This trend of extremely polarizing and provoking headlines is getting out of control.
Reading this headline, I feel like if you're not doing remote work, then you're wrong. Aren't there shades of grey here? Is remote work the way for EVERYONE? I understand that people need to get clicks but this is a worrisome evolution.
Agreed. It also completely glosses over the difficulties in managing collaboration across time zones. Yes, software tools make this a lot easier, but there is still the physical limitation of different members of a team working at different hours. And guess what? Some of those team members may end up working longer or later than they'd want to because they're farther away than everyone else.
This was my experience when I worked remotely for an East Coast company while based in SF. When I joined the company the expectation was that I would work Pacific hours, coming online around 9am PDT. Of course reality proved very different, and slowly my start time crept earlier and earlier until I found myself online at 6am daily - I was effectively working 3-4 hours longer than my East Coast colleagues simply because of the timezone I was located in. I didn't last long and moved to Bay Area company that allowed me to work from home 2-3 days a week.
I've worked for companies as a remote worker, and I've owned a company that for its entire lifetime hired remote staff. In my experience, as long as you hire good people, the time zone delta is the only limitation that's extremely difficult if not impossible to overcome. Everything else can be solved with good communication (which should exist anyway), good requirements (which should exist anyway), and good process (which should exist anyway).
If the time zone range of a team is less than about 4, then in my experience the team works quite well. If the range is greater than 5, it almost always encounters problems that even good process, requirements, and communication struggle to solve.
I think larger companies don't like remote work because in such a setup a lot of middle management has nothing to do. From my experience in remote setups people communicate directly and there is less need for endless meetings. It's also harder to micromanage people. There must be some level of trust.
This is a great observation and I can support your idea with some support from my own experience.
I used to work at a large corporation who had a ton of middle management. For a few years people had the ability to work from home in an emergency, but it wasn't something normal and you were expected to be in the office otherwise. At this point, people were working from home less than 2% of the time.
Then we got a new manager, who was a huge promoter of "ROWE" or Results Only Work Environment. within 6 months, 90% of the office were working from home 90-95% of the time. I used to come in on Monday's and the office would be empty, dead, not a peep and where six months ago, we had 15-20 developers working, we now had one or two. You seriously could have mistaken the office as being on holiday - it was crazy.
As such, the middle managers suddenly had a lot less to do. Since results were all that mattered, their jobs of micro-managing all the daily/weekly/monthly metrics they were following and tracking and emailing developers pretty much went out the window. Three months later, 5 managers either quit or were laid off because ROWE made their jobs essentially obsolete.
The funny part is the manager who was all about ROWE ran into some roadblocks for his other initiatives and left shortly thereafter (he lasted just over a year). Once he left, upper management quickly revoked ROWE (even though it had been incredibly successful and raised production 11%) and required people to be in the office 5 days a week unless it was for an emergency.
It was revoked after the manager who got it in place left after rubbing a few executives the wrong way. He had a lot of other positive things he was trying to do (like implement agile on a staunch old school waterfall company) and after he left, a lot of developers felt it was upper managements way to get back at the developer team since they had increased quotas so high developers started leaving and production was falling or leveling off.
It was an easy way for the executives to say, "See what ROWE got us? Production is down and turn over is increasing. See? This doesn't work and the developers are abusing it by working from home too much and missing their goals."
It pissed a lot of people off when then revoked it and more people started quitting in droves - and people who had been there 10+ years. I got a good taste of what were the corporate politics at its worst.
Interesting anecdote. Can you maybe provide details about this "raised production 11%"? How was this measured? I'm baffled to see that they would revoke the policy if it was so successful and removed useless positions.
Yeah if it raised production 11% and 5 managers were no longer needed, that would be a substantial savings. Why would upper management revert from ROWE?
One reason would be an assumption that ROWE requires a manager like the person that quit to maintain it, and without him, the production would drop through the floor. Upper management were conservatively rolling back to what worked before him.
I think it requires more skillful management. How do you measure results? It's much easier to count the hours people spend in the office or how often they repeat a predefined process even if that process is inefficient.
