5 ms·

Right, I think the important nuance is that "it depends" and therefore, top-down C-level suite dictates on Remote/Hybrid/In-office requirements are generally mo

Right, I think the important nuance is that "it depends" and therefore, top-down C-level suite dictates on Remote/Hybrid/In-office requirements are generally more punitive than useful. If your team level management org cannot organically work out the right mix on a team/role basis, then you probably should look at what else they are doing poorly.

repeekad 3y ago
I think you’re touching on an important point though, mix of in person and in office is really challenging, because some people see each other all day while others are literally more disconnected. It creates a heterogeneous mix of work relationships, and I’m not so sure that handling mix WFH WFO is purely evident of poor team management, it’s just difficult to have a cohesive team when some are physically there and some arent
- steveBK123 3y ago
  I don't know how important all this social science stuff is to be honest. I've worked for 20 years in global teams, and written communication is very important. Having US/UK/Ireland/HK/Singapore split team isn't much different from remote. Over the years I've worked in smaller orgs with a higher % of local people. What I can tell you is that the amount of chatter grew exponentially. One place I used to call it "bilateral communication" because A-B would side-talk then A-C, then A-D, then B-C, then B-D.. all in-person. Tremendous games of telephone constantly. Remote is a forcing function on better written communication. It's funny that half this site is people working on various SaaS tools that are supposed to make work collaboration better, but somehow we need to sit next to each other to be productive?
  - repeekad 3y ago
    Oh and to be clear I’m less commenting on productivity, more on the soft stuff like sense of belonging to the org, enjoying time at work, and building real relationships. These things are strictly local, no one expects to form relationships with the accounting team in Ireland, and having an explicit process for interacting with them is probably more important than an explicit process for interacting with your manager. How important is that stuff, I have no idea, but if half the team are friends at work and the rest can only be reached over slack, that doesn’t sound like much of a team
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      I mean I get the intention of this stuff, but some of it skates dangerously close to accidental discrimination. I am not accusing you of this, but just saying people should be mindful it can accidentally lead you down the wrong path. Places that are very focussed on "culture fit" or if they'd "have a beer" with the person they are interviewing.. leaves a lot of people behind. Women / non native speakers / older folks generally fail these types of implicit or explicit screens. Building a development team is something like building a baseball team. A bunch of specialists, a few generalists, and the ability to get along. Whether they'd grab a pint after a game isn't really important. I certainly have and maintain friendships at work, some of them from before remote, some of them from after. Some of them are people whom I've never lived in the same continent or city as.
      - helboi4 3y ago
        No its highly important that they will grab a pint after. If you've ever been part of a sports team you would know team morale is vitaly important to them and they socialise and party together ALL THE TIME. The military do it to. Anywhere where you need strong teams you need to have downtime with your team. Its WAY harder to do that remote. I've rarely made friendships with people 100% remote. It's not natural. And I never want to work somewhere where there aren't a decent amount of people that I would grab a pint with after work. And I'm like gay, nonbinary, and mixed race in like an predominantly straight male tech department. I love drinking with my colleagues it makes me feel like I'm not a robot and like I care about getting work done for them. Otherwise, I wouldn't give a single shit about making money for someone else.
