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How disorganised does a team need to be that they need to call meetings so involved they can only be done in-person with less than 24 hour’s notice? This isn’t

How disorganised does a team need to be that they need to call meetings so involved they can only be done in-person with less than 24 hour’s notice? This isn’t a genuine business requirement, it’s just management wanting to remind everyone that they’re on a leash which can be yanked whenever they like.

andrewjf 5y ago
I've found this really depends on seniority. Higher seniorities like principle engineers, senior managers, directors, vp meetings are much different than a normal stand up, strategy session or engineering discussion and physical presence does have an advantage. But I admit this isn't likely to be the target audience for the original policy.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> How disorganised does a team need to be that they need to call meetings so involved they can only be done in-person with less than 24 hour’s notice? I've put similar bounds on WFH hires before. Not because we were calling short-notice meetings frequently, but because it prevents single, long-distance employees from dominating all of the scheduling requirements. Once you have someone on your team who needs a lot of notice to attend any meeting, you are now planning every single meeting around their schedule. Everyone else must choose between accommodating that person or quietly doing the thing without them. It's ultimately not a great experience for the employee who gets left out of things because their schedule has become difficult to accomodate. It also sets appropriate expectations. Some people interview for flexible WFH positions when they really want full-remote positions, then spend a lot of energy trying to shut down any in-person meetings no matter how much the rest of the team wants them. This is a good way of signaling that in-person meetings are a requirement for the job.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  I think this is putting the cart in front of the horse. The thing you should be optimizing for is not geo-location, but time zone. The latter is only weakly related to the former. It doesn't matter if someone is within driving distance of the office so long as they are in (or willing to work in) the time zone that the office works at. Rejecting someone in Los Angeles because they're not within driving distance of Seattle would be penny wise and pound foolish. > Once you have someone on your team who needs a lot of notice to attend any meeting, you are now planning every single meeting around their schedule. This doesn't sound like you're actually running a "WFH" team then. You just can't demand short notice in person meetings with a remote team; that's an unreasonable ask. Hold remote meetings and schedule in-person meetups far in advance, or don't call it a "WFH" team.
  - doopy1 5y ago
    IMO, companies that do WFH well are ones that are designed for the work to be async.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    I don't know how productive it is to search for the true definition of "WFH". Regardless of what we call it, it seems reasonable to have an intermediate model like Amazon's proposing, where you can mostly work from wherever you'd like but you have to be available for in-person meetings because the company thinks they're valuable.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      > I don't know how productive it is to search for the true definition of "WFH". It's very productive, because abusing terms like "WFH" will be the technique that companies use to try and get through this without giving up anything. If you thought you were going to be "working from home" and discovered that your boss had the option to demand a commute from you at will on short notice, you would probably feel like you'd been tricked, no? Or if you landed that dream WFH job only to discover that it required you be X miles from Y expensive city, you would probably have some questions about what exactly they meant by "work from home". Personally, I'd call the environment OP described above as semi-remote or "Flexible Working Arrangements", although I'm sure there are other terms that would suffice. > Regardless of what we call it, it seems reasonable to have an intermediate model like Amazon's proposing, where you can mostly work from wherever you'd like but you have to be available for in-person meetings because the company thinks they're valuable. Not for me, but that's fine I guess. But it's very important that everyone be clear about what this is, and it's not WFH. If the expectation is that you'll commute regularly or on the demand of your boss (ew), then that's not a WFH job. Come up with a new name for it if you want, but it does not meet the social expectation of what "WFH" means. Unrelated to the terminology, I find this intermediate proposition utterly perplexing. So I have to live within reasonable commute range for the 2-3x times I commute per week, and I have to pay higher per foot cost if I want to work from my home? You do you, but I find this to be the worst of both worlds; I'd rather have a short commute to an office all the time, or no commute and more personal space. (Excepting of course the “I have a dentist appointment in the other direction, I’m going to WFH for that.” But even my non-remote jobs have offered one-off remote days for logistical reasons for years, so I implicitly exclude that from such discussions).
- alistairSH 5y ago
  Or, just host fully remote meetings. Which, if your employer is large enough, you have to do anyways because there’s an office in Europe or India or someplace else.
kevinsundar 5y ago
Pretty sure facebook needed to do this last week :) It's important for large companies to still have some way of getting people together quickly to solve problems. That's hard if people in are different timezones.
smileysteve 5y ago
The question this raises to me, is what travel times is this accounting for? There are more complex issues (taxes, school pickup, dog walking, local errands) before travel in a plane and rental car can't get you somewhere in 24 hours. Pre pandemic some nycers had a 15 minute walking commute, others might grind it out for 2 hours each way in the northeastern corridor.
- smileysteve 5y ago
  As an errand example. I schedule my dental appointments 6 months out. If my work gives me only 24 hour notice I have to be in the office for a meeting that didn't exist until now, it makes no difference if I live a 6 hour flight away or a 30 minute walk away. Now do the same for a 1hr meeting at 10am or 2:30pm with a need to be able to dropoff or pickup school children at 9am or 4pm.

