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The problem is that mixed office/remote is the worst of both worlds. I think that companies have to choose a model, then employees will choose companies based

The problem is that mixed office/remote is the worst of both worlds. I think that companies have to choose a model, then employees will choose companies based on this criteria.

j45 3y ago
How we work and get more effective at working is more of an issue than something being inherently wrong with working remote, hybrid, or in person. I’ve worked remote for a very long time including cycles in and out of it. Some remote work principles come and go and others remain mandatory but are often ignored. Primarily, people are not as good communicators as they imagine themselves to be and don’t dedicate a great deal of effort to improving constantly. This is in person, online and remote. Underdeveloped communication skills play themselves out through attempting to over communicate for hybrid work but the core competency is not where it needs to be. One test is if someone can’t explain a slide deck using only a voice call, do they know the material at all? Doing hybrid/distributed work well requires a clean slate in terms of space design both at office and home, and technology that elevates communication to the point where it’s invisible. Since that’s rare, working with what’s in place at a company and will take work if both parties to be willing to do it. Employees also have to realize a pandemic created many of the nascent remote/hybrid practices and there is a lot of room for improvement. Since most places will never invest or obsess enough over both deputizing and empowering their folks to have an unstoppable environment both at home and work, most are doomed to fail at it. Generally, startups work at a quicker pace from the very start at one table, until enough is in place to start leaving the building and bring back insights. Some ideas will not need this as a must but also not be their full potential. Startups are more than features and software development ceremony. In many cases it’s establishing a new way tech will work for and care for users. Edit: grammar and clarity.
mjevans 3y ago
'remote work' requires expressly documenting and writing things out. This is what companies have _said_ they wanted since forever. (Probably to in theory make employees more fungible.) Done well, this promotes clarity and consistency. The water cooler chat model, that tends to lead to other outcomes. Maybe the core goal does see some innovation, but documenting that becomes much harder. There are also detractions to the everyone together models. Anyone with kids _will_ bring the latest mutations of colds into work. They'll vector out of daycare and schools through the parents and infect everyone in the office. Frequent Fliers might also have a similar effect based on their sheer exposure. Allowing WFH isolates these fault domains and minimizes the spread.
- nightpool 3y ago
  Wait, sorry, your argument in favor of remote work is that in increases paperwork and pointless documentation that doesn't allow for flexibility? And your argument against working in the office is that sometimes people get sick? I will say, if those are my two options, I'm going to choose getting sick for a few days a year over filling out thousands of words of tech specs that don't actually clarify anything for anyone (because all of the actual questions get answered over slack DMs anyway) every single time. (Not saying all tech specs are bad, but they're certainly not a one size fits all process and if remote work means we need more of them then that means we're spending more time writing them then we need to be)
  - the_gipsy 3y ago
    You're completely twisting the words. Documentation is not pointless and not "paperwork" (a term used to describe bureaucracy e.g. rules and regulations and approvals). Writing documentation is en exercise of efficiency, when information is distilled into concise writing. Others can then process this information or recall it whenever they want. There are great tools to discuss and resolve questions in a collaborative way. It's just much more thoughtful than just blurting out what first comes to mind. Verbal communication is usually a huge time waster and can be outright disrespectful if someone prefers to rob everyone's time and digress and to push the "distilling" part onto everyone else - if the distilling even happens before everyone has tuned out and just agrees to finish yet another meeting.
    - eddythompson80 3y ago
      They aren't really twisting anything. A 20 minute in person chat over a whiteboard can save weeks of back and forth on written communication. It's not that crazy. My work place has "do what you want policy, but we want to encourage remote work and shrink our leased offices". My team at least has 4 people that come to the office regularly, and 2 that work remotely 100%. The #1 complaint of full time remote workers is they feel we all agree on designs and decisions and they just get to see a doc that 4/6 have already signed off on verbally and they feel not involved. I have no idea how to "make them feel involved" nor do I care tbh. I'll always do what's more efficient and what reduces red tape. If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute. > Verbal communication is usually a huge time waster and can be outright disrespectful if someone prefers to rob everyone's time and digress and to push the "distilling" part onto everyone else - if the distilling even happens before everyone has tuned out and just agrees to finish yet another meeting. You do far more pointless meeting and verbal communication when everyone is working remotely anyway. A conversation that just needs 3 people will now involve 12 because everyone needs to forward a meeting invite to everyone they think might even be remotely interested. The "outright disrespectful" is just a people problem. outright disrespectful people will be outright disrespectful in both verbal and non-verbal communication.