The company produced around 3-4,000 websites a year. Developers had a monthly quota. If you didn't make quota two months in a row, you got put on a PIP (performance improvement plan). If you didn't make quota the next three months in a row, you were let go. It was a total meat grinder to say the least.
The increase in productivity was directly related to the increase in quotas month over month. It started at 18 sites per month, then was elevated 4 months in a row until it got to 22 and then more and more people started missing the quota, so they backed it down after developers started leaving, or just gave up. Thus, you had an increase in production while upper management essentially found the breaking point of the team, then rest the quota right under that level.
I think upper management thought by giving us something like ROWE, we could continue to burn the candle at each ends so to speak, and not have our managers breathing down our backs about metrics and still make quota since we could work at home at our own pace and on the hours of our choosing. One of the developers surmised it was because they figured if everybody was out of the office and at their homes - we wouldn't talk so much to each other to figure out how really bad it was.
I can counter that with my own anecdote, this one from a large university setting, when somehow almost organically a large number of staff began "working" from home. At first it was a couple of people, and as others noticed that there were more and more people not in the office, they opted out as well.
Productivity went through the floor. Nothing got done. Nobody could get in touch with anyone.
After a while the mandate went out, almost apologetically, that people would actually need to work at the office unless prior approval from their supervisor was obtained.
Of course the work atmosphere was pretty dysfunctional to begin with (the secure setting of a university job attracts people who don't like to work very hard) but it was rather interesting to watch it play out.
That's where trust comes in. For remote work you need people who are self motivated. I see it as an amplifier. Motivated people often become more productive. Unmotivated people become less productive.
Once we really ramped up production and quotas for the developers, all upper management wanted were sites to be done and out the door. Hence, every month became a "production push". The managers work at the time was basically to monitor all the daily metrics like:
1 - how many sites did you get done yesterday?
2 - how many sites are in the queue?
3 - what was your QA defect rate? (this was eventually given to an off shore team, so we were no longer responsible for our own defects, which was totally bizarre to me)
4 - How close to your monthly goal were you?
5 - where were you with your professional development goals?
6 - what percentage of your goal were "refreshes" or sites that were re-designed and revamped?
There were a ton more I can't remember right now, but those were sent out in a daily email, in a list, to show were you ranked with your fellow developers. It was very outside sales like, so this really backfired on how developers took it. Most were very "fuck this, this shit is stupid" and performed really poorly under pressure and being micromanaged every day.
So once the only thing that mattered was just pumping sites out regardless of quality, then all the metrics became useless and the emails and micromanaging stopped. You were still handed a huge quota to hit every month though and many developers were burning out, getting put on PIPS and even without all the micromanaging, it was still a meat grinder.
Very light on facts. (Cherry-)picks a few companies which embrace telework that are successful. Lists four collaboration apps. Fails to make a compelling case that companies who don't embrace remote working are wrong,
Okay, I get the article is a bit polarizing. I've been wanting to work remotely for about a year now. Remote jobs are hard to get. Here's what I think about remote workplaces though:
- Remote work is hard. It's tough to get right. However, remote work is worth it. It's worth putting in the extra effort to try and get it right for your work place and your job. You get to spend more time with your kids, your SO, and you can travel.
- Face time is still important. Remote work makes face time a pleasant treat that you look forward to.
- Remote work makes financial sense.
- Good remote workers have to be excellent communicators.
It's not for everyone, but it's important that most organizations at least try and make it a reality for those that want it. Everyone will be the better for it.
The headline makes a strong claim and the article actually makes this much weaker claim:
Of course, there will be jobs where telecommuting isn’t practical, but in situations where all you need is a computer and an internet connection, then telecommuting is something to try.
I would be happy if more companies were open to giving 1 or 2 remote days per week. Breaking up the daily monotony of a commute for even just a single day makes me feel a lot better and less stressed. Makes it easier to do things like pick up your kid after school.
This is an accepted, if not encouraged, practice at my employer and it is much appreciated. Entire teams tend to schedule their "WFH" days together as a general time to focus, no meetings, etc. And, the teams that don't schedule together almost always have most members taking 1-2 WFH days a week.
