Maybe it shouldn't have come as a surprise, but as someone who considers themselves mostly introverted, it took me a good month or two to realize how much I miss meeting strangers.
It might have to do with where I was raised, or maybe I'm just more extroverted than I think, but these days the two things I really miss most are 1) regularly seeing friends who aren't my absolute closest circle and 2) small, casual interactions with total strangers (but that are slightly more than "that'll be $7.62"). The second has recently started to weigh on me more; maybe that's why I write a lot on HN/reddit :D
I think it's a psychological effect of having / not having options. in normal times, I prefer to spend most of my evenings playing games, making music, etc. alone in my apartment. I knew that if I felt unusually social, I could go out and eat dinner at the bar and talk to some strangers. before quarantine, I would do that a couple times a month and it mostly satisfied my desire to talk to new people. it was never a major part of my life, but I miss it a lot now that it's not available.
> I think it's a psychological effect of having / not having options.
Exactly. This, for me, is a perfect summary.
I am perfectly fine with working from home but the mental toll of having virtually nowhere to go outside of my four walls is starting to wear on me. It makes me upset and frustrated and I start projecting those emotions onto the actions of others and it becomes a downward cycle.
I'm not particularly social. In fact, I'm almost anti-social (I do not like the interactions like "how are you doing?" in the shops / "hello there!" while walking in a park / "how's your day going?" entering a takeaway place, and I will absolutely never strike up a conversation at the bus stop or on a train), but this is starting to feel suffocating.
Yet I'm still going to avoid unnecessary trips and minimize contact because until we have some effective shots to go around, that's how I avoid the consequences of this stupid virus.
Yeah. We gotta do what we gotta do, even if it sucks. That’s one small consolation — despite all the anti-maskers and so on, I know that you, and lots of people everywhere, are working really hard to protect others from the virus. Makes it a little easier to do my part.
One of my favorite things when working from home pre-pandemic used to be to go to a quiet bar with only a couple other patrons and sip a beer while working, or to go to the public library and work quietly in the group study room. Even without being 'social' it was my way of being social.
Now, even though I wake up without an alarm, eat clean, and exercise every day my productivity has tanked. There's some deep, human alarm buried somewhere in the reptile part of my brain that is saying 'things are not right...you are not ok...things are not right,' and it's been doing it since March. I can't seem to find a breaker to switch it off.
There's only so many times you can walk around the block.
Thanks for posting this, good to know there are kindred spirits!
I definitely consider myself an introvert, but I also realized I would normally do a ton of stuff during the day where I was just generally "around" people - I liked walking around our downtown, or eating out (even if I was alone), or working from a coffee shop in preference to working from home.
I really feel like I'm having a weird feeling of disassociation from the world, and I don't like it.
Strangely I have found myself to talk more to strangers and having a good laugh and chats with random people since the pandemic has unfolded. I think the reason is because where I live (London) there has been less people on the street, in shops, bars and so on, so the people who do go out are more likely to chat with others like myself. It’s kind of funny, people who are just out and about and getting in with their normal life have no real fear of the virus or most of them (like myself) already had it and therefore have little reason to follow any guidelines. It’s like a self selection process of all people who have a rather similar view on the pandemic which are mostly economically active and meet nowadays at public places. I kind of enjoy it if there wasn’t the bitter aftertaste of seeing lots of livelihoods being crushed and many shops and restaurants at the brink of collapse.
> or most of them (like myself) already had it and therefore have little reason to follow any guidelines.
FYI, just because you've already had it doesn't mean you can't be an asymptomatic carrier. In fact, you're more likely to be one, since you're less likely to have symptoms again.
> FYI, just because you've already had it doesn't mean you can't be an asymptomatic carrier.
That statement defies all science and logic. Either I have immunity, which means the virus can’t survive in my body which means I can’t be a carrier OR I don’t have immunity at which point it’s just as likely to get symptoms as it was the first time.
> Also, some people have had it twice.
There is no actual data to suggest that, only a few self reported cases which scientists have said were far from clear. It’s still regarded as very unlikely and in fact all regions in the world which had a very severe outbreak in March and April haven’t had a second wave at all yet whilst the rest of such countries are currently in the middle of a steep second spike again.
Immunity is not black and white. You could have sufficient immunity to stop it from taking hold in your body while at the same time carrying the virus in your sinuses and breathing them out on everyone.
> and in fact all regions in the world which had a very severe outbreak in March and April haven’t had a second wave at all yet
That's just straight up wrong. Most everywhere is now seeing a second wave, except the USA, because we never ended our first wave.
I specifically said "regions" and not "countries". Yes, when you look at a country holistically then there is a second wave, but when you look at where the infections are happening this time round then it is absolutely true what I said. Viruses don't think of countries, so looking at arbitrary borders to get an understanding is extremely unhelpful at best.
> in fact all regions in the world which had a very severe outbreak in March and April haven’t had a second wave at all yet whilst the rest of such countries are currently in the middle of a steep second spike again.
You should probably investigate Madrid before making such strong statements.
I am, without question, an introvert. But I also miss some of the things you describe in your comment.
If you very generically categorize introversion/extroversion as (I realize this is an oversimplification and doesn't take all factors into account):
- Interacting with people consumes energy
- Interacting with people is fuel
Missing that interaction as an introvert doesn't seem to make sense at first.
But for myself, I've realized that it's a bit more nuanced than that. It's not so much that all interaction saps energy. Certain types of interaction does.
Put me in a conference room all day with a group of colleagues to plan the next release, and I'll be utterly exhausted by the end.
Put me in a crowded street festival, and I'll feel energized and alive.
Make me talk with people at the crowded street festival, and I'll be exhausted by the end.
All of this to say, not all interactions are created equal, and I think it's fair to say that even introverts like/need to be around people, but the kinds of interactions an introvert is asked to participate in will mean the difference between energy/exhaustion.
I go back and forth on WFH. The two biggest pros are I have an extra 90 minutes that I used to use commuting that I can now spend on myself or with my family. Additionally I do not miss the open office at all. My home office is quiet and calm. I can focus for a lot longer than I could at the office.
The biggest downsides are a lack of human interaction with my coworkers. I've gotten used to Zoom meetings but they just aren't the same. I also miss the organic hallway conversations. Instead of running into someone while grabbing coffee or water I now have to go out of my way to book time with people. Its totally changed how I interact with people beyond my immediate group.
I suspect I'll WFH for as long as possible while going in a few times a month to socialize.
> Instead of running into someone while grabbing coffee or water I now have to go out of my way to book time with people.
Same. And for most people, I'm just not gonna book that time. It's time consuming (and sometimes awkward) to have one on one zoom chats with people in a way that a short conversation in the hallways isn't.
The act of having to book a meeting also just makes it feel so transactional.
I have booked social meetings with other folks at work, and sometimes you have energy for it and sometimes you don't. The fact that the meeting is for a fixed time in your calendar and that you're on camera, makes it feel so formal too.
There was a show HN a while back for a product that makes videochats feel more informal: can't remember what it was called though, maybe someone else can chime in.
> Moreover, he championed Microsoft's worrying new Virtual Commute feature, which asks participants to consider what they want to accomplish that day. And then asks them to fill out a questionnaire at the end of the day. (A little tiresome, surely.)
This is a terrible way to measure loss of productivity if you weren't doing this before the pandemic. Numerous times I've missed my day's targets because something came up or one of the task was more difficult than I expected is too high to count, remote and in office.
I know I'm being pessimistic, but this sounds like a way to micromanage your employees and build plausible deniability to fire whoever you want whenever you feel like it.
