The pre-pandemic work arrangements were in what is called a meta-stable state.
"If the ball is only slightly pushed, it will settle back into its hollow, but a stronger push may start the ball rolling down the slope" [1]
They only looked normal because there just aren't many mechanisms for society to explore (at scale) nearby states that might be more adapted but require a lot of energy to reach.
We have now tunneled by force into a more stable state. Everybody knows that massive amounts of knowledge work can be done remotely. There are tradeoffs of-course, a new equilibrium must be reached, but it has nothing to do with the old one.
That is a good thing. Somehow we should be able to get to better states without going through existential risks.
I’ve been seeing companies that have tried to get people to commute to/from and “work” from their office (any number of days) starting to lose the good people - the ones you want to keep around.
I’ve kept in contact with a couple of them and they’re now 100% remote, one is working for a local company the other an international and they seem genuinely so much happier.
We have a completely flexible working arrangement. Pretty much 'do what you want'. We provide equipment for working from home and we also have offices stocked with food, etc.
If we changed that and demanded return to office I know for a fact that the most capable people would be the first to give notice and we would immediately be less profitable.
> starting to lose the good people - the ones you want to keep around.
Right, because telework is only beneficial for the good developers, because most outside of the top 20%/10%/5% won't be able to compete with low-cost international labor enabled by telework.
Telework is quite clearly a way to cut down on the middle class while enriching a small elite class of workers, and comments like this show those who think that they're in that class.
Another anecdote to throw in the bucket: they announced that we'll be returning to the office on July 10th, and also that we'll be pausing catered lunches on July 7th.
(I know that it's the peak of privilege to complain about not getting free food delivered to work, but this feels like all-stick, and literally no carrots.)
Meanwhile, those unflexible, union-backed jobs in Germany now come more often than not with 40% remote work included, and guaranteed by signed, collectively bargained agreements.
No source, but in general it worls like this: each indiszry has a leading union and a coreespondong, leading epmployer association. Those two collectively bargain for all represented employees at represented employers, e.g. salaries, workinng hours and so forth, up to a certain salary range. In one case, the metal and electric industry in Bavaria, those salaries can go up to close to 120k Euro for a 40 hour contract in the highest wage bracket (those salary table are public).
In addition to those general agreements, worker councils and thwir individual employers can, and routinely do, negotiate supplental agreements, e.g. extended working hours, christmas and vacation bonuses, overtime (up to the possibility to save up for early retirememt or fully paid sabaticals).
And since Covid, those agreements include up to 40% of remote work where possible. Before Covid, working councils, and thus unions as the majority of council members are union members normally, where oppossed to that. Which kind of makes sense, since most union members tend to be blue collar folks with serious problems when it comes to taking work home. And those priviledged, like in no shift work, bettwr pay and less physical labour, office folks (I am one of those) already had enough benefits (which I get). Covid changed that, even if I have no idea how that came about, I wasn't working in collective bargaining environment during that time.
Overall so, unions turned out to be way more flexible and pragmatic, as were employers, that some people, certainly myself, expected.
The paycheck is the baseline, a given when it comes to performing labor in this context. Perks of working in a given location are the carrots above and beyond the standard baseline of “I work, you pay me”.
That’s true. That’s why I literally just quit my senior technical leadership megacorp job that was now requiring me to come in 5 days a week even though I work with no one locally. So, I found a job that paid better and was more interesting and was willing to value my abilities over control of my corporeal being. The attitude that money can buy everything will lead these companies to be structurally uncompetitive.
I see the folks who seem to revel in these policies around me, they are precisely the people who go to work to act on a stage. I’m here to build things the world has never seen and make it a commercial success. I guess you get what you pay for with your carrots?
Giving people food is like the oldest trick for engendering loyalty in the book. It is cheap, but feels personal. “There’s no such thing as free lunch” is a two-way street.
Plus, if you don’t have food on campus, your engineers might go out to lunch, which always takes much longer. Add to that, since they are going out anyway they might go around the cubes and grab their friends for a group lunch trip (might as well carpool if you are leaving campus, right?), so hopefully nobody needs a disruption free stint of work between like 11:00 and 1:00.
Sure, the paycheck helps, it is just the most expensive way to buy somebody’s attention.
I mean, I could - and once again, I am reminded of the fact that I get to sit in front of a laptop instead of doing hard physical labor that I can literally see construction workers doing down the street.
But I can get a paycheck elsewhere, without the company suddenly doing a 180 on me with regard to my other benefits!
This is what people always forget about work relationships. You need it for money. But if the employer doesn't also need it for money ... you don't have a job!
