You can't lure employees back to the office

https://www.zdnet.com/article/they-really-arent-going-back-work-from-home-is-here-to-stay/

by CrankyBear • 5 years ago

136 202 5 years ago

abraxas2• 5 years ago

Could start with not making them such awful places to work by getting rid of those awful open floor plans. Want people back in offices? How about building some rather than having big cattle herd areas where every sound and germ travels for miles in every direction.

BrazzVuvuzela5• 5 years ago

It's also important to consider that many people don't have homes that are conducive to working, because there are many other people in the house, or because they don't have the space for a dedicated office, or any other number of reasons. This isn't applicable to everybody obviously, but offices should be able to compete on these fronts.

toomuchtodo• 5 years ago

Provide a coworking space stipend to everyone, obtained with a corporate group rate. It's not "work from home", but rather "work from anywhere."

Guest423• 5 years ago

My experiences in offices have generally involved being surrounded by many people who talk rather consistently.

When coupled with surprise meetings that don’t pertain directly to my projects and the inability to multitask, I think that the home office is a net positive.

wintermutestwin• 5 years ago

many people don't have homes that are conducive to working

That's because (up until this shift) they have been forced to live in close proximity to offices. For the price of a downtown apartment, you can live in a suburb or rural area with more space that you could need. The longer this forced shift (pandemic) goes on, the more people will move away from the poor quality of life cities. Once they get the taste of a life without tiny overpriced apartments and time sucking commutes, they will only go back if they are forced - i.e. don't have the skills to easily jump ship.

2pEXgD0fZ5cF2• 5 years ago

open floor plans

This is the part where I personally experienced the most friction between the management/lifestyle/trend bubble and "boots on the ground" people/devs.

All of a sudden blog posts and news posts popped up that claimed how open space is better, everybody loves it and everyone should be able to look every coworker in the eye and on his monitor, 0 barriers etc. Meanwhile I have yet to meet a coworker in real life that prefers or even likes this trend, personally I hate it. Makes it hard to focus, turns the distractions and noises up to 11 and makes overall for a terrible workplace. It was a major reason to quit my last job, and I am much happier with my current one.

Similarly I believe that homeoffice has probably sensitized many people to terrible workplace environments.

nostrebored4• 5 years ago

My best workplaces have always been open offices with high quality coworkers!

tick_tock_tick2• 5 years ago

Meanwhile I have yet to meet a coworker in real life that prefers or even likes this trend, personally I hate it.

I just don't believe this. I would say a good 2/3rd of employee's at every job I've worked at preferred the open floor plan. The only way I could possibly see not a single, not even one, person you've worked with preferring it is if you front run the conversation with such a vicious condemnation of it that they didn't feel comfortable sharing with you.

Similarly I believe that homeoffice has probably sensitized many people to terrible workplace environments.

I'll take a guess that you have extra space and no kids or some combination? The feedback I've seen is the exact opposite with people realizing how poorly their home setup is and how little ability they have to make better.

machiaweliczny2• 5 years ago

I hate open office. It's required to wear headphones to focus or you get migraine. And whole day with headphones is not comfy and probably not healthy.

The coolest work I've had outside my personal office was in rented house and room per team.

Although having office in city centre has it's perks that you could have lunch, beer, meet somewhere after work with collegues and I enjoyed that - but I feel it only worked as I had mostly same age, childless peers there.

Still commuting kills most of joy. I would move to village outide of city if only I could cook. Maybe some tourist place in the mountains will work.

marcosdumay• 5 years ago

Nearly all of my short term resistance is because of the environment temperature and low quality of drinking water (bad tasting mineral water and often contaminated by plastic bottles).

Guest423• 5 years ago

Also a positive in that it reduces highway traffic.

soared2• 5 years ago

The title of the article doesn’t really match the content. The article says 34% of workers want to go into the office 3-5 days a week. So very clearly you can lure employees back.. because some of them do want to go back.

The article has stats about what we’re all assuming, namely employees want wfh and employers don’t. But in no way does it attempt to answer/justify the thought provoking question asked in the title.

How would I be lured back into the office? As a late 20s male in the USA I mostly miss the social aspect of work. I always had friends at work (despite what the grumpy people says about coworkers being friends), and I miss that. I left a job four years ago and still hang out all the time with those old coworkers.

I’d also like to not be held to specific hours or days. Breakfast and lunch would lure me in, along with high quality coffee. I don’t mind open floor plans, but do know most people don’t like them.

sharadov3• 5 years ago

I miss the social aspect of work, as someone who took a remote job about 4.5 yrs back, I don't think most people who have only experienced it as a side effect of covid - realize how important it is for mental sanity. Yes, I like being at home too, but I would prefer hybrid, with no more than 1 to 2 days of working in the office.

rabuse2• 5 years ago

This is what weekends are for though. I've been remote pretty much my entire life, and still socialize a ton.

ykevinator2• 5 years ago

You nailed this I think it's exactly right.

ghaff9• 5 years ago

This is pretty much what I'm hearing even at a rather remote-friendly company. Most people have not up and moved away from where they were working--though I know a few who have. And pretty much every survey I've seen suggests that the most common behavior is going to be people coming into an office two or three days a week.