>Numerous times I've missed my day's targets because something came up or one of the task was more difficult than I expected is too high to count, remote and in office.
There are so many days where I've uttered the phrase "So this is what I'm doing today" destroying what ever you originally had planned. Whether that's from some emergency/important email, a newly found bug that is critical, or just one of those comment/requests from a senior manager that sounds like it's made on the whim but comes with the un-said "by end of day".
Wow Nadella just passed Ballmer as my least favorite Microsoft CEO. Who could possibly endorse this idea in good faith? It sounds like something you’d use to keep 10-13 year olds accountable for schoolwork not something fitting for adults in a dynamic working environment.
I find that can do most of my day-to-day work just fine from home. Maybe even better because there's less distraction. But I miss the casual interactions at the office. Finding out what other people are up to. What other teams are up to. I try to stay on top of what's going on, but it's much more difficult when I'm no longer having short, casual chats in the lunch room.
I do software eng and at my work we have "meeting days" and "maker days". Maker days are supposed to be no meetings unless it's an emergency, while meeting days are just normal work days.
Personally, I've found meeting days to be pretty much unbearable for working from home, while I love my maker days from home. Anything that requires collaboration of more than 2 or 3 people just sucks to do over Zoom, IMO, but being able to lock myself in a quiet room and turn off notifications is a godsend for writing code.
In my experience, I've found that this seems to match up with the opinions of the people I know. The people who work in jobs that require a lot of meetings are completely burned out on WFH, while the people I know who are mainly individual contributiors absolutely love it. I'm curious if that is the experience others are having, but personally, it seems to me a good explanation why opinions on WFH seem to be all over the place.
Man, I wish we had similar culture. But multinational corp where IT is viewed as purely an annoying cost centre, every day is meeting day. On top of 100% project allocation (3 in parallel), which run side by side various maintenance/troubleshooting/support roles. On top of that any production issue takes first seat. I skip what I can, but there are limits.
Recently tried pair programming, it was a joke. Or I wish it was, rather a frustrating experience for both parties. Maybe one day virtual reality will take it closer to real experience, but we were far away from that.
I hate my work now more than ever. Meetings certainly don't help. Kind of death by thousand cuts.
If you haven't tried Live Share in VS Code, it might be worth a shot. It's not the same as a "perfect" pairing set up but it's certainly better than two people sitting at one keyboard/mouse or screensharing over Zoom.
One person writes a test, the other implements the test. Commit between non-passing test and passing implementation. Switch places, repeat.
In this way you don't have to rely on controlling the ux of a remote machine and you can just rely on the screen sharing video and voice communication.
"Maker Days" sound like a great idea but they don't fit every company. At my place the eng department is far from the biggest team and we do a lot of cross-team work. No way the rest of the company (who do most of their work via meetings... somehow) would agree to have a day with no meetings at all.
It's often impossible to schedule a meeting with 5 people where there is a no-conflict time for anyone.
The person scheduling (ideally) looks at people's calendars, guesses which meetings a person will be able to move (20-person OKR review no, 1-1 with peer yes), and tries to schedule at a time like that.
So yes, anywhere I've worked, blocking your calendar doesn't magically get you out of meetings.
Especially with distributed teams. When you try to have meetings with Europe and Asia at the same time, there's only a small window available that fits two of the groups (which every other meeting is fighting for), and the third group is going to have to suffer a midnight meeting. So meetings are scheduled with the time where most people can attend.
Probably has something to with the Extrovert-Introvert personality spectrum.
The reward mechanisms of Extrovert brains is tied to social contact. Introverts not so much. Whats required in creating good teams is understanding there is a spectrum and different people need different things to thrive.
I have a confession to make. I love doing meetings over video conferencing specifically because everyone hates them and it makes them get right to the point so they can get off of them as quickly as possible. There's far less chit chat about irrelevant stuff, or political talk, or whatever other nonsense is keeping me from getting work done. Yes, I hate the disconnects and freezes, and the half-second delay, and all that stuff. But if it makes my meetings short (and it does!) then I'll take it!
Interestingly, I have not found the same to be true at all. I suspect this varies from org to org.
I've noticed a marked increase in meeting pre-amble:
- General checkins about how people are doing / holding up (mostly a positive thing)
- Chitchat about the latest thing: new COVID restrictions, or a favorite restaurant closing, or "I finally braved a haircut"
- Fires
- The usual small chitchat about the weather, etc.
I've interpreted this as folks feeling desperate for connection. Connection they'd usually get by being in the office.
When I started typing this comment, I was trying to categorize the type of meeting where I've seen this happen, but it's actually pretty universal, ranging from:
- Daily standups and other standing meetings with immediate team
- Broader planning discussions
- I've even seen this "personal interest" chatter from execs who are usually a bit more private.
At times, it's nice to indulge in this. Over time, it's had a negative impact on productivity. It's hard to know how to react to it - on the one hand, it feels like people are in need, and this is their way of staying sane. On the flip side, there aren't very many hours in a day.
I've been working from home for five years now, at remote only companies. One thing we do is start every all hands meeting with a personal update. Everyone gets a chance, if they want, to talk about something personal. A movie they saw, a kid's accomplishment, etc.
But these updates are limited to the weekly all hands meeting. Other meetings just get right into it.
It seems to be a good balance of getting to know your coworkers and not wasting too much time. In the grand scheme of things, it probably takes up less time than all the random water cooler chitchat that takes place in an office.
I've been working from home since March and my experience matches yours exactly. In general, any task that requires you to allocate several hours of consecutive time with no interruptions (and coding is definitely like this) is much better from home.
So much better in fact that I wish I could continue to work from home at least a couple of days a week even after covid is over!
I suspect a part of this is due to the fact that developers/individual contributors are more used to using tools like git, ssh etc. that makes the transition almost seamless; my workflow is completely independent of even my machine, I could pick up any brand new laptop on amazon and I'd be productive within minutes. Maybe less familiarity with the technology stack is a significant source of additional attrition.
I work in Times Square in a huge building with a ton of people with an open floor plan. It would be very distracting to have to worry about wearing a mask, social distancing, getting covid tests, let alone commuting. Meanwhile, half of my team isn't in New York anyway. It just doesn't make sense to return to offices yet.
I suspect there’s a big split in anxiousness to stop working from home between the executive/managerial class and the people that actually labor. The former has a much harder time maintaining the illusion that they provide any value when everyone is off-site.
Given that most of our jobs are 'Bullshit Jobs'[1], I guess it doesn't really matter if we are 'productive' or 'creative' enough. WFH can give us real productive time elsewhere - like spending time with family or friends, on hobbies and so on.
I am tired of exclusively at home. I would ideally like to go into the office once or twice per week, just to see people. It gets lonely and boring being at home this much.
I read the article and I'm sure he is tired of working from home, but I notice no mention was made of how his work environment is/was dramatically different than the tens of thousands of employees under his management.
First and foremost, Mr Nadella has an office with a door. This is a privilege he and his management staff have denied to quite a few of his employees, even after those employees repeatedly turned in surveys indicating their preference for not-that.
Distractions and being able to get away from the din of the open plan are much easier to do when you are simply not in the din of open plan.
I'm in tech but not a software developer and my team does a lot of different things at the same time, so this probably colors my view. Perhaps software devs are either more outgoing, can manage distractions easier, or have some other secret method to flourish in open plan.