So you are almost always in a situation that your employer needs you more than you need your employer.
If the employee is getting paid the same amount, and can get paid a similar amount for a different company without going to the office, it's not a carrot.
As opposed to a hyper competitive market where the worker is replaceable due to the market OR a market where there is literally little to no high paying jobs available, even for qualified applicants.
No, my paycheck is why I show up at all, it's table stakes. Carrots are things that show I'm appreciated, and the bare fucking minimum to keep me there isn't a show of appreciation.
I get paid to work, I'm not there because I fundamentally care about the organization or what it does. If you want to motivate me to do more than the bare minimum, please do so through motivating me, not by telling me I should be grateful to work for you.
And, yes, I'm entitled to be treated well, just like everyone else.
I just don't know how you get the Genie back in the bottle. Will employees come back in eventually probably if forced to enough. will smaller companies see how much of a benefit WFH is and use it as a hiring advantage I would imagine.
I wonder if people forced to come back into the office are working a ton of free hours for the company. I can't really stay late because I have that commute now.
And every time someone from management sent an email or tried to have a zoom I'd have a hard time not asking in the zoom why it wasn't an in person meeting?
And I could see people spending a whole lot of time "collaborating" too.
Maybe there needs to be a blog post 50 passive aggressive ways to get back at your employer for making you come back into the office.
Employees should start associating in-office required days with just talking about a four day work week (which is probably another anathema thing to management).
Well, assuming an hour traveling in and an hour out from the office, that’s another 8-hour day. So yeah, talking about a four-day work week is completely reasonable.
There was an article in Salon or Slate last year where they asked people what it would take to get them back in the office, and the universal answer was on-site free day care for their kids.
>And every time someone from management sent an email or tried to have a zoom I'd have a hard time not asking in the zoom why it wasn't an in person meeting?
I love this as malicious compliance in RTO workplaces. Brilliant.
I left my previous employer when it was clear they were forcing everyone back to the office.
The CEO recently claimed on Twitter and LinkedIn, essentially that people working from home were lazy grifters who did nothing all day.
He’s the sort of manager who believes on the one hand that no-one does any work unless he personally is there to crack the whip, and on the other that it’s fine to pay less than market rate salaries because the company culture is so fantastic.
Also conveniently forgetting that the best years the company ever had financially was when everyone was remote.
Now work for a much smaller fully remote company who love the fact they’re no longer geographically limited for good employees.
> “You can interrupt each other without being rude when you’re in person,” said Mr. Medina, whose company, Outreach, is now in the office on a hybrid basis. “In a Zoom conversation, you have to let somebody finish their thought.”
How is this not admitting that WFH is superior? If it puts a damper on people like this who feel it's their right to interrupt your thoughts, it's only a good thing. This article title may sound pro-WFH but it's basically pro-WFO and has no data other than CEO "feelings" to back it up. It also doesn't even mention all of the companies that started fully remote and will stay that way. Count me among those who would never WFO again, for any reason.
From my point of view, he's right. Virtual meetings with more than 3 participants make back-and-forth discussions very hard. Interruptions aren't always negative - they're part of a natural conversation. In a situation where I'm talking, often an interruption will be to ask for clarification, or more information, and it'll come just as I start to move on to something else. The latency and awkwardness of video calls makes that hard to do. As a result, people talk more continuously and those little questions/requests for clarification don't ever get said.
Sure, there's people who feel it's their right to interrupt your thoughts. There's also people who feel it's their right to talk at everyone without stopping. Healthy conversation is a balancing act, and it's hard to get right in a group situation over video.
You can, of course, find ways round this. One on one calls, with shared screens, are often more productive if you're remote. Maybe large meetings are ultimately a bit pointless anyway?
I always found Zoom great for latency and communication. For some reason Google vid hangouts had us unintentionally interrupting each other more frequently - don't know if they've improved that now. I think it's one hidden reason Zoom got more popular so quickly over other vid conf offerings.
Latency is only one of the problems. Most of these services seem to handle audio in a way where they are picking one person as the speaker, and muting or ducking everyone else's audio. Practices like cooperative overlap are technologically inhibited.
Seems like a reasonable feature to more productive meetings in general? In-person meetings can degenerate to unproductive noise if people can't speak in turn. If you don't want the "talking stick" pattern there are other remote spaces where one can all meet online and have multiple conversations simultaneously.
Yes, but can you actually prove them wrong with real data? Everybody I know advocating WFH (including myself FWIW) tend to use words that amount to their own “vibes” that they are more personally productive but I rarely hear people moving beyond feelings and anecdotes about their personal productivity and into real data that shows benefits to the organization far beyond the individual.
