The strongest argument against remote work (generally speaking, not specific to the current coronavirus) is that a company is not disciplined enough to communicate well, especially across teams. This may be the case if a significant number of business decisions are done in side conversations. You probably need some tooling such as a chat app, video conferencing software etc and a process where important business decisions are written down and communicated.
There's also a case where some jobs need to be done in-person. A good example is a restocker for a grocery store. You can't move boxes remotely. Similarly a surgeon can't do a surgery remotely.
> This may be the case if a significant number of business decisions are done in side conversations. You probably need some tooling such as a chat app, video conferencing software etc and a process where important business decisions are written down and communicated.
Also, don't forget that there's a lot people naturally discuss in those side-conversations that they really don't want to have "on the record" or "discoverable" in the legal sense. The moment someone tells you that lawyers might scrutinize everything you discuss, you become far more hesitant to have open conversations.
Of course that's why many business types quickly transition from Email to "call me", but that's less likely to happen with tech types and more casual topics.
> a company is not disciplined enough to communicate well, especially across teams. This may be the case if a significant number of business decisions are done in side conversations
this is a very very good point!
but I don't think that being remote or not make this
communication problem worse or not.
It typically does. Most people are used to communicating in-person, often by chatting in casual interactions. Once you go remote, especially on a distributed team, individuals who are used to chatting in-person often don't have the discipline to send messages out to every member of a team. They typically also don't do multiple notifications (for example my company cross-posts announcements in both Slack and via email).
It doesn't fundamentally or categorically make it worse, it just increases the importance of the communication discipline. So, if the discipline is lacking or slips temporarily, then you're more likely to pay the cost for that than with in-person work. I agree it doesn't exacerbate the amount or lack of communication, it just increases the dependency on good communication.
I work from home and am a big advocate of doing so.
One thing I find difficult in remote teams is the ability to ask a coworker a question quickly. There can be a fair amount of lag time over messenger and this occasionally blocks the completion of work.
I have been working from home for nearly 8 years now with a very small team (2-3 other people over the years max, mainly just with 1 other).
We have been using VSee to keep a constant video/audio feed going. We both have microphones which are muted, and if we need to ask a question we just press unmute and talk away.
For smaller teams that need to communicate a lot, I think something like this is the best setup because like you said, it's not a lag from a messenger.. having to make a new phone call etc if you just want to ask a simple question.
> One thing I find difficult in remote teams is the ability to ask a coworker a question quickly.
Why is it so important that your colleague HAVE to respond quickly? Have you ever considered that your colleague may need some time alone to finish her own task before she can answer your super important question? (sorry for the mood of my answer but it is so bad on purpose :) )
I am just reading your other comments and I am getting the impression that you don't want honest feedback but just confirmation that remote work is good.
If I am stuck on something, and that something is in your realm, either for understanding or providing, then I might be stuck and unproductive until you answer.
e.g. I send you a message - I am trying to use 'xyzzy' which you provide. When I send it 'plover' I do not get back the response I need. Am I doing something wrong?
<crickets for 3 days>
WTF why can he not respond in a reasonable time frame? 1) on vacation, 2) sick in bed 3) over worked 4) a jerk 5) missed my email. In an office I can walk over and say WTF? Where I will easily find the new person who took his place, since he moved on to another job.
In my experience with very early stage teams, a lot of creativity and innovation occurs as a byproduct of spending a large amount of time together in close quarters discussing a range of topics (work related and not.) I’ve managed remote teams as well and while there are ways to replicate certain aspects of this dynamic, overall it’s much more difficult.
Remote is so much easier to make work well with an established team and an ongoing project. When either of them is new, it makes things harder and slower.
I have some experience with this having been part of Precision Nutrition for seven years and counting. We wrote the platform as a remote team, and DID find it very helpful to have a series of important brainstorming sessions in person. At the time we did this the state of the art for video conference tech was pretty lousy. These days we're 100% remote except for a few in person meetings throughout the years -- the vast majority of which are entirely social in nature.
Agreed. But as soon as a company gets mature creativity and innovation get killed. If anything, I feel that in larger companies remote people have a better chance to be creative because they don't have to go through the whole meeting circus. My team is onsite with the exception of me another guy. I feel we have the chance to fly under the radar and do stuff whereas the in-office people immediately get sucked into tons of meetings where ideas go to die.
And a lot of creativity also gets lost (stifled) mostly after a week to a month of the team working in close quarters. Not that it does not occur in remote teams, but remote makes non-verbal communication much harder for the loud-mouths or bullies or whatever kind of suppressor disguised as a leader that can exist in a team.
