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Manager of a hybrid team here, 2 remote, 4 in 2 different remote offices, and 4 in the office with me. My experience is that remote workers often have higher v

Manager of a hybrid team here, 2 remote, 4 in 2 different remote offices, and 4 in the office with me. My experience is that remote workers often have higher velocity but lower agility. When there's a well-defined task and little ambiguity, remote workers can usually complete it faster than in-office workers. But when the task is highly ambiguous, requires many course corrections, involves rapid communication, or relies on a large degree of trust, the in-office teams end up more productive. It all stems from known research on the benefits & detriments of office work, i.e. offices build trust and allow higher-bandwidth communication, but they also have more distractions and a less comfortable work environment. I think the trigger that would bring people back to the office is a new economic boom based on new and unknown technology. That creates a highly ambiguous environment where you're forging ahead in unknown directions and need a lot of trust in leadership to make progress at all. Established companies with known markets probably would be better off adopting remote work - the employees work faster, and there are already well-known processes and strategic direction. Of course, if you're already well-established in your market, it probably doesn't matter what you do.

theknocker 3y ago
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m3kw9 3y ago
The tech isn’t there for quick discussion, it’s a very UI/UX issue especially for current generation of video conferencing software, there is a huge layer between digital and physical. Hopefully AR can bridge some of that gap. Future job may look for prospects that are adept in AR office work and will be asked how well they use it
- foobarian 3y ago
  This is such a huge gap. Why there is no widespread more impromptu collaboration product I have no idea. I try to get people to use the excalidraw shared whiteboard any chance I get, at least that doesn't require the uncomfortable on-camera appearance. There's got to be some other process we could try to recreate (to the extent possible) that "together" feeling of the office. Maybe set aside an hour when team calls into a meeting but just keep on working as normal? And can banter/ask random questions etc. Otherwise things are just too formal.
  - m3kw9 3y ago
    Is hard to replicate the physical instant access you get at an office and simulate it well in digital form. in the physical office space you cannot ignore someone while maintaining plausible deniability like if you were remote. You likely will be responded if you are face to face physically. I’m not sure if replicating that remotely is too intrusive for people to handle(forcing a camera to be on when requested). You can always ignore people from remote till you are good and ready
    - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
      We had a product called Sococo some years ago, that showed active team members. You could 'knock on their door' and know whether they were ignoring you or not. So it's possible, with the right interface.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Well, and getting together for lunch, or a beer/mocktail after work. Virtual socialization feels so forced by comparison. And no-agenda meetings don't work either. I sort of agree on the virtual whiteboarding (it's partly a surface area thing) but I think we've also discovered that colllaborative docs work fine for a lot of purposes.
  - ge0ffclapp 3y ago
    Google meet works for my team. We have a few rooms dedicated to hang out in during the day. Some people leave the camera off, others don't. It reminds me very much of the office where if someone has a random question there are already people around to answer it. There is no expectation you have to be in a room but lots of people do it because it is fun and interesting.
  - gopher2000 3y ago
    Lots of teams/groups have open video conferencing rooms where people can just hang out without any specific purpose - while doing other work. It works to some extent.
- esafak 3y ago
  If anybody wants to work on this find me on LI.
bnchrch 3y ago
I'm not typically a statistics hawk. However your team having 2 members that are remote, then generalizing it to all remote workers is a bit of a leap. Outside of that I do agree. New technologies that require a high degree of experimentation and discovery lend themselves to in person work.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  It's really 6 - the ones in remote offices effectively serve as remote workers for the purposes of management effort & management style. One of them is a singleton anyway - he has a desk in the office that is local to him, but he's the only one on the team there, and I don't really care whether he comes in. Also about half of the rest of the org is remote - folks that collaborate with my team, but who I don't have reporting-line responsibility over. So there's a good sampling across 30-50 people who I interact with as teammates as well.
cheschire 3y ago
There's also the struggle of remote workers in a hybrid team unable to move up the ladder as easily as on-site workers for the same trust-based collaborative reasons you mentioned. It is possible that remote workers would look elsewhere for upward mobility, leading to more turnover. Additionally, because the social fabric is weaker around remote workers in a hybrid environment, there may be a perception of them being less likely to remain out of any sense of loyalty or obligation. This seems like a potential stigma that remote workers would need to overcome in the absence of explicit inclusivity efforts by leadership.
- alienicecream 3y ago
  > there may be a perception of them being less likely to remain out of any sense of loyalty or obligation. Well, technically that would be a market inefficiency, so we should be encouraging employees to view their employers as fungible and switch jobs as soon as it's advantageous to them. If your employer is trying to keep you around through social ties instead of competitive compensation you're being taken advantage of.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  Loyalty is a funny thing, because companies are not loyal, yet they want their employees to be loyal, without reciprocating in any manner. I don't recommend holding loyalty to any company. Maybe to co-workers(s) or a direct boss (IE, if they leave, maybe you leave too. I've seen this happen) but certainly not to the employer, since it will never be reciprocated
  - helen___keller 3y ago
    Agreed but the image of loyalty is valuable even if loyalty is never worth giving
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - seadan83 3y ago
wharvle 3y ago
This can be made better or worse by processes and tools. After years and years in Slack workplaces, I’m now witnessing firsthand how Teams can effectively throw sand in the gears of remote work, simply due to how its UI is designed. The lack of basic normal-ass chat rooms in a “team” pushes everything into 1-1 chats and chats attached to meetings. It kills serendipity, splits attention in unhelpful ways, and, thanks to the astonishing bad idea of how they crammed a threaded model—and only a threaded model—into a single-channel chat interface for Teams chats, makes those feel disorganized and high-friction. It’s like the tool was deliberately designed to create ad-hoc, hidden silos. A simple choice of tool can make a big difference in the effectiveness of remote workers. Business processes and such can have just as big an effect. A lot of that stuff improves in-person work, too (that Teams horse-shit isn’t better for in-office workers, either) so adjustments to improve remote work tend not to even be trade-offs.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  I been saying for years that Teams is worse than Slack -- glad I'm not the only one. > The lack of basic normal-ass chat rooms in a “team” pushes everything into 1-1 chats and chats attached to meetings Exactly. The big killer is being able to pop into a team's room and say "hey tell me about VLAN X" and get an answer from someone. or even just figure out who to ask. with teams that's much harder, you have to play the "find the right person to ask" game, and the visibility is poor. > (that Teams horse-shit isn’t better for in-office workers, either) Teams is fine if you need a IM client for people who are in cubes on the other side of the office and integrates with the Office suite. but for distributed team use it's garbage.
