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People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully. It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually. Seeing

• watwut 4y ago
  That sounds like a reason why an employee would go to the office. But not really something employer would care about - they don't care about employees social lifes in other contexts.
  • ganoushoreilly 4y ago
    I disagree, that's exactly why an employer would want that. Team cohesion is important.
    • shyn3 4y ago
      You can't have team cohesion and outsource so better learn to scale early.
    • stuckonempty 4y ago
      Team cohesion is important as far as being able to work collaboratively to finish a project, but it’s not clear that requires being in an office every day for 8+ hrs
  • dasil003 4y ago
    > "People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully"
    • toomuchtodo 4y ago
      Tens of billions of dollars in market cap of remote first orgs disagrees. You can work with colleagues without any superfluous social connection, it’s just a job, not a tribe or family. One should be both polite and effective; this does not make you friends. The inability to support remote work signals the employer cannot manage based on performance, is power hungry, or is managing from emotion instead of data. (have worked remote for 10+ years)
    • watwut 4y ago
      Yeah, but we know that people were more productive in home. So, nah.
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    Because people will leave. I will no longer work any job which doesn't have an office. Remote work is depressing and isolating.
• waltherg 4y ago
  OP pointed out that meetings and projects have happened remotely anyways for a long time - an experience I share. The peers you describe aren’t in the same place as yourself even if you’re both in some office.
  • devoutsalsa 4y ago
    I had an in-office contract in 2019. No one in the open office plan wanted to be interrupted while sitting at their desk. Everyone had headphones on. I literally used Slack to talk to the people sitting to the left & right of my desk XD
• SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
  Why not just get rid of the office space and use the money saved to get people together twice per quarter for an extended period? I bet in almost every case it would be a significant cost savings for the employer. Unless, of course, there is some other reasoning than what you state in your comment, like for example, middle management feeling irrelevant or sunk cost fallacy on office space?
  • yablak 4y ago
    It's very hard to get people to travel for days at a time. Especially those with children.
    • SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
      Couldn’t the employer just hire people close together if they feel like that is an issue and still not have an office space?
      • devoutsalsa 4y ago
        When I owned a business, that’s what I did. Everyone worked remotely, except for me and a couple of people. I had a small coworking space simply because working out of my shoebox sized apartment was not fun. I hired everyone from the local area & occasionally had a meeting in the coworking space.
    • dsr_ 4y ago
      This is true. Companies can make this more appealing by holding the meetings in nice parts of the world -- note, nice doesn't have to be outrageously expensive -- putting people up in nice hotels with suitable space for spouses and kids, and by making the week before vacation for half the group and the week after for the other half, with the option to stay in the same hotel at the company's expense. This won't work for everyone, or every company, but it's a much nicer carrot than usual.
    • mitthrowaway2 4y ago
      Couldn't one say the same about getting people to come to an office 250 days per year?
• irrational 4y ago
  That happens through zoom. Half my team (including my manager) is remote. All of our meetings are over zoom, even when half the team is on campus at the same time. I go to campus, I find someplace to sit (we don't have assigned places to work), I hop on zoom calls as needed, I work, I go home. I never talk to anyone on campus - so my social connections are entirely the same whether I'm working from home or working on campus.
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  Five years in office. Five years fully remote with a team of dozens of fully remote engineers. I find the latter, in my experience, to be strictly superior in all ways including working together successfully despite being remote. I think we overrate the need to build in-person social rapports. Just be a professional. I think there’s a concept where often work colleagues become friends and we misidentify that as being a key part of the work dynamic. I’m not sure it’s necessary. Most of my work colleagues are not my friends and I’m quite fine with that.
  • ttul 4y ago
    To whit, open source projects have been run for decades over nothing but email mailing lists. People participating in these projects feel a strong social connection.
    • necovek 4y ago
      And a bunch of conferences like FOSDEM, GUADEC, LinuxConf, PyCon... All the while not forgetting that people contributing to free software have altogether different motivations: they are (almost) all in it because they want to contribute their own time to something they believe in. Quite different from what majority of people in any company are there for.