This is why I've greatly enjoyed working from home. The only distractions I have are on my computer, and thus can be easily managed, or my partner and pet who live with me and neither of them come barging in with an Urgent Question Which Must Be Answered Immediately or carry on long and loud conversations about disparate topics multiple times per day.
I am a software developer and I do not have any secret sauce to manage distractions of the open plan/ I absolutely hate those. Luckily I run my own company and have worked from home (except some meetings) for the last 20 years.
Don't nearly all Microsoft employees have offices? Every building I've been to (I can probably name off about 30 of them) had employees with offices. Can you name the buildings where employees don't have offices?
Buildings that have been built or remodeled in the past three years no longer have solo or pair offices. Some examples off the top of my head, though there are more: 82-84, 30-32, 42-44, a couple of the Studios.
Most of the central campus is a large hole in the ground because it is being rebuilt and the buildings constructed there will not have solo or pair offices.
Most of the buildings I spent time in for the last 7 years didn't have private offices any longer. Studios A-D had hybrid models where leads and the most senior engineers often had very small glass offices and teams sat in bays (I think some of those might have reverted to all small glass offices). 16,17,18,40,41,42,43, some of the buildings in the 30s as well had all moved to open. Many of the newest buildings (which I forget the numbers of were open) and IIRC , the new campus when complete was to be open. There were still to be sure many many buildings with offices but as buildings were remodeled they were mostly converted to open offices.
Ah fair enough. It's been a little while. I'm surprised the Office buildings (16-18) turned hybrid, since weren't the buildings themselves architected to basically only have window offices? It was shaped like a snake to optimize for that.
No, I think we've got a larger proportion of introverts in SW development than compared to many other fields.
> can manage distractions easier,
Definitely no. When you're developing code you're essentially loading up that code into your brain. Every interruption causes it to fall out of your head and you need to start that process over. It can take a good half hour or more to get into the programming "zone", so each interruption costs a significant amount of time.
Interruptions are really bad for software development productivity.
> or have some other secret method to flourish in open plan.
Nope. A very good pair of noise cancelling earphones maybe help some, but mostly we just have to put up with it because that's what management decided to do to save a little money without realizing that it's detrimental to productivity.
He also likely has a private bathroom. For those of us whose bowels like to make their move late morning, and whose offices were light on bathrooms relative to the number of employees in the building, WFH has been a godsend.
I am sure there are another dozen in-office perks that CEO has that the average employee does not.
The private bathroom has been a completely underrated aspect of WFH.
I can poop outdoors on backpacking trips using natural materials to wipe, I can poop in busy airports and I can poop in stinking 100 degree portapotties.
But I have a really hard time pooping in gleaming offices where all my coworkers can see me walking into the bathroom and emerging 10 minutes later. I hate it!
I began to hate it less when I remembered a little empathy game that has served me well. The question is not, "when I leave the bathroom, is everyone looking at me and judging me for having used it?" Rather, the question is, "when I see someone else leave the bathroom, do I think about it for more than a fraction of a second, and if I knew they had defecated, would I want to shame or embarrass them for it at all?"
The answer to the latter, if you are not a horrible person, is of course not. You don't really care, it's not your problem, you're not keeping track of it, it's just an event you forget moments later. Probably, then, that's what your coworkers think of you, when you go; so stop caring, because they definitely don't.
(If anyone ever were to metaphorically give me shit for using the bathroom, I'd turn it around on them in a heartbeat, too. It's so easy - just ask, what kind of creep cares about their coworker's bodily functions to this extent? Gross, weird!)
> I began to hate it less when I remembered a little empathy game that has served me well. The question is not, "when I leave the bathroom, is everyone looking at me and judging me for having used it?" Rather, the question is, "when I see someone else leave the bathroom, do I think about it for more than a fraction of a second, and if I knew they had defecated, would I want to shame or embarrass them for it at all?"
before WFH, I worked at a desk in an open floorplan. for whatever reason, it gives me a constant low level of anxiety to be in an environment where lots of people can see me, especially if I can't easily tell when people are actually looking. so I used to go to the bathroom a bit more often than I really needed, just so I could spend a few minutes in a more private space. I personally don't care, but I certainly do notice which of my coworkers also seem to be frequent users of the bathroom. if I were a pointy-haired boss, that might be one of the data points used to assemble my list of slackers.
Yes, this! I worked at a large US CPU company (Not AMD). There were several buildings on the campus. When nature called, I often had to go one or even two buildings away to find an open toilet stall. It was a nightmare. God help you if you had to poop near the top of the hour when meetings were getting out. There were lineups in the restrooms. I used to joke that it was like a concert but without the music and beer. I couldn't believe that a company that designs CPUs couldn't anticipate something simple like restroom loading.
Haha, I always wondered if I'd find a thread on HN that actually recognized that workers are human and to be human is to defecate. Truly the one thing we have in common with kings. The true art is to speak about it obliquely.... probably won't accomplish that here.
In All Quiet on the Western Front, there's a passage about this, where the men discover a tremendous camaraderie about their shared shitting time - since there's no way to have privacy or any nicer facilities than what they can scrape together, it's basically just a purely functional experience. They sit in a field and provide each other dignity, instead of privacy; something we could well learn from.
Interestingly, the Romans also had this - https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTcxODU0MDM4OTM2MDY5N... - and it seems they did fine by it. It may be only really in relatively recent Western culture that we added a layer of shame over a natural act, and in turn required immense privacy for it. Wasn't the Tuilieries garden in Paris a place where fancy ladies might pop a squat?
I once worked at a startup with 300 people on a floor with one bathroom with 3 stalls. 90% men. You'd always be waiting, you'd always be voiding yourself next two two other people. Maybe people you'd be going back to sit next to in a few minutes. You begin to know things about people you don't want to know.
I myself of course do prefer the privacy, like most anyone, and further prefer a single occupancy bathroom because the hygiene opportunities are much better when you have direct and private access to a sink. I think the 300 people to 3 stalls situation was probably close to violating some kind of building code and at the very least it's just not a good example of treating your workers as though you value them.
On the far polar opposite, I worked at a startup that had 5 single-occupancy bathrooms for 50 people. Two of them had showers. It was so much nicer in every way.... just that feeling that you were as comfortable at work as you are at home. Not just cattle, but treated with modern dignity; there's a cost to the employer to do this, but it might actually have ROI in the sense that your employees are more comfortable and healthier.
I would gladly take a roman bathroom over what I had at the office. I have no shame about the act, merely hate having to hold it in during a long meeting because there was a line for the bathrooms before hand.
Oddly enough, I think the shift to open offices deserves at least some credit here. I think most office spaces were designed with a median estimate of occupancy in mind. Before open offices, it was a mix of offices and cubicles, with much less density. When I worked in a cube farm, we had 4 stalls and 2 urinals for about 60-70 men on two floors. My most recent office had 2 single occupancy bathrooms for about 40 people. If we count the urinal as 0.5 toilet, we get almost double the per-bathroom density in the open office.
And the other confounding factor is when you combine open offices with cell phones, the bathroom turns into the 'Candy Crush break'. I imagine median occupancy times were lower back in the day, as lugging a newspaper or magazine to the bathroom was a little too obvious.
Just so you know and for what it's worth I am actually extremely shocked by what I am reading here. All of these would be completely illegal in my country and I don't understand why Americans agree to work in such conditions.
Here you need at least a stall and an urinal per twenty male occupants and two stalls per twenty female and the entrance can't be directly connected to the working space so you need to have an intermediate space (a corridor or a changing room for example).
> All of these would be completely illegal in my country and I don't understand why Americans agree to work in such conditions.