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Non-imposing mixed work as in "and we supply an office if that's your thing" is basically the same as WFH, so it can't be the worst of both worlds. Task-based mixed as in "those activities require coming to the office" doesn't create a lot of problems, but you will discover that workers will demand some incentive to engage on those activities. The one that is the worst of both worlds is just the "we require your presence 3 times a week", but that is just the failure mode the article talks about presenting itself on a different way.
- whiplash451 3y ago
  It is the worse of both worlds, because the company ends up paying for an expensive but unused office. Meanwhile, employees who strive in in-person collaboration suffer in their development.
  - luma 3y ago
    Why would a company furnish an office space for employees who have elected to WFH? The flip side of that argument is that WFH employees should be getting a bonus for all the extra money a company has to spend to babysit the in-office employees. In terms of the collaboration, you are implying that I need to be in the office in order for you to be able to progress as a human. I’d once again wonder why you see this as a problem created by the WFH employee and not the in-office employee who needs personal emotional support from others in order to get the job done.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Have you ever attended a meeting where some people are remote while others are gathered in an office? That's often worst of both worlds. The alternative of just having everybody use zoom even if they're in the office disturbs everybody else in the office.
  - luma 3y ago
    I do this literally every work day and we don’t have many problems with it. What sort of issues are you encountering? Your post doesn’t really say.
cs02rm0 3y ago
I'm not sure I entirely agree. It definitely can be, but I think adjustments can be made. I usually point at the way F1 teams do their meetings where everyone wears a headset, even if a bunch are in the same room: https://tinyurl.com/2uenm69f https://tinyurl.com/2uenm69f But often if you suggest this to traditionally office based people they feel daft doing it and plough ahead with a mic/speaker in the middle of the room and the remote guys become second class citizens, not being able to hear half the room.
- stephc_int13 3y ago
  On mixed config, remote people will always feel and be treated as lower rank. They will miss a lot of "inside" information and personal dynamics.
- throwuwu 3y ago
  This is where remotes are trying to force the in office people to cater to them. A proper compromise would be better microphones like lapel mics that are used in panel discussions or a single high quality conference mic. One of the reasons people want to be in an office is to have better meetings, taking that away from them is the same as taking away a WFH perk like forcing you to use a standardized work station and chair instead of your own setup or something.
- bombcar 3y ago
  As a side note the Logitech rally systems are quite good and you can get more mics to cover a room quite well. The only thing they do not handle well is multiple simultaneous conversations and people talking over each other, but those shouldn’t be happening anyway.
- nemetroid 3y ago
  There are a few technical hurdles that must be overcome for "everyone wears a headset to work" to work at all. * The headphones must block outside sound sufficiently, so you only hear the people in the same room through the call and not directly. * Your headset must not pick up when other people in the same room are speaking. But even then, it has serious drawbacks compared to an in-person meeting: * Latency. With anything over a 50 ms roundtrip (including hardware), people inadvertently start speaking over each other, and typical latencies are much much higher than that. It becomes more difficult to break into a discussion, trying to make a small interjection often disrupts the flow of conversation. * Lack of non-verbal communication. Webcams remedy this to some extent (though many are negative to using webcams in their home for other reasons). It can be argued that this is a small price to pay for the ability to WFH, but it's disingenuous to say that pushback against "everyone on headset" is just due to people feeling "daft" doing it.
chasd00 3y ago
One downside of the mixed model is decisions may get made without the remote people’s input. I was at a job where I was remote but a peer was two desks away from the ceo. Strategic discussions and decisions would get made there without me. It drove me nuts and I ended up leaving (wisely it turns out).
marssaxman 3y ago
> The problem is that mixed office/remote is the worst of both worlds. What issues do you see with it? The startup I work for has an office, for those who want to use it, but there's no obligation, and many of us work remote full-time. This seems to be working out well for us, so I'm curious what obstacles you foresee.