andrewjf 5y ago

I've found this really depends on seniority. Higher seniorities like principle engineers, senior managers, directors, vp meetings are much different than a normal stand up, strategy session or engineering discussion and physical presence does have an advantage. But I admit this isn't likely to be the target audience for the original policy.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> How disorganised does a team need to be that they need to call meetings so involved they can only be done in-person with less than 24 hour’s notice? I've put similar bounds on WFH hires before. Not because we were calling short-notice meetings frequently, but because it prevents single, long-distance employees from dominating all of the scheduling requirements. Once you have someone on your team who needs a lot of notice to attend any meeting, you are now planning every single meeting around their schedule. Everyone else must choose between accommodating that person or quietly doing the thing without them. It's ultimately not a great experience for the employee who gets left out of things because their schedule has become difficult to accomodate. It also sets appropriate expectations. Some people interview for flexible WFH positions when they really want full-remote positions, then spend a lot of energy trying to shut down any in-person meetings no matter how much the rest of the team wants them. This is a good way of signaling that in-person meetings are a requirement for the job.

ashtonkem 5y ago
I think this is putting the cart in front of the horse. The thing you should be optimizing for is not geo-location, but time zone. The latter is only weakly related to the former. It doesn't matter if someone is within driving distance of the office so long as they are in (or willing to work in) the time zone that the office works at. Rejecting someone in Los Angeles because they're not within driving distance of Seattle would be penny wise and pound foolish. > Once you have someone on your team who needs a lot of notice to attend any meeting, you are now planning every single meeting around their schedule. This doesn't sound like you're actually running a "WFH" team then. You just can't demand short notice in person meetings with a remote team; that's an unreasonable ask. Hold remote meetings and schedule in-person meetups far in advance, or don't call it a "WFH" team.
- doopy1 5y ago
  IMO, companies that do WFH well are ones that are designed for the work to be async.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I don't know how productive it is to search for the true definition of "WFH". Regardless of what we call it, it seems reasonable to have an intermediate model like Amazon's proposing, where you can mostly work from wherever you'd like but you have to be available for in-person meetings because the company thinks they're valuable.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    > I don't know how productive it is to search for the true definition of "WFH". It's very productive, because abusing terms like "WFH" will be the technique that companies use to try and get through this without giving up anything. If you thought you were going to be "working from home" and discovered that your boss had the option to demand a commute from you at will on short notice, you would probably feel like you'd been tricked, no? Or if you landed that dream WFH job only to discover that it required you be X miles from Y expensive city, you would probably have some questions about what exactly they meant by "work from home". Personally, I'd call the environment OP described above as semi-remote or "Flexible Working Arrangements", although I'm sure there are other terms that would suffice. > Regardless of what we call it, it seems reasonable to have an intermediate model like Amazon's proposing, where you can mostly work from wherever you'd like but you have to be available for in-person meetings because the company thinks they're valuable. Not for me, but that's fine I guess. But it's very important that everyone be clear about what this is, and it's not WFH. If the expectation is that you'll commute regularly or on the demand of your boss (ew), then that's not a WFH job. Come up with a new name for it if you want, but it does not meet the social expectation of what "WFH" means. Unrelated to the terminology, I find this intermediate proposition utterly perplexing. So I have to live within reasonable commute range for the 2-3x times I commute per week, and I have to pay higher per foot cost if I want to work from my home? You do you, but I find this to be the worst of both worlds; I'd rather have a short commute to an office all the time, or no commute and more personal space. (Excepting of course the “I have a dentist appointment in the other direction, I’m going to WFH for that.” But even my non-remote jobs have offered one-off remote days for logistical reasons for years, so I implicitly exclude that from such discussions).
alistairSH 5y ago
Or, just host fully remote meetings. Which, if your employer is large enough, you have to do anyways because there’s an office in Europe or India or someplace else.

kevinsundar 5y ago

Pretty sure facebook needed to do this last week :) It's important for large companies to still have some way of getting people together quickly to solve problems. That's hard if people in are different timezones.

smileysteve 5y ago

The question this raises to me, is what travel times is this accounting for? There are more complex issues (taxes, school pickup, dog walking, local errands) before travel in a plane and rental car can't get you somewhere in 24 hours. Pre pandemic some nycers had a 15 minute walking commute, others might grind it out for 2 hours each way in the northeastern corridor.

smileysteve 5y ago
As an errand example. I schedule my dental appointments 6 months out. If my work gives me only 24 hour notice I have to be in the office for a meeting that didn't exist until now, it makes no difference if I live a 6 hour flight away or a 30 minute walk away. Now do the same for a 1hr meeting at 10am or 2:30pm with a need to be able to dropoff or pickup school children at 9am or 4pm.