I'm not American, friend. Poor conditions exist even in very nice places, simply because people don't get together and do anything about it. After all, who wants to be the Bathroom Advocacy Dude?
Not to mention, the 1-ply sandpaper most offices stock in their bathrooms instead of proper toilet paper. I imagine they use the 3 seashells at FAANG companies, but I'll settle for Charmin.
> Distractions and being able to get away from the din of the open plan are much easier to do when you are simply not in the din of open plan.
Our company considered getting rid of cubicles a few years ago and there was almost an open revolt. People ended up accepting drastically smaller cubicles as a compromise and everyone ended up pretty happy.
I can confirm, having spent time at Microsoft, that Microsoft provides a very proportion of offices to their workers.
> He explained: "Thirty minutes into your first video meeting in the morning, because of the concentration one needs to have on video, you're fatigued."
Meetings have become excruciating to me. I'm not alone so it does seem like people are having fewer meetings (positive!) but the idea that we're all going to be remote knowledge workers after this seems to be a fantasy. I think the remote workforce will grow 2-4x, and certain nonessential knowledge work will become remote (and therefore cheaper) but the best and brightest knowledge workers will continue to all congregate in high COL cities for career development and things by and large will not be that different.
This is the type of article where the first thing to do is reject the premise.
If you are getting exhausted by video calls, something is wrong. You should not be spending all your days on calls, doing even more meetings than before. You should be using a variety of communication mechanisms, and figuring out which work for different situations. Managers should not be striving for "more contact", they should be striving for "more trust". You should also be relaxing the formality of calls so they are not exhausting. And your teams should be figuring out their own personal WFH environments - we are all different, which is why the advice on WFH is so scattered. Individuals need to experiment to find out what works for them.
If you miss the office because your simply miss the people and enjoy the office environment, that is one thing. But if you miss it because you have not yet put in those efforts to make remote work effective for yourself, your team, or your entire organizations... then you have some work to do.
A lot of people's jobs almost literally entirely involve interacting with people. There is no alternative to video meetings/calls other than human interaction.
Furthermore when those meetings/calls involve multiple persons it becomes increasingly time consuming and complex to scale efficient interaction. In my experience impossible.
I'm a product owner. I'm one of those people whose entire job is interacting with people. I do have about 3 hours of scheduled calls every week. The other 37 hours are mostly written communications via email, slack, Aha, Jira, Confluence, Zeplin, comment threads in Office docs... and probably other tools I'm forgetting. And of course, a few hours each week of ad-hoc calls as questions come up.
I admit, it took me months to break down exactly which conversations truly need to happen each week, and the smallest groups that still made them effective. But it is quite possible.
If you'd ever be willing to write about the process of breaking those down and minimizing meetings, I'd be your first reader.
As a Product Manager at a larger SaaS Platform company, if I did not carefully say "no" to most invites that come my way, I'd be on calls for 10 hours/day. Even with that, I'm still on more meetings than I should be (currently not sustainable), and I'm actively seeking strategizes to improve this.
I struggle with the premise of this comment for this reason:
> If you are getting exhausted by video calls, something is wrong. You should not be spending all your days on calls, doing even more meetings than before.
Is not congruent with
> your teams should be figuring out their own personal WFH environments - we are all different
There are many reasons to be exhausted by video calls that have nothing to do with something being "wrong".
Some general thoughts on the topic.
1. For some, video interaction is highly personal. You're inviting work into your home, and even with virtual backgrounds and quick access to the mute button, video can be exhausting for these reasons and/or just because it's video. Not everyone has adjusted as well as others to this form of communication.
2. You're describing a desired end state, which is not necessarily the current reality. Small and agile teams/companies may have more success in fundamentally altering their communication structures and habits. Larger (and especially growing) orgs haven't necessarily mastered this. Entire teams who have never worked remotely have been asked to adjust overnight. And even though we've all been in this for awhile now, the organizational change required to truly alter the meaning of a meeting, or perhaps remove the need for that meeting altogether is not something that will be achieved any time soon for some companies.
3. I can fully dedicate myself to making "remote work effective for myself" (and in fact, I have - I've been remote for ~7 years), but making those changes for myself does not automatically translate to changes for the team/org. Anecdotally, pre-COVID, I spent ~6-7 days/month IN the office to handle those things that are better accomplished in person. That's what made it work for me. That's no longer an option, AND everyone who I worked with - folks who were not remote workers - are all going through their own personal transition and set of struggles unique to their home life, personality, prior WFH experience, etc.
I don't disagree with some aspects of your conclusion - but I'd argue that they are unreasonable to achieve without a company-wide commitment to changing how we work, and those changes will not happen quickly for most.
> I'd argue that they are unreasonable to achieve without a company-wide commitment to changing how we work, and those changes will not happen quickly for most.
Yep, I agree with that 100%. We all got surprised by going remote last spring. And we didn't know how long it would last. But it is time for companies to make that commitment and act on it.
sorry to say, but most of the people that i know that don't like working from home are micromanagers (who have to know what every employee is doing at every second of the day), people who like to gossip (usually the people that hang around the water cooler all day) or warm bodies (co-workers who do nothing all day anyway but want to be at work so they can act like they do something)
people who are self-motivated or like to GSD, don't want the distractions that come along with an office or waste their time commuting.
I work in management consulting. Between fifty and eighty percents of my work each week is having meetings with my customers to figure out exactly what their problems are and work on solving them. You lose so much by being remote: body language, less formal moments like coffee breaks and lunch. It makes everything more complicated.
i do the same thing over the phone and through google meet. i don't ever have to go to see a client face to face. some clients i have are even across the country and i have never personally met them.
point being is that if you can navigate your clients through the correct questions, cut down on the small talk and have focused, guided meetings, there is no reason to have to meet someone face to face.
There used to be soooo many small interactions that happen throughout the day that right now require way too much formal structure. For example, after lunch as we're walking back to our desks we would randomly chat about an idea. These ideas might grow into a bigger group conversation that clarifies things or shifts how one approaches it. Sometimes just sitting next to someone having that conversation is enough, and sometimes I feel like I have something to contribute to it.
These are things that can never be replaced with WFH and shouldn't need to be. It's not a problem right now since we're all WFH as we're in the middle of this pandemic. Once we return to safer times, some of us will really want to stay WFH, but they'll begin to miss out on a lot of these small interactions. People won't realize they missed out, and it'll never be intentional, but it'll happen. At some point it'll become a forcing function to bring everyone back into the office.
I am definitely pro-WFH a couple days a week, like Tue/Thur or Wed/Fri. Make those meeting-less days and I can use those to go into deep focus mode. If the whole company does it then we won't miss out on any in-office banter.
This isn't to say there aren't roles that work well fully remote if the entire team is fully remote too. Keep in mind those are going to be less-creative projects and much more task based, and if that appeals to you, those will always exist. They existed before the pandemic, and what's different now is that these types of teams can now flourish in bigger companies as well.
There used to be soooo many small interactions that happen throughout the day that right now require way too much formal structure.
That's what I miss. It's those conversations in the hallway, or seeing someone in the break room that reminds you about something you meant to ask them about.
It's really hard to replicate that in WFH. I can't want to say "can't be replicated" or "shouldn't need to be". I think they absolutely should be replicated. But I don't know how. Things like slack help, but it's just too disconnected. You can have "fun meetings" (a contradiction in terms!), but those feel like a waste of time. Zoom happy hours exhaust me.
