5 ms·

What one executive wishes they could tell employees about return-to-office plans

27 points by msh 4y ago

LocalH 4y ago
There are two types of people - those who perform better working in person, and those who perform better working remotely. Forcing either to work in the other fashion is harmful. The best solution for productivity will be that which respects both types of people.
outsomnia 4y ago
That awkward feeling is the employees being aware that the motivation of the people paying them and their own interests are in opposition. In this business, in code and in management, Async is god. If it can be done async, it will be better done async plus or minus the social considerations.
Flankk 4y ago
> We want to do the right thing by our employees. [...] And it’s really unclear what the right thing is. [...] We do have office space and we have welcomed people back to the office, but not many have been coming in. It took me a while but I just did the complex analysis including some long division. It turns out the right thing by the employees is the thing they are freely choosing to do. So it appears the right thing is to give them that freedom, unless of course the premise is flawed.
- junofan 4y ago
  It sounds like junior employees are not coming in, and some are struggling. Anecdotally I’ve seen that too. Maybe some in this company do not know what they don’t know. Is the right thing to do just to let them fail? I don’t think so. The right thing could be a compromise.
GRBLDeveloped 4y ago
If they've identified juniors having issues, they should train managers to identify and solve for it. Ask them to come in or set up pair programming/joint work sessions like 'shoulder surfing'. Tell people it's inappropriate to go to a museum during work or that they're underperforming. Seems like we've got solutions to these issues
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Some of the issue with junior employees is that what worked before won’t work as well now (or at minimum, won’t work the same way). When I was a junior programmer, I ate lunch every day with junior and senior programmers. I developed a trust that let me easily ask one of them to “walk me through how a variable of char * and char[256] are related” or show me some trick in the debugger or help me get unstuck. It’s not that you can’t do any of those things remotely. It’s that the social constructs are vastly different in the absence of repeated casual interactions. In a remote-mostly world, a junior programmer is likely to struggle longer solo on any given issue (which brings along some benefits, of course), but once they get into a spot where they’re underwater, they don’t have an easy, low-stakes, smooth way to recover as “asking one of the 10 people you’ve eaten lunch with 100 times.”
hunglee2 4y ago
some valuable insights in this critique 1. remote being best suited for those who have pre-built in-person networks 2. lack of osmotic information transfer for inexperienced staff 3. decline of social cohesion, especially for new joiners who never had in-person experience I suspect that we will end up with many different flavours of working mode, we are in the pre-Cambrian explosion for working culture practices. The diversity should lead to self sorting along the way
zaptheimpaler 4y ago
I completely understand their concerns about remote work long term. Maybe it really does make it harder for new employees to form networks, and productivity does take a hit. This might make the company less innovative, less competitive and even deliver a lower return on capital. The thing is though, I don't give a shit. I am generally not rewarded for being productive. Employees might be more inclined to think like owners if they actually reaped the benefits of ownership. Benefits like a share of profits or any semblance of decision making power for important decisions. All of this stuff is doable. Until then, work from home sounds good because it's all upside for employees.
- origin_path 4y ago
  But tech firms all give employees equity and are facing the same problems.
  - bunsenhoneydew 4y ago
    Certainly not all tech firms do this
    - origin_path 4y ago
      Which ones don't? I never heard of such a thing.
RestlessMind 4y ago
From my first hand experience in managing teams, this article resonates well. The biggest problem my company sees is a low level of trust between team members now that a lot of the tenured engineers have left and new ones joined in a fully remote environment. More than half the team hasn’t met colleagues in person and the culture feels very transactional with shallow bonds, compared to old days when all of us were in office. Organizing social events on Zoom very contrived and awkward. Chatting for 5 min at a water cooler was better to actually get to know someone and build trust. Of course, the company has no budget for physically bringing people together. Fully remote doesn’t work and I am willing to bet on companies with some in-office presence beating fully remote companies in the long run.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  >culture feels very transactional with shallow bonds, compared to old days when all of us were in office. Seems like the underlings and management are on the same page now.
  - Aromasin 4y ago
    I'm still very much an underling, and I resonate with the shallow bonds comment. At my previous role, I was friends with my colleagues. We went to the pub together after work, had each other around for parties, and invited each other to our weddings. Doing any of the above with my current team seems unimaginable - not because I don't like them, but because we've never had the opportunity to break that trust barrier over Teams or Zoom.
    - dickersnoodle 4y ago
      What "trust barrier"?
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      N=1. Colleagues are not my friends. We share a revenue source and common body of work, but my friends are outside of work for a reason. Under exceptional circumstances, a friendship bond that lasts beyond an employer might be established, but in my 20+ years in tech, it’s happened so few times I can count on one hand. And I prefer it that way.
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
I don't see what's so hard. Give people a choice and leave it at that.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  You need to force the senior staff to come (because they want to) or else there's nobody for the junior staff to learn from. That's basically the trade-off: senior freedom vs. junior learning
  - jen20 4y ago
    It’s not though. Pairing via Tuple is no less productive, and juniors can learn equally well from it.
jleyank 4y ago
Middle management is struggling to show their value or even find something to do. The head shed is needed, and the workers are needed. Throw in tram leads to insulate the team from the bs and to keep them on the right path. And given that software development usually profits from peace and quiet, a bullpen or place where interruptions occur daily or worse is counterproductive. Let the marketeers or the like do their thing to the best of their ability, but please have them do it somewhere else. If you can’t asychronously tell whether a project you’re purportedly responsible for is advancing, why are you being paid?