Personally I've gone fully remote but that's what I was effectively (though not officially) pre-pandemic. I just never bothered to request a status change in the system.

keewee7• 5 years ago

despite what the grumpy people says about coworkers being friends

Why are Americans so hostile to the idea of being friends with coworkers? In Denmark it's pretty common to have a beer with coworkers on Fridays and have an annual "Christmas dinner" in December or January. Many workplaces also have an annual company party.

ghaff9• 5 years ago

I don't see it as being "hostile to the idea of being friends with coworkers." I'm friends with quite a few current and former co-workers, mostly who weren't in a local office. It's more a pushback against the (perhaps mostly imagined) idea that people are arguing that social circles inherently revolve around work.

soared2• 5 years ago

It may be one of those opinions you always see on reddit, but isn't actually reflected in reality.

mkl95• 5 years ago

I will happily go back to the office for a life changing raise.

decafninja10• 5 years ago

This is pretty much what happened to me. New company is not friendly to WFH except for the occasional day here and there, but my compensation has quadrupled. I am not complaining.

notreallyserio• 5 years ago

It would have to be enough to allow me to retire soon, which would probably not be in their interest. So remote full time it is!

akudha3• 5 years ago

If everyone (whenever possible, obviously a trucker or a nurse can't work from home) worked from home, imagine how much better off we would all be - traffic would be less, people would eat home cooked food, less stress, less office politics, no need to pay for office space/coffee/electricity (even toilet paper) ... on and on and on. If I were running a software company, I'd calculate all these savings and pass it on to my employees and retain talent.

I guess the only people who don't like remote is middle management, their career depends on dumb meetings and other such meaningless things. At home, at least we can mute ourselves and do something useful.

FredPret6• 5 years ago

Take it a step further. No need to live on top of one another (unless you like that), no need to live in an unpleasant climate, no need to tolerate local politics you don’t like, etc. An explosion in human freedom.

machiaweliczny2• 5 years ago

Just make it so it's easy to employ people cross borders and you are trillionere.

akudha3• 5 years ago

Yup, if only we can work from anywhere...

I am flat out refusing non-remote jobs (I was remote even before covid) even though I am just an average engineer. One recruiter argued with me - she was like "remote workers should be paid less", lol. In my opinion, remote workers should be paid more, as companies aren't spending on their office space, electricity etc.

If our species survives for another 100 or more years, future generations will look at our cubicles and laugh. There is absolutely no reason for digital workers to go to office (with very few exceptions).

The one (only?) good thing that came out of COVID is people are realizing a lot of bullshit they have been fed all these years about work and are pushing back, though slowly - one of them being remote working.

smugglerFlynn3• 5 years ago

Take it a step further. No need to be present in a physical world at all, as you can replace all human-to-human interactions and other legacy experiences with their digital equivalents.

Even food can be delivered to the body via a series of tubes.

nickff2• 5 years ago

"If I were running a software company, I'd calculate all these savings and pass it on to my employees and retain talent.

This is the height of foolishness; to dismiss all those experienced managers out of hand. If someone far more experienced than you has taken a position, you should try to understand why a smart person could think that way, before calling them 'dumb'.

tuckerpo2• 5 years ago

Spotted the manager /s

inkblotuniverse• 5 years ago

They're not dumb, but their interests are misaligned with yours.

akudha3• 5 years ago

Experience doesn't necessarily equal to wisdom or smartness. I have been working remote for the last 5 years, after working in offices for a decade. Guess what advantage the office gave me? Nothing. Everything good I did in office I do at home, just more efficiently.

Also, you're assuming those "experienced" managers are taking a position that is beneficial to everyone. At least in my experience, this is not often true. They're doing what they need to do, to further their own careers (not faulting them, just pointing it out).

I didn't call the managers dumb, I called their meetings dumb. One can be super smart and still force dumb meetings, if that helps his/her career.

michaelcampbell2• 5 years ago

Compared to, say, calling something the height of foolishness and not knowing the source's experience?

I've had some great middle managers, but I've had far more (and even some of the good ones) that the company's and my own productivity wouldn't have suffered if that entire layer in the organization had never existed.

onlyrealcuzzo• 5 years ago

Interesting that you think managers have far more experience than ICs

On average, sure. There's not really such a thing as an entry level engineering manager.

But in FAANG the majority of managers manage at least one SWE with more experience than them.

Qub3d• 5 years ago

Indeed, the epitome of Chesterton's fence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

tick_tock_tick2• 5 years ago

With how I see everyone working during full remote work I think having an office will be viewed as a competitive advantage in the near future. Going from office mostly remote work will be another stage in a companies life-cycle. Cutting edge and heavy R&D reinvestment to stable slower long-term growth.

chefkoch2• 5 years ago

There should be shared office space next or in to the living areas so people could still socialice without commute.

baron8164• 5 years ago

I don't know if this would work, but Google, FB, Apple, et al should try to build out live/work communities. Yeah, kind of like a company town.

The best part of college is the college campus. I don't know why companies don't want to try to replicate that. It would definitely be more appealing to younger employees, and I be it would get them to stick around much longer.

Imagine being able to walk to work, and having most of your coworkers live close by as well. The social bonds you would form with people would be much stronger. And moving to that campus to start at the company would be less scary knowing that you'd quickly get to know and build good relationships with coworkers/neighbors.