Until WFH advocates can do that, a CEO’s vibe is going to trump their vibes all day long.
I would argue the best indicator is that, after all this time, productivity has not dropped, businesses are not failing, unemployment has not sharply risen, etc. Everyone is making record profits.
(but it would be a hard case to prove, at macro-level, given all the other recent factors which would also impact those metrics.)
... I guess I've not heard of any businesses failing specifically because of WFH.
Productivity has dropped [0], businesses (small ones in particular) are struggling [1], unemployment rose 0.3% between April 2023 and May 2023 [2], and "record profits" are also dropping (why did you think inflation was dropping?) [3].
So uh, any other indicators you'd like to use to measure the impact of WFH?
> I guess I've not heard of any businesses failing specifically because of WFH
Sure, but that is an argument to a baseline not a benefit. Easily countered by “How many businesses failed pre-pandemic because they were not work from home?”
Without real hard data showing a direct benefit, we cant argue WFH over in office from a position of strength.
Maybe it's my ADHD or cultural norms, but I read it as "finally, a conversation doesn't have to a boring turn-based event". Natural conversations are duplex
Definitely ADHD. My neurotypical coworkers can't stand my constant interruptions. On the flip side their adherence to turn-based conversations drives me crazy.
This spotlights the difference between managerial time, where things are accomplished in 30-minute meeting blocks, and developer / creative time, where things are accomplished in half-day blocks. Remote work is superior for the latter, office work for the former. So yes, meetings are far better in person. But coding is far better in solitude, and we have tools that let you pair-program for that 30% to 50% of the time you'd spend pair-programming.
There's a reason why nearly every single developer in modern office settings wears headphones. It's not for the synergy.
I very much agree with your response, yet will also say that I’ve still observed plenty of interruptions on Zoom. It may just raise the difficulty barrier, which I don’t regard as bad.
This entire article is weak on the work-from-office advantages. While they claim that some companies have "run the numbers," unfortunately no factual data from this number running has made it into the article.
its polite to discuss the chit-chat.. its "not polite" to discuss the actual supervision as it is implemented. This is about supervision and metrics, manager roles and executive roles, as much as anything IMHO
CEO and leadership need peons genuflecting to feel powerful. My wife took a job that promised 2 days wfh. First week they switched it to 1 day because leadership thinks it's easier to build relationships in office. Total bait and switch. Was a year ago and she is still there and enjoys the job. I'm still furious about it but let it go. It's frustrating because plans involving the kids were made and then the job changes the playing field and all kid duties are mine 4 days a week instead of 3. Figure for most people that have to go back it's way worse.
It's funny how not one sentence mentioned corporate real estate, which I think is a far bigger driver of the push to in-person work than "you can't interrupt people on Zoom" or whatever inane reason these corporate types think justifies the huge (and patently unnecessary) expenditure in employee time and energy commuting represents.
> “You can interrupt each other without being rude when you’re in person,”
With a large pay increase and a promotion to “guy who remembers stuff so nobody else has to”, I would gladly come into the office and not feel like it was rude to be constantly interrupted.
But as it is, my job is “finish the work you asked me to do”, and constant interruption is quite rude, in-person or otherwise.
I took a significant pay increase on a new job with the understanding that the role would be hybrid, two days a week. That was agreed upon above everything else.
Our whole team agreed to do the two days so we could have our project meetings in the lab and do our scrums in person. We also acknowledged that the days are shorter because of commuting time and productivity will not be as strong because of the office environment.
Hell, we spend half our time shooting the shit, eating lunch, and talking about non-work stuff. But we're happy to see real people. So far I'm not unhappy with the setup.
It’s awesome that that was agreed to up-front! As COVID eased, a friend who works for a local software shop was worried about the fights they’d have over remote vs. in-office, as they’d had a super-strong in-office culture before. The company threaded the needle on it, though: because all the teams work in pods, the decision was that each pod (6-10 people) would decide by consensus whether to be remote, hybrid, or in-office. They then ran an exchange program to help re-home people on teams that wanted something different. It wasn’t perfect, but the willingness to let each team determine for itself what was best and trust them to make the right decision fairly really worked.
It sounds like a good setup, mostly because everyone knew ahead of time what they were getting into, and understood what in-office days were going to be like!
I realize I'm lucky that I found a group that picked a plan that worked for them. The company overall hasn't set an RTO plan in place, but we're predicting that will happen soon and maybe by demonstrating we already have a hybrid plan that's working, they'll leave us alone.