> These are things that can never be replaced with WFH
I don't see how that's true. These kinds of chats can easily take place via chat apps, informal real time chats, etc. In fact, I'd argue they're significantly better in those forums. Off the cuff few people have very well thought out ideas. Written conversation tends to yield more well-formed and careful communication. This may reduce the quantity, but likely increases the quality.
> At some point it'll become a forcing function to bring everyone back into the office.
Only at companies where this kind of thing is required for whatever reason (usually companies with old school or technologically impaired brass). If you don't get offered a promotion or get to contribute to a project b/c you didn't have lunch with your boss to chat about some random idea that flung into your head and could only be shared in person, then I'd argue it's no place I'd want to be. Certainly others may prefer this type of environment, but I would view this as a company with misplaced priorities and inefficient structures.
> Written conversation tends to yield more well-formed and careful communication. This may reduce the quantity, but likely increases the quality.
But that defeats the purpose. The whole of the interactions mentioned (at least for me) is that they are spontaneous, informal, unstructured and not tracked.
> b/c you didn't have lunch with your boss to chat about some random idea that flung into your head
Companies are first and foremost collection of people. At some point, building a career means building ties with the rest of the company and there is only so much you can do out of strictly professional interactions. So yes, at some point, not having the ability to have lunch with your boss will hinder your career.
> Certainly others may prefer this type of environment, but I would view this as a company with misplaced priorities and inefficient structures.
Most employees are not robots. It's not only about being efficient. At some point things need to feel a bit human.
The paraphrased summary of what you're saying here is "I want to have conversational in-person interaction with people and I identify mainly with companies that value this highly." This is certainly fine and understandable, but is more of a personality trait than a company or productivity rule (or guiding function as you put it earlier). What you call "feel a bit human" I call "office politics." Forced superfluous off the cuff interaction sounds terrible to me. You say most employees are like you (not robots), I say it depends.
The real answer here is there is no universal answer. Your guiding function is not the same as mine as we have different tolerances and wishes for interaction. Yours is not more right nor more creative in every case, just as mine is not more efficient nor more productive in all instances.
You're right companies are collections of people, and there is no singular method to organizing them that makes sense in all cases as personalities are different. Usually though, autonomy is important to satisfaction. Letting your people choose their environment rather than forcing your own personality on them is more likely to help them, and in turn the organization, succeed.
Dude, that's totally fine, if you're okay with online only and that gives you personal maximum job satisfaction there are tons of fully remote positions out there waiting for you if you haven't found one yet. You and I don't have to want the same things out of a job.
It doesn't mean that online chat is equivalent to in-person informal conversation. They are different mediums and different tools.
Why does it have to be either/or? Why not both? My team is kicking around the idea of being on-site one day every week or two. We have noticed an increased productivity while working from home yet there are things we miss working together. My employer is paying attention and realizing they can significantly reduce their office expenses while providing a space for teams to meet periodically.
My employer is also realizing you don't have to rely exclusively on local talent. For practical purposes if you're meeting every week or two then you still have to live in the same region. For example, one of the guys on my team just bought a house that's 2-2.5 hours away from the office. If he has to make that trip once every other week then it's not bad. Given that traffic congestion has dramatically decreased that 2-2.5 hours provides you with considerable range and options with where to live. Yet you still get to interact with your team face-to-face every other week. It's the best of both worlds - I think.
Is this a scenario you guys have been thinking about?
My very first job programming was in Sacramento while I was living on the Peninsula. I would go in once a week and I have missed that schedule ever since.
I think we should identify that there's two separate main concerns people have over WFH:
(1) the loss of fidelity of moving business information. Informal and unscheduled discussions contributed a lot to movement of information within a business, triggered innovation in unexpected places, and losing these conversations had a big impact. In addition I think it's fair to say talking to someone in person is almost always more effective than talking over the internet (body language, no delay, etc etc)
(2) the loss of the the social connection that all humans crave in some amount (even extreme introverts like myself). Scheduled online meetings might be effective for keeping in touch with people you knew before the pandemic, but it's not as effective as office chitchat for building a connection with people you haven't already met. I can't even imagine how lonely it must feel starting a new job when the entirety of your relationships are built over zoom and slack.
I don't know the answer for (1), but (2) is something that I'm confident we could find an answer to in a more remote world. For all of history, humanity has been able to build communities and fulfill the social itch, long before the industrial revolution (i.e. before most workers commuted to a shared workplace), so I'm confident we could do it again if the world continues moving work remote post-pandemic. Actually, I'm hopeful we could do it better than in a commuting world: in a non-commuting world, individuals should be much more invested in their community, their neighborhood and their neighbors, something that from my understanding has been on the decline for the past century or so (coinciding with the rise of the automobile, the rise of the 2 working parent household, and the fall of the multi-generation household).
I'm exhausted of the pandemic situation as well, but working from home is not the main driver. The enormous reductions in social interaction, random and intentional, is my primary driver.
No gyms, clubs, bars, libraries, etc., and now I find that whenever I get even short social interactions I'm extremely delighted. I think that these social interactions is one of the main drivers of the desire to work in the office, not productivity or any other metric.
Am I alone in thinking that video conferencing (i.e. you can see people's faces) is totally useless?
Screen sharing is fine, but seeing random people's faces is distracting at best and reduces my tolerance for meetings.
- My home/life balance is shot to shit. I can't just leave work at work
anymore. And now I have a toddler and a dozen other distractions as part of my workday.
- Also, I am not reading anything anymore. It turns out my commute was the only time I got any reading done, and that 40 mins of cooldown between work and home was actually important in some way to my personal life.
- Any meeting virtually takes about half-again as long.
- Sure, no one is dropping in to bug you. But we are now missing deadlines like crazy because people will just work on whatever and never bother to check in on each other. It turns out that 16 hours on a project someone could have told you was about to be canned is less productive than 5 minutes of someone dropping in on you and telling you that it's about to be canned.
- Burnout is crazy high because now nobody cares about your life and how you are doing. Some people effectively lost all of their friends overnight.
- The quiet, conscientious people who make up the bread and butter of an organization will never have the assertiveness to be heard in a virtual setting. The only people who are consistently getting things done are the bullies.
- Promotions and advancements will be a shitshow. No one knows what an effective employee looks like right now, even less a manager.
- In the case this does workout then corporate has is considering hiring people from wherever they are cheapest since there are no geographic constraints.
I can't speak to everyone's experience, but as someone who has shifted back and forth in my career between technical and business roles, I can confirm that I was much more productive at home when working on technical problems, and much MUCH less effective when working on business problems.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadIt might have to do with where I was raised, or maybe I'm just more extroverted than I think, but these days the two things I really miss most are 1) regularly seeing friends who aren't my absolute closest circle and 2) small, casual interactions with total strangers (but that are slightly more than "that'll be $7.62"). The second has recently started to weigh on me more; maybe that's why I write a lot on HN/reddit :D
Exactly. This, for me, is a perfect summary.
I am perfectly fine with working from home but the mental toll of having virtually nowhere to go outside of my four walls is starting to wear on me. It makes me upset and frustrated and I start projecting those emotions onto the actions of others and it becomes a downward cycle.
I'm not particularly social. In fact, I'm almost anti-social (I do not like the interactions like "how are you doing?" in the shops / "hello there!" while walking in a park / "how's your day going?" entering a takeaway place, and I will absolutely never strike up a conversation at the bus stop or on a train), but this is starting to feel suffocating.
Yet I'm still going to avoid unnecessary trips and minimize contact because until we have some effective shots to go around, that's how I avoid the consequences of this stupid virus.