Yeah, it would mean earning more money might not actually get you a nicer living arrangement, since you might not have many choices and pretty much everything would be provided for you. I guess you'd want to try to figure out the correct mixture (maybe 40% on campus 60% off).

ptmcc• 5 years ago

Sounds absolutely dreadful

sharkster711• 5 years ago

Most people in the US want to own the house they live in, and most would also want to not move when they move jobs. I think the campus idea would only appeal to younger folks.

I'd also not like the idea that my life revolves around work - and this sounds exactly like that.

baron8164• 5 years ago

Ok, I didn't say it should be mandatory.

A lot of people also don't care about owning a house (at least right now). A lot of people care about forming good relationships, but don't have good ways to do so.

lancebeet• 5 years ago

What about people's spouses or significant others?

baron8164• 5 years ago

Easy: the couple wouldn't have to live on the campus.

But I can ask you this: what happens to the significant others of people in the military?

FredPret6• 5 years ago

Campus is fun when you’re 19, but when you hit 35 and want to be more choosey about who you spend your time with, this no longer works. You’d have to multiply my salary by ten to get me to move to that hell.

baron8164• 5 years ago

I never said it should be mandatory, just something employers offer and maybe encourage. Companies have a history of putting people into "corporate housing", which is expensive. You may not like it, but others might.

MrKristopher• 5 years ago

In other words, megacorps should buy up / produce all the housing so that the employees can't become home owners?

rbartelme• 5 years ago

This is an extreme example of what can happen in a "company town". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_View_massacre

optimalsolver• 5 years ago

standardUser2• 5 years ago

In San Francisco, tech workers flooded the city specifically because they refused to live in the various bedroom communities close to their mega-campuses. Hence the widespread emergence of shuttles and satellite offices in city centers.

Karsteski• 5 years ago

ngl, this sounds like an absolute nightmare to me...

yowlingcat• 5 years ago

It sounds like you are building an "ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of" a city. Why not just live in the trendy areas of a real city if you want that feeling?

toast0• 5 years ago

Piling on that this sounds terrible. A case could be made for big tech should build high density housing near their offices, but once it's built, big tech shouldn't own or operate it. Chances are, a good number of people who work nearby would consider living there, but without any of the awful results of having your living arangements tied directly to your working arangements.

tuckerpo2• 5 years ago

I'd come to the office on a daily basis if companies began subsidizing my commute. I used to spend nearly 2 hours every day sitting in traffic, uncompensated, to get to/from the office. That's a _very_ large % of my life doing absolutely nothing of value to anyone, pumping emissions into the air.

decafninja10• 5 years ago

This, though it's public transit for me. Absolute waste of 2-3+ hours every day commuting to and from Manhattan. Multiply that by the number of my fellow Manhattan commuters* and that is a gargantuan waste of collective time for everybody.

* (I've observed the vast majority of people that work in Manhattan do not live in Manhattan)

Larrikin• 5 years ago

Are the passes not atleast tax subsidized? One of the perks I miss from the office was the commuter pass.

In Tokyo it was provided from the company, you said what your home station was and where your work was, bought the pass at the station, and were reimbursed.

Every single station in between was essentially free to go to and you got the discounted rates to other stations. It was pretty great when I worked in a Roppongi office my last year for going out on the weekends.

In Chicago it's a benefit of being able to pay before taxes so there's a slight discount, not as great but the passes here open up the entire system. When you're commuting it makes no sense to not to have the pass, so all your errands and weekend travel is covered.

davidgerard4• 5 years ago

In the UK. My company's dropped a lot of our office space, because we have no use for it any more - we've done very well in 2020 and 2021 full-remote. But meetings have their place, and some teams do better in the office, that's fine. So we renovated the space as largely for meetings of various sizes.

So when techies were called into our shiny new meetings-office (which is very nice, actually - happy to come in ... maybe every couple of months), they were immediately asking "so commute time is work time, right?" and "who's paying for my train ticket?"

The UK has absolutely proven that work from home is just fine and companies can still do super-well.

The big push over here for going back to the office is not from the companies - it's from commercial landlords, putting puff pieces in the newspapers. The actual companies can do arithmetic just fine, and realise that offices on the scale they were are just a losing proposition.

decafninja10• 5 years ago

I don't think the UK is really any special - for better or for worse, in this regard. It's probably company or even industry specific regardless of country.

My old company (bank) has a huge UK presence. They are adamantly anti-WFH whether you're in the US or UK or Asia, etc. My understanding is most banks and other financial services companies are likewise, and aren't a large number of UK SWEs working in finance?

codegeek7• 5 years ago

Depends on when you got the job. If you took the job knowing the 2 hour commute, it is more on you and the company has no obligation to subsidize. If you took the job when commute was reasonable but they changed their office and commute time went up, then it is on the employer to make some adjustments for you.

loco5niner3• 5 years ago

If you took the job when commute was reasonable but they changed their office and commute time went up, then it is on the employer to make some adjustments for you.

This is what happened to me, no adjustments.

cpursley2• 5 years ago

I've told companies in the past when job hunting that I'll drive into the office, but it will be an extra $20k per year in salary. And thats probably not enough.

ericmcer2• 5 years ago

Hundreds of people commuting from all over to gather at some gigantic corporate center everyday should be a thing of the past. It was bad for workers, bad for the environment, bad for neighborhoods/housing, and a bunch of overhead for the company to deal with.

