Working From Home

[Habbaku]

My company recently gave a 1-month alert to "client-facing" colleagues that they need to be in office 2-3 times a week while assuring the rest of us that we'll continue as-is.

Naturally, the rumors started up pretty quickly that this was just a first step. Though skeptical of that, I would love to see how they made my team (distributed across 3 countries and 4 states) would collaborate better if we were all in office. 

[DGuller]

Creative collaboration definitely does go better in-person.
But this generally isn't the sort of thing you're doing every day. Not even every week.

Maybe not every day and not every week, but you don't know which day and which week.  Collaboration is something that happens spontaneously, but only when the conditions are there.  It definitely doesn't happen in collaboration sessions.

[garbon]

I think one of the downside to all of this is that we can't have good faith dicussions about WFH and it's challenges at all. Management will go for the simple solution of ordering full time BTTO. So, we endure on our stupid commute to be alone in an cubicle for a couple of hours everyday.

 

When my company chose to fire my only in office employee + hire all my employees out of the country, I feel like they lost all credibility in discussing the downsides of worl from home.

[Josquius]

Creative collaboration definitely does go better in-person.
But this generally isn't the sort of thing you're doing every day. Not even every week.

Maybe not every day and not every week, but you don't know which day and which week.  Collaboration is something that happens spontaneously, but only when the conditions are there.  It definitely doesn't happen in collaboration sessions.

Not in my experience. The best collaboration absolutely has intense preparation behind it. Its arranged well in advance.

Ad-hoc minor bits of collaboration are a thing. They do happen. But thats where the trade off of in office giving slightly better work vs. happier, better employees (due to the benefit of remote work) giving better work, comes in.

[DGuller]

Maybe it depends on a job.  In my experience, collaboration is often unplanned.  You run into someone getting coffee, for example, start exchanging pleasantries, but then realize that the other person in the other department is trying to solve a problem much like the one you solved before.  There is zero chance of this kind of conversation happening remotely by plan.

[Tamas]

Maybe it depends on a job.  In my experience, collaboration is often unplanned.  You run into someone getting coffee, for example, start exchanging pleasantries, but then realize that the other person in the other department is trying to solve a problem much like the one you solved before.  There is zero chance of this kind of conversation happening remotely by plan.

Probably it does depend on the job. If you mean working on things independent of each other and exchanging ideas while doing what middle management is afraid WFH employees are doing (i.e. not working) than you are right this is less likely to happen remotely.

But if you mean discovering that somebody else is working on the same/related problem you are working on, that's just bad management and organisation and fairly easy to avoid, remotely or not.

[garbon]

Guys, with POTUS level healthcare available to him, there is no way Trump dies before the end of his second term, and has a decent shot at completing his third. Especially since I don't think he'll care enough about the job to stress about it.

[HVC]

Guys, with POTUS level healthcare available to him, there is no way Trump dies before the end of his second term, and has a decent shot at completing his third. Especially since I don't think he'll care enough about the job to stress about it.

If we can get his doctors to work from home then there's a chance!

[Tamas]

 

Goddamit

[crazy canuck]

Maybe it depends on a job.  In my experience, collaboration is often unplanned.  You run into someone getting coffee, for example, start exchanging pleasantries, but then realize that the other person in the other department is trying to solve a problem much like the one you solved before.  There is zero chance of this kind of conversation happening remotely by plan.

Probably it does depend on the job. If you mean working on things independent of each other and exchanging ideas while doing what middle management is afraid WFH employees are doing (i.e. not working) than you are right this is less likely to happen remotely.

But if you mean discovering that somebody else is working on the same/related problem you are working on, that's just bad management and organisation and fairly easy to avoid, remotely or not.

I can't speak to what DGuller meant, but in my line of work the most meaningful collaboration occurs in an unplanned way and the least productive collaboration occurs during planned meetings. A daily occurrence for me is people coming into my office to ask a question. Another daily occurrence is people calling out to me as I make my way from my office to the coffee room, to ask a question.  Those sorts of impromptu meetings can be as little as minutes, but can go on for some time. 