Now, even though I wake up without an alarm, eat clean, and exercise every day my productivity has tanked. There's some deep, human alarm buried somewhere in the reptile part of my brain that is saying 'things are not right...you are not ok...things are not right,' and it's been doing it since March. I can't seem to find a breaker to switch it off.
There's only so many times you can walk around the block.
I definitely consider myself an introvert, but I also realized I would normally do a ton of stuff during the day where I was just generally "around" people - I liked walking around our downtown, or eating out (even if I was alone), or working from a coffee shop in preference to working from home.
I really feel like I'm having a weird feeling of disassociation from the world, and I don't like it.
FYI, just because you've already had it doesn't mean you can't be an asymptomatic carrier. In fact, you're more likely to be one, since you're less likely to have symptoms again.
Also, some people have had it twice.
That statement defies all science and logic. Either I have immunity, which means the virus can’t survive in my body which means I can’t be a carrier OR I don’t have immunity at which point it’s just as likely to get symptoms as it was the first time.
> Also, some people have had it twice.
There is no actual data to suggest that, only a few self reported cases which scientists have said were far from clear. It’s still regarded as very unlikely and in fact all regions in the world which had a very severe outbreak in March and April haven’t had a second wave at all yet whilst the rest of such countries are currently in the middle of a steep second spike again.
> and in fact all regions in the world which had a very severe outbreak in March and April haven’t had a second wave at all yet
That's just straight up wrong. Most everywhere is now seeing a second wave, except the USA, because we never ended our first wave.
But if you have data showing that regions with a high level of infection in March don't have a high level now, I'd love to see it.
Here is some data about Spain, showing Madrid with a huge second wave: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/europe/spain-...
You should probably investigate Madrid before making such strong statements.
If you very generically categorize introversion/extroversion as (I realize this is an oversimplification and doesn't take all factors into account):
- Interacting with people consumes energy
- Interacting with people is fuel
Missing that interaction as an introvert doesn't seem to make sense at first.
But for myself, I've realized that it's a bit more nuanced than that. It's not so much that all interaction saps energy. Certain types of interaction does.
Put me in a conference room all day with a group of colleagues to plan the next release, and I'll be utterly exhausted by the end.
Put me in a crowded street festival, and I'll feel energized and alive.
Make me talk with people at the crowded street festival, and I'll be exhausted by the end.
All of this to say, not all interactions are created equal, and I think it's fair to say that even introverts like/need to be around people, but the kinds of interactions an introvert is asked to participate in will mean the difference between energy/exhaustion.
The biggest downsides are a lack of human interaction with my coworkers. I've gotten used to Zoom meetings but they just aren't the same. I also miss the organic hallway conversations. Instead of running into someone while grabbing coffee or water I now have to go out of my way to book time with people. Its totally changed how I interact with people beyond my immediate group.
I suspect I'll WFH for as long as possible while going in a few times a month to socialize.
Same. And for most people, I'm just not gonna book that time. It's time consuming (and sometimes awkward) to have one on one zoom chats with people in a way that a short conversation in the hallways isn't.
I have booked social meetings with other folks at work, and sometimes you have energy for it and sometimes you don't. The fact that the meeting is for a fixed time in your calendar and that you're on camera, makes it feel so formal too.
This is a terrible way to measure loss of productivity if you weren't doing this before the pandemic. Numerous times I've missed my day's targets because something came up or one of the task was more difficult than I expected is too high to count, remote and in office.
I know I'm being pessimistic, but this sounds like a way to micromanage your employees and build plausible deniability to fire whoever you want whenever you feel like it.
There are so many days where I've uttered the phrase "So this is what I'm doing today" destroying what ever you originally had planned. Whether that's from some emergency/important email, a newly found bug that is critical, or just one of those comment/requests from a senior manager that sounds like it's made on the whim but comes with the un-said "by end of day".
There isn't a lot of room to optimize for a WFH world with those kinds of spatial restrictions.
Personally, I've found meeting days to be pretty much unbearable for working from home, while I love my maker days from home. Anything that requires collaboration of more than 2 or 3 people just sucks to do over Zoom, IMO, but being able to lock myself in a quiet room and turn off notifications is a godsend for writing code.
In my experience, I've found that this seems to match up with the opinions of the people I know. The people who work in jobs that require a lot of meetings are completely burned out on WFH, while the people I know who are mainly individual contributiors absolutely love it. I'm curious if that is the experience others are having, but personally, it seems to me a good explanation why opinions on WFH seem to be all over the place.
Recently tried pair programming, it was a joke. Or I wish it was, rather a frustrating experience for both parties. Maybe one day virtual reality will take it closer to real experience, but we were far away from that.
I hate my work now more than ever. Meetings certainly don't help. Kind of death by thousand cuts.
One person writes a test, the other implements the test. Commit between non-passing test and passing implementation. Switch places, repeat.
In this way you don't have to rely on controlling the ux of a remote machine and you can just rely on the screen sharing video and voice communication.
It's often impossible to schedule a meeting with 5 people where there is a no-conflict time for anyone.
The person scheduling (ideally) looks at people's calendars, guesses which meetings a person will be able to move (20-person OKR review no, 1-1 with peer yes), and tries to schedule at a time like that.
So yes, anywhere I've worked, blocking your calendar doesn't magically get you out of meetings.
The reward mechanisms of Extrovert brains is tied to social contact. Introverts not so much. Whats required in creating good teams is understanding there is a spectrum and different people need different things to thrive.
I've noticed a marked increase in meeting pre-amble:
- General checkins about how people are doing / holding up (mostly a positive thing)
- Chitchat about the latest thing: new COVID restrictions, or a favorite restaurant closing, or "I finally braved a haircut"
- Fires
- The usual small chitchat about the weather, etc.
I've interpreted this as folks feeling desperate for connection. Connection they'd usually get by being in the office.
When I started typing this comment, I was trying to categorize the type of meeting where I've seen this happen, but it's actually pretty universal, ranging from:
- Daily standups and other standing meetings with immediate team
- Broader planning discussions
- I've even seen this "personal interest" chatter from execs who are usually a bit more private.
At times, it's nice to indulge in this. Over time, it's had a negative impact on productivity. It's hard to know how to react to it - on the one hand, it feels like people are in need, and this is their way of staying sane. On the flip side, there aren't very many hours in a day.
Could be a company culture thing.
But these updates are limited to the weekly all hands meeting. Other meetings just get right into it.
It seems to be a good balance of getting to know your coworkers and not wasting too much time. In the grand scheme of things, it probably takes up less time than all the random water cooler chitchat that takes place in an office.
So much better in fact that I wish I could continue to work from home at least a couple of days a week even after covid is over!
I suspect a part of this is due to the fact that developers/individual contributors are more used to using tools like git, ssh etc. that makes the transition almost seamless; my workflow is completely independent of even my machine, I could pick up any brand new laptop on amazon and I'd be productive within minutes. Maybe less familiarity with the technology stack is a significant source of additional attrition.
https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
Usual chitchat between coworkers is not what a CxO would complain about.
First and foremost, Mr Nadella has an office with a door. This is a privilege he and his management staff have denied to quite a few of his employees, even after those employees repeatedly turned in surveys indicating their preference for not-that.
Distractions and being able to get away from the din of the open plan are much easier to do when you are simply not in the din of open plan.
I'm in tech but not a software developer and my team does a lot of different things at the same time, so this probably colors my view. Perhaps software devs are either more outgoing, can manage distractions easier, or have some other secret method to flourish in open plan.
