suffering from unequal opportunity. On the other hand, they/we specifically have made the choice to be remote despite the inherent disadvantages (and also advantages though in another dimension).
- domepro 5y agoAgreed, as I said, some people will not consider things like visibility, chit chat, camaraderie valuable. I don't really want to be friends with people I work with, or generally spend time with my coworkers when I'm in the office since I already spend 8+ hours daily looking at them. Even when remote, people I work with are not my friends, those are a separate bunch of people, I'm there to do my job, solve problems and I don't need camaraderie, chit chat or visibility for that. On the other hand, relying too much on office chit chat tends to make knowledge more word-of-mouth than written down if there are no documentation practices in place, while its practically a necessity to write things down when you're working remotely and that's a huge gain in my book. I think it's really really hard to to decisively say that one model is better than the other, but it does smell like distrust and micromanagement from the higher-ups to me when office work is considered mandatory.
- silisili 5y agoI've been remote a loooong time and that's always been the case. I miss out on so many 'oh, because Timmy in the SOC told me so' type things, spontaneous whiteboards, and much information. It certainly makes things a bit more complicated. Further, I found it harder to get promotions in general. All in all, I still prefer it despite its drawbacks. But it's certainly not for everyone, especially people who get or had little social interaction outside of work, and those who are chasing ladder climbing.
- axpy906 5y agoHow does it make it harder to get promoted?
- tzamora 5y agoNetworking? Interactions person to person can achieve you promotions if you know how to move.
- silisili 5y agoFrom my experience, often being the only remote on the team...frankly, because you're generally forgotten about quite often. You aren't as chummy with your direct, you don't do lunch together, small gifts/favors, etc. I don't mean that as a suckup or anything, just things people generally do with one another. If you have two equal performers, and one came to your wedding, gave you a jump, etc....and the other you often forget exists, the choice is quite natural. And I don't find any fault in that or hold any bitterness, it's human nature. Also, you see your direct's boss in the cafeteria, or hallway, get to chatting, etc. I'd never just ping him or her on Slack to chat, for example. Then again, I'm only speaking from experience at where I've been. I'm sure others are more strict about meritocracy, perhaps.
- sfg 5y agoIt works best, when the entire company is remote.
- sam0x17 5y agoThis is why I like fully-remote workplaces. That said, I've only seen remote work well in fully remote workplaces. Once there are some remote some not, things break down a bit.
- sharken 5y agoFully-remote workplaces are very rare, so it's a lot more likely that remote workers will lose out. E.g. there is a task that requires the help of person A or B, where person B is working remote. I'd argue that person A will be chosen 9 times out of 10 simply due to convenience. To counter that, workers are required to spend 2 or 3 days in the office. Slowly but surely some will go to the office one additional day, causing the remote workers to be left out of some tasks, while on-site workers form stronger bonds. So i don't see a very bright for WFH, but it's all very new so time will tell.
- cortesoft 5y agoI always have heard it said “if you have one remote employee on your team, everyone is a remote employee”, because if you don’t interact as if you are all remote, then the remote employee is going to miss so much.
- ghaff 5y agoThere aren’t absolutes. But yes if end up hybrid expect to do video meetings and write everything down—the latter of which is a pretty good idea anyway.
- walshemj 5y agoAnd I think the number of new employees not making it past probation will increase.
- hinkley 5y agoPeople will revert to the mean. Notably, it's always been emotionally easier to lay off someone who is remote or less like you than it is to lay off people who are in your immediate social group. Expect the amount of remote-only work to tank in the next economic downturn.
- sam0x17 5y agoThey don't link this data with something tangible like "profits" nor do they really try to quantify productivity in any way, so it is left up to the reader to decide whether the effects they observe actually hurt or help productivity. Case in point, what they consider useful spontaneous interactions between disparate corners of the social graph could in reality be annoying distractions that decrease productivity.
- Areading314 5y agoMicrosoft delivered all time high earnings for 2020. Seems like maybe a lot of "collaboration" is just people wasting time?