    - malermeister 3y ago
      I always thought that's kind of a bullshit thing. I have plenty of friends outside of work. I work for a living and I'm a professional doing a job, not a kid on a play date. The cynic in me always felt that people who emphasize this benefit of office work just can't make friends unless people are forced to hang out with them every day.
      - 3y ago
  - wharvle 3y ago
    In my experience, remote takes already-inefficient and error-prone workplace communication cultures that manage to muddle by with in-office workers at "merely" a significant productivity cost, and makes it totally unworkable. The obvious solution is to fix your very-noticeably fucked up communication culture, since that would also improve in-person work. Some orgs and managers seem to have decided, comically incorrectly, that WFH is the problem element in the above scenario, however.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      You mean having 3 layers of management do a drive-by at developer desks in the space of a day, with conflicting asks is bad? Or having the universe revolve around Jira, berating devs for lack of story progress in standup, and shouting about velocity in sprint ceremonies.. while also doing the above said verbal drive-bys? Who is causing all this churn?? Where is our focus? Where are people spending their time?? It's unknowable.
      - wharvle 3y ago
        I sometimes wonder if all the time spent inputing and tracking various not-naturally-generated "metrics" is worth it. Manager and executive hours analyzing this stuff and devising systems for it and arguing over which systems to use and crafting mandates and plans, can be extremely expensive. Expensive ICs like programmers can easily lose 10-20% of their time to task-tracking and time-tracking and shepherding various things along that only exist for better tracking. Like, if we just didn't do those things at all... would productivity go down? Or up? The cost of doing all this measuring and evaluating and preparing-to-measure certainly isn't being measured, though, so we'll never know.
        steveBK123 3y ago
        Yes, and often the management instituting such granular tracking systems are also the people who want to go outside it for their own "quick asks". It's entirely possible to construct beautiful metrics, amazing velocity charts, etc and have a terrible product with miserable users. Many such cases. Some of this metrics stuff is like "expressed vs revealed preferences". Users who complain about your product and demand new features more quickly don't want a beautiful burndown chart. They want you to improve your product. You may actually need to slowdown to speedup. It's likely you need to do some R&D, and lots of experiments that will look bad on metrics. You see this a lot when you quantize teams into little buckets like operations vs new features vs customer success vs core engineering teams. It's possible for a team run by a bad actor to have nice metrics while being a net drag on the other parts of the org.
pompino 3y ago
IMHO, each team does something poorly, and it doesn't mean you go on a fishing expedition to find everything else they're doing poorly. Rather, you focus on what they're doing great, and incentivize/reward them for that. As a manager this has what has worked for me over the years, but YMMV.
- iamthirsty 3y ago
  It has to be a mix. If I only encouraged my employees at what their good at, and never pushed them to get better in areas they're lacking, things would go down-hill over time. It can't be an everyone gets a gold star situation. Encouragement/reward is good when warranted, and encouraging everyone to recognize their strengths and weaknesses is required.
  - pompino 3y ago
    Well my style works for me, and your style seems like its working for you. Its quite possible we're managing completely different set of personalities. For many of the people I work with a job is just means to an end, and the concept of continuous improvement is alien to them.