The problem is that mixed office/remote is the worst of both worlds. I think that companies have to choose a model, then employees will choose companies based on this criteria.

j45 3y ago

How we work and get more effective at working is more of an issue than something being inherently wrong with working remote, hybrid, or in person. I’ve worked remote for a very long time including cycles in and out of it. Some remote work principles come and go and others remain mandatory but are often ignored. Primarily, people are not as good communicators as they imagine themselves to be and don’t dedicate a great deal of effort to improving constantly. This is in person, online and remote. Underdeveloped communication skills play themselves out through attempting to over communicate for hybrid work but the core competency is not where it needs to be. One test is if someone can’t explain a slide deck using only a voice call, do they know the material at all? Doing hybrid/distributed work well requires a clean slate in terms of space design both at office and home, and technology that elevates communication to the point where it’s invisible. Since that’s rare, working with what’s in place at a company and will take work if both parties to be willing to do it. Employees also have to realize a pandemic created many of the nascent remote/hybrid practices and there is a lot of room for improvement. Since most places will never invest or obsess enough over both deputizing and empowering their folks to have an unstoppable environment both at home and work, most are doomed to fail at it. Generally, startups work at a quicker pace from the very start at one table, until enough is in place to start leaving the building and bring back insights. Some ideas will not need this as a must but also not be their full potential. Startups are more than features and software development ceremony. In many cases it’s establishing a new way tech will work for and care for users. Edit: grammar and clarity.

mjevans 3y ago

'remote work' requires expressly documenting and writing things out. This is what companies have _said_ they wanted since forever. (Probably to in theory make employees more fungible.) Done well, this promotes clarity and consistency. The water cooler chat model, that tends to lead to other outcomes. Maybe the core goal does see some innovation, but documenting that becomes much harder. There are also detractions to the everyone together models. Anyone with kids _will_ bring the latest mutations of colds into work. They'll vector out of daycare and schools through the parents and infect everyone in the office. Frequent Fliers might also have a similar effect based on their sheer exposure. Allowing WFH isolates these fault domains and minimizes the spread.

nightpool 3y ago
Wait, sorry, your argument in favor of remote work is that in increases paperwork and pointless documentation that doesn't allow for flexibility? And your argument against working in the office is that sometimes people get sick? I will say, if those are my two options, I'm going to choose getting sick for a few days a year over filling out thousands of words of tech specs that don't actually clarify anything for anyone (because all of the actual questions get answered over slack DMs anyway) every single time. (Not saying all tech specs are bad, but they're certainly not a one size fits all process and if remote work means we need more of them then that means we're spending more time writing them then we need to be)
- the_gipsy 3y ago
  You're completely twisting the words. Documentation is not pointless and not "paperwork" (a term used to describe bureaucracy e.g. rules and regulations and approvals). Writing documentation is en exercise of efficiency, when information is distilled into concise writing. Others can then process this information or recall it whenever they want. There are great tools to discuss and resolve questions in a collaborative way. It's just much more thoughtful than just blurting out what first comes to mind. Verbal communication is usually a huge time waster and can be outright disrespectful if someone prefers to rob everyone's time and digress and to push the "distilling" part onto everyone else - if the distilling even happens before everyone has tuned out and just agrees to finish yet another meeting.
  - eddythompson80 3y ago
    They aren't really twisting anything. A 20 minute in person chat over a whiteboard can save weeks of back and forth on written communication. It's not that crazy. My work place has "do what you want policy, but we want to encourage remote work and shrink our leased offices". My team at least has 4 people that come to the office regularly, and 2 that work remotely 100%. The #1 complaint of full time remote workers is they feel we all agree on designs and decisions and they just get to see a doc that 4/6 have already signed off on verbally and they feel not involved. I have no idea how to "make them feel involved" nor do I care tbh. I'll always do what's more efficient and what reduces red tape. If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute. > Verbal communication is usually a huge time waster and can be outright disrespectful if someone prefers to rob everyone's time and digress and to push the "distilling" part onto everyone else - if the distilling even happens before everyone has tuned out and just agrees to finish yet another meeting. You do far more pointless meeting and verbal communication when everyone is working remotely anyway. A conversation that just needs 3 people will now involve 12 because everyone needs to forward a meeting invite to everyone they think might even be remotely interested. The "outright disrespectful" is just a people problem. outright disrespectful people will be outright disrespectful in both verbal and non-verbal communication.