- AndreiCalazans 5y agoUnintentional by accident remote work shouldn’t be considered the baseline for such comparison. This research does at best find results at Microsoft, thus it could be titled “effects of remote work at Microsoft” to not induce the sense of generalist research. For the negative results: remote work creates silos and reduces cross-network collaboration. These might easily be mitigated with strategies and tooling. Nevertheless, I admire Microsoft for conducting such research - congratulations to whoever had the initiative.
- killjoywashere 5y agoCan you tool-in a water cooler? A walk to the cafeteria? A weird smell several people notice? [ninja edit]: someone downvoted you, it wasn't me.
- tobr 5y agoNot literally, but you can dedicate time for everyone to occasionally talk to a mix of people they don’t talk to every day.
- geofft 5y agoAbsolutely! I started a scheduled call for a weekly "monorepo morning tea" for people interested in the mechanics of our monorepo and how we build/version/distribute software in-house. No agenda, no commitment, the meeting link is posted weekly via a Slack reminder to a public channel. It gets a couple of folks from our build farm team, a couple of people who are experts in specific languages/runtimes (Python, Node, etc.), a couple of SREs, a couple of random developers across the company who find this stuff interesting, etc. The topics tend to be pretty wide-ranging but it's a good way to find people doing interesting and relevant work that you might not ordinarily think of talking to and hear what's on their minds. Also, my company already had (before the pandemic) a voluntary program to match with random coworkers to get lunch, specifically to facilitate this sort of thing, and that's been turned into online coffee chats. Seems to work pretty well. If you value these serendipitous interactions as part of your company culture, then it behooves you to properly support and encourage them. You can't just set off a weird smell and let the two coworkers who feel like speaking up meet each other. They're probably the least shy people on the floor and know each other anyway.
- The_Colonel 5y agoThis fits my experience pretty well. The available communication tools suck so much, people are for the most part not used to communicate effectively / frequently enough in remote setting. I think it's solvable with better technology (something like Facebook's Horizon Workrooms), but at the same it seems very far.
- missedthecue 5y agoAt the end of the day, it's just hard to build and maintain relationships from afar. Any kind, be it business, platonic, or romantic. Humans are social creatures, meant for in-person interaction.
- rybosworld 5y agoThis is more or less the same train of thought that people first had about online dating. "It won't work", "it's not the same", "it's weird to meet someone online" etc. I couldn't disagree more that remote relationships are more difficult. On the contrary, technology continues to make it easier to stay in touch with 500 friends, coworkers from your last 3 jobs etc.
- missedthecue 5y agoPeople don't date online. They meet online and go date in person.
- kortilla 5y agoThat’s not a given.
- newbie2020 5y agoIt still is harder to date online. Developing a relationship in person is still way easier and more fulfilling
- civilized 5y agoNext paper from these guys will say: "the shift from an open office plan to private offices caused work to become more siloed. Previous research shows this may impede the flow of information through the network" People need to stop fetishizing "breaking down silos" and "serendipitous hallway encounters" and all that nonsense and think about the big picture. You're more likely to have something worth saying, and a work product worth talking about, if you aren't wasting time on your commute and shooting the shit in the office.
- hogFeast 5y agoIf your business model includes: "we put people in an office in the hopes that their random interactions will create value"...then that sounds like the problem is something else. Random encounters that create value sound good. It sounds less good when you flip this logic, and ask whether the reliance on randomness is a function of weak information-sharing within formal structures. It is easier to break down silos if you put this online, then there is genuine sharing. That is what the internet is for.
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- imbnwa 5y ago> Random encounters that create value sound good. It sounds less good when you flip this logic, and ask whether the reliance on randomness is a function of weak information-sharing within formal structures. It is easier to break down silos if you put this online, then there is genuine sharing. That is what the internet is for. Probably why I've never seen a Confluence that wasn't a disaster, magnified by turnover. This kind of stuff isn't interesting to business because it forces them to be accountable rather than deflecting accountability on the people in the trenches. Those people are expected to do all the heavy lifting for the org while business focuses on 'the bigger picture'
- rybosworld 5y agoConfluence does the bare minimum to support organization, imo. It is too easy for documents to become orphaned.