- RestlessMind 4y ago
  > And given that software development usually profits from peace and quiet It seems you have never built any complex software which needed a lot of whiteboarding, intense design discussions with lots of nuances to hash out, lots of unanticipated tiny cases which were solved by a quick 2-min chat or other aspects which are far better addressed in person vs via Zoom.
  - jleyank 4y ago
    I’ve spent decades building such things. But it’s not something that’s done much after things are threshed out and work assigned. Fine, gather the clans to start things up, divvy up work, and get out of their way and let them work. Better?
    - RestlessMind 4y ago
      > gather the clans to start things up, divvy up work, and get out of their way and let them work That sounds good. But my company has no budget to gather the clans. So what is the alternative?
      - jleyank 4y ago
        Embrace remote work and zoom away. I assume there was never or is no longer an office to collect in?
tonywastaken 4y ago
Are travel costs for quarterly in-person really more than real estate costs for always in-person?
prirun 4y ago
Rather than focusing on how to get people back in the office, the execs already know the things they should work on: > How do you build a compelling culture remotely? > the majority of people seem to want to be remote when we survey them. But are they as engaged? Will they stay? ... how sustainable is that? > How do you make those people [out of state] still feel like they are part of everything? > Are people working as hard? > there’s still just a lot of empty space right now. When I’m in the office, there’s not a lot of people. > I recently attended an in-person meeting and I loved it. It was great. There are still things that are fun to talk about in-person and we were doing a lot of brainstorming. The time went by like that, and on a Zoom call, it just doesn’t. Q: did the other people like it, or did they wish they were at home on a Zoom call and that the meeting was dragging on and should have been shorter? > But I can’t get away from the inescapable reality that there’s still a hit to productivity. It was so scary the first six months of the pandemic and everybody just wanted to keep their job. Now, people are multitasking too much. Seems this could be measured, and if it's just a problem for the exec internally and not an "inescapable reality", he needs to get over it. If productivity hasn't taken a hit, "people are not multitasking too much": they are able to do the same amount of work more efficiently away from the office, and that allows them to do more other things that may not be work related. > [On working 4 days vs 5:] We’re not even in a space where you tell me you are just so good and efficient at your job, and you’re willing to work longer days for four days to have a fifth day off. That’s not the situation. I can keep my mind open to that. In other words, if a smart worker can get their work done in 4 days, the exec expects them to do 25% more work without extra pay. > Boundaries are being tested all over the place... the workplace was probably out of whack and companies did have too much power... There’s a level of distrust that employees have for their organizations, almost like an old dated image of like fat cats sitting around counting their money I don't think it's dated considering that the gap between executive compensation and average worker compensation has only increased: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/07/us-wage-gap-ceos-workers-institute-for-policy-studies-report https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/07/us-wage-gap-...
jen20 4y ago
> There’s a level of distrust that employees have for their organizations, almost like an old dated image of like fat cats sitting around counting their money. Because it is broadly true, as the nonsensical, obfuscated-with-bullshit layoff announcements prove - and there is always someone waiting in the hacker news comments to bleat about how corporations must be this way because of “shareholder value”. Executives need to learn that they can’t have it both ways.
- nullfield 4y ago
  Right-my partner was just laid off without notice, while as usual the company has had record profits and just recently they were talking about opportunities for training. So no, fuckers. There’s no trust.
plaguepilled 4y ago
I say this without venom. If you think that the complaining workers WANT to go to workplace socials and aren't just feeling obliged, they do not feel grateful. They feel blackmailed. This wash about consensus is irrelevant. Your culture is only valuable if the workers actually indicate they value it. Listen. To. The. Individual.
iainctduncan 4y ago
This read ok to me until the red flag about a worker wanting to have a set day off. If you're trying to build a remote culture with trust, that attitude should be exactly what you're looking for - straight up honest boundaries stated at the beginning when everyone can back out. This is way better than people having to prove their deservedness for time off or some other bullshit, or conversely, having them pretend to work while sneaking in time off. If the company has a problem with that, then I'd say they are trying to do this from the wrong head space, and yeah, it's not going to go well. If I got a bad reaction from a potential employer over an honest conversation on what my and their expectations should be, I'd be out and on to the next.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ilaksh 4y ago
It's amazing how little integration of online tooling there is even in the thought process. The fact that they are remote or not actually says little about the communication patterns except that it is not physically face-to-face. If mentorship is important then rather than relying on the physical distance between the new person's desk and the senior, you make it a policy that they need to do mentorship. And provide tools, structure and time for that. If the senior or junior by virtue of the fact that they are not sitting in the same space cannot or will not work together, then either you have not got the tooling in place or you don't have control over your employees. Learn to use internet software, set firm policies about communication and collaboration and availability to the degree it is actually necessary. If people don't comply then fire them. The fact that they are physically in the same space or not is a minor detail for most of these jobs. Absolutely incredible how little understanding there is of that fact. Learn to use an online white board, screen share, write an email, or open a video or voice chat.
angmarsbane 4y ago
Fixing the commute and/or fixing housing would help get people into office heaps. Fully remote seems to work really well for people who are who’ve been at the company for awhile so offer fully remote once someone has been at the company X amount of years.

