I'm partially remote working (RW) at an organization that is slowly rolling back its RW culture(1). The motto for this goes like 'teams work better if they are collocated, yada, yada'. The real reason is that managers want to feel in control (plus they want to drive away a lot of people by taking RW away). "Culture" is used as a smoke screen for more sinister incentives. (I can say that with confidence because I can see that RW is working fine while what hinders productivity is mammoth bureaucracy and politics put forward by the same people that keep blabbing about "culture".
To me it's clear that remote working is (should be) the way to go (why on earth tech jobs and consequently tech workers should cluster in small geographic areas, spend hours in commuting and feed our salaries to landlord rentiers is beyond my understanding). Then again other things in the past were a no-brainer future (e.g. less working hours - see experiments in Kellogs) but the world spinned to a different direction.
PS: Of course RW makes your tech job even easier to offshore which makes the whole thing more of a mixed bag of blessings and curses - like everything else in life :) .
(1) I think the trend started off by M.Mayer's move to roll back RW in yahoo (<cynic>leading to the spectacular yahoo growth we all know of</cynic>) but I'm not sure.
> The motto for this goes like 'teams work better if they are collocated, yada, yada'. The real reason is that managers want to feel in control (plus they want to drive away a lot of people by taking RW away).
Sorry, but I've got to be the party pooper in this thread. I have worked with teams over the years that indeed DO work better co-located, and who ARE more productive when forced to communicate in an open office environment, etc. Night and day difference. When not in that environment they reverted back to the ol' "do something in isolation, throw it over the fence, wait days for feedback, then iterate" mode. I will stress that not all teams needed co-location, but many absolutely did.
This whole thread needs to be filed under the category "different people/teams thrive in different environments", because right now it's a "remote Work is best for everyone" echo chamber.
Fair enough, but I believe we can do a little better than "different people/teams thrive in different environments".
If its within team communication, and with slack/trello/github/standups and the team members are not speaking except every few days then thats an issue.
If its with external teams, then perhaps its an opportunity for self service api's or automation? I.e. let me query your api instead of having to meet with you. Understood that most cultures don't function this way but is there argument with the ideal?
I think coordination is the key. If someone with authority isn't willing to step up and make sure everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing, things will definitely slow to a crawl and people won't communicate until it's too late. And that team will do better colocated. But a good PM can make a remote team work just as well as a colocated team, in my experience. If you don't have that person, you're just leaving your efficiency up to chance (does the team get along; do they feel like working that day) no matter the work environment you choose.
Edit: I'm not sure "is willing to" is the right phrase. You have to have a brilliant PM, period. I've worked with bad PMs, no PM, and a few great PMs, and it really is night and day. A talented PM can make an organization sing.
As somebody that remote works most of the time, I will stick my head out and agree that working side by side tends to be my most productive times with co-workers.
Working remotely is great for ones health. Co-working is best for synergy and communication.
Yep. Some people default-to-productive, and others need guidance, coaching, "forcing", whatever you want to call it. It's almost as if different people have different motivations, work habits and communication styles!
Yes. There is a pernicious group of candidate employees lurking outside of every organization all of the time, and if you let these people in, this is the kind of output you get.
People who've made their careers as "non-technical people managers" have no. freaking. idea. what to do when you put them in a "remote office". They've gotten by with their free donuts twice a week, their wry smiles, their nice suit, their good posture, and their firm handshake all of these years and work makes no sense to them if you can't have these things. Reading technical mumbo-jumbo in a Slack channel and having to pretend to know what it means is their worst nightmare.
It seems that every technical organization these types touch quickly begins to adopt nonsense practices and make really dubious overall business decisions. Sometimes the manager/executive's connections can help give the company a kick in the pants, but it usually won't survive the new employees' MBA-informed directives too long before fresh MBAs come in to issue a fresh kick in the pants or someone competent eventually ascends (rarely happens).
The really scary thing about the MBA-types is that once you let one in, they invite their friends, and then they're impossible to extricate. Then you start getting "technical" people (read: management's buddy who fixes his computer on the weekend) getting big titles, pretending they know what they're doing and making technical decisions that are absolutely, criminally disastrous in the medium and long term.