This is why I've greatly enjoyed working from home. The only distractions I have are on my computer, and thus can be easily managed, or my partner and pet who live with me and neither of them come barging in with an Urgent Question Which Must Be Answered Immediately or carry on long and loud conversations about disparate topics multiple times per day.
Most of the central campus is a large hole in the ground because it is being rebuilt and the buildings constructed there will not have solo or pair offices.
No, I think we've got a larger proportion of introverts in SW development than compared to many other fields.
> can manage distractions easier,
Definitely no. When you're developing code you're essentially loading up that code into your brain. Every interruption causes it to fall out of your head and you need to start that process over. It can take a good half hour or more to get into the programming "zone", so each interruption costs a significant amount of time.
Interruptions are really bad for software development productivity.
> or have some other secret method to flourish in open plan.
Nope. A very good pair of noise cancelling earphones maybe help some, but mostly we just have to put up with it because that's what management decided to do to save a little money without realizing that it's detrimental to productivity.
I am sure there are another dozen in-office perks that CEO has that the average employee does not.
I can poop outdoors on backpacking trips using natural materials to wipe, I can poop in busy airports and I can poop in stinking 100 degree portapotties.
But I have a really hard time pooping in gleaming offices where all my coworkers can see me walking into the bathroom and emerging 10 minutes later. I hate it!
The answer to the latter, if you are not a horrible person, is of course not. You don't really care, it's not your problem, you're not keeping track of it, it's just an event you forget moments later. Probably, then, that's what your coworkers think of you, when you go; so stop caring, because they definitely don't.
(If anyone ever were to metaphorically give me shit for using the bathroom, I'd turn it around on them in a heartbeat, too. It's so easy - just ask, what kind of creep cares about their coworker's bodily functions to this extent? Gross, weird!)
before WFH, I worked at a desk in an open floorplan. for whatever reason, it gives me a constant low level of anxiety to be in an environment where lots of people can see me, especially if I can't easily tell when people are actually looking. so I used to go to the bathroom a bit more often than I really needed, just so I could spend a few minutes in a more private space. I personally don't care, but I certainly do notice which of my coworkers also seem to be frequent users of the bathroom. if I were a pointy-haired boss, that might be one of the data points used to assemble my list of slackers.
In All Quiet on the Western Front, there's a passage about this, where the men discover a tremendous camaraderie about their shared shitting time - since there's no way to have privacy or any nicer facilities than what they can scrape together, it's basically just a purely functional experience. They sit in a field and provide each other dignity, instead of privacy; something we could well learn from.
Interestingly, the Romans also had this - https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTcxODU0MDM4OTM2MDY5N... - and it seems they did fine by it. It may be only really in relatively recent Western culture that we added a layer of shame over a natural act, and in turn required immense privacy for it. Wasn't the Tuilieries garden in Paris a place where fancy ladies might pop a squat?
I once worked at a startup with 300 people on a floor with one bathroom with 3 stalls. 90% men. You'd always be waiting, you'd always be voiding yourself next two two other people. Maybe people you'd be going back to sit next to in a few minutes. You begin to know things about people you don't want to know.
I myself of course do prefer the privacy, like most anyone, and further prefer a single occupancy bathroom because the hygiene opportunities are much better when you have direct and private access to a sink. I think the 300 people to 3 stalls situation was probably close to violating some kind of building code and at the very least it's just not a good example of treating your workers as though you value them.
On the far polar opposite, I worked at a startup that had 5 single-occupancy bathrooms for 50 people. Two of them had showers. It was so much nicer in every way.... just that feeling that you were as comfortable at work as you are at home. Not just cattle, but treated with modern dignity; there's a cost to the employer to do this, but it might actually have ROI in the sense that your employees are more comfortable and healthier.
Oddly enough, I think the shift to open offices deserves at least some credit here. I think most office spaces were designed with a median estimate of occupancy in mind. Before open offices, it was a mix of offices and cubicles, with much less density. When I worked in a cube farm, we had 4 stalls and 2 urinals for about 60-70 men on two floors. My most recent office had 2 single occupancy bathrooms for about 40 people. If we count the urinal as 0.5 toilet, we get almost double the per-bathroom density in the open office.
And the other confounding factor is when you combine open offices with cell phones, the bathroom turns into the 'Candy Crush break'. I imagine median occupancy times were lower back in the day, as lugging a newspaper or magazine to the bathroom was a little too obvious.
Here you need at least a stall and an urinal per twenty male occupants and two stalls per twenty female and the entrance can't be directly connected to the working space so you need to have an intermediate space (a corridor or a changing room for example).
I'm not American, friend. Poor conditions exist even in very nice places, simply because people don't get together and do anything about it. After all, who wants to be the Bathroom Advocacy Dude?
Our company considered getting rid of cubicles a few years ago and there was almost an open revolt. People ended up accepting drastically smaller cubicles as a compromise and everyone ended up pretty happy.
I can confirm, having spent time at Microsoft, that Microsoft provides a very proportion of offices to their workers.
Microsoft once ran recruiting ads for programmers advertising that the job came with an office with a door.
Meetings have become excruciating to me. I'm not alone so it does seem like people are having fewer meetings (positive!) but the idea that we're all going to be remote knowledge workers after this seems to be a fantasy. I think the remote workforce will grow 2-4x, and certain nonessential knowledge work will become remote (and therefore cheaper) but the best and brightest knowledge workers will continue to all congregate in high COL cities for career development and things by and large will not be that different.
If you are getting exhausted by video calls, something is wrong. You should not be spending all your days on calls, doing even more meetings than before. You should be using a variety of communication mechanisms, and figuring out which work for different situations. Managers should not be striving for "more contact", they should be striving for "more trust". You should also be relaxing the formality of calls so they are not exhausting. And your teams should be figuring out their own personal WFH environments - we are all different, which is why the advice on WFH is so scattered. Individuals need to experiment to find out what works for them.
If you miss the office because your simply miss the people and enjoy the office environment, that is one thing. But if you miss it because you have not yet put in those efforts to make remote work effective for yourself, your team, or your entire organizations... then you have some work to do.
Furthermore when those meetings/calls involve multiple persons it becomes increasingly time consuming and complex to scale efficient interaction. In my experience impossible.
I admit, it took me months to break down exactly which conversations truly need to happen each week, and the smallest groups that still made them effective. But it is quite possible.
As a Product Manager at a larger SaaS Platform company, if I did not carefully say "no" to most invites that come my way, I'd be on calls for 10 hours/day. Even with that, I'm still on more meetings than I should be (currently not sustainable), and I'm actively seeking strategizes to improve this.
> If you are getting exhausted by video calls, something is wrong. You should not be spending all your days on calls, doing even more meetings than before.
Is not congruent with
> your teams should be figuring out their own personal WFH environments - we are all different
There are many reasons to be exhausted by video calls that have nothing to do with something being "wrong".
Some general thoughts on the topic.
1. For some, video interaction is highly personal. You're inviting work into your home, and even with virtual backgrounds and quick access to the mute button, video can be exhausting for these reasons and/or just because it's video. Not everyone has adjusted as well as others to this form of communication.
2. You're describing a desired end state, which is not necessarily the current reality. Small and agile teams/companies may have more success in fundamentally altering their communication structures and habits. Larger (and especially growing) orgs haven't necessarily mastered this. Entire teams who have never worked remotely have been asked to adjust overnight. And even though we've all been in this for awhile now, the organizational change required to truly alter the meaning of a meeting, or perhaps remove the need for that meeting altogether is not something that will be achieved any time soon for some companies.