27 points by msh 4y ago

There are two types of people - those who perform better working in person, and those who perform better working remotely. Forcing either to work in the other fashion is harmful. The best solution for productivity will be that which respects both types of people.

outsomnia 4y ago

That awkward feeling is the employees being aware that the motivation of the people paying them and their own interests are in opposition. In this business, in code and in management, Async is god. If it can be done async, it will be better done async plus or minus the social considerations.

Flankk 4y ago

> We want to do the right thing by our employees. [...] And it’s really unclear what the right thing is. [...] We do have office space and we have welcomed people back to the office, but not many have been coming in. It took me a while but I just did the complex analysis including some long division. It turns out the right thing by the employees is the thing they are freely choosing to do. So it appears the right thing is to give them that freedom, unless of course the premise is flawed.

junofan 4y ago
It sounds like junior employees are not coming in, and some are struggling. Anecdotally I’ve seen that too. Maybe some in this company do not know what they don’t know. Is the right thing to do just to let them fail? I don’t think so. The right thing could be a compromise.

GRBLDeveloped 4y ago

If they've identified juniors having issues, they should train managers to identify and solve for it. Ask them to come in or set up pair programming/joint work sessions like 'shoulder surfing'. Tell people it's inappropriate to go to a museum during work or that they're underperforming. Seems like we've got solutions to these issues

sokoloff 4y ago
Some of the issue with junior employees is that what worked before won’t work as well now (or at minimum, won’t work the same way). When I was a junior programmer, I ate lunch every day with junior and senior programmers. I developed a trust that let me easily ask one of them to “walk me through how a variable of char * and char[256] are related” or show me some trick in the debugger or help me get unstuck. It’s not that you can’t do any of those things remotely. It’s that the social constructs are vastly different in the absence of repeated casual interactions. In a remote-mostly world, a junior programmer is likely to struggle longer solo on any given issue (which brings along some benefits, of course), but once they get into a spot where they’re underwater, they don’t have an easy, low-stakes, smooth way to recover as “asking one of the 10 people you’ve eaten lunch with 100 times.”