- potta_coffee 3y ago
  Most of the company uses Windows. A few of us actually write code and are on Mac. For some reason, for me, Teams is perpetually disconnecting from the network and requiring a refresh. It's essentially become a worse email service for me.
hellisothers 3y ago
Anecdotally having spent several years at my current job in person and now several years fully remote (whole company, full remote) I find it much much easier to do quick huddles and swarm on tasks/ideas. Before you had to convince everybody you wanted to talk to to leave their desks and hopefully find a free conference room and you had to premeditate this by days for scheduling (and free conference rooms). Now we can meet almost right away, no physical context switching. As with most things it really depends, also having some people be remote and some in person is always going to disadvantage the remote workers and set them up for failure in management’s eyes so no surprise there.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  "Before you had to convince everybody you wanted to talk to to leave their desks and hopefully find a free conference room and you had to premeditate this by days for scheduling (and free conference rooms)." This may be a company-culture thing, but before remote work, collaboration at my past employers was always "Swing your chair around and open your mouth". It didn't take a whole lot of convincing or a conference room.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    IMO this is the worst kind. It means I can be interrupted at a moments notice. Unfortunately, even the act of asking "hey are you free?" means I am sometimes broken from very deep concentration. Remote Work lets me silence the things I don't need to deal with right away while those that truly need my attention I can prioritize ahead of time or there are ways to "break through" the silence because its urgent enough to warrant it. I hated not having that level of autonomony in the office. Mostly, so did everyone else once they realized how this wasn't as nice as it seemed
    - scottLobster 3y ago
      Unpopular opinion, but this seems more like an issue of developer comfort than actual productivity, similar to how taking adderall can make you feel more productive than you actually are. If the product quality depends on you maintaining a flow state for extended periods, then you're either working in a research lab or it's a poorly designed product. I say this as a dev who also gets annoyed when my deep focus is interrupted, but so long as the interruption is actually warranted (and with my company's culture it usually is) I swallow my annoyance, task-switch and get the job done anyway. I'm already earning a higher salary than than most people in the world with good benefits and flexible hours. I can be mildly annoyed at work sometimes if it helps get the job done.
zapcto 3y ago
So many of these managers are basically saying, "in-office is better because I get to engage in high-status behaviors with other people IRL." I get that it makes you feel good but that's not necessarily translating to the bottom line.
- ericmay 3y ago
  Nobody has any numbers on what is translating to the bottom line. There aren't any facts and even then the variables will be highly dependent on person, company, situation.
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    That's not what the RTO proponents bring forward. A sincere "I prefer you to be here so that I can admire my kingdom and feel good" would be more productive than the currently preferred grasping for straws on why it's better for the bottom line: Everybody gets a good laugh, and returns to their tasks, or coffee chats, or whatever it is that they were doing, where ever they were doing it.
  - electrondood 3y ago
    I mean, companies all did WFH successfully for 3 years without issue. The bottom line is probably more affected by multimillion dollar commercial leases than C-level "feels" about productivity.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Those 3 years would different enough in important ways so you cannot look at numbers to compare before/after.
- danenania 3y ago
  I think this is pretty much the key to it, psychologically speaking. It comes down to status and personality type. Higher status and more extroverted workers tend to get energy and motivation from going to the office. It feels good and is fun for them. Our brains have evolved to know when we're high on the social totem pole and give us copious feel-good chemicals as a reward. For similar reasons, lower status and more introverted workers tend to not enjoy the office. They find it de-motivating and draining. This isn't always the case across the board, and there are often other reasons involved like family/commute, but I think it explains the different camps fairly well in broad strokes. All that said, an argument can definitely be made that having happy, highly motivated leadership actually is extremely important to a company's bottom line, so I don't think it can be so easily dismissed.
no_wizard 3y ago
Time and again I see this when these claims come up, it comes down to a lack of responsive cultural changes to new norms, rather than inherent differences in in-office vs remote work. If you change your processes and cultural norms to facilitate better work for all styles, everyone benefits. There are ways to overcome preceived deficiencies of remote work. In short, its a solved / solvable problem, but it means changing culture, and seemingly, thats what the C-Suite hates. I would love to hear otherwise. I haven't yet seen evidence to the contrary, and I'm very open to it. I don't think executives like culture changing without their fiat, which is what happend in most WFH transition cases. Some did end up embracing it anyway, but over and over again as of late, its being walked back, and even Amazon admitted they have no data to backup their RTO plans. The pattern of behavior I'm obvserving aligns (to me) with what I'm saying: its C-suite taking back control because it diminished their executive power and increased competition for labor, driving up labor costs.
- omginternets 3y ago
  100% agreed. I've noticed major differences between companies that are deliberately organized to facilitate remote work, and companies that deep down wish they could convince people to RTO. The difference is palpable in, for example, whether and how explicit norms around asynchronous communication are implemented, whether office budget is repurposed into services and materials that enable remote work (including, for example, company offsites), etc. It's obvious that certain jobs require in-person presence, but I think the big reveal is that most white-collar jobs don't.
seydor 3y ago
Too small sample size
morgango 3y ago
I totally disagree. I have worked remotely for more than a decade and run a team that is 100% remote. The company I work for is remote first as well. For white collar work, there is no difference between remote and on-premise employees. There is a huge difference between remote and on-premise leadership, however. In my experience, remote workers are significantly more productive than on-site employees IF the culture is one of employee empowerment and trust. If you expect people to be mature, communicate effectively, and get things done AND you give them the tools and support to do it then being remote is absolutely no barrier. It just gives people an extra hour or two a day to think about things and do a little extra work because they are not commuting. The missing piece is that leaders need to plan, execute, and communicate effectively. They need to empathize with their teams and work with people as individuals, which means extra time and thought and attention. Face-to-face work covers up for a lot of incompetence because that person is standing in front of you. Remote employees can't hide behind a herd and remote leaders can't hide behind an org chart. You don't need to spend millions of dollars on a building to cover up for poor leadership and weak culture. For reference, I run a team of 10 remote employees and am responsible for highly technical engineers that support sales for a team that generates 8-figures of annual revenue on SaaS and on-prem software.