Then they call their friends at the trade mag and get an article written about their new revelation, which starts a trend that a lot of normal tech people inexplicably try to copy. :|
A lot of bureaucracy and politics are coming from tech people too. Turf wars, ego issues, you name it. But yes, collocation seems to be of particular advantage to the ones being talented at 'being pleasant to the right people'.
Yeah, it's not that there are no political issues among technical people. I just feel like most technical people will generally recognize good technical arguments and work toward them as long as the arguments are framed/presented considerately, because when it comes down to it, there are cold hard facts in that world. They're approaching their work semi-rationally, so there's some possibility that you'll get somewhere if you have a strong case respectfully presented. That's been my experience with good technical workers over the years.
The primary time that pattern is subverted is when a technical person gets overly concerned with appeasing a non-technical boss. That happens because the non-technical bosses want it to happen. They don't care about the engineering. They are trying to remake the technical side in their image, which is part of why they bring in the aforementioned weekend-computer-fixer and give him a fancy title like "director and architect". This makes it so that he doesn't really have to do much if any technical work because there is plausible deniability -- he can say he was busy doing "direction and architecture" so he didn't have time to write the code. Especially true if subordinates get added.
With non-technical types, successful interaction in the workplace goes from being half-about feelings and half-about demonstrable truths to being completely about feelings. To them, no arguments matter. For example, a non-technical manager or a faux-technical person will always be looking for ways to deflect blame because admitting you're wrong is weakness, it doesn't play well emotionally or superficially. If you want them to change something, you have to make it so that there is no possible superficial negative interpretation of their actions, and then you must show them why it's in their interest to do what you want them to do with emotions, because they don't operate in a world of rationality.
Technical teams are driven to improve their product even if there is blame involved or the possibility of a negative perception somewhere because there are actually consequences to failure or inefficiencies. The program will stop, the data may be lost, etc. Non-technicals don't have this type of real consequence behind their work.
For the non-technical MBA crowd, work is entirely a dance where you curtsy to the other entity's interest in authority, power, respect, and similar emotional expectations and (in)securities in the correct sequence. The dance program must be completed successfully. If it is, the other party rewards the participant(s) with a sum of money (aka "strippers and steak"); if not, offense is taken.
People from that world hate remote work because remote work takes away 97% of their dance floor. With few inflection points for emotional manipulation, they have practically nothing to work with. Technical people love remote work because it trims their "dance floor" down so that the emotional dance area is only there on the fringes, and the technical work can take what they feel is its appropriate place at center stage.
I'm not trying to wholly discount the emotional components that come into play in the workplace or say that they're necessarily wrong. But in work that comprises something more than pampering/nurturing the right feelings, it is obviously beneficial to minimize that aspect.
One huge mistake some companies do is treat remote vs on-site workers differently, making on-site people feel bad when they "work from home". If remote is available it should be available to everybody who doesn't need to be physically in the office, otherwise resentment starts to build up.
This has happened to me as an employee at my previous job;
People living far from office location were allowed to always remote work. However team members living in the same town needed a really good excuse to actually be able to do remote.
Why giving excuses?
I really think that for some types of work, for which you might have been hired for, being at the same office is important. Remote work is not easy nor for everyone and being able to work with remote team members neither it is. The easiest path is to have everyone at the office unless it's physically important to have someone you have in your team there.
But certainly its available to everyone to negotiate during the interview process no? I have also seen people "become remote" after some time on the job, so its also possible to negotiate after that fact I would think.
> certainly its available to everyone to negotiate during the interview process no
Probably not. It would be available to those that are considered living too far away from the office. Those that work within a range that is considered close enough are expected to be in the office and attempting to negotiate that would take you out of consideration.
I'm a remote worker and love it. That being said it's important to keep in mind that face to face communication and collaboration is unquestionably higher bandwidth.
It's gotten much easier since Video Conference became ubiquitous but there is still no contest when comparing face to face communication to a Video Conference or Conference call. Now I happen to think the benefits of remote working outweigh that loss of bandwidth but I don't think you can make the case for it without acknowledging that loss of bandwidth.