- phillipcarter 5y agoThe key thing is here: > over the first six months of 2020 Those first six months were pretty rough. The large majority of people had little to no experience working remotely, so many folks didn't have a good home office environment, and there was a general sense of being unsure if this would just be temporary or if employees should settle in for the long haul. Many orgs didn't have good practices set up for remote work yet, and people were still struggling a lot with the tools (say what you want about MS Teams, but they improved their product by leaps and bounds over the pandemic, much of which after the first 6 months). I'd be interested in a follow-up that analyzes the same time period but for 2021.
- goodells 5y agoI would agree with this. Ancedotally, at least for the first 6 months until the fall of 2020, my team and its management were completely accepting of sub-par WFH setups and attitudes. We couldn't really blame the guy whose two young daughters screamed all day and tromped up and down the stairs next to his desk. Now it's different - remote hires are expected to have a decent working environment (either at home or elsewhere at their own expense).
- kahmeal 5y agoElsewhere at their own expense? Yea that's gonna be a no from me.
- earthscienceman 5y ago"We used to pay for entire buildings to house our employees, but covid made us realize we can pass that cost on to them!"
- kiklion 5y agoIt kind of depends on the details. My company has offices that you can go to, but if you want to work remotely then it’s up to you to manage your environment. The company already has offices. Why would they pay for more just because you don’t want to go to the offices. There is a one time budget for hardware, such as a second monitor at home, we’ll have to see how that plays out with upgrades in a few years.
- nojito 5y agoThe unfortunate aspect of data and studies like this is that the HN/tech community prefers working in silos.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- akomtu 5y agoSilos are ideal for knowledge workers: their often autistic personalities and the nature of the work fit really well a quiet corner office. Managers don't really exist without the chitchat: if managers are fish, then chatty open office is their fish pond. The guys above them, VP+, who I'd call "gamblers", don't really need the open offices. They build networks anywhere they want. The in-office connections are too fake and weak anyway.
- dave_sullivan 5y ago"I just read a study in Nature saying remote work is more trouble than it's worth, back to the office everybody!" /s
- dang 5y ago"Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ryanSrich 5y ago> over the first six months of 2020 What a completely worthless set of data. Not only do their findings mean nothing for long term remote work, it’s now fuel for the anti-remote work movement. Shameful coming from nature.
- emadabdulrahim 5y agoI stopped reading when I realized it was just the first six months in the pandemic.
- macando 5y agoWe expect that the effects we observe on workers’ collaboration and communication patterns will impact productivity and, in the long-term, innovation. Yet, across many sectors, firms are making decisions to adopt permanent remote work policies based only on short-term data52. Importantly, the causal estimates that we report are substantially different compared with the effects suggested by the observational trends shown in Figs. 2 and 4. Thus, firms making decisions on the basis of non-causal analyses may set suboptimal policies. For example, some firms that choose a permanent remote work policy may put themselves at a disadvantage by making it more difficult for workers to collaborate and exchange information. This implies that innovation is somehow a formalized process.
- robertlagrant 5y agoPerhaps the issue is that remote workers at Microsoft are constrained to using Office 365 for information exchange.
- aj_nikhil 5y agoNormal work from office as past will resume in next few months. WFH is not sustainable or enjoyable experience for most people.
- icedchai 5y agoI thought that back in June, when Covid cases were heading down to a reasonable level. Today, not so much. You are right though, WFH is not sustainable for many. Many folks are burnt out.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lr4444lr 5y agoI don't know on what basis you make these sweeping generalizations. If nothing else, commutes made people miserable in terms of time, money, stress, and difficulty scheduling outside life. Time will tell whether you are right or not.