For context: Employer is a late stage startup with ~500 employees that generally embraces remote work with many full-time remote employees.
Good virtual reality could make remote working a lot easier. Face time is important. I don't know if VR meetings could fully replace face-to-face, but I feel they'd go a lot further.
Terrible article, however, as a remote worker myself I see both advantages and disadvantages.
1. Some people's lives are better suited for it. This is especially true in the summertime when the kids are home from school all day.
2. Having an office is still very nice. Sometimes you simply can't get work done and home and need to come to the office.
3. Collaboration tools are awesome. Working with remote teams has never been easier if you have the right tools.
4. When you work from home you actually get more done. This seems strange, but you can actually get more done since there are no random impromptu meetings nor is there the guy that chats you up all morning with a cup of coffee in his hand.
5. Design sessions are better done in person. White boarding remotely doesn't work very well still.
6. Remote workers work at night. Give an employee a laptop and he'll work till 2:30 in the morning until the work is done.
7. Meetings tend to be shorter and more well defined. When people are co-located, there is a tendency to abuse people's time with meetings that have no agendas. When you have to organize people for a meeting, your forced to do a better job planning. That's been my impression at least.
I favor some sort of balance. 2/3 days in office 2/3 days remote seems like a good balance. this allows people to collaborate in person when they need to, but have a flexible schedule for the rest of the week. This sort of schedule actually is a productivity boost and is better for employee morale.
2. Having an office is still very nice. Sometimes you simply can't get work done and home and need to come to the office.
Sometimes you just can't get any work done at the office and need to go home and do it without distractions and micromanagement.
For the most part I agree with you. My most productive stint lately was when I was in the office on Mondays, and worked remotely the rest of the time. Get all the face-to-face stuff and boiler-plate communication out of the way on Mondays, resigning to the fact that nothing really productive will get done.
I think there would be value in distinguishing fully remote from occasional work from home.
I can see reasons to reject the former, but the latter (at least to me) should be a given. If you don't do it, you are losing a significant competitive advantage over the competition to hire great people.
I used to work at a company where WFH was not allowed. We were working with a recruiter to fill a few positions, and the guy was pretty honest, it told us "you guys are at the bottom of the pool because you don't allow WFH".
My biggest question about remote work is how do you get the culture and knowledge-sharing-through-osmosis (that is, unconference style chats at the watercooler or the pub after work or whatever informal knowledge sharing that happens)?
I work from home 3 days a week, so I still have enough office-face-time for that not to be a problem, but we have a lot of 100% remote workers too (who aren't even in the same country) and who get left out of a lot of informal conversations just because they don't happen to be there when a group of us walks to the shop or whatever it is. We do fly everyone over every few months, and those periods are fantastic, but I still can't help but feel that the remote people are losing out and the company is losing out on their input outside of the normal work stuff.
Would love to hear others thoughts and experiences on this and ideas on how it could be remedied!
In a mixed on-site/remote culture, I don't think you do get fair knowledge sharing. In that culture, the on-site workers will always have an edge. And they will be more likely the ones to get promoted.
For anyone looking for remote work, I suggest finding a "remote first" or "100% distributed" company.
In a 100% distributed environment, how do you get the same knowledge sharing and culture? Or is it largely not an issue, because everybody communicates the same way (text chat, video chat, voice chat, screen sharing, email)?
Is company culture and the connection that people have as strong? What about the random after-work-pub-chats where people say whats on their minds or otherwise talk about things that they might not during the normal course of the day?
Maybe its not an issue when everyone is in the same boat.
Since this article uses Spotify as an example, I'll use a Quora reply from a Spotify Employee
Does Spotify hire remote employees?
If you have something spectacular to bring to the table and absolutely won't come aboard otherwise. Otherwise, no.
Spotify is not 37Signals - we work in small units called squads, and each squad fits into a medium-sized room. It extremely efficient, but totally suboptimal environment for remote workers, because we cannot shoot you with nerf darts to call your attention when it's time for the daily standup.
