I have experience with a company that went 'ROW' back in the 10s. If a majority of your company is remote, you can forget about the office, its a dead space. There's no water cooler talk, no games after work. I can see why some companies are going to try the hybrid model.
I do agree with the GP, there is something about the separation between work and living. I miss the feeling that when I did work from home "after hours", it was for special cases, rather than the "same old".
Which is one of several reasons for a lot of the emotion around the question. People are already discovering that if you’re largely a pre-pandemic office person, that doesn’t work if most of your co-workers are only wandering in maybe a day per week if at all.
When I was at GE we straight up ignored the division CTO and just worked from home when we felt like it...a whole org team under him (he specifically banned WFH more than 1 day a week, most of us worked at least two or three). We scheduled meetings in rooms at the office and came in on those days when we felt the need. It worked fine.
Most companies I have been at just ignored the CEOs stupid out-of-touch WFH proclaimations. This was tech though. The other departments usually obeyed on a case by case basis.
I do think there are a fair number of people looking for more than come into the office for meetings now and then though. There’s also the fact that you still need to live in some semblance of commuting distance. That says 1.5 to 2 hours one way is doable for a day a week and gives you quite a bit of flexibility.
Indeed. I've seen some companies say they want people back in 100% of the time but I've seen others close their office and have all their employees work remotely 100% of the time. I feel both are toxic policies to place on your entire workforce and the best approach is flexibility because different employees will have different preferences and needs.
Thankfully there are a good number of companies (in the UK at least) who are allowing their employees to make this decision themselves.
I've been thinking about this and perhaps the most appropriate solution is to not have onsite companies vs remote companies, and also not companies with a random mix of the both; but having a company consist of onsite teams and remote work teams - so both preferences can work well, but you can optimize the day-to-day work process (which usually happens within a team) to the very different needs of in-office vs work-from-home environment.
I disagree. I think the best solution is giving your employees flexibility. People who want to travel into the office can do so. People who want to work remotely can also do so. And people are able to come in as often or infrequently as they want.
There will always be instances where fully remote people might still want to come in (eg someone leaving social). And there will be reasons why people who normally like to come in every day might chose not to (eg a doctors appointment at lunch time).
I agree that this is what employees would prefer; however, I'm not certain that full flexibility is the most effective way of achieving results for the business. My (totally unverified) assumption is that giving employees a choice between a remote team and an on-site team captures most of the value that the employees care about in that choice, while still allowing teams to choose a reasonably effective remote or on-site work process.
I manage a few teams and have been trialling allowing employees to chose their working terms. It's been working fine for us thus far. I'm sure other companies could manage too.
He wanted to get rid of choice altogether. Hostile bias enforced by institutional power...not a sustainable position these days. Go back to Honeywell or GE.
I do agree with the GP, there is something about the separation between work and living. I miss the feeling that when I did work from home "after hours", it was for special cases, rather than the "same old".