A remote team is good at maximizing those benefits while minimizing the costs. But some people are just incapable of managing remote teams. I'm dealing with one right now and the pain is real on both sides.
I think RW supporting teams that do RW well (including both managers who know how to run it and techies) outperform local ones. However, RW makes it easier for slackers to slack off; it is difficult for less effective managers to detect, let alone handle it.
I think managing RW teams well (getting needed work and shielding members from most non-tech crap) is a pretty rare skill.
In any case, if you want to do X (work remotely) and your management sees this as a problem, not a solution, consider looking elsewhere.
> However, RW makes it easier for slackers to slack off; it is difficult for less effective managers to detect, let alone handle it.
This is, I think, because most management techniques don't rely on any sort of objective measurement to determine effectiveness.
Using measurements can have its own dangers if done poorly, but subjective observations and feelings about how productive or effective a team or individual is can be even more dangerous.
I've been on the receiving end of subjective judgements that have ruined a good team.
Yeah, I spent last week clarifying stuff with business analyst and QA person. Cleaning up delivery with small changes. When my team mate wrote quite a lot of code that need bunch of fixes. How to measure productivity.
" Then again other things in the past were a no-brainer future (e.g. less working hours - see experiments in Kellogs) but the world spinned to a different direction."
You are more efficient when you work less (obviously, because you have an internal deadline that says you want to finish before your time is up), it is just that the culture surrounding software engineering is biaised towards long hours, half in which you are not really working or working with a terrible productivity, or worse, be in endless meetings. It also pleases management to work more hours, because you "work harder" :-).
I can't think of a single positive thing any "company culture" I have experienced (around two dozen places in my lifetime so far) has ever created, but racism, sexism, harassment, homogeneity, demotivation, distraction, drunkedness, fraud, and other negatives were indeed products of "company culture" at almost every company I've worked for that touted a focus on "company culture." Often, even the food/drinks are shit, let alone the rest of the culture.
The great thing about remote work, IMO, is that there is NO remote culture and therefore, you don't have to be subjected to the above as much or as often (the actual article sounds like some generic marketing speak to me about something that doesn't exist). It's one of the huge perks I only realized after starting remote work. Mind you, there are whole classes of people, especially many middle managers, whose only job is to create the above things and call them "company culture," and they are typically not so happy about not controlling those below them through abuses of this idea. Thus, they want to pull the remote workers back into their sphere of influence, where they can be controlled, and their jobs' existence justified.
As far as being off shored: if they thought that was a good idea to begin with, the company would have already done it and I wouldn't be working remotely. They probably also wouldn't be in business anymore.
>The motto for this goes like 'teams work better if they are collocated, yada, yada'. The real reason is that managers want to feel in control (plus they want to drive away a lot of people by taking RW away).
A related reason, that I mentioned in a comment a few weeks ago, is that some people in management who are required to be in the office resent the fact that their reports (who by the nature of their role definitely do not need to be working every day in the main office) are remote and that it helps their work/life balance.
The solution, I think, is for companies to properly define which roles are open to remote — perhaps it might be time for developers to receive a comp differential for being office-based — and to make work in the main office more appealing. Good food, a nice office, and other quality onsite benefits are ways this can be achieved.
... before it's too late and they can't backtrack because it already cost too much in the transition and their ego can't handle admitting they were wrong.
I've lost track of the number of times I've been hired to fix an outsourced project disaster. I feel like this has burned enough people that I'm not nearly as worried about it as I was 10 years ago. If you make your living doing wordpress sites, though, it's time to retool.
To me it's clear that remote working is (should be) the way to go (why on earth tech jobs and consequently tech workers should cluster in small geographic areas, spend hours in commuting and feed our salaries to landlord rentiers is beyond my understanding). Then again other things in the past were a no-brainer future (e.g. less working hours - see experiments in Kellogs) but the world spinned to a different direction.
PS: Of course RW makes your tech job even easier to offshore which makes the whole thing more of a mixed bag of blessings and curses - like everything else in life :) .
(1) I think the trend started off by M.Mayer's move to roll back RW in yahoo (<cynic>leading to the spectacular yahoo growth we all know of</cynic>) but I'm not sure.