I think I have told the story here now multiple times about how impossible it has been to get people to just call me to have the same interaction.  For some reason people, and it is especially young people, feel a lot more comfortable just coming to talk to me in person.  That is why I now come into the office on a daily basis.
 

[grumbler]

I can't speak to what DGuller meant, but in my line of work the most meaningful collaboration occurs in an unplanned way and the least productive collaboration occurs during planned meetings. A daily occurrence for me is people coming into my office to ask a question. Another daily occurrence is people calling out to me as I make my way from my office to the coffee room, to ask a question.  Those sorts of impromptu meetings can be as little as minutes, but can go on for some time. 

I think I have told the story here now multiple times about how impossible it has been to get people to just call me to have the same interaction.  For some reason people, and it is especially young people, feel a lot more comfortable just coming to talk to me in person.  That is why I now come into the office on a daily basis.

This is pretty much my experience as well.  Meetings tend to stick to the general in order to avoid getting bogged down in details.  Chance meetings/chats are all about the specifics of what I've tried, or the other person has tried, and then those specific half-ideas suddenly make a whole once they've bounced back and forth a bit.  It just happened to me today.

[crazy canuck]

I can't speak to what DGuller meant, but in my line of work the most meaningful collaboration occurs in an unplanned way and the least productive collaboration occurs during planned meetings. A daily occurrence for me is people coming into my office to ask a question. Another daily occurrence is people calling out to me as I make my way from my office to the coffee room, to ask a question.  Those sorts of impromptu meetings can be as little as minutes, but can go on for some time. 

I think I have told the story here now multiple times about how impossible it has been to get people to just call me to have the same interaction.  For some reason people, and it is especially young people, feel a lot more comfortable just coming to talk to me in person.  That is why I now come into the office on a daily basis.

This is pretty much my experience as well.  Meetings tend to stick to the general in order to avoid getting bogged down in details.  Chance meetings/chats are all about the specifics of what I've tried, or the other person has tried, and then those specific half-ideas suddenly make a whole once they've bounced back and forth a bit.  It just happened to me today.

 

[Tamas]

Structure your meetings better. :p

Seriously though, I agree that brainstorming sessions can work better face to face. But that's not where projects end. Me and my teams have delivered complex projects requiring technical creativity and very detailed planning by a large number of people never meeting face to face.

I feel like you guys apply your in-office approaches to a remote setup, conclude that they don't end up working exactly like they do for the office ergo remote working isn't as good.

I may elaborate on this more when I am not on my phone.

[Sheilbh]

In my work there's a huge divide between the engineering and tech teams who absolutely hate having to go into the office and are fighting tooth and nail to stay WFH as much as possible and the newsroom who are often in more than required (3 days a week).

Me and most of the other sort of commercial bits are somewhere in the middle - doing our 3 days and liking it but not going in more than that.

Edit: I would add where I work is exceptionally "relationship-based". People hate process and hate any sense of being told what to do. Everything is through meetings and not quite negotiations but sort of - also some fairly strong unions (of which I'm a member ). I wouldn't say it necessitates in person, but it helps.

[crazy canuck]

Structure your meetings better. :p

Seriously though, I agree that brainstorming sessions can work better face to face. But that's not where projects end. Me and my teams have delivered complex projects requiring technical creativity and very detailed planning by a large number of people never meeting face to face.

I feel like you guys apply your in-office approaches to a remote setup, conclude that they don't end up working exactly like they do for the office ergo remote working isn't as good.

I may elaborate on this more when I am not on my phone.

I do also hold structured meetings.  But as Grumbler mentioned those are for a different purpose. They are held for the purpose of me conveying information to people, not for informal discussion.  If it were otherwise they would go on and on and on, you get the point 

Also, if I could get people to feel as comfortable just giving me a call, as they do walking into my office, then it would be different.  But there is definitely a generational divide at work.  Younger folks just don't feel comfortable calling people spontaneously whenever they have a question.  I kept track of the number of times someone spontaneously wondered into my office to ask a question since I made my last post - three times.  That just doesn't happen when I work remotely.  Instead, if I miss a day at the office, people save up their questions for when they can come see me personally.