- aj_nikhil 5y agoWFH is poor for intra-team communication and rapport building. Companies won't want to take this risk. It only works for experienced individual contributors like freelancers, who aren't many. Good things are created only by collaboration. The collaboration suffers in WFH. Let's come back to this in next 6 months. Don't delete your comment.
- aaomidi 5y agoHere's an anecdote. I left because Microsoft was being weird about long term remote plans and I wanted to actually be able to plan ahead. They lost me because they couldn't give me a straight answer if I can continue working there if I went fully remote or not.
- wombatmobile 5y ago"If there's one thing in business that's certain, it's uncertainty." -- Stephen Covey "It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man." -- Richard P. Feynman "There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing." -- Robert Burns
- MattGaiser 5y agoBut the employer/employee relationship is heavily built around certainty. That’s the trade off. Employers must then offer more for uncertainty.
- wombatmobile 5y ago> But the employer/employee relationship is heavily built around certainty. That's one kind of gig. It isn't what Apple employee 100 signed on for, or Google employee 12. Some employees are looking for upside and challenges more than certainty. In uncertain times, the most valuable employees are the ones who thrive on uncertainty. The most difficult are those who prioritise something an employer can't guarantee as a prerequisite for performance.
- aaomidi 5y agoHence why I left. Company didn't want to make a hard choice and I found a better job.
- ok_coo 5y ago
- mmaunder 5y ago“ Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts. Furthermore, there was a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication. Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to acquire and share new information across the network.” So less interruptions and more asynchronous work. That’s awesome! But it’s framed as a negative outcome. Do we really think that a company fully geared up for in-office work for over 100,000 employees in the USA alone would produce an impartial report on the effects of remote work?
- walshemj 5y agoYou didn't see "static and siloed" that's just asking for a disruptor to come in and eat your lunch
- ryanSrich 5y agoA disrupter that’s likely also working remotely. A businesses absolute shit remote working process != remote working is bad.
- walshemj 5y agoCo located teams always wins sorry if you don't want to hear this but its true. December 94 did first agile web project in BT took a month two developers flew up to Edinburgh collocated team. The traditional remote (Cardiff) quoted 2 years. Before that 3 of us developed SIROS the system that controlled the UK core ip network in 12 weeks again using agile and getting the customer in the room regularly
- spanktheuser 5y agoInteresting study. The data collection & classification methods seem strong as does the underlying data set. However I’m unconvinced their analysis necessarily follows from the established facts. - Knowledge workers are treated as a homogeneous population. But it seems unlikely a software engineer, a VP of software engineering, and a business development associate obtain the same benefit from frequent in person meetings. - Remote teams aren’t merely in-person teams + Video/VOIP stack. Optimal process and culture is drastically different for each case. It seems possible that some/most of detrimental effects would disappear over time as new remote teams adopt better processes and discard legacy methods optimized for proximity. - There is a lack of nuance. While I may be persuaded that on average in-person collaboration adds value I strongly suspect there is tremendous variability between individual meetings. I once worked for a very senior Ballmer-era product executive who jumped ship to an alluring startup. In the year before they were fired I easily spent over 200 hours meeting and collaborating with them. To say that each hour was merely empty and valueless would do a disservice to this individual’s talent for value deletion. The abrupt conversion to WFH was accompanied by a substantial increase in communication friction. In such cases I would expect lower value, less focused, and more vacuous meetings and network connections to be the first that are jettisoned. It seems dangerous to assume the collaboration dynamics associated with success pre- WFH will remain so post-WFH. This is a novel, potentially pattern breaking change.
- wombatmobile 5y agoYou've identified a major weakness of the study, which the authors acknowledge themselves (and then ignore when reaching conclusions). > For each month, we classified ties as strong when they were in the top 50% of an employee’s ties in terms of hours spent communicating, and as weak otherwise. Although we have not seen strong and weak ties defined in this exact way elsewhere in the research literature on social networks, the research community has not, to our knowledge, converged on a standard way to measure tie strength.
- joe_the_user 5y agoAnother aspect of the study is it's primarily measuring proxies to reach conclusions - for example: because email is used rather than zoom, they assume (following various theories) that nuance is lost. Maybe, maybe not.