I absolutely think you lose something from lack of face-to-face contact. Some of the most productive leadership and decison-making sessions I've had came from sitting around a table or sharing a meal or a drink with a team, and going back and forth about something.
Additionally, casual contact helps too. I put a couch in my office, and people would come just sit down and talk. The setting set the vibe. I had some great conversations with people just kicking back that I would have never otherwise had.
I absolutely realize people will disagree, but this is my experience.
Absolutely - we have a dedicated "water cooler" channel, and as a lead I try to ensure people feel comfortable going "off topic" during small group meetings.
I don't see how it's possible to reasonably disagree with that. You obviously lose something. You also obviously gain in other ways. Whether it's worth it is another (important) question.
And I say this as someone who thinks it is worth it - for me personally, at least - having been working remotely for a about a year now.
Well of course you like it, you are lucky enough to have an office. If everyone had that or least not open office bull pens then I could also see the appeal.
I don't think people necessarily disagree, but I also think that the benefits of that are limited by human biases and tendencies toward clique-ish behaviors, and that hurts both the people who inevitably get left out of those events and the broader company, because the opportunities for unpredictable synergies are limited by those biases/cliques.
I've been working remote for better part of a year. It works well as long as your team has good systems in place. However, you do miss out on deeper relationships with your coworkers if you start remote. People try to counter this with on-sites, but still, it's not quite the same. Water cooler conversations don't happen as often and though you would think that doesn't matter, it does. There's less serendipity. I have less random interactions with people who are not on my precise team.
All that being said, I think remote is here to stay.
This article is entitled "There's No Such Thing as Quality Time."
It's oriented towards families, but it makes the case that there's no levels of time, just...time, we spend together. Things happen in the cracks between scheduled events that matter.
> When you work remote, everything is scheduled, almost by definition
This assumption is not true in my experience. When shifting our company to full time remote we did have an uptick in scheduled events but we still have plenty of things that are unscheduled, unless you consider "hey can I call you right now?" A scheduled event
> When you work remote, everything is scheduled, almost by definition. No conversations happen that are not task-directed. You lose something there.
This is not how it was for us. And other teams that were distributed even before covid also were not like this - portion of their calls were always idle chat.
You generally miss the out of band communication, i.e. the conversations between other colleagues that you overhear, as well as the 'waterfountain' chat. Sure, these spaces can be created online, but in my experience the threshold is too high for such spontaneous things to happen.
> i.e. the conversations between other colleagues that you overhear, as well as the 'waterfountain' chat.
Never underestimate the value of these conversations. Often, this simple ability to "overhear" others is EXACTLY how you avoid being left out of the loop and have some clue as to what's going on.
this is a real issue even with in office presence; not everyone is in the loop and the solution, in my opinion, is not to keep everyone in the same room but to spread information in the company
But the people in charge are often oblivious to this situation, because it feels to them like everyone is in the loop. Mostly because "the loop" has been happening for a long time as a side-effect of people overhearing conversations.
Of course this problem also manifests when a company grows to the point where no one sits within earshot anymore.
Online meetings seriously suck still. It's harder to form real relationships with coworkers (some would see this as a plus, but I think it depends on the company/team culture). But the biggest change is forming trust. How do we come to trust in each other and in the mission if we never interact physically? It certainly takes a different kind of leadership.
I can say by experience that being in the same building does not imply that you are building a relationship.
Meetings are meetings, you still have to prepare, you still have to communicate well, you will have your turn to speak, if it does not work it is not because you are behind a webcam
I agree with you. I just think there are more reasons why a meeting would not be productive over zoom, especially if you're working with older, non-tech people!
- Getting unblocked by talking to someone is easier in person.
- Collaborating with materials is easier in person (shared whiteboard, post it notes, no delay in comms)
- Meetings are easier in person as video conferences can have audio delays, people talking over each other, etc. No worries about people leaving their mic on while blending a smoothy or other tech issues.
- In a meeting, it is easier to keep distractions low when on site (everyone close your laptops and leave your phones in your pocket is easier at a location).
- Work socializing is waaaay harder when working remotely.
I say all these as a full time remote person before this whole COVID thing. That said, each of the arguments above are able to be mitigated and can we can learn cope with them.
There isn't one, for our industry. You are right now remotely asking for help with how to manage a business. We can do everything remotely, and many businesses in our industry have done so. The fact is that, if you don't have co-located capital (a data center), then you don't need co-located labor (employees to maintain the data center).
Hiring is more difficult. It's not that you can't find applicants, but the people capable of performing without direct supervision is (mostly) a subset of those capable of performing in an office. It can be difficult to identify those who will actually perform well in that environment. It takes some degree of maturity and responsibility to provide value as a remote worker because there's always that temptation to do something else.