And maybe that's the solution, if you're willing to do a bit of hybrid work. Get a plan going before you have one pushed upon you.
It's the complete opposite when you’re in person. It’s so much more rude as your demanding their immediate attention at a time that suits you. Remote you can manage your notifications and methods of contact which is so much healthier.
Rather not rehash this discussion, but just a reminder that some people feel exactly opposite. In person disruption is really no big deal for me, but slack is a tool that destroys all productivity.
Another mental burden to remember to turn off slack notification, and notifications of this other Collab tool whenever I do not want to be interrupted.
Also, at least for me, it's not black and white when I need quiet time. I might jot down something, brings another idea and suddenly I have a new idea to fix a problem which has been nagging at me for months and off I go for 10 hours.
I won't think about turning off notification until there is one - by then my mental flow has been disturbed.
But I do love home office, I just want to outline that managing notifications is not without friction.
I might entertain giving up remote if these clowns at the helm decided to get rid of crowded open office plans. I can’t stand open office plans and get anxiety thinking about being forced back into them. It’s one of the reasons I worked on getting a remote position even before the pandemic. I think I’ll leave the tech industry if it comes down to that being the only option.
It's curious how there seems to be few if any hard numbers on the work in the office side of the argument. What I've seen are anecdotes like, "We're more creative in person" or, without evidence: "Being near each other makes the work better." In google's case: ok, take a look at all those KPI's for teams that WFH vs in office: where is that?
On the WFH side, it's straightforward to calculate the commute hours saved, carbon footprint lowered, and minutes more spent with friends/family.
Now that many workers have enjoyed the WFH status quo, they feel that management is actively removing benefits.
These articles are kinda funny to me since I don’t know anyone in my corner of the industry, in my corner of the world who has been fully wfh since 2021. And like, nobody is all that upset about it? We need to share hardware, we were borrowing lab equipment, passing prototypes and going in to have techs solder stuff, etc, might as well go in a few days a week.
I’m not saying I don’t get why people like wfh, it’s just like, a small subset of workers this applies to who have purely computer jobs, and many of the articles about it seem to imply “everyone” is working from home, never mind carpenters or cooks.
Probably not THAT small, but not most workers, and I guess I feel that articles like these, reflecting the work that the authors themselves do, make it that WFH-capable jobs are the default. Office workers are normal, and taxi drivers aren’t. But that might be reading a bit much into it.
Seems like these companies are banking on a recession to impact the job market and reduce labour bargaining power, thereby freeing them to change the WFH situation without significant attrition.
It'll be interesting to see who ends up being right.
I saw a video that indicated that the attrition from RTO is desirable for some CEOs. If revenues are falling, its better to have staff leave than it is to announce layoffs. RTO gives them a shield and they can paint the WFH crowd as lazy and not a culture fit.
"If revenues are falling" is a big if. I've seen no real evidence that'd happening, and rather the reverse seems to be occurring: record corporate profits.
Now, granted, tech is an outlier in that a lot of companies ballooned up during the pandemic and are now undoing that mistake, and so your explanation makes sense in that industry, but the push for RTO is happening outside tech as well.
If there is one thing everyone should know, it is that board members, CxOs and VCs are all just regular humans. They think exactly like you. Which means, they are as dumb as you.
"They would much rather focus on their own returns than on the continued well-being of the company."
Apply this line to your job, your career, your family. This is life in modern America.
A nitpick, but: if you get equity with your comp package, then you are an "owner" as well. The distinction between you and the C-suite is that their equity package is much higher.
Another article about forced RTO that fails to mention that executives are afraid of losing their tax incentives / welfare payments by not delivering x number of bodies to the location that gave them incentives to be there
The desperation phase? Yes, for employers. Watch this whole RTO thing collapse and corpos "changing their mind" once the herd gas been thinned and 2024, an elections year, rolls around. They have limited time to pull this off.
They need your vote. If you make it slightly more comfortable for the peasants you get more votes. Or if the situation is dire this oppons the door for the opposition.
There are so many downsides to WFH, and even the upsides encourage the opposite behaviors you want in a team, so this is in no way surprising. The larger permanent WFH experiment failed.
That said, not every role, in every situation, needs in person interaction. It’s even reasonable to argue not every day needs in person interaction.
- Lack of unit cohesion through informal interactions
- Lack of access to equipment and tools necessary to complete job effectively
- Lower social interaction
- Risk of underworking
- Risk of overworking
- Unending distractions
The list goes on...
The interactions that take place when humans are next to one another is irreplaceable by current technology. Actual bandwidth to exchange ideas is lower.
