[kodah]

There are some people who cannot work from home. These people have been especially vocal. Sometimes they include people who have kids, other times they include people who get their social interaction in at work. I think the office should accommodate them as well as remote workers.

The biggest challenge I've faced being on a remote team (read: not necessarily WFH) is that people who are at the primary physical location are acutely unaware of their remote colleagues. On VCS systems they'll shout and have conversations with each other, they won't focus conversations in chat or make equivalent channels for hallway conversations, and they'll assign work to themselves first.

I'd like to have the option for remote work to be available to me in the future and if we're going to do that then that means people who go into primary locations must learn to play ball with everyone.

[kube-system]

In my experience, there are two ways for a company to be successful at having remote employees:

1. everyone is 100% remote

2. everyone comes into the office occasionally

Anything else leads to a two-tiered system.

[chrisco255]

I don't think so. My company was remote-first before the pandemic, but we still had about 25% of our staff or so go into an office regularly. The key is to have that remote-first attitude in spite of there being an office. One of the rules we had was "if one person is remote that's supposed to be on a meeting, then everyone has to treat that as a remote meeting and Zoom in". In other words, no one was on unequal footing for important team decisions, and if you had 5 people in an office that were supposed to have a meeting with 2 other remote peeps, those 5 people would jump on their laptops for the meeting, not huddle into a conference room. Subtle changes like this make a big difference.

[ghaff]

I work with teams that have rules like that.

The other thing to consider is that many of us routinely work with people across much of the world on a day-to-day basis. Even if everyone were in office--some are, some aren't--almost every meeting I'd be in would have people from 2 or 3 different offices. One office I work with a lot is in the same time zone. The other is 6 time zones away but that still works pretty well because we have meetings early in the workday our time, which for them is mid-afternoon.

[jcims]

This is my situation as well. My employer has >>100,000 full time folks spread all over the planet, and despite having one of the largest office buildings as my home base, for the most part I didn't work with anyone from it. So even back 3-4 years ago when I went to the office I spent almost all of my day on videoconference calls.

[taylodl]

That's the same conclusion my company, a Fortune 500 utility company in the US, came too. Their solution? 90% of the staff is expected to continue working remotely as the new normal. Frankly it's working too well. Productivity has increased, employees are happy, we've successfully on-boarded new hires and we can expand the geographical range from which we can hire. Win-win-win. The executives are happy, the workers are happy, we're all saving time and money - this is good!

[dalbasal]

Luckily/unluckily, companies can operate just fine with tiered systems. They're often more comfortable with this kind of structure.

[dstick]

You mean, you can't have some that are always remote and some that are in the office? Like a split?

[mjevans]

It's very difficult for humans to resist putting the burden on someone else. Like that in person meeting that results in a conversation where someone else has been given additional work, or 'needs' to help show someone how to do their job in a spreadsheet... etc.

Remote work forces everyone to contribute to the burden of documenting what's happening.

[rockinghigh]

The main reason people who have kids cannot easily work from home is because schools are closed and they have to take care of their kids during the day.

[slavapestov]

Yeah. In a hypothetical situation where schools were closed but workplaces were open, parents would not be able to go to the office to work either.

[ckgjm]

That’s why WfH really means Work FOR Home for many. I know of many who really worked 2 shifts, balancing between WforH and WfromH.

[bvirb]

My (small) company didn't skip a beat moving from entirely in office to entirely remote. In retrospect we were already having all of our conversations on Slack when we were in the office.

The key was we were always listening to music in our headphones.

[ramblerman]

This sounds a bit like wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Sure it's not entirely fair, but it's human nature.

It's akin to saying you want good relationships and friendships but without the hassle of all that conversation.

[j0ba]

That's fine. They can just take a salary cut if they need their employer to provide them an officespace.

[walshemj]

So workers have to pay for the costs of the office now -did you think that through

[withinboredom]

That’s a tax write off in the US.