repeekad 3y ago

I think you’re touching on an important point though, mix of in person and in office is really challenging, because some people see each other all day while others are literally more disconnected. It creates a heterogeneous mix of work relationships, and I’m not so sure that handling mix WFH WFO is purely evident of poor team management, it’s just difficult to have a cohesive team when some are physically there and some arent

steveBK123 3y ago
I don't know how important all this social science stuff is to be honest. I've worked for 20 years in global teams, and written communication is very important. Having US/UK/Ireland/HK/Singapore split team isn't much different from remote. Over the years I've worked in smaller orgs with a higher % of local people. What I can tell you is that the amount of chatter grew exponentially. One place I used to call it "bilateral communication" because A-B would side-talk then A-C, then A-D, then B-C, then B-D.. all in-person. Tremendous games of telephone constantly. Remote is a forcing function on better written communication. It's funny that half this site is people working on various SaaS tools that are supposed to make work collaboration better, but somehow we need to sit next to each other to be productive?
- repeekad 3y ago
  Oh and to be clear I’m less commenting on productivity, more on the soft stuff like sense of belonging to the org, enjoying time at work, and building real relationships. These things are strictly local, no one expects to form relationships with the accounting team in Ireland, and having an explicit process for interacting with them is probably more important than an explicit process for interacting with your manager. How important is that stuff, I have no idea, but if half the team are friends at work and the rest can only be reached over slack, that doesn’t sound like much of a team
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    I mean I get the intention of this stuff, but some of it skates dangerously close to accidental discrimination. I am not accusing you of this, but just saying people should be mindful it can accidentally lead you down the wrong path. Places that are very focussed on "culture fit" or if they'd "have a beer" with the person they are interviewing.. leaves a lot of people behind. Women / non native speakers / older folks generally fail these types of implicit or explicit screens. Building a development team is something like building a baseball team. A bunch of specialists, a few generalists, and the ability to get along. Whether they'd grab a pint after a game isn't really important. I certainly have and maintain friendships at work, some of them from before remote, some of them from after. Some of them are people whom I've never lived in the same continent or city as.
    - helboi4 3y ago
      No its highly important that they will grab a pint after. If you've ever been part of a sports team you would know team morale is vitaly important to them and they socialise and party together ALL THE TIME. The military do it to. Anywhere where you need strong teams you need to have downtime with your team. Its WAY harder to do that remote. I've rarely made friendships with people 100% remote. It's not natural. And I never want to work somewhere where there aren't a decent amount of people that I would grab a pint with after work. And I'm like gay, nonbinary, and mixed race in like an predominantly straight male tech department. I love drinking with my colleagues it makes me feel like I'm not a robot and like I care about getting work done for them. Otherwise, I wouldn't give a single shit about making money for someone else.
  - malermeister 3y ago
    I always thought that's kind of a bullshit thing. I have plenty of friends outside of work. I work for a living and I'm a professional doing a job, not a kid on a play date. The cynic in me always felt that people who emphasize this benefit of office work just can't make friends unless people are forced to hang out with them every day.
    - 3y ago
- wharvle 3y ago
  In my experience, remote takes already-inefficient and error-prone workplace communication cultures that manage to muddle by with in-office workers at "merely" a significant productivity cost, and makes it totally unworkable. The obvious solution is to fix your very-noticeably fucked up communication culture, since that would also improve in-person work. Some orgs and managers seem to have decided, comically incorrectly, that WFH is the problem element in the above scenario, however.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    You mean having 3 layers of management do a drive-by at developer desks in the space of a day, with conflicting asks is bad? Or having the universe revolve around Jira, berating devs for lack of story progress in standup, and shouting about velocity in sprint ceremonies.. while also doing the above said verbal drive-bys? Who is causing all this churn?? Where is our focus? Where are people spending their time?? It's unknowable.
    - wharvle 3y ago
      I sometimes wonder if all the time spent inputing and tracking various not-naturally-generated "metrics" is worth it. Manager and executive hours analyzing this stuff and devising systems for it and arguing over which systems to use and crafting mandates and plans, can be extremely expensive. Expensive ICs like programmers can easily lose 10-20% of their time to task-tracking and time-tracking and shepherding various things along that only exist for better tracking. Like, if we just didn't do those things at all... would productivity go down? Or up? The cost of doing all this measuring and evaluating and preparing-to-measure certainly isn't being measured, though, so we'll never know.
      - steveBK123 3y ago
        Yes, and often the management instituting such granular tracking systems are also the people who want to go outside it for their own "quick asks". It's entirely possible to construct beautiful metrics, amazing velocity charts, etc and have a terrible product with miserable users. Many such cases. Some of this metrics stuff is like "expressed vs revealed preferences". Users who complain about your product and demand new features more quickly don't want a beautiful burndown chart. They want you to improve your product. You may actually need to slowdown to speedup. It's likely you need to do some R&D, and lots of experiments that will look bad on metrics. You see this a lot when you quantize teams into little buckets like operations vs new features vs customer success vs core engineering teams. It's possible for a team run by a bad actor to have nice metrics while being a net drag on the other parts of the org.

pompino 3y ago

IMHO, each team does something poorly, and it doesn't mean you go on a fishing expedition to find everything else they're doing poorly. Rather, you focus on what they're doing great, and incentivize/reward them for that. As a manager this has what has worked for me over the years, but YMMV.

iamthirsty 3y ago
It has to be a mix. If I only encouraged my employees at what their good at, and never pushed them to get better in areas they're lacking, things would go down-hill over time. It can't be an everyone gets a gold star situation. Encouragement/reward is good when warranted, and encouraging everyone to recognize their strengths and weaknesses is required.
- pompino 3y ago
  Well my style works for me, and your style seems like its working for you. Its quite possible we're managing completely different set of personalities. For many of the people I work with a job is just means to an end, and the concept of continuous improvement is alien to them.