Most lab jobs can be done at least hybrid. I arranged a hybrid setup for a high-performing team member well before the pandemic just so she could have a day away from the lab to do office work like reports, experimental protocols and planning. When she was in the office, people would constantly bug her with requests and questions, such that it made it nearly impossible for us to meet deadlines.
7 Likes
I understand your point of view, and it has obvious merit. That said, I believe you are wrong in your generalization. Humans are social animals. This is not a theory, it is scientific fact. Right now, there is a ton of blow back to going back to work and I completely understand it. I personally eliminated several company’s need to have offices decades ago so I’m speaking from experience. In my years of visualizing work environments I noticed an inescapable phenomenon. Little by little, the businesses that eliminated “the office” and switched to work from home started replacing the office with ad hoc meeting places. A restaurant, a bar, or even a park. They got together for face to face interactions as you suggest. The issue is that not all people wanted to interact face to face and they slowly got left behind. When a decision needed to be made on who to keep and who to drop, the ones that had personal connections, were almost always retained. Slowly this evolves into a “natural selection” of the social animals dominating the group and finally returning to a shared space. This did not always happen, sometimes the companies morphed into only part time workers and the principals were able to keep them together but this only worked with smaller orgs. Time will tell when this massive experiment runs it’s course.
This reads like a case study of dysfunctional “popularity contest” management, not an argument for mandatory office time.
Some very sharp and highly productive people are drained by forced interaction. We should be protecting those people from the Michael Scott’s and Lundburghs of the workforce, not feeding them to them.
17 Likes
That’s a good description of 20 years ago when the tools didn’t exist. Perhaps even 10 years ago when the tools were around but not as good and not as available. Now, it’s just a description of a choice to use physical space instead of other tools. A choice to use airplanes and hours instead of the internet.
It’s also a choice to never get to a size that has multiple locations. Rules out lots of merger and acquisitions which tend to come with extra locations. Rules out lots of outsourced contract work too, a multi billion dollar industry that doesn’t work without distance.
Since, if you want to play in any of those spaces, you have to get good at using the tools to do them. Once you do that, you’ve got the tools, process, and culture that having other workers remote shouldn’t matter at all. They’re effectively just like someone at another location to everyone else.
Or, you never get good at it and the company is at a disadvantage everywhere, not just some remote workers.
Somewhere at Apple there is a manager who is responsible for all the retail stores across the country. While it’s good for them to get to stores to see how the physical store is working, it’s also critical they’re able to effectively manage and work with those local store managers while remote. If they are only able to be effective on the days they’re at the same site as the store, they’ll be horrible management.
Supporting a remote workforce takes different skills and tools than supporting only an onsite one. But, there’s severe limits to not developing those skills as a company grows.
8 Likes
So I’m not necessarily disagreeing with any of that, but what would you say is the best example of a large, creative company that has successfully transitioned to a mostly remote work environment with very few in-person interactions even among executive-level folks such as the director for major company initiatives?
…and looking at websites that were blocked at work, but not at home:
But, presumably, not looking at Facebook.
ETA:
Having spent time in both, I can say that an “open concept” school is worse than an office configured this way.
I’ll confess to having been that guy:
5 Likes
I’m not sure, since I don’t work for a creative company. By random chance, I ended up working for a series of medium and large insurance companies. What one could call the most risk adverse and boring industry around. The work-life balance is spectacular though, and I’ve been been full time remote for most of the last 20 years. I did 18 months hybrid last time I switched jobs and the commute was a major hit to that balance.
What I know from my current company, based on executive statements is that prior to 2020 board meetings used to be largely in person with perhaps a small group remote. Since 2020, they’ve been largely all remote. We’ve been told that the board thought the meetings worked better when everyone was remote.
A side effect of the boring insurance companies is, we use lots of off site contractors and we have lots of offices as the companies frequently grow through acquisition. Back at the first time I was in a merger, there was lots and lots and even more flying and driving the 180 miles between the combining home office locations. Today, 20 years later, it’s between one and four times a year they bring everyone together. There was simply no point in limiting remote work if you’re going to have teams spread across what used to be multiple home offices for the acquired companies. The other decision could have been to close those old home offices and bring everyone together instead. The last merger I was part of, did just that and laid off almost everyone at the acquired company site. They still ended up with remote workers because there were still multiple home offices, just not the one I had been at.
My current company is going all hybrid return to office. With lots of opportunity for individual employees to decide if they want to stay full remote, come in 1-4 days, or all 5 days a week. Whatever works best for the individual employee. As long as there’s no physical limitation that needs them in the office. The people who print the bills and checks have been in the office the entire time. Even if someone picks a 2 day a week hybrid plan, everyone was granted a 2 week full remote benefit to take anytime they want. Want to work from the beach for a week while the family vacations and be there for evenings, go for it. Use your vacation time for additional full vacations on top of that.
I didn’t mean to trivialize it. Remote work takes effort. In person work takes effort. Some of that effort is the same, some is different. Either way, the effort needs to be put in. Someone who doesn’t want to put in any more effort than stumbling through the office and who they randomly bump into is not a good remote work candidate. They’re probably not a good work candidate either though.