- j0hnyl 3y ago
  I agree with you. I find remote work infinitely more productive for ambiguous task as well. I have memories of being in an office and getting into conference rooms and dicking around for 30 minutes before the work actually begins. This doesn't happen with remote meetings.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Those conference rooms are often where you learn about unstated requirements. Or the real requirement that they assuemed was too hard to asked for so they put in something that would accept that they thought was easier (even though the real requirement is easier). That is also where you learn when the company is shifting directions and so you can start doing what the company really wants. All of the above can be avoided with remote work. However it is a lot easier to pick those things up in the office.
dr-detroit 3y ago
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broast 3y ago
Interestingly I see divides like that in the fully remote parts of my org, so I think it may be more related to what those teams work on rather than work style. In fact our in-person teams have the opposite reputation: they are slow but theoretically work on high business value problems, while the remote hive mind takes care of business in the background.
headcanon 3y ago
That aligns with my (admittedly anecdotal) views as well. I wonder if thats part of why so many managers and leaders feel lost without in-office culture. Most organizations are not good at that kind of explicit communication and organization, and remote work magnifies those flaws. So instead of trying to reduce ambiguity and improve the process accordingly, they instead just wish people could come back to the office and absorb that inefficiency. And I'm just talking here about dysfunctional organizations, there are plenty of valid reasons for a functional organization to need in-office culture if they need to work through "legitimate" ambiguity (like designing a new technology or product).
- bluGill 3y ago
  Explicit communication is harder as you don't get feedback about what people don't understand. A conversation means you see the blank look on the other's face and know to slow down, or see they got it already so you can go faster. Without that feedback you have to carefully go into extreme detail about everything because you can't be sure the other understood any other way and that is a lot more effort - most of that effort is wasted because the other would get it with much less, if only you knew that.
  - headcanon 3y ago
    I have noticed that in my remote-first organization, we've started being much more explicit in all of our communication, written _and_ verbal. This does add a lot of overhead to each of our conversations and I sometimes get impatient, but I suppose it does help overall.
acchow 3y ago
The new technology is already here: LLMs. OpenAI requires 3 days per week in office
tootie 3y ago
I have been running remote teams for many years. Offshoring has been a thing for a long, long time. Globally-distributed businesses have been a thing for a long, long time. I had been lucky with some walkable commutes in the past and the period immediately preceding the pandemic, I would walk 20 minutes to the office, sit at a desk and spend my day on Slack and Meet with my dev team in South America, my clients in the midwest, my account managers in California. Maybe get a coffee with whoever was around, then walk home. There were days I just didn't bother going in and nobody noticed. The economics of it are purely about labor efficiency. A company in the midwest that needs tech services isn't limited to service providers within driving distance. Service providers aren't limited in hiring. Talented people in developing nations get ready access to first-world markets without needing any connections. This was all thoroughly proven and justified before 2020.
DwnVoteHoneyPot 3y ago
I totally agree. If you have a task oriented job, working from home is great. More focus, more comfort, more efficiency. If you are a CEO and need to bounce ideas off of I.T., legal, finance, marketing with highly dynamic environment, definitely need to be in same location. Think war room or command center.
- ghaff 3y ago
  The CEO of a large company will certainly have in-person face time with their senior leadership team (among many others including customers). Their office may also very well not be in the same location as that of many of their first or second level reports.
tracerbulletx 3y ago
Come on now. Maybe that's true with workers who are not very good communicators or proactive yet, but it's not true if they are good at it. I've been involved with plenty of fully ambiguous online open source projects and they've all been incredibly nimble and excellent at resolving complex disagreements and decisions quickly.
EMM_386 3y ago
I would resepectfully disagree. I think this depends on the engineers you are working with. I have been remote since 2014, so far before the pandemic changed all of this. I also have 25+ years of experience. I am able to handle architecting a major enterprise project fully remotely. The entire tech stack, writing code, handling pull requests, highly complex issues requiring communication between myself and other people to ensure everything goes smoothly. It does. We release updates on a weekly cadance and everything thus far (2 years with this current project) has been smooth sailing. And the number of issues, new features, and requests addressed in each update is significant. It can be done remotely, without issue. I spent over a decade in the office, with an hour commute each way. I am never doing that again.
- esafak 3y ago
  > I also have 25+ years of experience. With such a user name it goes without saying :)
nomy99 3y ago
I agree with this. I manage a fully remote team, and the bottleneck on delivering complex technical projects is the inability to effectively communicate. Slack/Teams do have limitations as communication tools.
alberth 3y ago
> ”My experience is that remote workers often have higher velocity but lower agility.” I concur. I’m a remote employee (no company office in my city) I work remote 3 weeks and then 1-week travel to be in office. It’s a great balance of the dynamic you described.
evantbyrne 3y ago
We are just now shipping novel biotechnology to market (cancer screening via cell-free DNA fragmentomics), and everyone that can be remote is. I'm skeptical that being in a new market in of itself makes RTO competitive. I can see how being able to hold people hostage IRL would be helpful in a state of emergency though, and a hard pivot might qualify as such.
pmarreck 3y ago
I think the same. It's also (IMHO) way more important to work in person together at a startup, where that agility has maximum application.
wdb 3y ago
When I go to the office. I am in online meetings talking to my colleague (and others) next to me.
hot_gril 3y ago
In most tech companies, I'd agree. When I was on exceptionally good teams where everyone was energetic and responsive, remote was perfect. When I was on average teams, it was too hard to get a hold of remote people even if they were productive. The individual action is simple, respond to messages ASAP and take video calls readily (maybe aside from some prearranged team-wide "focus time"), but leadership didn't set this direction. I'd like to think that any new software workforce can arrange itself to be remote-only if it really tries, and it'd be much better off that way. Can also see why an existing company would rather bring people in-office.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  I think this is a problem comparing older remote companies which likely selected for people who are good at working remote, but an average employee / team won't be as effective. I've worked in a rather average team remotely during Covid and it was pretty bad. Lack of communication, difficult to get hold of people, low productivity. The team fared better before Covid for sure.
code_runner 3y ago