That said collaboration and socialization are a great part of working. My dream is satellite offices, it would be cheap to have 10-20 5000 square foot offices spread throughout the bay area instead of one giant 50000sf mega office in the heart of downtown San Francisco.

SomewhatLikely2• 5 years ago

And if the team members don't live near that satellite what then? Centralized offices at least minimize the expected commute for workers randomly scattered around the metro. Satellite offices could lead to even longer commute times.

ericmcer2• 5 years ago

How? They could have a largish satellite in the city itself as well… I don’t really see how having more offices distributed throughout the area would lead to longer commutes. They could even scale up/down areas based on popularity.

reustle• 5 years ago

Local smaller coworking spaces could be a good middle ground

cableshaft• 5 years ago

Before the pandemic I was thinking it could be nice if neighborhoods were redesigned so that they were like a grid that surround a neighborhood co-working space and park, and have some commercial food options at the corners (so each corner serves four neighborhoods). Commute would be like 3-5 minutes at most, easily biked, also easily go home at lunchtime or reach multiple food options within a 3 minute drive, even more with a 5 minute drive, etc.

Spent a few minutes and made an image of what I was thinking: https://imgur.com/gallery/3ybeBDE

CountDrewku• 5 years ago

Sounds like you're suburbanizing the office environment, which has all sorts of negative aspects...

I would like to know how something like this would even work with the limited space in large cities. There's a reason they build up and not out.

bradlys2• 5 years ago

Ah, yeah, the absolute worst then. I get to now go to an office and have to still deal with all the remote aspects because Billy is in office 1, Jenny is in office 2, Alex is in office 3, and I’m here in office 4. Since these offices are spread throughout a large geographical area - there’s no real way for us to easily meet up for a meeting randomly. Wooo!!

On top of that - small offices tend to have less amenities as well. So now there’s no gym, maybe no kitchen, and very little benefits to the office overall because everyone is still distributed and now you have a super shitty micro office that clutters up a suburban hellscape.

Awesome…

arcade79• 5 years ago

The main reason I miss the office: Meeting my workmates regularly.

I want the ability to go to the office most days, while having the opportunity to take a couple of days a week from home.

If it wasn't for open floor plans, I'd prefer to go to the office every day.

FredPret6• 5 years ago

I’m the opposite. Even though I’m an extrovert and love people, I so excited to never have to meet a colleague in person again.

ghaff9• 5 years ago

That seems... extreme. I'm fully remote but I love getting together with peers (both co-workers and otherwise), quite a few of whom are genuine personal friends to greater or lesser degrees, at occasional company meetings and at events.

nostrebored4• 5 years ago

I dramatically prefer (open, loud, busy) offices and they have always been more productive in my experience.

I go to a WeWork alone just to simulate the ecosystem.

Among people who I bucket into the top 15% of people I have worked with wfh preference has been right down the middle.

Among the bottom 15% it’s been exclusively wfh preference.

papandada3• 5 years ago

Do you allow for the possibility that you, as someone who prefers loud and busy offices and feels more productive in such, might have a blind spot in how you "measure" coworkers?

xeromal2• 5 years ago

In the same way most people on reddit and hackernews preach working completely from home. It's a spectrum and everyone needs a different approach. I think the hybrid approach fits everyone with minimal disruption to each person's preferences.

nostrebored4• 5 years ago

I measure coworkers on deliverables lol

karaterobot• 5 years ago

Among the bottom 15% it’s been exclusively wfh preference.

That's what I would expect to be true if the vast majority of people have a strong preference for working from home. The previous anecdote is more surprising, though I guess I would explain it as people who work really hard wanting to be seen working really hard. Or, maybe people who are very good at their job get pulled in to a lot of meetings, and find it easier to do that in person. In any case, I think the tentative consensus is that there's some overall productivity increases from working from home[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_work#Productivity_and_e...

bennysomething• 5 years ago

Went back to office for a half day recently. Hated it. It feels barbaric .

TigeriusKirk• 5 years ago

It really does. For me it feels like some relic of a past I have no desire to return to.

kozikow6• 5 years ago

Working in the software company management, I think 100% remote is not great either. We developed a policy that Mondays are required, Wednesday are encouraged, rest is work from home. We have some fully-remote employees.

When there was a long period of 100% remote during Covid, there were some issues:

- Spontaneous interactions: Someone complaining over the lunch about issues with some library, just as a small talk. Someone else says, "hey, have you tried X instead?". Someone joking about product feature that actually ends up being a good idea. Ask for some feedback on what you're working. Discuss some issues over the lunch. In remote-only setting, everything requires setting up a meeting. That often formalizes everything, and less things end up being discussed.

- Morale : Working with everyone in the office is somehow good for team building. Maybe Morale was lower just because Covid was bad for everyone, but most people would admit they experienced it.

- Developing team connections: If you know someone in person, it feels easier to ask them for help, etc. Some ideas posted online, like shared board game via zoom is really far away from in-person interactions.

- Some people are quite good at focusing at home. It varies person by person. We have some people, who are great at fully remote work. In my case, when I am at work, I am working. When I am at home, I much often end up doing stuff like reading HN.

I am not saying it's not possible to work around those somehow. We tried several ideas posted online, in some books like REMOTE: Office Not Required, but it didn't work for us.

xeromal2• 5 years ago

Yeah, I agree with you and would push that point a little further to say that social interaction at work is necessary for a subset of humans. I know it is for me and I love having at least 1 or 2 days of social interaction that I don't even get hanging with my family.

kozikow6• 5 years ago

We had one guy, who completely isolated himself from the world for 6 months during Covid. Total 0 interaction - he even ordered groceries online and he would wait a few days before unpacking them.