That said, I wouldn't trade this lifestyle for anything. The only complaint I've ever had is that coworkers not capable of performing in a remote environment sometimes last too long at the company.
The other side of this is that managers need to be more mature too. There's a fairly significant difference between communicating asynchronously. If you can figure it out, it'll actually increase the company's overall productivity because it'll reduce interruptions.
A great way to approach this is to build trust incrementally. Small projects where responsibility is given to individuals to own work end to end with reviews and feedback. After a few iterations, everyone will get used to it.
> A great way to approach this is to build trust incrementally. Small projects where responsibility is given to individuals to own work end to end with reviews and feedback. After a few iterations, everyone will get used to it.
Thank you very much for providing a useful practical advice!
> Hiring is more difficult. It's not that you can't find applicants, but the people capable of performing without direct supervision is (mostly) a subset of those capable of performing in an office.
OTOH, your applicant pool is limited only to the time zones and legal jurisdictions you're willing to hire from. If you're office-based, it's limited to those who can reasonably commute there.
I think the best argument is that it offloads the cost of office space from the company onto the worker. Sometimes the company will provide little stipends for things like desks or monitors, but rarely for ongoing costs like rent.
Some people get really jazzed when they see companies start to adopt remote work, but in a lot of cases I suspect it's about little else than reducing fixed costs.
I think for established companies it's that there is a big risk and time commitment to realign company process and organisation to support remote work.
Definitely less of an argument for starting something new but if you've not done it before then it also carries some risk you might not be willing to shoulder.
I know it can potentially be controversial but a lot of outside of work relationships start at the office. Some can be romantic and may even lead to marriage. Others can be friendships that last job changes. It can even be as simple as having a great group of people to chill at a bar with. While I love my wife and kids, I think most others are like me and want to periodically get out and meet new people. Work is often the best place for that.
"The office" can be the building where you may have your desk, does it mean that the desk must be owned by the company you work for? or that everyone in the room must work for the same company to build a relation ship? :)
Fully remote work does not permit the community that research requires to progress. So fully remote isn’t an option for me. Flexible time, of course, is.
Now Alan Chynoweth mentioned that I used to eat at the physics table. I had been eating with the mathematicians and I found out that I already knew a fair amount of mathematics; in fact, I wasn't learning much. The physics table was, as he said, an exciting place, but I think he exaggerated on how much I contributed. It was very interesting to listen to Shockley, Brattain, Bardeen, J. B. Johnson, Ken McKay and other people, and I was learning a lot. But unfortunately a Nobel Prize came, and a promotion came, and what was left was the dregs. Nobody wanted what was left. Well, there was no use eating with them!
Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, "Do you mind if I join you?" They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring.
In the fall, Dave McCall stopped me in the hall and said, "Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. what were the important problems in my field. I haven't changed my research," he says, "but I think it was well worthwhile." And I said, "Thank you Dave," and went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles. They were unable to ask themselves, "What are the important problems in my field?"
There was a really interesting freaknomics podcast discussing remote work. There was some study on a large sales company in China that experimented with half of employees working remotely and half not. At the end they found that remote workers were more productive in terms of sales numbers (less time on commute, office socializing) but they got promoted at lower rates (less facetime with superiors, not on peoples' radars)
A bit of the out of sight out of mind at play? Curious too as to how much visibility into efforts of remote employees (wins) were shared, celebrated and known across the company vs. folks in person that have a better platform to promote themselves.
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[ 161 ms ] story [ 2096 ms ] threadThere's also a case where some jobs need to be done in-person. A good example is a restocker for a grocery store. You can't move boxes remotely. Similarly a surgeon can't do a surgery remotely.
Also, don't forget that there's a lot people naturally discuss in those side-conversations that they really don't want to have "on the record" or "discoverable" in the legal sense. The moment someone tells you that lawyers might scrutinize everything you discuss, you become far more hesitant to have open conversations.
Of course that's why many business types quickly transition from Email to "call me", but that's less likely to happen with tech types and more casual topics.
You just made me envision a robot warehouse where humans drive the forklifts remotely to move items around.
this is a very very good point! but I don't think that being remote or not make this communication problem worse or not.
A lot of people like it, learn from it, and also provide me with advice when they happen to know something I do not.
One thing I find difficult in remote teams is the ability to ask a coworker a question quickly. There can be a fair amount of lag time over messenger and this occasionally blocks the completion of work.
Agreed. But the reverse is also true: it's harder for people to interrupt you.
We have been using VSee to keep a constant video/audio feed going. We both have microphones which are muted, and if we need to ask a question we just press unmute and talk away.