it just comes down to willingness to stop and chat with each other. at a company of sufficient size everyone is in different offices/cities/countries anyways so you'll always hit some sort of odd issue. You just have to be able to control what you can. For me, being in office would add nothing, because my team is split between two cities, and if i ask a question outside of my team its highly likely we're talking about crossing oceans. Like anything, its about communication
asdadsdad 3y ago
the key part is really trust. there's no substitute for in-office work on that matter. 100% agree with your take on this.
agumonkey 3y ago
To me it's all gray. I agree that in person makes room for freeform chat, exchanges, collaboration but it's also a swamp of masks and fluff where people just chat, annoy, babble, disrupt and nobody is enjoying any of it. A good internet link and company hosted audio/video room is enough for us to share issues, unblock, pair or cut some slack.
lamontcg 3y ago
The problem with hybrid teams are that there tends to be in-person communication happening in the in-office teams which the remote employees aren't brought up to speed on. That creates alienation and preferential treatment. And the latter is important since it isn't a blinded scientific experiment and the manager gets to pick and choose how to interact with the two different teams, which is going to shift the outcomes. If the manager was remote-only with 8 remote employees they'd have to adapt to 100% remote work and the bias would likely evaporate.
- OfficeChad 3y ago
  This is how it should be, if you care - return to your team in person.
bostik 3y ago
I believe it is more nuanced. Full disclosure: before moving to UK I worked for seven (7) years in a remote-first company. And while it is certainly possible to run with a fully distributed, remote-only organisation, not every company can do that. The company would have to have been built, from day zero, to not merely "support" remote working but to fully endorse it. Starting from the founders. When the plague hit, I was one of the few who knew how to transition from office to remote without a glitch - because I had the experience for how to do it. I honestly believe that fully remote can work only for a select few businesses, but mostly remote is perfectly doable for vast majority of tech and tech-adjacent companies. To start, remote work self-selects for two types of people. Seniors, who already know how to work independently and productively - and the reasonably well-off who have the space and can afford to dedicate a physically separate study as their office. The overlap between the two is significant. Several things are fundamentally more challenging in a fully remote setting. Such as... 1: Training and/or onboarding juniors. People entering the industry need constant supervision and near-synchronous assistance for a prolonged period of time. The first two years of your career you are clueless. Yes, you too, a HN reader. We ALL were! Training juniors takes time, skill, attention and - let's be honest - a personal touch. Doing that remotely is possible, but a lot harder. And only really possible in a company where everything has been built, from the ground up, to assume remote-first for everybody. 2: Active brainstorming. Bouncing ideas rapidly off of each other depends on establishing a rhythm where any communication delays are detrimental and can crash the cycle at any time. Having to devote brain cycles to communication delays and/or equipment detracts your attention. 3: Mob debugging. Very few things are more effective at complex root-cause analysis than having two or three people cluster around the same set of desktops, with enough large monitors to pull up new dashboards on a whim, and a whiteboard or three ready for quick scribbles and ad-hoc diagrams. 4: Random encounters. The US term is for some reason "watercooler effect", but in my experience "not at the office"-effect would be more accurate. If your culture manages to encourage people to take a walk outside the office setting, a small but meaningful fraction of those end up with valuable insights and outsized productivity boosts. Getting away from the physical office, while discussing things with coworkers, is an essential aspect. 5: Cultural cohesion. Maintaining a good company culture is tricky when most communication happens without leadership having any clue of it taking place at all. The only solution I can think of is solid trust. Replicating or reproducing any of the above in a remote-only setting is incredibly hard. However - remote work has enormous benefits that don't necessarily show up directly. Such as: Ten-second commutes. The ability for a remote worker to effectively flip from at-home mental state to at-work mental state, without having to endure commute is an incredible advantage. Disturbance shutdowns. At remote work we can completely block off coworkers (or managers) from disrupting the flow. Just remember to also set your phone to silent. "Friendly face effect". When your mostly-remote workforce does meet in person, they tend to spend time talking about things they have had simmering at the back of their minds. Stuff that has takenl iterally weeks to form. And they are for most parts happy to see each other. Compare that to office work, where seeing the same faces day after day gets dreary, really quick. Encouraging async communications. When you have to properly think through what you want to convey, and actually take time to do it right, email chains can become quite fruitful[0]. Sure, the latency of communication may be slower, but the S/N ratio for non-combative topics tends to be high. (For combative topics, nothing helps. Best way to resolve them is to put the people involved in a cage and let them pummel each other to different shades of blue.) For all of the reasons above, I believe that for most companies the best approach in the long run will be "mostly-remote". Have people meet in person for couple of days every couple of weeks, so that they can get all the synchronous activities done in one batch, and then let them disperse back to their home offices to focus on their real product-oriented work. Onboarding juniors and non-senior new hires is still going to be tough. For companies that thrive on hiring newgrads, it's unlikely they could ever embrace remote work for real. One of the unexpected downsides of mostly-remote is that a company going down that route is incentivised to have location based salaries. This works, mostly, when their staff live reasonably near large cities. But by incentivising their workforce to relocate to lower CoL areas during employment, they are actually also encouraging social isolation. I saw this first hand - and it's not healthy. 0: Writing a good email takes time. You may have to spend an hour on it, just to ensure that readership can not easily misunderstand the message you want to convey.
dvfjsdhgfv 3y ago
Thank you for sharing your experience. Mine is the opposite: when I work remotely, I work. There is only measure my work can be estimated: whether I finish my tasks on time or not. But when I'm in the office, there are many distractions and productivity suffers, not to mention the fact that open plan offices are completely unsuitable for zoom/teams calls.
CapstanRoller 3y ago
>I think the trigger that would bring people back to the office is a new economic boom based on new and unknown technology The modern Internet, the WWW, Linux, etc. and most of the core infra as we know it (and take for granted) was built in the 90s by people worldwide largely communicating via IRC and mailing lists. If that's not an example of new and unknown technology, then I don't know what is.
drewcoo 3y ago
Maybe it's easier for managers to accept all of the workers' stumbling when there's more contact between them. Rapport lubricates forgiveness. Remote work seems to only be a manger problem. So how can we help managers feel more "in control?" Or where can we hire managers that are like that?
dev_0 3y ago
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LtWorf 3y ago
> But when the task is highly ambiguous, requires many course corrections, involves rapid communication Seems like the kind of task that should have never been created, but required you to schedule meetings first, which you didn't. Failure on your side.
deleted 3y ago
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theknocker 3y ago