hunglee2 4y ago

some valuable insights in this critique 1. remote being best suited for those who have pre-built in-person networks 2. lack of osmotic information transfer for inexperienced staff 3. decline of social cohesion, especially for new joiners who never had in-person experience I suspect that we will end up with many different flavours of working mode, we are in the pre-Cambrian explosion for working culture practices. The diversity should lead to self sorting along the way

zaptheimpaler 4y ago

I completely understand their concerns about remote work long term. Maybe it really does make it harder for new employees to form networks, and productivity does take a hit. This might make the company less innovative, less competitive and even deliver a lower return on capital. The thing is though, I don't give a shit. I am generally not rewarded for being productive. Employees might be more inclined to think like owners if they actually reaped the benefits of ownership. Benefits like a share of profits or any semblance of decision making power for important decisions. All of this stuff is doable. Until then, work from home sounds good because it's all upside for employees.

origin_path 4y ago
But tech firms all give employees equity and are facing the same problems.
- bunsenhoneydew 4y ago
  Certainly not all tech firms do this
  - origin_path 4y ago
    Which ones don't? I never heard of such a thing.

RestlessMind 4y ago

From my first hand experience in managing teams, this article resonates well. The biggest problem my company sees is a low level of trust between team members now that a lot of the tenured engineers have left and new ones joined in a fully remote environment. More than half the team hasn’t met colleagues in person and the culture feels very transactional with shallow bonds, compared to old days when all of us were in office. Organizing social events on Zoom very contrived and awkward. Chatting for 5 min at a water cooler was better to actually get to know someone and build trust. Of course, the company has no budget for physically bringing people together. Fully remote doesn’t work and I am willing to bet on companies with some in-office presence beating fully remote companies in the long run.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
>culture feels very transactional with shallow bonds, compared to old days when all of us were in office. Seems like the underlings and management are on the same page now.
- Aromasin 4y ago
  I'm still very much an underling, and I resonate with the shallow bonds comment. At my previous role, I was friends with my colleagues. We went to the pub together after work, had each other around for parties, and invited each other to our weddings. Doing any of the above with my current team seems unimaginable - not because I don't like them, but because we've never had the opportunity to break that trust barrier over Teams or Zoom.
  - dickersnoodle 4y ago
    What "trust barrier"?
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    N=1. Colleagues are not my friends. We share a revenue source and common body of work, but my friends are outside of work for a reason. Under exceptional circumstances, a friendship bond that lasts beyond an employer might be established, but in my 20+ years in tech, it’s happened so few times I can count on one hand. And I prefer it that way.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

I don't see what's so hard. Give people a choice and leave it at that.

fxtentacle 4y ago
You need to force the senior staff to come (because they want to) or else there's nobody for the junior staff to learn from. That's basically the trade-off: senior freedom vs. junior learning
- jen20 4y ago
  It’s not though. Pairing via Tuple is no less productive, and juniors can learn equally well from it.

jleyank 4y ago

Middle management is struggling to show their value or even find something to do. The head shed is needed, and the workers are needed. Throw in tram leads to insulate the team from the bs and to keep them on the right path. And given that software development usually profits from peace and quiet, a bullpen or place where interruptions occur daily or worse is counterproductive. Let the marketeers or the like do their thing to the best of their ability, but please have them do it somewhere else. If you can’t asychronously tell whether a project you’re purportedly responsible for is advancing, why are you being paid?

RestlessMind 4y ago
> And given that software development usually profits from peace and quiet It seems you have never built any complex software which needed a lot of whiteboarding, intense design discussions with lots of nuances to hash out, lots of unanticipated tiny cases which were solved by a quick 2-min chat or other aspects which are far better addressed in person vs via Zoom.
- jleyank 4y ago
  I’ve spent decades building such things. But it’s not something that’s done much after things are threshed out and work assigned. Fine, gather the clans to start things up, divvy up work, and get out of their way and let them work. Better?
  - RestlessMind 4y ago
    > gather the clans to start things up, divvy up work, and get out of their way and let them work That sounds good. But my company has no budget to gather the clans. So what is the alternative?
    - jleyank 4y ago
      Embrace remote work and zoom away. I assume there was never or is no longer an office to collect in?

tonywastaken 4y ago

Are travel costs for quarterly in-person really more than real estate costs for always in-person?