For smaller teams that need to communicate a lot, I think something like this is the best setup because like you said, it's not a lag from a messenger.. having to make a new phone call etc if you just want to ask a simple question.
Why is it so important that your colleague HAVE to respond quickly? Have you ever considered that your colleague may need some time alone to finish her own task before she can answer your super important question? (sorry for the mood of my answer but it is so bad on purpose :) )
e.g. I send you a message - I am trying to use 'xyzzy' which you provide. When I send it 'plover' I do not get back the response I need. Am I doing something wrong? <crickets for 3 days> WTF why can he not respond in a reasonable time frame? 1) on vacation, 2) sick in bed 3) over worked 4) a jerk 5) missed my email. In an office I can walk over and say WTF? Where I will easily find the new person who took his place, since he moved on to another job.
Additionally, casual contact helps too. I put a couch in my office, and people would come just sit down and talk. The setting set the vibe. I had some great conversations with people just kicking back that I would have never otherwise had.
I absolutely realize people will disagree, but this is my experience.
If you want to have a remote team I advice having a space for casual conversation and non-work video calls, it improves things a bit for the first.
For the latter, IRL gatherings/meetups are valuable but obviously not something you can do all the time.
And I say this as someone who thinks it is worth it - for me personally, at least - having been working remotely for a about a year now.
Yep, if I had an office with a door that closed, big enough for a couch, I would also enjoy working in an office.
All that being said, I think remote is here to stay.
It's oriented towards families, but it makes the case that there's no levels of time, just...time, we spend together. Things happen in the cracks between scheduled events that matter.
https://ryanholiday.net/quality-time/
When you work remote, everything is scheduled, almost by definition. No conversations happen that are not task-directed. You lose something there.
This assumption is not true in my experience. When shifting our company to full time remote we did have an uptick in scheduled events but we still have plenty of things that are unscheduled, unless you consider "hey can I call you right now?" A scheduled event
This is not how it was for us. And other teams that were distributed even before covid also were not like this - portion of their calls were always idle chat.
Never underestimate the value of these conversations. Often, this simple ability to "overhear" others is EXACTLY how you avoid being left out of the loop and have some clue as to what's going on.
Of course this problem also manifests when a company grows to the point where no one sits within earshot anymore.
- Connections with people are easier in person.
- Getting unblocked by talking to someone is easier in person.
- Collaborating with materials is easier in person (shared whiteboard, post it notes, no delay in comms)
- Meetings are easier in person as video conferences can have audio delays, people talking over each other, etc. No worries about people leaving their mic on while blending a smoothy or other tech issues.
- In a meeting, it is easier to keep distractions low when on site (everyone close your laptops and leave your phones in your pocket is easier at a location).
- Work socializing is waaaay harder when working remotely.
I say all these as a full time remote person before this whole COVID thing. That said, each of the arguments above are able to be mitigated and can we can learn cope with them.
- extroverts
- some of our more junior engineers
- workers with families
I think having a good mix of traditional, partially-remote, and fully-remote businesses is the place to be.
That said, I wouldn't trade this lifestyle for anything. The only complaint I've ever had is that coworkers not capable of performing in a remote environment sometimes last too long at the company.
A great way to approach this is to build trust incrementally. Small projects where responsibility is given to individuals to own work end to end with reviews and feedback. After a few iterations, everyone will get used to it.
Thank you very much for providing a useful practical advice!
OTOH, your applicant pool is limited only to the time zones and legal jurisdictions you're willing to hire from. If you're office-based, it's limited to those who can reasonably commute there.
Some people get really jazzed when they see companies start to adopt remote work, but in a lot of cases I suspect it's about little else than reducing fixed costs.
(I have worked remotely for ~10 years)
Definitely less of an argument for starting something new but if you've not done it before then it also carries some risk you might not be willing to shoulder.
Now Alan Chynoweth mentioned that I used to eat at the physics table. I had been eating with the mathematicians and I found out that I already knew a fair amount of mathematics; in fact, I wasn't learning much. The physics table was, as he said, an exciting place, but I think he exaggerated on how much I contributed. It was very interesting to listen to Shockley, Brattain, Bardeen, J. B. Johnson, Ken McKay and other people, and I was learning a lot. But unfortunately a Nobel Prize came, and a promotion came, and what was left was the dregs. Nobody wanted what was left. Well, there was no use eating with them!
Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, "Do you mind if I join you?" They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring.
In the fall, Dave McCall stopped me in the hall and said, "Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. what were the important problems in my field. I haven't changed my research," he says, "but I think it was well worthwhile." And I said, "Thank you Dave," and went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles. They were unable to ask themselves, "What are the important problems in my field?"
Hamming, “You and your Research”