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m3kw9 3y ago

The tech isn’t there for quick discussion, it’s a very UI/UX issue especially for current generation of video conferencing software, there is a huge layer between digital and physical. Hopefully AR can bridge some of that gap. Future job may look for prospects that are adept in AR office work and will be asked how well they use it

foobarian 3y ago
This is such a huge gap. Why there is no widespread more impromptu collaboration product I have no idea. I try to get people to use the excalidraw shared whiteboard any chance I get, at least that doesn't require the uncomfortable on-camera appearance. There's got to be some other process we could try to recreate (to the extent possible) that "together" feeling of the office. Maybe set aside an hour when team calls into a meeting but just keep on working as normal? And can banter/ask random questions etc. Otherwise things are just too formal.
- m3kw9 3y ago
  Is hard to replicate the physical instant access you get at an office and simulate it well in digital form. in the physical office space you cannot ignore someone while maintaining plausible deniability like if you were remote. You likely will be responded if you are face to face physically. I’m not sure if replicating that remotely is too intrusive for people to handle(forcing a camera to be on when requested). You can always ignore people from remote till you are good and ready
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    We had a product called Sococo some years ago, that showed active team members. You could 'knock on their door' and know whether they were ignoring you or not. So it's possible, with the right interface.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Well, and getting together for lunch, or a beer/mocktail after work. Virtual socialization feels so forced by comparison. And no-agenda meetings don't work either. I sort of agree on the virtual whiteboarding (it's partly a surface area thing) but I think we've also discovered that colllaborative docs work fine for a lot of purposes.
- ge0ffclapp 3y ago
  Google meet works for my team. We have a few rooms dedicated to hang out in during the day. Some people leave the camera off, others don't. It reminds me very much of the office where if someone has a random question there are already people around to answer it. There is no expectation you have to be in a room but lots of people do it because it is fun and interesting.
- gopher2000 3y ago
  Lots of teams/groups have open video conferencing rooms where people can just hang out without any specific purpose - while doing other work. It works to some extent.
esafak 3y ago
If anybody wants to work on this find me on LI.

bnchrch 3y ago

I'm not typically a statistics hawk. However your team having 2 members that are remote, then generalizing it to all remote workers is a bit of a leap. Outside of that I do agree. New technologies that require a high degree of experimentation and discovery lend themselves to in person work.

nostrademons 3y ago
It's really 6 - the ones in remote offices effectively serve as remote workers for the purposes of management effort & management style. One of them is a singleton anyway - he has a desk in the office that is local to him, but he's the only one on the team there, and I don't really care whether he comes in. Also about half of the rest of the org is remote - folks that collaborate with my team, but who I don't have reporting-line responsibility over. So there's a good sampling across 30-50 people who I interact with as teammates as well.

cheschire 3y ago

There's also the struggle of remote workers in a hybrid team unable to move up the ladder as easily as on-site workers for the same trust-based collaborative reasons you mentioned. It is possible that remote workers would look elsewhere for upward mobility, leading to more turnover. Additionally, because the social fabric is weaker around remote workers in a hybrid environment, there may be a perception of them being less likely to remain out of any sense of loyalty or obligation. This seems like a potential stigma that remote workers would need to overcome in the absence of explicit inclusivity efforts by leadership.

alienicecream 3y ago
> there may be a perception of them being less likely to remain out of any sense of loyalty or obligation. Well, technically that would be a market inefficiency, so we should be encouraging employees to view their employers as fungible and switch jobs as soon as it's advantageous to them. If your employer is trying to keep you around through social ties instead of competitive compensation you're being taken advantage of.
no_wizard 3y ago
Loyalty is a funny thing, because companies are not loyal, yet they want their employees to be loyal, without reciprocating in any manner. I don't recommend holding loyalty to any company. Maybe to co-workers(s) or a direct boss (IE, if they leave, maybe you leave too. I've seen this happen) but certainly not to the employer, since it will never be reciprocated
- helen___keller 3y ago
  Agreed but the image of loyalty is valuable even if loyalty is never worth giving
  - deleted 3y ago
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wharvle 3y ago

This can be made better or worse by processes and tools. After years and years in Slack workplaces, I’m now witnessing firsthand how Teams can effectively throw sand in the gears of remote work, simply due to how its UI is designed. The lack of basic normal-ass chat rooms in a “team” pushes everything into 1-1 chats and chats attached to meetings. It kills serendipity, splits attention in unhelpful ways, and, thanks to the astonishing bad idea of how they crammed a threaded model—and only a threaded model—into a single-channel chat interface for Teams chats, makes those feel disorganized and high-friction. It’s like the tool was deliberately designed to create ad-hoc, hidden silos. A simple choice of tool can make a big difference in the effectiveness of remote workers. Business processes and such can have just as big an effect. A lot of that stuff improves in-person work, too (that Teams horse-shit isn’t better for in-office workers, either) so adjustments to improve remote work tend not to even be trade-offs.

red-iron-pine 3y ago
I been saying for years that Teams is worse than Slack -- glad I'm not the only one. > The lack of basic normal-ass chat rooms in a “team” pushes everything into 1-1 chats and chats attached to meetings Exactly. The big killer is being able to pop into a team's room and say "hey tell me about VLAN X" and get an answer from someone. or even just figure out who to ask. with teams that's much harder, you have to play the "find the right person to ask" game, and the visibility is poor. > (that Teams horse-shit isn’t better for in-office workers, either) Teams is fine if you need a IM client for people who are in cubes on the other side of the office and integrates with the Office suite. but for distributed team use it's garbage.
potta_coffee 3y ago
Most of the company uses Windows. A few of us actually write code and are on Mac. For some reason, for me, Teams is perpetually disconnecting from the network and requiring a refresh. It's essentially become a worse email service for me.