3. I can fully dedicate myself to making "remote work effective for myself" (and in fact, I have - I've been remote for ~7 years), but making those changes for myself does not automatically translate to changes for the team/org. Anecdotally, pre-COVID, I spent ~6-7 days/month IN the office to handle those things that are better accomplished in person. That's what made it work for me. That's no longer an option, AND everyone who I worked with - folks who were not remote workers - are all going through their own personal transition and set of struggles unique to their home life, personality, prior WFH experience, etc.
I don't disagree with some aspects of your conclusion - but I'd argue that they are unreasonable to achieve without a company-wide commitment to changing how we work, and those changes will not happen quickly for most.
This is why people are clamoring to get back.
Yep, I agree with that 100%. We all got surprised by going remote last spring. And we didn't know how long it would last. But it is time for companies to make that commitment and act on it.
people who are self-motivated or like to GSD, don't want the distractions that come along with an office or waste their time commuting.
point being is that if you can navigate your clients through the correct questions, cut down on the small talk and have focused, guided meetings, there is no reason to have to meet someone face to face.
These are things that can never be replaced with WFH and shouldn't need to be. It's not a problem right now since we're all WFH as we're in the middle of this pandemic. Once we return to safer times, some of us will really want to stay WFH, but they'll begin to miss out on a lot of these small interactions. People won't realize they missed out, and it'll never be intentional, but it'll happen. At some point it'll become a forcing function to bring everyone back into the office.
I am definitely pro-WFH a couple days a week, like Tue/Thur or Wed/Fri. Make those meeting-less days and I can use those to go into deep focus mode. If the whole company does it then we won't miss out on any in-office banter.
This isn't to say there aren't roles that work well fully remote if the entire team is fully remote too. Keep in mind those are going to be less-creative projects and much more task based, and if that appeals to you, those will always exist. They existed before the pandemic, and what's different now is that these types of teams can now flourish in bigger companies as well.
That's what I miss. It's those conversations in the hallway, or seeing someone in the break room that reminds you about something you meant to ask them about.
It's really hard to replicate that in WFH. I can't want to say "can't be replicated" or "shouldn't need to be". I think they absolutely should be replicated. But I don't know how. Things like slack help, but it's just too disconnected. You can have "fun meetings" (a contradiction in terms!), but those feel like a waste of time. Zoom happy hours exhaust me.
I don't see how that's true. These kinds of chats can easily take place via chat apps, informal real time chats, etc. In fact, I'd argue they're significantly better in those forums. Off the cuff few people have very well thought out ideas. Written conversation tends to yield more well-formed and careful communication. This may reduce the quantity, but likely increases the quality.
> At some point it'll become a forcing function to bring everyone back into the office.
Only at companies where this kind of thing is required for whatever reason (usually companies with old school or technologically impaired brass). If you don't get offered a promotion or get to contribute to a project b/c you didn't have lunch with your boss to chat about some random idea that flung into your head and could only be shared in person, then I'd argue it's no place I'd want to be. Certainly others may prefer this type of environment, but I would view this as a company with misplaced priorities and inefficient structures.
But that defeats the purpose. The whole of the interactions mentioned (at least for me) is that they are spontaneous, informal, unstructured and not tracked.
> b/c you didn't have lunch with your boss to chat about some random idea that flung into your head
Companies are first and foremost collection of people. At some point, building a career means building ties with the rest of the company and there is only so much you can do out of strictly professional interactions. So yes, at some point, not having the ability to have lunch with your boss will hinder your career.
> Certainly others may prefer this type of environment, but I would view this as a company with misplaced priorities and inefficient structures.
Most employees are not robots. It's not only about being efficient. At some point things need to feel a bit human.
The real answer here is there is no universal answer. Your guiding function is not the same as mine as we have different tolerances and wishes for interaction. Yours is not more right nor more creative in every case, just as mine is not more efficient nor more productive in all instances.
You're right companies are collections of people, and there is no singular method to organizing them that makes sense in all cases as personalities are different. Usually though, autonomy is important to satisfaction. Letting your people choose their environment rather than forcing your own personality on them is more likely to help them, and in turn the organization, succeed.
It doesn't mean that online chat is equivalent to in-person informal conversation. They are different mediums and different tools.
My employer is also realizing you don't have to rely exclusively on local talent. For practical purposes if you're meeting every week or two then you still have to live in the same region. For example, one of the guys on my team just bought a house that's 2-2.5 hours away from the office. If he has to make that trip once every other week then it's not bad. Given that traffic congestion has dramatically decreased that 2-2.5 hours provides you with considerable range and options with where to live. Yet you still get to interact with your team face-to-face every other week. It's the best of both worlds - I think.
Is this a scenario you guys have been thinking about?
(1) the loss of fidelity of moving business information. Informal and unscheduled discussions contributed a lot to movement of information within a business, triggered innovation in unexpected places, and losing these conversations had a big impact. In addition I think it's fair to say talking to someone in person is almost always more effective than talking over the internet (body language, no delay, etc etc)
(2) the loss of the the social connection that all humans crave in some amount (even extreme introverts like myself). Scheduled online meetings might be effective for keeping in touch with people you knew before the pandemic, but it's not as effective as office chitchat for building a connection with people you haven't already met. I can't even imagine how lonely it must feel starting a new job when the entirety of your relationships are built over zoom and slack.
I don't know the answer for (1), but (2) is something that I'm confident we could find an answer to in a more remote world. For all of history, humanity has been able to build communities and fulfill the social itch, long before the industrial revolution (i.e. before most workers commuted to a shared workplace), so I'm confident we could do it again if the world continues moving work remote post-pandemic. Actually, I'm hopeful we could do it better than in a commuting world: in a non-commuting world, individuals should be much more invested in their community, their neighborhood and their neighbors, something that from my understanding has been on the decline for the past century or so (coinciding with the rise of the automobile, the rise of the 2 working parent household, and the fall of the multi-generation household).
No gyms, clubs, bars, libraries, etc., and now I find that whenever I get even short social interactions I'm extremely delighted. I think that these social interactions is one of the main drivers of the desire to work in the office, not productivity or any other metric.
- My home/life balance is shot to shit. I can't just leave work at work anymore. And now I have a toddler and a dozen other distractions as part of my workday.
- Also, I am not reading anything anymore. It turns out my commute was the only time I got any reading done, and that 40 mins of cooldown between work and home was actually important in some way to my personal life.
- Any meeting virtually takes about half-again as long.
- Sure, no one is dropping in to bug you. But we are now missing deadlines like crazy because people will just work on whatever and never bother to check in on each other. It turns out that 16 hours on a project someone could have told you was about to be canned is less productive than 5 minutes of someone dropping in on you and telling you that it's about to be canned.
- Burnout is crazy high because now nobody cares about your life and how you are doing. Some people effectively lost all of their friends overnight.
- The quiet, conscientious people who make up the bread and butter of an organization will never have the assertiveness to be heard in a virtual setting. The only people who are consistently getting things done are the bullies.
- Promotions and advancements will be a shitshow. No one knows what an effective employee looks like right now, even less a manager.
- In the case this does workout then corporate has is considering hiring people from wherever they are cheapest since there are no geographic constraints.
I can't speak to everyone's experience, but as someone who has shifted back and forth in my career between technical and business roles, I can confirm that I was much more productive at home when working on technical problems, and much MUCH less effective when working on business problems.
This is an indication of organizational dysfunction -- beyond WFH.