prirun 4y ago

Rather than focusing on how to get people back in the office, the execs already know the things they should work on: > How do you build a compelling culture remotely? > the majority of people seem to want to be remote when we survey them. But are they as engaged? Will they stay? ... how sustainable is that? > How do you make those people [out of state] still feel like they are part of everything? > Are people working as hard? > there’s still just a lot of empty space right now. When I’m in the office, there’s not a lot of people. > I recently attended an in-person meeting and I loved it. It was great. There are still things that are fun to talk about in-person and we were doing a lot of brainstorming. The time went by like that, and on a Zoom call, it just doesn’t. Q: did the other people like it, or did they wish they were at home on a Zoom call and that the meeting was dragging on and should have been shorter? > But I can’t get away from the inescapable reality that there’s still a hit to productivity. It was so scary the first six months of the pandemic and everybody just wanted to keep their job. Now, people are multitasking too much. Seems this could be measured, and if it's just a problem for the exec internally and not an "inescapable reality", he needs to get over it. If productivity hasn't taken a hit, "people are not multitasking too much": they are able to do the same amount of work more efficiently away from the office, and that allows them to do more other things that may not be work related. > [On working 4 days vs 5:] We’re not even in a space where you tell me you are just so good and efficient at your job, and you’re willing to work longer days for four days to have a fifth day off. That’s not the situation. I can keep my mind open to that. In other words, if a smart worker can get their work done in 4 days, the exec expects them to do 25% more work without extra pay. > Boundaries are being tested all over the place... the workplace was probably out of whack and companies did have too much power... There’s a level of distrust that employees have for their organizations, almost like an old dated image of like fat cats sitting around counting their money I don't think it's dated considering that the gap between executive compensation and average worker compensation has only increased: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/07/us-wage-gap-ceos-workers-institute-for-policy-studies-report https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/07/us-wage-gap-...

jen20 4y ago

> There’s a level of distrust that employees have for their organizations, almost like an old dated image of like fat cats sitting around counting their money. Because it is broadly true, as the nonsensical, obfuscated-with-bullshit layoff announcements prove - and there is always someone waiting in the hacker news comments to bleat about how corporations must be this way because of “shareholder value”. Executives need to learn that they can’t have it both ways.

nullfield 4y ago
Right-my partner was just laid off without notice, while as usual the company has had record profits and just recently they were talking about opportunities for training. So no, fuckers. There’s no trust.

plaguepilled 4y ago

I say this without venom. If you think that the complaining workers WANT to go to workplace socials and aren't just feeling obliged, they do not feel grateful. They feel blackmailed. This wash about consensus is irrelevant. Your culture is only valuable if the workers actually indicate they value it. Listen. To. The. Individual.

iainctduncan 4y ago

This read ok to me until the red flag about a worker wanting to have a set day off. If you're trying to build a remote culture with trust, that attitude should be exactly what you're looking for - straight up honest boundaries stated at the beginning when everyone can back out. This is way better than people having to prove their deservedness for time off or some other bullshit, or conversely, having them pretend to work while sneaking in time off. If the company has a problem with that, then I'd say they are trying to do this from the wrong head space, and yeah, it's not going to go well. If I got a bad reaction from a potential employer over an honest conversation on what my and their expectations should be, I'd be out and on to the next.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ilaksh 4y ago

It's amazing how little integration of online tooling there is even in the thought process. The fact that they are remote or not actually says little about the communication patterns except that it is not physically face-to-face. If mentorship is important then rather than relying on the physical distance between the new person's desk and the senior, you make it a policy that they need to do mentorship. And provide tools, structure and time for that. If the senior or junior by virtue of the fact that they are not sitting in the same space cannot or will not work together, then either you have not got the tooling in place or you don't have control over your employees. Learn to use internet software, set firm policies about communication and collaboration and availability to the degree it is actually necessary. If people don't comply then fire them. The fact that they are physically in the same space or not is a minor detail for most of these jobs. Absolutely incredible how little understanding there is of that fact. Learn to use an online white board, screen share, write an email, or open a video or voice chat.

angmarsbane 4y ago

Fixing the commute and/or fixing housing would help get people into office heaps. Fully remote seems to work really well for people who are who’ve been at the company for awhile so offer fully remote once someone has been at the company X amount of years.