hellisothers 3y ago

Anecdotally having spent several years at my current job in person and now several years fully remote (whole company, full remote) I find it much much easier to do quick huddles and swarm on tasks/ideas. Before you had to convince everybody you wanted to talk to to leave their desks and hopefully find a free conference room and you had to premeditate this by days for scheduling (and free conference rooms). Now we can meet almost right away, no physical context switching. As with most things it really depends, also having some people be remote and some in person is always going to disadvantage the remote workers and set them up for failure in management’s eyes so no surprise there.

nostrademons 3y ago
"Before you had to convince everybody you wanted to talk to to leave their desks and hopefully find a free conference room and you had to premeditate this by days for scheduling (and free conference rooms)." This may be a company-culture thing, but before remote work, collaboration at my past employers was always "Swing your chair around and open your mouth". It didn't take a whole lot of convincing or a conference room.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  IMO this is the worst kind. It means I can be interrupted at a moments notice. Unfortunately, even the act of asking "hey are you free?" means I am sometimes broken from very deep concentration. Remote Work lets me silence the things I don't need to deal with right away while those that truly need my attention I can prioritize ahead of time or there are ways to "break through" the silence because its urgent enough to warrant it. I hated not having that level of autonomony in the office. Mostly, so did everyone else once they realized how this wasn't as nice as it seemed
  - scottLobster 3y ago
    Unpopular opinion, but this seems more like an issue of developer comfort than actual productivity, similar to how taking adderall can make you feel more productive than you actually are. If the product quality depends on you maintaining a flow state for extended periods, then you're either working in a research lab or it's a poorly designed product. I say this as a dev who also gets annoyed when my deep focus is interrupted, but so long as the interruption is actually warranted (and with my company's culture it usually is) I swallow my annoyance, task-switch and get the job done anyway. I'm already earning a higher salary than than most people in the world with good benefits and flexible hours. I can be mildly annoyed at work sometimes if it helps get the job done.

zapcto 3y ago

So many of these managers are basically saying, "in-office is better because I get to engage in high-status behaviors with other people IRL." I get that it makes you feel good but that's not necessarily translating to the bottom line.

ericmay 3y ago
Nobody has any numbers on what is translating to the bottom line. There aren't any facts and even then the variables will be highly dependent on person, company, situation.
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  That's not what the RTO proponents bring forward. A sincere "I prefer you to be here so that I can admire my kingdom and feel good" would be more productive than the currently preferred grasping for straws on why it's better for the bottom line: Everybody gets a good laugh, and returns to their tasks, or coffee chats, or whatever it is that they were doing, where ever they were doing it.
- electrondood 3y ago
  I mean, companies all did WFH successfully for 3 years without issue. The bottom line is probably more affected by multimillion dollar commercial leases than C-level "feels" about productivity.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Those 3 years would different enough in important ways so you cannot look at numbers to compare before/after.
danenania 3y ago
I think this is pretty much the key to it, psychologically speaking. It comes down to status and personality type. Higher status and more extroverted workers tend to get energy and motivation from going to the office. It feels good and is fun for them. Our brains have evolved to know when we're high on the social totem pole and give us copious feel-good chemicals as a reward. For similar reasons, lower status and more introverted workers tend to not enjoy the office. They find it de-motivating and draining. This isn't always the case across the board, and there are often other reasons involved like family/commute, but I think it explains the different camps fairly well in broad strokes. All that said, an argument can definitely be made that having happy, highly motivated leadership actually is extremely important to a company's bottom line, so I don't think it can be so easily dismissed.

no_wizard 3y ago

Time and again I see this when these claims come up, it comes down to a lack of responsive cultural changes to new norms, rather than inherent differences in in-office vs remote work. If you change your processes and cultural norms to facilitate better work for all styles, everyone benefits. There are ways to overcome preceived deficiencies of remote work. In short, its a solved / solvable problem, but it means changing culture, and seemingly, thats what the C-Suite hates. I would love to hear otherwise. I haven't yet seen evidence to the contrary, and I'm very open to it. I don't think executives like culture changing without their fiat, which is what happend in most WFH transition cases. Some did end up embracing it anyway, but over and over again as of late, its being walked back, and even Amazon admitted they have no data to backup their RTO plans. The pattern of behavior I'm obvserving aligns (to me) with what I'm saying: its C-suite taking back control because it diminished their executive power and increased competition for labor, driving up labor costs.

omginternets 3y ago
100% agreed. I've noticed major differences between companies that are deliberately organized to facilitate remote work, and companies that deep down wish they could convince people to RTO. The difference is palpable in, for example, whether and how explicit norms around asynchronous communication are implemented, whether office budget is repurposed into services and materials that enable remote work (including, for example, company offsites), etc. It's obvious that certain jobs require in-person presence, but I think the big reveal is that most white-collar jobs don't.

seydor 3y ago

Too small sample size

morgango 3y ago

I totally disagree. I have worked remotely for more than a decade and run a team that is 100% remote. The company I work for is remote first as well. For white collar work, there is no difference between remote and on-premise employees. There is a huge difference between remote and on-premise leadership, however. In my experience, remote workers are significantly more productive than on-site employees IF the culture is one of employee empowerment and trust. If you expect people to be mature, communicate effectively, and get things done AND you give them the tools and support to do it then being remote is absolutely no barrier. It just gives people an extra hour or two a day to think about things and do a little extra work because they are not commuting. The missing piece is that leaders need to plan, execute, and communicate effectively. They need to empathize with their teams and work with people as individuals, which means extra time and thought and attention. Face-to-face work covers up for a lot of incompetence because that person is standing in front of you. Remote employees can't hide behind a herd and remote leaders can't hide behind an org chart. You don't need to spend millions of dollars on a building to cover up for poor leadership and weak culture. For reference, I run a team of 10 remote employees and am responsible for highly technical engineers that support sales for a team that generates 8-figures of annual revenue on SaaS and on-prem software.