Before Covid he was great. During the isolation he developed mental health issues. We tried to help, offered paid sick leave for a while, but eventually we couldn't help. He is unemployed for last few months. I meet with him sometimes, but he is still unfit to work. I can't think of something I could do now.

firebaze• 5 years ago

With this policy, you'll keep the 20% capable staff. Anyone else (except a few both too afraid to leave and too comfy with their current pay) will leave.

That'll leave you with a few 10x staff, too lazy to leave, but capable, and a lot of ballast.

chefkoch2• 5 years ago

I think you underestimate how many people like the socialising in the office if you have a relativly short commute.

kozikow6• 5 years ago

I forgot to add that our office is not in San Francisco, so you can get decently priced apartment within walking distance to the office, without people injecting heroin at your front door and a good public transport.

adjkant3• 5 years ago

Your points weighs heavily on a lot of implicit parts of the value equation you left out.

1. That 20% number. What if it's 40%? 50%?

2. How easy/quick is it to replace the people you will lose who don't prefer this work style?

3. What percentage of your current workforce likes the environment as described? Maybe hiring off the street is 20%, but you've already selected for 80% through other selection factors.

Basically, at what point does the value gained from the in person work / setup overtake the loss of potential workforce? You're making an argument for why some people won't want to work there, but so long as the environment is not discriminating on things like race/gender/ability, a partial in person setup may actually be the right call for some teams/companies, without any "luring" needed.

I say all this as someone who primarily prefers to work at home now, but goes into the office once a week or so without any requirement to do so. I agree with OP's initial points a lot, though I think I would lean less towards requirements and more towards guides.

cesarb• 5 years ago

Spontaneous interactions: Someone complaining over the lunch [...] In remote-only setting, everything requires setting up a meeting. That often formalizes everything, and less things end up being discussed.

Our team scheduled a daily half-hour meeting early in the morning with no set agenda, to try to replace all these casual interactions until we can go back to hybrid. It's not perfect, but it helped.

kozikow6• 5 years ago

We have daily dev (remote) standups at noon. It's about 9 people on the meeting, so even if someone gives quick update about what they working on, discuss a few top priority issues that came up, it still ends up eating up the whole 30 minutes pretty quickly. And it supposed to be 15 minutes in the first place.

eitland• 5 years ago

Nice! We had a voluntary meeting early in the morning but we ended up dropping it.

What we do now is to encourage calling each other and also to encourage showing up for meetings early - if we want.

For all its warts, this is a thing I like about MS Teams: it shows a notification whenever someone else first enters a scheduled meeting so if someone enters a meeting 5, 15 or even 20 minutes ahead of time I know they want to talk and can join if I want to talk.

Talk before meetings can be anything both work and weather, but work has priority (I think).

We also have a voluntary meeting sometime after lunch where we aren't allowed to talk about work : )

aweiland• 5 years ago

We do this too. Plus async on slack (sometimes with huddles). Works out well and I don't miss a thing about in person.

onion2k2• 5 years ago

We developed a policy that Mondays are required, Wednesday are encouraged, rest is work from home.

I find this sort of policy fascinating. You say people are required to be on site every Monday, but what would happen if they said no? Would you fire them and go through the pain and expense of replacing them? Or is it "required" in the "we'll say it in the hope no one actually questions it" sense?

kozikow6• 5 years ago

Some people are fully remote and only meet with a team once in a while and that's ok. You can say "I will WFH on Monday, because I am waiting for sofa delivery". It is not a big company and we don't have anything formalized. We have about 80-90% people in the office on Mondays, 50-70% on Wednesdays, 20-40% on other days and it works out OK.

adjkant3• 5 years ago

Curious why this is downvoted, it seems like a valid question here of how to handle a situation that may arise. I like a lot of these rules but could see myself hitting these. What if I "can't make" 25% of Mondays. What about half? What's the general force behind the policy? That's a big part of the design here.

standardUser2• 5 years ago

As soon as a requirement is made that an employee be in the office on a semi-regular basis, remote works is no longer an option. Frequent WFH days are still possible, sure, but that is a different beast than remote work.

I wonder how much of the benefits you describe could be gained by instead flying everyone out for two weeks to work together in an office, maybe 3 or 4 times every year.

polishdude20• 5 years ago

That would work well for people without kids. Kinda sucks for the people with kids. Now you not only have to find a nanny for when you go on vacation, you need a nanny for when you work. This is coming from a guy who doesnt any have kids himself mind you.

bidivia2• 5 years ago

Some people are quite good at focusing at home. It varies person by person. We have some people, who are great at fully remote work.

I am really good at focusing at home NOW but it took lots of training to be good at.

People are taught to read and write or ride a bicycle but are expected to be productive working from home from day 1.

kreeben2• 5 years ago

Thank you for your point of view. It was lovely of you to share it.

I'm going to paraphrase:

> Some are allowed to work from home, others aren't

I'm guessing the people who insist they continue working from home, if they bring in enough money to the company, they are allowed to and the ones who you feel needs to be managed, by a manager, old-school way, until they become such a valuable, income bringing member of your team, aren't.

