[PragmaticPulp]

> 3. They are good at or enjoy office politics.

As a counterpoint, we had a mix of remote department and in-office departments at my last company. Transitioning to fully remote made marked an increase in politics every time.

It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels. At the office it’s hard to have secret exclusionary meetings without other people noticing eventually. Online, you can create a private Slack channel or even a separate off-Slack group for the in-crowd where you exclude others, and no one can see it.

The politicians also developed a habit of meeting up in person (lunch, shared work days, etc) in ways that strengthened their political power. Ironically, having everyone go remote was a catalyst for giving the politicians a leg up on relationship building.

We still saw upsides of remote work, but I’ve lost all illusions that remote work is an improvement for office politics. If anything, the extra effort required for relationship-building in remote teams just gives the politicians more of a moat to protect their political domain.

[rootusrootus]

> It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels

I am 100% experiencing this right now. It isn't negative, exactly, at least not yet, but a lot of informal discussions between teams that used to occur in the hallway, break room, or wherever, just doesn't happen spontaneously when we are all remote. So it goes through more traditional channels, which makes it more formal and more political in many cases.

[patmorgan23]

As some one currently doing an internship this is wait I don't like what COVID-19 has done the workplace. It's much harder for me to build relationships with my coworkers, over hear conversations (in a good way) and have informal extemporaneous interactions when me and my coworkers aren't in the same physical place.

[dml2135]

I'd say on top of that, remote work comes with some of the same communication problems as social media platforms. Without facetime, the assumption of goodwill starts to wear way.

[PragmaticPulp]

The quickest way to resolve political standoffs in remote companies is to fly people out to an office and stick them in a conference room for a day.

The agenda barely matters. People just tend to behave better when they're dealing with a real human being that they've met instead of a screen name in Slack that they argue with every day.

This is why I never promise anyone 100% WFH or 100% remote any more. I tell everyone to plan for 0-3 weeks travel, giving some leeway for flying people out for face-to-face planning.

[notherthrowaway]

== People just tend to behave better when they're dealing with a real human being that they've met instead of a screen name in Slack that they argue with every day.==

I’ve seen this work with unruly customers, too.

[zwayhowder]

The usage stats for our MS Teams instance shows this. Before COVID hardly any messages, after a massive increase as you'd expect, but private messages outnumber public messages 10:1 or more. Several times I've found out that there are multiple private chat groups all for the same P1 or Project instead of using Channels that all staff can see.

[nitrogen]

I saw the same thing with Slack stats at a company. Plotted over time, private messages started at like 10%, but eventually reached something like 80% after a couple of years.

[sevrinsky]

I've tried to convince my colleagues to use MS Teams channels instead of chat groups, to increase searchability and spontaneous joining (rather than needing to be invited). They've mostly resisted because they prefer the interface for group chats.

MS Teams makes a substantial distinction between:

- group chats, which appear like any other chat interface (Whatsapp, FB Messenger)

- and channels, which appear as potential threads to be nested (which most chatters _hate_)

MS Teams also has much greater overhead for adding members to a Team, which is a prerequisite for looping them in on a @mention within a Channel. All of these are much easier and straightforward on Slack, but you're basically stuck once your Corporate IT Overlords have selected a Product.

[ksec]

>As a counterpoint, we had a mix of remote department and in-office departments at my last company. Transitioning to fully remote made marked an increase in politics every time.

That basically turn Office Discussions into Internet discussions. There are many things that just dont translate well with words, or even with Voice and Video Call.

[flyingramen]

> Online, you can create a private Slack channel or even a separate off-Slack group for the in-crowd where you exclude others, and no one can see it.

Since you say politics reasons wholly because of this reason, it’s not like Slack is not available if you are not fully remote.

[vkou]

It's available when you're not fully remote, but people prefer to have in-person meetings instead, because they have higher communication bandwidth.