  • doubled112 4y ago
    I agree with you. > Just be a professional In my experience, there are many people that find this an incredible challenge. This is where it can easily fall apart.
  • skibidibipiti 4y ago
    [dead]
  • cj 4y ago
    Similar story here. 5 years in person, 5 years running a fully remote company (remote before Covid, not because of). I agree, for the most part. It's not too hard to build good working relationships within a small team that's remote. One notable challenge, though, is developing working relationships between different teams and cross-departments. In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running into people in the hall or at lunch. Remote, it's not unheard of to (literally) never interact with other departments at all. So in remote, cross-department projects like "let's launch a new marketing site" become more difficult to orchestrate because the engineers simply don't know the people they're working with in (for example) Marketing until the project starts. Granted, this issue isn't completely unique to remote work. At big 200+ person companies, even when 100% in-person, you won't know everyone and you'll face the same challenges. But for a 10-50 person company, it's pretty easy for everyone to know everyone when in-person. Still possible when remote, but it has to be encouraged at the management level since intermingling between departments for fun isn't something that most people will do on their own unless directed to. Remote works really well for task-oriented jobs (like engineering, where you're assigned a Jira ticket to complete) especially when you're working with a small group of people every day. Remote starts to become challenging as an engineer if you're in a position where you need to frequently (and quickly) build working relationships with people on other teams to complete cross-departmental projects where collaboration is necessary. This is also where good product managers can really come in handy. Good product managers will be able to handle the cross-team relationships, manage expectations, gather/communicate requirements (offloading that overhead from engineers).
• davedx 4y ago
  This is just conjecture, post some evidence for your claims
• alar44 4y ago
  You can do this through any video conferencing platform. Or do we need to smell our coworkers for teamwork to work?
• lostlogin 4y ago
  > People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully One size very much does not fit all, and that’s the entire point that those who prefer remote work are trying to drive home.
• scotty79 4y ago
  More important role of those connections is that they promote inertness in the employees so they will remain employees even when they are disadvantaged because social component will hold them back from moving on.
• wankle 4y ago
  "People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully." Our team doesn't, are we anomalies? People need to be mature, reasonable, responsible and accountable to work together well.
  • olliej 4y ago
    No you’re not. There are many people who have never developed social connections outside of school or work and unilaterally decided that that is how people must socialize. After all if they can’t socialize outside of such an environment surely no one else can. If they can’t see a person as a person if they’re not face to face surely no one else can. It’s unfortunate that these folk provide backup to the executives who are forcing RTO simply to provide the appearance of value and/or control over the plebs.
    • wankle 4y ago
      Well, I was really more addressing social connections with my coworkers, we share jokes, care about each other too but most I'd say have families and several of us are geographically diverse, so we don't socialize with each other or very little. Outside work, I do have social connections, long term friendships. I wasn't addressing socializing or not across the board.
• olliej 4y ago
  People need social interaction, sure, people also need to have social interactions outside of the office. What we are seeing is a large swathe of people who use the office as their social life, and they’re taking the position that their inability to socialize out of work is important enough to inflict the negative consequences of returning to the office on people who don’t treat the office as a fun zone for personal sustenance.
• JohnFen 4y ago
  > It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually. This isn't self-evident to me at all.
  • l33t233372 4y ago
    It isn’t self evident that humans communicate better in person than from behind cameras and screens? Do you know how much time people spend on other tabs while in zoom meetings?
    • JohnFen 4y ago
      Correct, it isn't self-evident to me at all, but it depends on what is being communicated, of course. In-person communications are slow, and half of the communication isn't really about the topic at hand. In terms of meetings, I've only rarely seen a meeting that couldn't have accomplished the same goals in 1/10 the time if it done without being a meeting. Whether in-person or zoom. The information density is far too low, too much time is taken up with things that aren't moving toward the goal, etc.
• Redsquare 4y ago
  Love these soundbites with zero evidemce. Absolutely not true, plenty of us enjoying remote, we can socialise in a bar/restaurant. No need for an office.