[30367286]

What is a sufficient compromise, in your view, that satisfies the need of some workers to have regular face to face interactions with coworkers and prevents corporations unprepared to manage a remote team from whipping back to full in-office?

I do not want to put words in your mouth, but since you offered so few of them, I am tempted to believe you are one of the few lucky workers who has sufficient leverage to wholesale refuse to work in an office. If that is you, or if you the reader are such a person: consider the path we must take to bring flexible work to more people.

With that goal and those prerequisites in mind, what is a sufficient compromise?

[grardb]

Assuming the word "hybrid" is being used to mean that an individual employee has to go into the office for at least some amount of time per week/month/whatever:

Here's the issue I have with the main argument I see against remote work, or rather the main argument I see in favor of forcing people to commute to an office ("satisfies the need of some workers to have regular face to face interactions with coworkers"):

I want to be at home, and I am fine being at home. Why should I need to go to an office because of a coworker's need for social interaction? I don't need that social interaction. To me, the argument always seems very self-centered from the point of view of pro-office people. Let the people who need that social interaction go to the office, and let everyone else stay home if they want. There's no reason that someone should be forced to go to an office because of the needs of other people, especially when those needs have nothing to do with work.

This is like arguing that I should be wearing a certain color of clothing because some people like to (or need to?) see that color. That's not my problem to solve for them.

I get plenty of social interaction outside of work hours. There should be zero expectation for me to spend more time, energy, and/or money (getting ready, preparing or buying lunch, commuting both ways, etc.) so that people who aren't my friends get to look at/talk to me in 3D.

[closeparen]

I would be happy to socialize only with people who opt in. That’s how it is already, no one forced you to go to the lunch table or tag along for drinks.

To the extent that we collaborate on work, though, having to Zoom with you instead of having a normal free-flowing conversation forms an imposition on me. It becomes an extreme imposition when I am also prohibited from having normal free flowing conversations with other people in the office, out of a sense of “inclusivity” or “leveling the playing field” for you.

[ev1]

I am curious how this does not present an opposite extreme: forcing me to stop my work to have an unnecessary conversation instead of discussing in asynchronous issue tracker makes me have to remember what happened, have to write down whatever I remember, deal with not being able to get my stories done while this is happening, instead of being able to look it up and have it in writing along with other people not available at the time to discuss or leave notes and changes on.

[closeparen]

I agree, it is very bad to do things synchronously and in formal meetings that could have been async and offline. That's another reason to resent remote work. Number of meetings, duration of meetings, size of attendee lists, and % of calendar covered in meetings are all way up since the transition to remote. There's a meme on HN that remote means written async communication, but the objective measured reality at my company is the opposite.

[ornornor]

Exactly, why should we allow someone else to make their problem our problem?

[tharkun__]

A sufficient compromise would be to allow the people that want regular face to face interactions with coworkers to go to the office and do just that. Not sure what the culture is in your place but at my place everyone has their video on in calls, so there's always face-to-face communication (exceptions can apply of course in some circumstances but that is the general rule) that way. People that want that do go to the office from time to time and do just that. But they do it with like minded people.

What is not a sufficient compromise is to force people that don't need face-to-face in person interaction into the office again when we have found out that remote works perfectly well.

[30367286]

> But they do it with like minded people

This is the main problem I see with your compromise. The self-sorting will create or enforce existing silos. The compromise is not only between you and your employer, but also between you and your coworkers. You might derive no value from face to face interaction, but your coworkers certainly do — and that includes you.

I suspect that this self-sorting will result in a very loud cohort of in-office workers demanding everyone come back, which spoils the whole deal.

[tharkun__]

Definite +1 to my sibling about coming in and keeping the head down.

Not sure which kinds of silos you are talking about. If it's silos as in social circles, that exists with 100% in-office as well. You know, the people that always sit together at lunch, always go out together for lunch or coffee, that meet after work at the pub and the people that eat lunch at their desk or off to the side, drink office-coffee only and don't go to the pub but go home to their family instead.

If you're talking about departmental or team silos those existed with 100% in-office as well. Marketing not talking to Product or Dev? Nothing really changed here I would argue. If anything it might have gotten better because everyone thought it would get worse and very actively tried to do something about it.

Face to face communication works very well over video and I derive enormous value from it. Only using written communication or audio only would suck big time. Especially when first getting to know someone that you've never met in person. But I don't have to sit in the same room with them or be 12 floors away from them for most of the day except for the meeting at three, when we both take the elevator, them 3 floors down, me 9 floors up to talk about something.

I agree that there will probably be a loud cohort of in-office workers that demand others to come back and if they succeed it will spoil the whole deal. But that doesn't get better with a 2-day in-office hybrid compromise either. If anything they would have much more pull already when they demand we go back to 5 days a week "because obviously 3 days of remote work are bad, we only get anything done ever in the 2 forced in-office days".

[marcosdumay]

Oh, on my experience person to person interaction got much easier more common, because you don't have to get up and go to a different floor, or to the other end of your floor, or to another city.

We have some processes with high interaction on our development, and when people were considering going back to the office (in the end, we didn't) we met and decided how we would do then now. The remote option worked so much better than in person that there wasn't any discussion.

[SketchySeaBeast]

But if I'm forced to come in for two days I'm going to go in, keep my head down, and get out, which is what I did 5 days a week before. The loud people have always and will always dominate those conversations.

[lamontcg]

2 million people a year are permanently injured from car accidents and 38,000 people die a year. I'm not willing any more to put myself at those kinds of risks for my employer.

And that's before we engage with the climate impacts, the waste of time, the idiotic open office plans, the interruptions, etc.

I'm not interested in compromise, I'm not buying anything about the entire concept.

We're going to split into different kinds of workplaces, and remote-only employees are going to go to remote-only/remote-first workplaces.

Large tech employers who want offices are going to have to deal with the fact that they're not going to be able to hire a group of tech workers that have those demands. Those employers would probably do well to consider spinning off remote-first divisions. That isn't my problem at all though, and "hybrid" is a hard no for me, and a lot of other people.

People are making decisions about their life. This isn't something that you compromise with them over, you don't actually have a negotiating position.

It does look like the people who want everyone else back to the office are now entering into the 3rd stage of Grief though (Bargaining).

[thaumasiotes]

> What is a sufficient compromise, in your view, that satisfies the need of some workers to have regular face to face interactions with coworkers

Let them get their interactions from people who want to have them.

What's a sufficient compromise between the need of some men to have sex with women and the desire of some women not to have sex with those men?