I at least hope this will become old-school. I know that for me, I'm not going back to the open, life-crushing and money-saving open-office, ever. Yes, yes, I'm a privileged piece of this and that and I should be thankful that I have a job and all that. But on the other hand, since I'm once of those sought after persons, since I'm both a dev AND I've experience, I don't quite buy into that.

But this is just my personal feelings on the matter. Maybe I'm being selfish and I'm taking advantage of the situation, but so are you, I feel.

I hope to live long enough to see lots of change in the work place and I hope and believe you will enjoy them as much as I will.

kozikow6• 5 years ago

All people are OK with such setup. It was shared decision of the team, not just management sitting up in their high castle and issuing a decree. It's a small company with less than 20 total employees and most "executives" still write code. I am writing those posts now, when a long processing pipeline is running.

I think that most people, who are strongly against hybrid work just have to live in a miserable place like SF for their good software engineering job. It's unfortunate that so many software companies are in the Bay Area with one of the worst real estate markets in the world, horrible commute times and drug/homelessness crisis. I used to work there for a few years and if I still did I also would probably advocate hard for the fully-remote work.

Most of people in our company are happily living close to the office for other reasons that just the job, so coming to the office is not an issue.

My friend, who still works in SF recently came to visit Warsaw, Poland (where our engineering office is located) and jokingly said "funnily coming from SF to Warsaw feels like coming from a third world country to a first world country".

hellisothers• 5 years ago

FWIW I was pretty sure full-remote (even Covid remote) would lead to less spontaneous interactions but since we’ve gone full remote (no office ever) I’ve found spontaneous interactions/ideas to have gone up. I imagine, as with anything, you get out what you put in and my company went hard on full remote. Also oddly my meetings have gone down (and I’m a lead dev) I think because of increased use of Slack and async work, means small meetings aren’t necessary.

heisnotanalien• 5 years ago

I agree with everything you said but for the problem then simply becomes how do we do all that but do it remotely? Like why not just encourage more social chat? Have lunch on Zoom etc

loco5niner3• 5 years ago

Maybe Morale was lower just because Covid was bad for everyone

Not for me. Best 2 years of my life.

No commute, no (horrible) office. More time with family and new babies.

thrower123• 5 years ago

If you go to the office nowadays, it's more quiet than a tomb. So it's actually not that bad.

SomewhatLikely2• 5 years ago

As someone who has spent 4.5 of the last 7 years working from home I'm tired of spending 23+ hour days inside my house. Even one day a week in office meaningfully interacting with others would help my mood.

michaelcampbell2• 5 years ago

Why not propose a day out with coworkers at a coworking space? Compared to a lease, it's basis points on the dollar.

bidivia2• 5 years ago

As someone who has spent more than 10 years working remotely I don't understand what you are talking about.

When I was working away I spent two hours everyday on my car commuting breathing the toxic air of traffic jams of big cities. That exhausted me and was very expensive in time, energy and money.

I can interact with humans I love on my own terms now much more time than that every day. I can do exercise outside for an hour on the Wild, a luxury impossible before.

Are you an adult or a child? Are you a slave or a serf?

It looks like you have some kind of education that make you powerless when nobody tells you what to do every second.

That even in your own house you are not the master, but someone else is.

I recommend the first thing you do is work on your mindset:

You are the master of your life and can take ownership and responsibility for it.

DerArzt2• 5 years ago

Is there something stopping you from going to a coffee shop or co-working space?

AceyMan• 5 years ago

Yes, it's called a pandemic (at the risk of stating the obvious).

codegeek7• 5 years ago

Here we go with the whole "100% remote or nothing" thing. There are plenty of reasons why it cannot work:

- Entry Level employees who have never worked remote and need a lot of training/guidance. Their chance of failure goes up significantly if they have to wfh.

- Some people prefer to work from office as their home situation is not conducive for remote work. Lot of young people or even families literally live in shitty/tiny apartments where they hardly have space for desk.

- Some people just prefer to work from dedicated office even though they CAN work from home (I am one of those). Social animals. Whatever you wanna call them. I love interacting with my team, co workers etc.

- Some people actually enjoy a reasonable commute on a train/subway/bike etc. Yes, shocking right ? It allows them to get out of their house, get fresh air and take their minds off their house a little.

I keep saying this and will say it. This is not a binary thing. The best option is Hybrid where it should be a combination and people should have flexibility. Keyword is flexibility. I am however getting tired of this "100% remote is the future blah blah" crowd.

decafninja10• 5 years ago

The problem is that when offering flexibility, the WFO person is dependent on at least the majority of coworkers also being (forced?) to WFO to derive the often touted benefits of WFO.

Meanwhile the WFH person is not dependent on their coworkers being WFO or WFH.

What happens to the WFO person when a company/team offers the flexibility to WFH or WFO, but the majority of the team choose to WFH?

codegeek7• 5 years ago

Depends if it is 100% WFH or hybrid ? Regardless though, unless you literally are the only person in office, I don't see that as an issue.

dmitrygr• 5 years ago

Their chance of failure goes up significantly if they have to wfh.

That is quite a bold claim to make with no citation. Just because something is "intuitive" to you does not make it so, as history shows. Please cite your sources for this claim.

donkey-hotei• 5 years ago

Unless there is... free food ? That's how I was lured.. However, I also live a very short bike ride away from the office.