j0hnyl 3y ago
I agree with you. I find remote work infinitely more productive for ambiguous task as well. I have memories of being in an office and getting into conference rooms and dicking around for 30 minutes before the work actually begins. This doesn't happen with remote meetings.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Those conference rooms are often where you learn about unstated requirements. Or the real requirement that they assuemed was too hard to asked for so they put in something that would accept that they thought was easier (even though the real requirement is easier). That is also where you learn when the company is shifting directions and so you can start doing what the company really wants. All of the above can be avoided with remote work. However it is a lot easier to pick those things up in the office.

dr-detroit 3y ago

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broast 3y ago

Interestingly I see divides like that in the fully remote parts of my org, so I think it may be more related to what those teams work on rather than work style. In fact our in-person teams have the opposite reputation: they are slow but theoretically work on high business value problems, while the remote hive mind takes care of business in the background.

headcanon 3y ago

That aligns with my (admittedly anecdotal) views as well. I wonder if thats part of why so many managers and leaders feel lost without in-office culture. Most organizations are not good at that kind of explicit communication and organization, and remote work magnifies those flaws. So instead of trying to reduce ambiguity and improve the process accordingly, they instead just wish people could come back to the office and absorb that inefficiency. And I'm just talking here about dysfunctional organizations, there are plenty of valid reasons for a functional organization to need in-office culture if they need to work through "legitimate" ambiguity (like designing a new technology or product).

bluGill 3y ago
Explicit communication is harder as you don't get feedback about what people don't understand. A conversation means you see the blank look on the other's face and know to slow down, or see they got it already so you can go faster. Without that feedback you have to carefully go into extreme detail about everything because you can't be sure the other understood any other way and that is a lot more effort - most of that effort is wasted because the other would get it with much less, if only you knew that.
- headcanon 3y ago
  I have noticed that in my remote-first organization, we've started being much more explicit in all of our communication, written _and_ verbal. This does add a lot of overhead to each of our conversations and I sometimes get impatient, but I suppose it does help overall.

acchow 3y ago

The new technology is already here: LLMs. OpenAI requires 3 days per week in office

tootie 3y ago

I have been running remote teams for many years. Offshoring has been a thing for a long, long time. Globally-distributed businesses have been a thing for a long, long time. I had been lucky with some walkable commutes in the past and the period immediately preceding the pandemic, I would walk 20 minutes to the office, sit at a desk and spend my day on Slack and Meet with my dev team in South America, my clients in the midwest, my account managers in California. Maybe get a coffee with whoever was around, then walk home. There were days I just didn't bother going in and nobody noticed. The economics of it are purely about labor efficiency. A company in the midwest that needs tech services isn't limited to service providers within driving distance. Service providers aren't limited in hiring. Talented people in developing nations get ready access to first-world markets without needing any connections. This was all thoroughly proven and justified before 2020.

DwnVoteHoneyPot 3y ago

I totally agree. If you have a task oriented job, working from home is great. More focus, more comfort, more efficiency. If you are a CEO and need to bounce ideas off of I.T., legal, finance, marketing with highly dynamic environment, definitely need to be in same location. Think war room or command center.

ghaff 3y ago
The CEO of a large company will certainly have in-person face time with their senior leadership team (among many others including customers). Their office may also very well not be in the same location as that of many of their first or second level reports.

tracerbulletx 3y ago

Come on now. Maybe that's true with workers who are not very good communicators or proactive yet, but it's not true if they are good at it. I've been involved with plenty of fully ambiguous online open source projects and they've all been incredibly nimble and excellent at resolving complex disagreements and decisions quickly.

EMM_386 3y ago

I would resepectfully disagree. I think this depends on the engineers you are working with. I have been remote since 2014, so far before the pandemic changed all of this. I also have 25+ years of experience. I am able to handle architecting a major enterprise project fully remotely. The entire tech stack, writing code, handling pull requests, highly complex issues requiring communication between myself and other people to ensure everything goes smoothly. It does. We release updates on a weekly cadance and everything thus far (2 years with this current project) has been smooth sailing. And the number of issues, new features, and requests addressed in each update is significant. It can be done remotely, without issue. I spent over a decade in the office, with an hour commute each way. I am never doing that again.

esafak 3y ago
> I also have 25+ years of experience. With such a user name it goes without saying :)

nomy99 3y ago

I agree with this. I manage a fully remote team, and the bottleneck on delivering complex technical projects is the inability to effectively communicate. Slack/Teams do have limitations as communication tools.

alberth 3y ago

> ”My experience is that remote workers often have higher velocity but lower agility.” I concur. I’m a remote employee (no company office in my city) I work remote 3 weeks and then 1-week travel to be in office. It’s a great balance of the dynamic you described.

evantbyrne 3y ago

We are just now shipping novel biotechnology to market (cancer screening via cell-free DNA fragmentomics), and everyone that can be remote is. I'm skeptical that being in a new market in of itself makes RTO competitive. I can see how being able to hold people hostage IRL would be helpful in a state of emergency though, and a hard pivot might qualify as such.

pmarreck 3y ago

I think the same. It's also (IMHO) way more important to work in person together at a startup, where that agility has maximum application.

wdb 3y ago

When I go to the office. I am in online meetings talking to my colleague (and others) next to me.

hot_gril 3y ago

In most tech companies, I'd agree. When I was on exceptionally good teams where everyone was energetic and responsive, remote was perfect. When I was on average teams, it was too hard to get a hold of remote people even if they were productive. The individual action is simple, respond to messages ASAP and take video calls readily (maybe aside from some prearranged team-wide "focus time"), but leadership didn't set this direction. I'd like to think that any new software workforce can arrange itself to be remote-only if it really tries, and it'd be much better off that way. Can also see why an existing company would rather bring people in-office.