7 Likes
Nobody should be forced to do what they do not want. I am saying that if there are two “highly productive individuals”, I would bet hard on the one that is not scared of human interaction to beat the other one for success within an organization comprised of humans collaborating. I am not saying one is wrong and one is right, but I am sure one is much more likely to succeed. I would never work in an office every day but it’s not because I’m afraid of human interactions, quite the opposite, I enjoy socializing with others, and even though I work remotely, I always meet my customers face to face when it is to my and their benefit.
Perhaps making sweeping generalizations about how people ought to like working isn’t the best way to keep people happy. Some people do better in an office, some do better at home. If the right evaluations are used then both types should be able to maintain or advance their positions appropriately. And while being popular ought not to be a big part of those evaluations, a ton of built in biases will affect them, including does the evaluator like the evaluated.
My job cannot be done remotely-I’m a baker. I also teach after school cooking classes to kids from kindergarten to grade 5. The company I teach for does offer online classes, but that’s a whole different gig, and I’m not sure I’d be any good at it.
Most of the complaints seem more focused on the unwillingness of management to listen to what the workers want than the choice of office or home.
2 Likes
And you don’t need in-person communication to be “social”. I’ve never met anybody here in person, but nevertheless I feel a personal connection with many of them.
As others have said, hybrid work options are best as they can make everybody happy. Forcing people to the mothership “just because” is antiquated thinking, especially for a leading edge tech company. It only benefits those few type A extroverted managers everybody secretly loathes. Those people thrive in social settings. I find them exhausting.
12 Likes
I’m not sure what you mean. It can be both an open office and be inside a large square box far from any windows. They’re not mutually exclusive, and I’d argue the windowless open office is worse than the open office with windows (but both are pretty terrible, at least for my personality type).
Is your point that there are no benefits to in person interaction in the furtherance of a creative process? It has been my experience that communication is essential to such processes and remote communication, even when done as talking heads in a “Brady Bunch” grid, is a cold sorry substitute to sitting with others, brainstorming a solution to a problem.
I don’t doubt that but I would venture to guess you have in person relationships that are considerably more emotionally rewarding than some chat room buddies.
We had that problem at a fancy glass office I worked in as well. The poor dogs had it the worst. We had to frost all the glass halfway up so people (and dogs) would stop walking into it.
The worst (and this never got fixed) was the front of the building sloped outwards. The building looked like a wedge, basically. The walls were all glass though, so near the doors, the glass came outwards right at head level. People clonked their heads into it constantly coming and going from the building. It was this stupidest piece of architecture I’ve ever seen.
10 Likes
Humans are. At the same time, it’s also a fact that some people are extroverts and some people are introverts, who work best under different conditions. You do better recognizing it; often managers seem to assume everyone is as extroverted as them – hence the open office, hence the push for back to work – but forcing that on introverts is only missing an opportunity. It’s better to work with instead of against them, which is kind of sounds like your company is doing.
9 Likes
I agree. I am in no way saying it is the best fit for every employee. I have people with aspergers working for me that would not survive five minutes in a meeting or in an office. They do not work on anything that requires a lot of collaboration. I also have people who don’t speak a lick of english. They don’t answer the phones. We all have strengths and weaknesses but in general terms, I believe that social interaction in person is a general good for businesses.
All of them. The last two years showed everyone that things flow just fine, and sometimes better, with remote work. Let’s not pretend that the last two years didn’t happen. They did, and there’s no reason to put forward hypotheticals that imagine they didn’t.
That’s another management failure that likely would have happened in-office anyway, since the person who is drained by F2F interaction would have been labeled “less of a team player” than the other. Again, popularly contest management FTL.
There’s nothing about WFH that prevents this. Most field sales operates this way. That’s also my usual example of how to manage remote teams. You trust the sales team to WFH, why not everyone else? Oh, it’s because you can measure the productivity of the sales team? So are you too lazy to measure the productivity of everyone else or do you just not have the tools? We can build (or buy) the tools.
You are projecting what energizes and motivates you onto everyone else. Communication can happen in so many different ways. I guarantee there are software teams on Slack that communicate 10x more effectively, efficiently, and clearly that your in-person interactions. And unless you have fantastic mediators on your in-person brainstorming session, I also guarantee that some of the participants are being ignored, even if they are the smartest people in the room.
12 Likes
Architects sure do have a history of ignoring problems that glass features can create.
https://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/09/glass-staircase-not-dress-friendly/amp/
6 Likes
You are very sure about these specific things you have no personal knowledge of.
Ugh, this is the worst. Male architects and designers never think about skirts. Open front desks are the perfect example of this.
11 Likes
That’s distinctly unfair to say. I mean look what you wrote:
So maybe guarantee is hyperbole, but is your experience really so vast that you can be sure other people don’t have more of it, to the point where they can be fairly certain you’ve missed out on something? Because saying different things work for different people is probably the most true thing about humanity, and your experience that remote communication isn’t as good is the one that I would question generalizing.
9 Likes