- seanvk 5y agoI turned down a job offer in a principal engineering role at Microsoft because they were not allowing long term remote work.
- akomtu 5y agoSo a tobacco company has done a research on health impact of tobacco. Here are the surprising findings they've made...
- animanoir 5y agoCompanies will invoke even God to make employees return to offices. I don't trust Microsoft neither this study.
- jstx1 5y agoThat argument works both ways - some people who like remote will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to defend WFH when presented with evidence that it isn't ideal.
- walshemj 5y agoJust like when OOP was the new hotness any one suggesting that maybe OOP wasn't suitable for 100% of projects - used to get shouted down on slash dot.
- ThrowawayR2 5y agoOr XML and SOAP slightly later on. Everything had to use XML and SOAP or you weren't one of the cool kids; ugh.
- rybosworld 5y agoI think it's specifically driven by the management population. Individual contributors don't seem to feel too strongly about how their coworkers want to work (remote vs. in-office). But there seems to be a large effort by managers in general to get everyone back into the office, often without any supporting evidence for why that is a good option to force upon people. This study is not good evidence against remote work. If anything, this study is just confirming what we already know - that is, remote work happens differently (synchronously vs asynchronously). I've said it before and so have others: the push to bring everyone back into the office is in my opinion, representative of management's own insecurities.
- siliconc0w 5y agoMy experience is I can more easily join earlier or later meetings with remote teams in other timezones when I wouldn't been able before due to the commute. I can also meet with people spontaneously when before you'd struggle to find a room (or you'd annoy your neighbors). This far outweighs the number of work related 'coffee machine' or 'hallway conversations' I ever had.
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- kongin 5y agoSome basic stats about vaccinations using Israel: + Their double dose vaccination rate for adults is ~90%. + Their death rate per million is ~4 people/day. + Their ICU rate is ~25 per million. + They are doing third and fourth booster shots. + For the US those numbers would be ~1300 deaths per day and ~8000 ICU beds occupied. This is what going fully open with current vaccines and indefinite booster shots looks like until everyone susceptible dies. Anyone arguing for stopping work from home is arguing for 500,000 dead Americans a year as a good trade off for 'innovation'. I find this somewhere between unconscionable to genocidal.
- dang 5y agoWe've already asked you once to stop posting in the flamewar style to HN. If you do it again, we will ban you. It's not what this site is for, and—what's worse—it destroys what it is for, so this is somewhat of an existential issue for this forum. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
- Negitivefrags 5y agoAll we will find in this thread is a bunch of remote workers trying as hard as they can to dismiss any finding that remote work might have downsides. Those damn managers only caring about butts in seats!
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- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y agoImagine the desperation and helplessness of managers as they brainstorm behind closed doors on how to force back people into their shitty offices. Imagine it, and smile!
- timwaagh 5y agoI suppose it beats them thinking 'hey remote is great, why don't we start hiring more aggressively in Ukraine instead of Redmond'. If everything is remote companies won't have to pay non-remote wages anymore.
- kortilla 5y agoIf the availability of fluent English-speaking developers who work PDT hours was high, companies would absolutely do this already. Remote in same time zone so you can collaborate in real-time has absolutely no resemblance to an employee you can communicate with effectively a 24 hour delay.
- MattGaiser 5y agoThat is what my company does for a lot of positions it cannot fill here.
- yoyar 5y agoWhere is the study on the detrimental impacts of commuting?