I know this is going to bring a lot of bitter downvotes, and I accept that, but the reality is WFH failed as a universal, "Everyone can do this." idea. The upsides are all for the employees, and the downsides are all shouldered by the employer, the one with the money, the one who creates and justifies the job, so it is ending for most. Not everyone! But most.
Specific to your team, I do think it can work remotely, and have run remote engineering teams. But (and this is a big but) it requires a specific personality for everyone on the team, and you must do a lot to make up for the loss of in person interactions, and I can totally understand orgs who either a) don't think they have teams with the right dispositions to handle it or b) don't think they'll be able to successfully execute on all of the many extra work involved in recreating some of the missing aspects of WFH teams.
Do you have conflicts? If so, how do they get resolved? Maybe it all works, but if any real problem shows up, I've found creating safety is a lot more difficult remotely. WFH can breed all of the nasty "snake pit" attitudes and behaviors a lot more easily when everyone (or even someone) is remote and therefore less interconnected.
Funny, I've found that a hybrid scrum model works extremely well to address almost all items on your list, and works across the spectrum of personality types. M/W/F normal stand-ups and T/Th 1:1s with each team member or small group.
The one thing it can't address (unending distractions) is a red herring. Either you've hired an employee that can manage their own time or you haven't. If they can't manage their time while WFH I doubt they would be much better managing their time WFO, either.
I've found it's only bad management (and in some cases, access to exotic/expensive hardware) for WFH to not work for software development.
Most of the things you list there are not necessarily tied to WFH but to failures implementing it.
Other I don't know where you get them from, like "Unending distractions"; that's specifically one thing I love about WFH, since I don't have the constant bustle and noise of the office.
Then there other points that are universal like "Lack of access to equipment and tools necessary to complete job effectively". Sure, if workers doesn't have access to equipment and tools necessary, they cannot work - how is that different from a worker in the office that has lack of access to equipment and tools necessary?
> WFH can breed all of the nasty "snake pit" attitudes and behaviors a lot more easily when everyone (or even someone) is remote and therefore less interconnected.
That's not how social conflicts arise.
It seems to me that there's no evident connection between the points you list and your - in my opinion - quite premature and unjustified conclusion that "WFH failed".
That these points are somehow relevant for "unit cohesion" is entirely yours to demonstrate.
But after these ad hominem attacks I'm not actually in a mood to discuss this any further with you. If you cannot make a cogent argument and have to descend to such derogatory accusations, I'll rather leave this conversation.
You keep saying that "the WFH experiment failed" which is disingenuous; you are attempting to lend the credibility of science to your own speculation. You also claim that it failed as a 'universal' approach to work, which is an obvious strawman.
WFH was thrust on a good portion of the world by necessity. It was cobbled together at the last minute so that business could continue, with the typical amount of investment and diligence of a profit-driven entity fully expecting a return to the status quo. To frame WFH over the last 3 years as some deliberate experiment where learnings were sought (and found) is just plain ridiculous.
At best, you can argue that particular roles are best performed, or can only be performed, in an office environment, and that some people prefer the more social environment of an office. Any remark on WFH otherwise is just an anecdote that you're attempting and failing to pass off as a universal truth about WFH.
WFH cannot be done on teams that need cohesion, which is nearly all teams.
Study after study demonstrates in person interaction is superior to remote interaction when it comes to rapport, bonding, emotional safety, and every other critical aspect necessary for building and maintaining a team.
The people who think WFH is fine are the people who aren’t responsible for keeping a team functioning, and the people who are demanding a return to work are. There’s a reason for that, and no it’s not because they’re evil or out to get you.
Your home distractions are unrelated to your job, whereas what you call “work distractions” are in fact not distractions at all, but a critical part of working on a team.
As an employee, I love WFG/remote work, it's vastly increased my options (I've been working 100% remotely for ~5 years). And so as a company, there's huge upside because you can hire a bigger range of people.
But in person teams are way more effective IMO. I think an example is that (at least in my experience) with colocated teams if you have a problem to work through, you generally keep finding time to work through it until you solve it. With remote teams, it's really easy to become a slave to your calendar: "our one hour is up, maybe let's schedule some time for next week to discuss again". I'm not saying this is a trap that everyone is guaranteed to fall into, but I _do_ think that it's a case where there are a bunch of behavioral nudges that make collaborative work much more natural in person. In a lot of cases, that's very valuable!
> There are so many downsides to WFH, and even the upsides encourage the opposite behaviors you want in a team, so this is in no way surprising.
This blanket statement is not compelling on its own. In theory or in practice, it would need to be demonstrated that any of these soft assertions are true.