>but totally suboptimal environment for remote workers, because we cannot shoot you with nerf darts to call your attention when it's time for the daily standup
39 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 70.4 ms ] threadReading this headline, I feel like if you're not doing remote work, then you're wrong. Aren't there shades of grey here? Is remote work the way for EVERYONE? I understand that people need to get clicks but this is a worrisome evolution.
If the time zone range of a team is less than about 4, then in my experience the team works quite well. If the range is greater than 5, it almost always encounters problems that even good process, requirements, and communication struggle to solve.
There are always exceptions, of course.
I used to work at a large corporation who had a ton of middle management. For a few years people had the ability to work from home in an emergency, but it wasn't something normal and you were expected to be in the office otherwise. At this point, people were working from home less than 2% of the time.
Then we got a new manager, who was a huge promoter of "ROWE" or Results Only Work Environment. within 6 months, 90% of the office were working from home 90-95% of the time. I used to come in on Monday's and the office would be empty, dead, not a peep and where six months ago, we had 15-20 developers working, we now had one or two. You seriously could have mistaken the office as being on holiday - it was crazy.
As such, the middle managers suddenly had a lot less to do. Since results were all that mattered, their jobs of micro-managing all the daily/weekly/monthly metrics they were following and tracking and emailing developers pretty much went out the window. Three months later, 5 managers either quit or were laid off because ROWE made their jobs essentially obsolete.
The funny part is the manager who was all about ROWE ran into some roadblocks for his other initiatives and left shortly thereafter (he lasted just over a year). Once he left, upper management quickly revoked ROWE (even though it had been incredibly successful and raised production 11%) and required people to be in the office 5 days a week unless it was for an emergency.
It was an easy way for the executives to say, "See what ROWE got us? Production is down and turn over is increasing. See? This doesn't work and the developers are abusing it by working from home too much and missing their goals."
It pissed a lot of people off when then revoked it and more people started quitting in droves - and people who had been there 10+ years. I got a good taste of what were the corporate politics at its worst.
The increase in productivity was directly related to the increase in quotas month over month. It started at 18 sites per month, then was elevated 4 months in a row until it got to 22 and then more and more people started missing the quota, so they backed it down after developers started leaving, or just gave up. Thus, you had an increase in production while upper management essentially found the breaking point of the team, then rest the quota right under that level.
I think upper management thought by giving us something like ROWE, we could continue to burn the candle at each ends so to speak, and not have our managers breathing down our backs about metrics and still make quota since we could work at home at our own pace and on the hours of our choosing. One of the developers surmised it was because they figured if everybody was out of the office and at their homes - we wouldn't talk so much to each other to figure out how really bad it was.
Productivity went through the floor. Nothing got done. Nobody could get in touch with anyone.
After a while the mandate went out, almost apologetically, that people would actually need to work at the office unless prior approval from their supervisor was obtained.
Of course the work atmosphere was pretty dysfunctional to begin with (the secure setting of a university job attracts people who don't like to work very hard) but it was rather interesting to watch it play out.
1 - how many sites did you get done yesterday?
2 - how many sites are in the queue?
3 - what was your QA defect rate? (this was eventually given to an off shore team, so we were no longer responsible for our own defects, which was totally bizarre to me)
4 - How close to your monthly goal were you?
5 - where were you with your professional development goals?
6 - what percentage of your goal were "refreshes" or sites that were re-designed and revamped?
There were a ton more I can't remember right now, but those were sent out in a daily email, in a list, to show were you ranked with your fellow developers. It was very outside sales like, so this really backfired on how developers took it. Most were very "fuck this, this shit is stupid" and performed really poorly under pressure and being micromanaged every day.
So once the only thing that mattered was just pumping sites out regardless of quality, then all the metrics became useless and the emails and micromanaging stopped. You were still handed a huge quota to hit every month though and many developers were burning out, getting put on PIPS and even without all the micromanaging, it was still a meat grinder.