marcosdumay 3y ago

Non-imposing mixed work as in "and we supply an office if that's your thing" is basically the same as WFH, so it can't be the worst of both worlds. Task-based mixed as in "those activities require coming to the office" doesn't create a lot of problems, but you will discover that workers will demand some incentive to engage on those activities. The one that is the worst of both worlds is just the "we require your presence 3 times a week", but that is just the failure mode the article talks about presenting itself on a different way.

whiplash451 3y ago
It is the worse of both worlds, because the company ends up paying for an expensive but unused office. Meanwhile, employees who strive in in-person collaboration suffer in their development.
- luma 3y ago
  Why would a company furnish an office space for employees who have elected to WFH? The flip side of that argument is that WFH employees should be getting a bonus for all the extra money a company has to spend to babysit the in-office employees. In terms of the collaboration, you are implying that I need to be in the office in order for you to be able to progress as a human. I’d once again wonder why you see this as a problem created by the WFH employee and not the in-office employee who needs personal emotional support from others in order to get the job done.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
Have you ever attended a meeting where some people are remote while others are gathered in an office? That's often worst of both worlds. The alternative of just having everybody use zoom even if they're in the office disturbs everybody else in the office.
- luma 3y ago
  I do this literally every work day and we don’t have many problems with it. What sort of issues are you encountering? Your post doesn’t really say.

cs02rm0 3y ago

I'm not sure I entirely agree. It definitely can be, but I think adjustments can be made. I usually point at the way F1 teams do their meetings where everyone wears a headset, even if a bunch are in the same room: https://tinyurl.com/2uenm69f https://tinyurl.com/2uenm69f But often if you suggest this to traditionally office based people they feel daft doing it and plough ahead with a mic/speaker in the middle of the room and the remote guys become second class citizens, not being able to hear half the room.

stephc_int13 3y ago
On mixed config, remote people will always feel and be treated as lower rank. They will miss a lot of "inside" information and personal dynamics.
throwuwu 3y ago
This is where remotes are trying to force the in office people to cater to them. A proper compromise would be better microphones like lapel mics that are used in panel discussions or a single high quality conference mic. One of the reasons people want to be in an office is to have better meetings, taking that away from them is the same as taking away a WFH perk like forcing you to use a standardized work station and chair instead of your own setup or something.
bombcar 3y ago
As a side note the Logitech rally systems are quite good and you can get more mics to cover a room quite well. The only thing they do not handle well is multiple simultaneous conversations and people talking over each other, but those shouldn’t be happening anyway.
nemetroid 3y ago
There are a few technical hurdles that must be overcome for "everyone wears a headset to work" to work at all. * The headphones must block outside sound sufficiently, so you only hear the people in the same room through the call and not directly. * Your headset must not pick up when other people in the same room are speaking. But even then, it has serious drawbacks compared to an in-person meeting: * Latency. With anything over a 50 ms roundtrip (including hardware), people inadvertently start speaking over each other, and typical latencies are much much higher than that. It becomes more difficult to break into a discussion, trying to make a small interjection often disrupts the flow of conversation. * Lack of non-verbal communication. Webcams remedy this to some extent (though many are negative to using webcams in their home for other reasons). It can be argued that this is a small price to pay for the ability to WFH, but it's disingenuous to say that pushback against "everyone on headset" is just due to people feeling "daft" doing it.

chasd00 3y ago

One downside of the mixed model is decisions may get made without the remote people’s input. I was at a job where I was remote but a peer was two desks away from the ceo. Strategic discussions and decisions would get made there without me. It drove me nuts and I ended up leaving (wisely it turns out).

marssaxman 3y ago

> The problem is that mixed office/remote is the worst of both worlds. What issues do you see with it? The startup I work for has an office, for those who want to use it, but there's no obligation, and many of us work remote full-time. This seems to be working out well for us, so I'm curious what obstacles you foresee.