The worst environment I’ve seen for collaborating is an open office, where unless you want to talk everyone at once or call a meeting, you can only hide at your desk and send direct messages. So letting people work from home is about the same, it just doesn’t make them miserable. 
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Maybe this?
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They’re all good questions. I haven’t worked in a building like that. So maybe it’s not perfect but I can’t imagine cutting across that interior park is worse that walking through winding paths and around buildings. It seems like having the furthest a team is apart being the diameter of the ring could be an improvement?
Now that I think of it, there’s probably a psychological benefit to that. At my previous job, you definitely knew how important (or unimportant) the company considered you based on how far away your building was from the center of campus.
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That’s just the cover story.
The truth of the matter is that Apple’s Director of machine learning is actually a machine and having to show up to the office in person would have blown its cover.
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We’ve found it to work out both ways. We converted our call center jobs (clinical laboratory business) to full WFH early in the pandemic. Developing performance metrics and managing the remote employees (and remote supervisors, for that matter) was something of a challenge but we’ve gotten through that.
Many of our agents are relatively new hires and have not ever set foot in the physical call centers and they are fine with that. But there is a significant minority (~20%) of agents who want to go into the office full or part time. Mostly that’s due to social contact issues and people who do not have a suitable WFH environment due to space or family issues. And that’s fine. We keep the physical call centers open and there will always been a need for folks on the ground who can chase down missing paperwork or run out into the labs to talk to the bench techs and lab aides.
(Note that this is in Europe, so some of the negative aspects that exist in the US do not apply here. Also, while things have lightened up a little, we have not just declared the pandemic over and ignored the science that says it isn’t. Our biggest issue currently is trying to work out a way to provide childcare to remote workers in a way that is fair to both remote and on-site workers, since we do already provide a creche for on-site full-time workers.)
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I have never liked open offices. They are a nightmare. Being able to sit face to face with a few key people and brainstorm something is actually useful though.
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Like what?
At-will employment, lack of employment contracts, lack of collective bargaining units, required government benefits, and benefits that we provide above and beyond requirements.
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Excellent plan. I’m taking early retirement in 3.5 weeks, if I don’t storm out in a rage first.
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I’m pretty sure the US has contracts, unions, required government benefits, and companies that give employees above and beyond what is required by law. Is At-Will employment illegal in Europe?
Keep it as an option, you may need it.
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I’m not too keen with the level of surveillance that will undoubtedly become normalized once it is the norm for the majority of the workforce to be working from home. I fully expect companies to install spyware or require you to do so.
Why? If you don’t trust someone to do their job when you aren’t looking over their shoulder, then you just don’t trust them. Most of the time, the root cause of that problem is the employer, not the employee.
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If companies trusted their employees there would be no middle management.
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The Cupertino Fruit Co. has always had people in many buildings all over the place. I’ve been in shuttles between campuses and video-conferences for years. Meeting across the that pretty campus seems much easier and appealing than some other situations. Frankly, no one relishes the idea of commuting to the office just to find that you’re still having the same virtual conference you could’ve had at home.
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Union participation in the US is something like 10%. In the EU, it’s the opposite; most professional positions are represented by a union or a guild. Often both. And most employees are hired under an employment contract that dictates what both parties are required to do. At-will employment is not technically illegal in most EU countries, or in non-professional positions, but employment law here is much stronger than it is in the US.
As far as what’s required in the US, as far as I know the only actual requirements on the company are that they pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, and in some states, disability insurance. And beyond that it is up to the individual employee to negotiate unless they are covered by a union or other collective bargaining agreement. That is not the case here.
Here is some more information if you are interested.
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This is huge one. Any company that has departments in multiple locations, multiple cities or states. Any company that decided to outsource entire departments, locally or thousands of miles away. They’ve already made the fundamental decision that not everyone is going to be onsite.
They already needed the tools to make that work. If they didn’t have them, they were already failing. On this board, we’ve probably all been in the meeting that’s groups from 2 or 3 locations that go horribly wrong because they don’t have the right tools to support that. Once you get the tools to make that work, changing one or two people to also be remote is no big deal. Changing them all to be remote often actually makes those meetings better.
Making remote work is frequently a bigger management problem than a remote worker problem. Someone can surf boingboing.net all day instead of working while in person or remote. It’s a management problem hiding that they thing in person solves that.
Those were the first people to want to return to our office. Others did the reverse and solved the WFH environmental issue to make that better. It could have been anything from poor Internet or lack of space, to childcare was in the same house vs it being someplace else, say a stay at home spose and kids not in school.
WFH is still work. It’s the worker subsidizing the company for much of the physical infrastructure in exchange for eliminating the commute. If you don’t have the infrastructure, it works out poorly. I’ll gladly make that subsidy. It’s less overall than the commute, and I get all kinds of time back. It has meant that as we’ve moved, having home office space was a requirement not just a nice to have.
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Excellent point, and that can be a fairly hard problem to solve. Early in the pandemic, I was working from home quite often. I have a large family, and our duplex house in Belgium was pretty tight quarters for me, my self-employed wife, and all our kids doing remote school. When we moved down south to our place in France, we planned the place with room for all those activities, but that’s not an option for most people.
And there are infrastructure requirements on the company side as well. Remote call agents can’t work unless they have immediate information available as soon as they pick up the incoming call. That was a surprisingly difficult problem to solve and we spent a lot of money on it. We quickly learned that one of the job requirements had to be that the agent had access to fast and reliable internet. In much of western Europe that’s thankfully not a big issue, but it is for certain places in eastern Europe and some of our less-populated areas.
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Just wow. That’s not what management is about. Any company that uses its managers as babysitters has a much bigger problem than WFH.
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I’ve been thinking about leaving my current employer mostly because my immediate boss is always pissy when I do use my WFH time. He some how thinks his opinions override the HR policy which is probably the case but at the end of the day, he’s the one that’s oddly out of step with the rest of the company especially when we’re actual developers and we’re use to using remote communications tools. And I should point out he’s not older than me, I’m about a year older than him which amuses me considering how different our views are regarding WFH. I personally like it since I can actually think and not have to wear headphones to just muffle the noise of chitchat and useless meetings.
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