Zanneth• 5 years ago

One of the problems I noticed with people citing productivity statistics is that they always come from surveys of employees who are evaluating themselves. I don't know how many people are being completely honest about their own productivity when the remote work benefits are mostly aligned with their personal goals and not necessarily the company's.

Maybe there is a reason why so many more people in leadership positions are willing to return to the office compared to lower-ranking employees. They see a serious problem with productivity that doesn't show up in self-oriented surveys.

decafninja10• 5 years ago

People in leadership positions - especially in more conservative and traditional companies/industries - often derive their status and sense of worth (both personal and on the job) by exerting and enforcing control on their underlings. So of course they prefer the environment where they can do just that - working from the office.

mr_tristan• 5 years ago

I will never go back to a team that's even partially "colocated" because I've found, that when the team gets async right, it's enormously annoying to go back.

But, as someone who has experienced full time work in a couple of different places, let me start by saying it is hard to get right. A ton of process has been built up in a sync world, like, most of your agile process recommendations. So you have to approach async with a constant experimentation, and question all the "best practices" of the past.

A few observations that work well:

1. Slack workflows are your friends for stuff like status checks, or cross-team communication. 2. Have meetings regularly (like, daily), but, have a clear agenda.

If you ever have a meeting that's a "round robin" sort of thing, that's a giant red flag for me. Every time I've gotten people used to a daily Slack thread for "my status" it's gone really well. And any other meeting it just makes it better to offload that kind of thing.

At the same time, meetings are useful, if they have a good agenda. Managing a regular meeting agenda is tricky. What I've found that works well is to have some kind of kanban-like tool where anyone can propose a topic. Then you just go through any of the open topics until you're out of time. We usually pair the kanban board with a meeting notes document that we can cross link to for each topic. Then, any follow ups or whatever can just be tracked.

If you smooth out the communication like this, a lot of the interpersonal connnections, morale and spontaneous interaction problems get fixed. The dynamic will never be like having everyone together, but, I've noticed that the meetings I attend are actually useful. Which is 99% of the reason I will never, ever, join a company that wants me physically located again.

What's still not clear to me is exactly how to build broader cross-team connections. I suspect the right way to do this is to actually just move teams every 12-24 months.

disgruntledphd2• 5 years ago

What's still not clear to me is exactly how to build broader cross-team connections. I suspect the right way to do this is to actually just move teams every 12-24 months.

This is probably gonna be the biggest issue with fully-remote/WFH setups. Like small team communication can definitely work (even better, sometimes), but it's really really hard to meet people organically in a remote/WFH setup, which leads to a decrease in weak ties, which tend to be the most useful in retaining company culture and forging bonds that make things happen.

deet• 5 years ago

I’m a manager at a FAANG company—-resigning in a few weeks!—-and I previously small startup that was distributed (though we had an office too). So I’ve seen the good and bad of both remote work and in-person offices, and at opposite ends of the company size scale.

I’ll possibly start another company at some point, and here’s a remote work policy I’ve thinking about:

- Employees live wherever they want

- People need to commit to being reachable a certain number of hours per day, overlapping with a selected USA time zone

- Company maintains an office in an accessible-but-affordable location capable of housing the entire company at one time

- Require in-person attendance for one week every X weeks — where X might be small early in the company’s life (like 4, so one week/month) when iteration must be fast and X might be higher (like one week every 6, 8 or 12 weeks) in later stages.

- The in-person attendance week would be for the whole company, and everyone would be there at the same time. The selected week would be announced with sufficient advance notice so people can plan their lives

- Provide limited in-office perks, instead focusing on wellbeing subsidies for gyms, outdoor activities, and other self-care, etc that can be used anywhere

- Provide a per-day stipend to *every employee in the company* for each day that the whole company is required to be in office. For example if in a month there are 5 “in office days”, maybe everyone gets $100-150/day = $500-750 added to their pay check. No expensing for the travel beyond the stipend

- No location-based pay adjustments, just market rate for remote roles (including attractive to Bay Area/NYC talent)

Reasoning:

- Work that gets done is the important measure. How it gets done is the employee's choice.

- The stipend aligns company incentives with employee incentives -- more days in office costs the company more

- Try to not favor either local or remote employees with pay, perks, etc

- Reason for stipend instead of expensing: level the playing field for location; if an employee wants to live close to the office and save the money, that’s their choice. If they want to live in a hard-to-get-to location but pay more for travel, that’s also their choice.

This is based on my beliefs that: - Full in-office is too limiting — we all know that much work can be done from home much of the time, people want to live in different places, etc. I certainly enjoy the flexibility myself

- Fully remote all the time does reduce iteration speed and collaboration that’s crucial for innovation (especially in an early stage company). There’s still no substitute for a whiteboarding session. It also does reduce social bonding, team culture, etc. But that doesn't mean it needs to be every day. Periodic in-person sessions followed by a few weeks to "get stuff done" seems to balance the objectives.