The_Colonel 3y ago
I think this is a problem comparing older remote companies which likely selected for people who are good at working remote, but an average employee / team won't be as effective. I've worked in a rather average team remotely during Covid and it was pretty bad. Lack of communication, difficult to get hold of people, low productivity. The team fared better before Covid for sure.

code_runner 3y ago

it just comes down to willingness to stop and chat with each other. at a company of sufficient size everyone is in different offices/cities/countries anyways so you'll always hit some sort of odd issue. You just have to be able to control what you can. For me, being in office would add nothing, because my team is split between two cities, and if i ask a question outside of my team its highly likely we're talking about crossing oceans. Like anything, its about communication

asdadsdad 3y ago

the key part is really trust. there's no substitute for in-office work on that matter. 100% agree with your take on this.

agumonkey 3y ago

To me it's all gray. I agree that in person makes room for freeform chat, exchanges, collaboration but it's also a swamp of masks and fluff where people just chat, annoy, babble, disrupt and nobody is enjoying any of it. A good internet link and company hosted audio/video room is enough for us to share issues, unblock, pair or cut some slack.

lamontcg 3y ago

The problem with hybrid teams are that there tends to be in-person communication happening in the in-office teams which the remote employees aren't brought up to speed on. That creates alienation and preferential treatment. And the latter is important since it isn't a blinded scientific experiment and the manager gets to pick and choose how to interact with the two different teams, which is going to shift the outcomes. If the manager was remote-only with 8 remote employees they'd have to adapt to 100% remote work and the bias would likely evaporate.

OfficeChad 3y ago
This is how it should be, if you care - return to your team in person.

bostik 3y ago

I believe it is more nuanced. Full disclosure: before moving to UK I worked for seven (7) years in a remote-first company. And while it is certainly possible to run with a fully distributed, remote-only organisation, not every company can do that. The company would have to have been built, from day zero, to not merely "support" remote working but to fully endorse it. Starting from the founders. When the plague hit, I was one of the few who knew how to transition from office to remote without a glitch - because I had the experience for how to do it. I honestly believe that fully remote can work only for a select few businesses, but mostly remote is perfectly doable for vast majority of tech and tech-adjacent companies. To start, remote work self-selects for two types of people. Seniors, who already know how to work independently and productively - and the reasonably well-off who have the space and can afford to dedicate a physically separate study as their office. The overlap between the two is significant. Several things are fundamentally more challenging in a fully remote setting. Such as... 1: Training and/or onboarding juniors. People entering the industry need constant supervision and near-synchronous assistance for a prolonged period of time. The first two years of your career you are clueless. Yes, you too, a HN reader. We ALL were! Training juniors takes time, skill, attention and - let's be honest - a personal touch. Doing that remotely is possible, but a lot harder. And only really possible in a company where everything has been built, from the ground up, to assume remote-first for everybody. 2: Active brainstorming. Bouncing ideas rapidly off of each other depends on establishing a rhythm where any communication delays are detrimental and can crash the cycle at any time. Having to devote brain cycles to communication delays and/or equipment detracts your attention. 3: Mob debugging. Very few things are more effective at complex root-cause analysis than having two or three people cluster around the same set of desktops, with enough large monitors to pull up new dashboards on a whim, and a whiteboard or three ready for quick scribbles and ad-hoc diagrams. 4: Random encounters. The US term is for some reason "watercooler effect", but in my experience "not at the office"-effect would be more accurate. If your culture manages to encourage people to take a walk outside the office setting, a small but meaningful fraction of those end up with valuable insights and outsized productivity boosts. Getting away from the physical office, while discussing things with coworkers, is an essential aspect. 5: Cultural cohesion. Maintaining a good company culture is tricky when most communication happens without leadership having any clue of it taking place at all. The only solution I can think of is solid trust. Replicating or reproducing any of the above in a remote-only setting is incredibly hard. However - remote work has enormous benefits that don't necessarily show up directly. Such as: Ten-second commutes. The ability for a remote worker to effectively flip from at-home mental state to at-work mental state, without having to endure commute is an incredible advantage. Disturbance shutdowns. At remote work we can completely block off coworkers (or managers) from disrupting the flow. Just remember to also set your phone to silent. "Friendly face effect". When your mostly-remote workforce does meet in person, they tend to spend time talking about things they have had simmering at the back of their minds. Stuff that has takenl iterally weeks to form. And they are for most parts happy to see each other. Compare that to office work, where seeing the same faces day after day gets dreary, really quick. Encouraging async communications. When you have to properly think through what you want to convey, and actually take time to do it right, email chains can become quite fruitful[0]. Sure, the latency of communication may be slower, but the S/N ratio for non-combative topics tends to be high. (For combative topics, nothing helps. Best way to resolve them is to put the people involved in a cage and let them pummel each other to different shades of blue.) For all of the reasons above, I believe that for most companies the best approach in the long run will be "mostly-remote". Have people meet in person for couple of days every couple of weeks, so that they can get all the synchronous activities done in one batch, and then let them disperse back to their home offices to focus on their real product-oriented work. Onboarding juniors and non-senior new hires is still going to be tough. For companies that thrive on hiring newgrads, it's unlikely they could ever embrace remote work for real. One of the unexpected downsides of mostly-remote is that a company going down that route is incentivised to have location based salaries. This works, mostly, when their staff live reasonably near large cities. But by incentivising their workforce to relocate to lower CoL areas during employment, they are actually also encouraging social isolation. I saw this first hand - and it's not healthy. 0: Writing a good email takes time. You may have to spend an hour on it, just to ensure that readership can not easily misunderstand the message you want to convey.

dvfjsdhgfv 3y ago

Thank you for sharing your experience. Mine is the opposite: when I work remotely, I work. There is only measure my work can be estimated: whether I finish my tasks on time or not. But when I'm in the office, there are many distractions and productivity suffers, not to mention the fact that open plan offices are completely unsuitable for zoom/teams calls.

CapstanRoller 3y ago

>I think the trigger that would bring people back to the office is a new economic boom based on new and unknown technology The modern Internet, the WWW, Linux, etc. and most of the core infra as we know it (and take for granted) was built in the 90s by people worldwide largely communicating via IRC and mailing lists. If that's not an example of new and unknown technology, then I don't know what is.

drewcoo 3y ago

Maybe it's easier for managers to accept all of the workers' stumbling when there's more contact between them. Rapport lubricates forgiveness. Remote work seems to only be a manger problem. So how can we help managers feel more "in control?" Or where can we hire managers that are like that?

dev_0 3y ago

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LtWorf 3y ago

> But when the task is highly ambiguous, requires many course corrections, involves rapid communication Seems like the kind of task that should have never been created, but required you to schedule meetings first, which you didn't. Failure on your side.

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