- Terretta 5y agoTwo issues jump out at me: 1 ) It’s unclear to me why Microsoft, a leading software firm with distributed offices, should be considered representative of “information workers”. Contrary to this study of a digitally inter-connected firm, finding their preferred connection patterns and rhythms took a hit before adapting (see #2 below), most enterprises had no established digital connection patterns or rhythms and despite the challenges of going online, had been so bad before they saw a boost. Many “big enterprise” firms’ collaboration and productivity shot way up from April through September, as necessity drove adoption of any collab at all. 2 ) Aside from this, “the first six months” is not how adapting to change works. MBA types like it call it “Storming, Norming, Performing”, but I prefer this: - Virginia Satir Change Curve image: https://www.plays-in-business.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/virginia-satir-change-curve.jpg https://www.plays-in-business.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11... - Virginia Satir Change Curve discussion: https://dhemery.com/articles/managing_yourself_through_change/ https://dhemery.com/articles/managing_yourself_through_chang... Bottom line: I’d argue they studied a top decile performing firm far ahead of typical US enterprises, and found that Satir was right, a foreign element can induce a performance hit.
- hinkley 5y agoGenerally have not had good experiences bringing up formal names for project or information theoretical phenomena. Not everyone is in my headspace and they can balk if you 'obfuscate' by throwing formal terms around. Many of us and some of your managers will recognize the Satir curve as the 'J-curve'. In fact the guy who introduced this concept to me did not allow that he'd heard of Satir. I'm slightly curious to ask him if he did but we haven't talked in a while.
- allenu 5y agoOne thing about slack- and zoom-based remote working I've noticed is that there's less room to be your "informal self". Meetings require more coordination since only one person can speak at a time and there are fewer non-verbal cues to communicate which topics are resonating with you. You also can't continue smaller conversations with people after a meeting. Everything is more formalized. Likewise, conversations outside of meetings go on in Slack, generally. You could set up a zoom meeting with someone informally, but it feels too "heavy" an operation compared to a in-person hallway chat. In person, I feel like people are more likely to be critical of their work, workplace, bosses, and coworkers. Now I don't think people should go overboard and whine all the time, but I think it's valuable to get stuff off your chest once in a while, and doing that in person, to me, feels natural, and it's not "recorded" anywhere (Slack messages aren't deleted and a lot of our meetings are recorded for others to view later). Anyway, what I'm getting at is the channels for communication are more "formalized" and it has a sort of chilling effect on our expressiveness in conversations about our work's office culture.
- snegu 5y agoI really feel this. I've been working remotely for a few years, and will probably continue doing so for the foreseeable future, but there is no such thing as informal conversation in that setting. My company encourages everybody to set up "salon" meetings with random people to just chat, but these conversations end up being awkward and forced (though that could just be me). The result of this is that I feel completely disconnected from my co-workers and my company. I have plenty of other things going on in my life, so that doesn't bother me too much, but it's certainly not ideal.
- dcolkitt 5y agoThis is something I don’t understand. People have been having informal conversations with their friends, family and even colleagues over the phone for a hundred years. I almost feel like it’s a generational thing. People who came of age before widespread text messaging spent countless hours chit-chatting with their friends on the phone. It might be that late Millenials and Gen Z are less suited to remote work compared to Xennials and Gen X.
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- sneak 5y agoThe first line: > The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused a rapid shift to full-time remote work for many information workers. Wow, really? Why is it standard practice to pad these things with useless statements that waste the time of thousands of people? It's disrespectful to your reader to squander their time.
- MattGaiser 5y agoProbably so it is still useful 20 years from now?
- whateveracct 5y agoBeing in meetings and "working with others" is not always collaboration. It's frequently waste. I can't tell you how many "collaborative meetings" are just 1 or 2 devs doing their thing with the other 4-6 sitting in the meeting in silence. You read that right - there are 8-dev meetings multiple times a week at my BigCo workplace. The wasted time is palpable.
- hinkley 5y agoUsed to be you knew that in-person meetings were going badly when you had three people showing up with laptops working on other things during the meeting. In a remote meeting it's very hard to tell what people are doing in the background. I'm finding myself missing things because I'm bored and working on something else, and so far I've only gotten as far as the problem statement.