- The “Hybrid” plans many companies propose (a few times in office per week) don’t make sense. They still force people to live near a particular office, within commuting distance, and with a routine that mostly looks like a full in-office one. And even if the days are synchronized, these policies still seem more like “butts in seats” pseudo-management than actively trying to promote collaboration with an intentional goal of getting stuff done

I'm still thinking on this; any feedback would be welcome

heleninboodler• 5 years ago

I like most of this, but I do think that requiring the occasional week-long travel for remote employees is a pretty big burden for parents. Single parents especially. Maybe that's just the breaks and those people have to think hard before they accept such a job, but do give this some consideration. I worked at a fully-remote company that had occasional one-week on-site gatherings and when my kids were small, it was really hard on my wife. I don't know what I would have done if I were a single parent.

metaltyphoon• 5 years ago

Agreed. I liked everything about this but the mandatory week-long travel.

uptownfunk• 5 years ago

My perfect solution, 2-3 days in office every 2-3 weeks and no more slack.

dathinab• 5 years ago

You can't lure employees back to the office

a) You don't need to because for a lot of work office isn't necessary, but you have to approach many things very different in a remote only/first context on the long term. (Like don't think replacing in-person meetings with digital ones is all what is needed.)

b) You don't need to as long as your office has good conditions part of them will come back. Which can be "good enough" for quite many use cases where you sometimes need people in place.

Home office is not all flowers, and weather it's better or worse depends on many individual factors. The spectrum is so wide that for some people staying at home is a major health risk while for others going to work is. And I'm speaking about a situation where both places have reasonable good working conditions.

(Home-office only is good for people in a well working relation ship with many social contact and a stable life and mind. It can be outright poisonous for people with chronic depression which life alone and are social rather isolated. To name one example.)

thunderbong• 5 years ago

I've commented on this earlier [0]

I think there is a particular aspect of social interaction that gets fulfilled at work. Talking about some small things, not for too long. Meeting people face to face whom you've enjoyed working with. Sharing work related anecdotes. These have a special place which don't quite get fulfilled elsewhere. And all the while having a clear line which doesn't get crossed is a relief and one which we take for granted.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29434272

mbrodersen• 5 years ago

My company introduced minimum 2 days in the office, the rest is up to us. Perfect.

smugglerFlynn3• 5 years ago

I predict that most people will just switch from badly designed office work to badly designed remote/hybrid.

Remote work is not a silver bullet that magically waives all the workspace problems away. It is much harder to do right, both in terms of productivity, and in terms of keeping people motivated and mentally healthy.

My experience with badly designed remote:

  - it may improve personal productivity, but decreases team productivity   
  - it decreases transparency across the org    
  - it reduces personal connections inside of a team    
  - it reduces touch points between different teams    
  - any problems with personal performance are now very tricky to ‘debug’ and solve

Unless your org invests heavily to redesign all work processes in a proper way that fits remote or hybrid work, unless your managers are good enough to self-adjust their work habits, you might as well end up spending all these ‘personal extra hours’ talking to a mental health professionals and actively avoiding burnout.

You may even find yourself working more and doing overtimes to keep up because overall productivity of your org has plummeted (despite “self reported productivity gains” that all these articles preach).

Wowfunhappy2• 5 years ago

I think we should have teams where everyone is expected to work from the office, and those teams should hire people who are talented at working from the office, and we should also have teams where everyone is expected to work from home, and those teams should hire people who are talented at working from home.

This seems to be controversial, and I don't quite understand why. It takes all sorts to make the world, but there is such a thing as culture fit.

No, I don't necessarily think people should be able to switch where they work and keep their current job at the same time. Office work is pointless unless you also have team members in the office—the more the better—and frankly home work is less-than-ideal if everyone else is sitting in an office together. Figure out which you prefer, then apply for jobs accordingly, just like anything else in life.

flyingchipmann• 5 years ago

You can, if the pros outweighs cons. Why not?

geodel• 5 years ago

I think one detail that is not covered often in pro/against in-office or remote work is nature of work has changed quite a bit for typical IT worker. It is vastly more standardized and in-person discussions are not more insightful than webex/zoom calls. All this seems to have happened over last decade so it is not a pandemic thing.

In my case a lot of good technical work I have seen/done during 2005-2015 is now replaced with commercial/OSS assembly which requires a lot less design/architecture work. Now for businesses it maybe absolutely delightful or reasonable change. But for me this new model where every little thing is broken into 50 JIRA tickets, office now seems extraneous. So WFH saves me few hours per day, help me take care of my unwell kid and avoid general dreariness of office environment.

All good things that I remember from past about office like great discussions, watercooler talks, discussions with managers about upcoming projects and so on does not happen nowadays. Work flows through project management tools. By the time it reaches me interesting parts are taken care of and all that is left if marking JIRA complete and filling timesheets against it.

themusicgod1• 5 years ago

Step #1: End the pandemic. Then we'll talk

el_don_almighty• 5 years ago

WFH is ONE workplace compensation claim away from ending at your company.

- HR exists to mitigate legal risks to the company

- The company cannot manage health and safety risks at your home

- HR is going to insist that WFH ends with implementation of the OSHA vaccine mandate

- The lawyers are coming to destroy your WFH comfy slippers and sweatpants

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf• 5 years ago

I could be lured back to WFO by an extra $30k a year commuting bonus and a private office with a door that closes. Seems laughably far-fetched in today's world.

therealbilly• 5 years ago

Honestly, I think it's best if we have two modes of working. We could have an office mode, where you go in to the office and interact with others for whatever reason. Then we have remote mode (maybe the preferred mode), where we have an office like setup, at home with the appropriate equipment to carry out the company's mission. What do you guys think?

You can't lure employees back to the office

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