Also author's affiliation is unclear. Retweets everything from PukkaTeam (a product mentioned in article) -- which says © isev -- which author works for. A disclaimer in the body or footer of the article would have been welcome!
- Remote work is hard. It's tough to get right. However, remote work is worth it. It's worth putting in the extra effort to try and get it right for your work place and your job. You get to spend more time with your kids, your SO, and you can travel.
- Face time is still important. Remote work makes face time a pleasant treat that you look forward to.
- Remote work makes financial sense.
- Good remote workers have to be excellent communicators.
It's not for everyone, but it's important that most organizations at least try and make it a reality for those that want it. Everyone will be the better for it.
Of course, there will be jobs where telecommuting isn’t practical, but in situations where all you need is a computer and an internet connection, then telecommuting is something to try.
For context: Employer is a late stage startup with ~500 employees that generally embraces remote work with many full-time remote employees.
1. Some people's lives are better suited for it. This is especially true in the summertime when the kids are home from school all day.
2. Having an office is still very nice. Sometimes you simply can't get work done and home and need to come to the office.
3. Collaboration tools are awesome. Working with remote teams has never been easier if you have the right tools.
4. When you work from home you actually get more done. This seems strange, but you can actually get more done since there are no random impromptu meetings nor is there the guy that chats you up all morning with a cup of coffee in his hand.
5. Design sessions are better done in person. White boarding remotely doesn't work very well still.
6. Remote workers work at night. Give an employee a laptop and he'll work till 2:30 in the morning until the work is done.
7. Meetings tend to be shorter and more well defined. When people are co-located, there is a tendency to abuse people's time with meetings that have no agendas. When you have to organize people for a meeting, your forced to do a better job planning. That's been my impression at least.
I favor some sort of balance. 2/3 days in office 2/3 days remote seems like a good balance. this allows people to collaborate in person when they need to, but have a flexible schedule for the rest of the week. This sort of schedule actually is a productivity boost and is better for employee morale.
Sometimes you just can't get any work done at the office and need to go home and do it without distractions and micromanagement.
For the most part I agree with you. My most productive stint lately was when I was in the office on Mondays, and worked remotely the rest of the time. Get all the face-to-face stuff and boiler-plate communication out of the way on Mondays, resigning to the fact that nothing really productive will get done.
I would __much__ rather see two types of meetings.
b) A brainstorming session where ideas are proposed (just exactly that, no further discussion of them, even though that part is difficult).
v) A meeting where voting on pre-discussed ideas happens; this assumes you have a discussion mechanism of some sort outside of meetings.
I can see reasons to reject the former, but the latter (at least to me) should be a given. If you don't do it, you are losing a significant competitive advantage over the competition to hire great people.
I used to work at a company where WFH was not allowed. We were working with a recruiter to fill a few positions, and the guy was pretty honest, it told us "you guys are at the bottom of the pool because you don't allow WFH".
I work from home 3 days a week, so I still have enough office-face-time for that not to be a problem, but we have a lot of 100% remote workers too (who aren't even in the same country) and who get left out of a lot of informal conversations just because they don't happen to be there when a group of us walks to the shop or whatever it is. We do fly everyone over every few months, and those periods are fantastic, but I still can't help but feel that the remote people are losing out and the company is losing out on their input outside of the normal work stuff.
Would love to hear others thoughts and experiences on this and ideas on how it could be remedied!
For anyone looking for remote work, I suggest finding a "remote first" or "100% distributed" company.
Is company culture and the connection that people have as strong? What about the random after-work-pub-chats where people say whats on their minds or otherwise talk about things that they might not during the normal course of the day?
Maybe its not an issue when everyone is in the same boat.
Does Spotify hire remote employees?
If you have something spectacular to bring to the table and absolutely won't come aboard otherwise. Otherwise, no.
Spotify is not 37Signals - we work in small units called squads, and each squad fits into a medium-sized room. It extremely efficient, but totally suboptimal environment for remote workers, because we cannot shoot you with nerf darts to call your attention when it's time for the daily standup.
http://i.imgur.com/TIVp2.gif
Do they have tickling contests too?