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- aussieguy1234 5y agoMy anecdote is I've found that when working remotely, my collaboration, communication and sharing of ideas go up. That's apart from the fact I'm also a lot more productive. This study looks at the first 6 months of 2020 when most people working remotely had never done it before and had less than ideal office setups at home. So it's not surprising they ran into some issues. I have a standing desk, a large monitor and I'm using a dedicated room in my house as my office. The other day I helped a junior engineer set up their local development environment (who was struggling to do it remotely) by remote controlling their desktop over Zoom. So there are good solutions for collaboration.
- IlliOnato 5y agoMy experience is a bit unusual; for many years I was switching from working in the office to WFH and back every few months (basically I was going back and forth between the country where my family was and a country where my company was located). Most of the rest of the team worked at the office, but there were a couple of other remote workers would come to the office once a week or so. The company also had a tradition of "company retreats" where we would meet for the whole day in some nice surroundings, and do a mix of strategical planning, brainstorming, social interaction, walking in the woods, and even some silly "team-building" activities which occasionally turned up to be a lot of fun. We would be mostly off-line, won't even look at the automatic test reports. Having this experience, I believe that such retreats are much better than usual meetings or water-cooler conversations at building team cohesion, disperse knowledge, etc. (Thet don't replace impromptu white-board sessions, though, but I think in reality these are not happening as often as people claim they are). I only felt we did not have them often enough; Covid killed them, of course, which for me was the biggest directly work-related impact.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoIf most all of the productivity gains accumulate to the 1%, who cares if we are a little less productive when quality of life is so much higher?
- momirlan 5y agoRubbish. Office based work is conducive to loose knowledge sharing and too much personal "touch". A lot of time was being wasted in office silos. People need to make the shift to formalizing processes and knowledge sharing. Only then a new era of productivity will be unleashed. Remote is the future.
- dcposch 5y agoA lot of discussion here about productivity and flow of information. For me, the biggest downside of remote was something less measurable: it's much harder to build rapport with people you can't hang out with. Even more so with people you've never met. From the article: > Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts. You could ascribe this clinically to "communication patterns" etc, but I think the deeper reason is that many of those "bridges" were friendships that stopped happening. This is a huge cost that goes beyond money or anything else you can put a number on. -- Early in Silicon Valley history, there was a bar in Mountain View called the Wagon Wheel. Engineers from Fairchild Semiconductor, from Intel, Apple, other pivotal early companies would get beers after work. How many ideas do you think were hatched there, shared across department lines or between competitors? The Atari guys reportedly beta tested Pong by bringing it to the Wagon Wheel and watching people play.
- hinkley 5y agoI think we are going to find that the places that remain successful post-vaccination are those who encourage and subsidize business trips to trade shows. Getting all of your people together at an OSCon or similar convention can facilitate some of those connections without having to host everybody in your headquarters, which are likely not set up for it.
- atoav 5y agoI had a small job in the shipping department of a small pro audio web shob. The "department" consisted of three people who shared a whole week. So I'd work two days the other guy two days, yet another day another guy. It wasn't remote, but the communication with the guy after you needed to be so clear that they wouldn't bother you one your day off. It worked extremely well. Our communications were mostly done through a common email inbox.
- rcarmo 5y agoI moved to an EMEA position inside Microsoft (on the consulting side) in early 2020 and simply cannot relate to this paper. My entire org was distributed (manager and skip were European and in two different locations from mine), all my work was remote, team coordination happened entirely over Teams and we generated tons of content. Yes, the first few months _dealing with other teams_ (especially country-based ones) were messy, but most of my team had been working remotely (and internationally) for years, so we did not experience the kind of disconnect mentioned in the paper. We took the time to do team 1:1s, had informal chats going for days, etc. I am now moving to a Worldwide position, still working from Europe. My new manager is in the Americas and my skip in the UK. It is a quite normal arrangement in our line of work. So, in a nutshell, I don’t think this paper reflects what it’s like to work remotely at Microsoft at all. It _might_ be a good sample of the US portion, but it is extremely limited: “the period of time over which we measured the causal effects of remote work are quite short (three months)”
- octodog 5y agoWhat does 'skip' mean in this context?
- tomduncalf 5y agoI could be wrong but I think it means your manager’s manager