[tjoff]

Colleagues working from home affects those in the office...

There are certain types of communication that are vastly superior to do in person that can get quite tedious over text or phone. A 2 minute quick talk can save tons of time.

Now if my colleague is working from home I get the that same disadvantage from working from home - even when I'm still in the office. Many of the downsides people list here with working from home will be shared by those who are still in the office.

[thomas232233]

In my experience middle level managers are the gate keepers to work from home. Developers are willing to work from home, while managers especially people managers are afraid their work might be perceived by the company as unnecessary. If WFH has to become norm then company should assure managers their job security.

[JDiculous]

You could have a 2 minute chat remotely

[tjoff]

I certainly would hope so. The point is that it wouldn't be nearly enough or as efficient.

[feanaro]

Then we work on the technology to make it efficient.

Remote work will have to become much more common in the future. It makes absolutely no sense to waste so much time and energy on commutes.

[tjoff]

Always a good idea. But the entire company culture needs to adapt for it to work. The conundrum as to why anyone in office would care isn't that hard to figure out.

Personally I would look for another job.

I love being able to work from home, when I'm recovering from being ill or if it somehow makes life easier on a particular day. Will probably come in handy during this crisis as well - so I'm very thankful of it.

But 363 times out of 365 I much prefer to work in office. And that is with the assumption that I won't be alone...

[feanaro]

It seems to me that almost everyone prefers having the ability to work from home at some times and work remotely at other times. Also, there are clearly preferences around this, such that a given person might prefer one of the other more (or most) of the time.

Taking this into account, along with the undeniable time and energy benefits of remote work, I think companies should start preparing for, allowing and offering remote work. It should become normalized, so that people who want to work from home on some days should be able to.

Importantly though, I don't think it makes sense for most companies to try to completely switch to remote work. Eventually, I think this will lead to a stable equilibrium of some significant percentage of people working from home and a significant percentage coming to work, on a given day. Except for companies which deliberately want to be remote-only, I doubt it would ever result in no one coming to the office.

This seems like a win-win. It reduces the burden of commuting for those that do not want it or cannot manage it on a given day, it gives people more free time, it lessens energy expenditure, but there's still an office to come to and socialize, interact directly and do immediate in-person business, just with a bit less people than usual.

[ghaff]

In all fairness, unless teams coordinate, what often tends to happen is people come into the office haphazardly based on what they're doing and whether they have a reason to want to stay home that day. And then, once in the office, none of the other people they want to see are there.

I know this has happened with me and others I know. I wouldn't mind going into the office a day or two per week if it were useful but between travel and people working from home and people who aren't in the same office, there won't be a lot of people I work with circulating around if I do. So I don't bother.

But we're a pretty remote friendly company in general--although the degree to which people who have an office come in varies by team.

[asjw]

There are things that technology can't replace

Like talking to a room where people are actually present and to 20 people each from their laptop, with the mic muted and the video turned off

It's much harder to 'read the room' and much is lost

And I certainly love working from home and don't fancy socializing much when at work

But technology made a lot of work-related things harder or worse

[feanaro]

I appreciate what you're saying and I agree that it's very hard, but I think it may be too quick to chalk it up as being impossible.

In fact, things like making the room easier to read despite using a camera is exactly what I was talking about. It is definitely the case with today's systems where you simply have a camera on the lid of the laptop and display many individual images of people on the screen. This does look very unnatural.

For instance, one very distracting aspect of this is that it is impossible for two people to be looking into each other's eyes as they are communicating, since the image and the camera are not aligned. Solving this would at least make addressing a single person over a video call much more natural. Perhaps we could somehow place a camera behind the screen? Will volumetric display technology make it easier once it is more widespread?

And this is just one problem that we can identify. I'm sure there are many other subtle cues missing from a video call which could be identified and then hopefully fixed.

[ivanhoe]

How exactly is video call different than face to face in transferring information? I admit being in the same room has different socio-psychological benefits, but in almost 20 years of me working fully remote most of the time, I've never encountered the problem that couldn't be explained by screen-sharing or on a virtual white-board just as good as in person?

[kingludite]

I know from marketing that people should be considered different people in person at home, in person at work, in person at their client's, on the phone, on the web cam 1 on 1, on the cam with multiple people, in text messages. Further modification happens depending on who participate in the conversation.

The funniest example I know is a guy who will first call people then when they say NO in no uncertain terms and hang up on him he drives there and asks exactly the same thing. He frequently describes how both him and the prospect pretend the rude phone call never happened.

He one time needed 100 plants for a stage of a theater performance. On the phone the grower refused to rent them to him, he didn't want to name a price, just NO. In person he immediately agreed to do it for free.

[christophilus]

I find that my power poses are less intimidating over video.

[tjoff]

In every conceivable aspect? Maybe after 20 years one learns to adapt.