[Guid_NewGuid]

I think -- on the basis of this same argument playing out for years at this point -- it's because the 2 views are talking past each other.

Sure, in office works better for some people and remote makes them miserable. They're real people.

But the side suffering economic compulsion is the remote preferred people being forced back to the office against their will.

If everyone can work how they prefer then great. But that's not the world we live in and to draw a false equivalence between the dominant (at exec level) RTO view and remote workers forced into unpaid commutes and time away from families gets our hackles way up.

[Aurornis]

> If everyone can work how they prefer then great.

The problem with this is that people's work preference doesn't always match up with the environments where they actually work well.

I've managed remote and hybrid teams for years. I've done this long enough to realize that a lot of the people who struggle to be productive at home will swear up and down that they're much more productive working remote.

The reason is simple: People aren't just expressing their preference for where they work best. They're expressing their preference for where they want to be. When it comes to low performers and difficult employees, they almost universally don't want to be at the office.

That's why it's not as simple as letting everyone work according to their preference.

Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is filtering for people who can actually work remote. Many people will claim they work well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible at communicating, can't manage their own time, are constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's hard to start removing these people from the company, but it's the only way to make it work.

All of those companies that switched everyone to WFH during COVID learned the hard way that you can't just take everyone and go remote. You have to build the team for it from the start. And it takes more than just asking people what they prefer.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

What about based on performance? Pre-covid, my company required ridiculous amount of politics to have remote approved. Eventually, one guy cracked the code ( basically be too hard to replace ) and just told the management he is staying remote. And I can see that management would love to get that carrot ( remote ) back to something that is either very rare or non-existent.

<< Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is filtering for people who can actually work remote. Many people will claim they work well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible at communicating, can't manage their own time, are constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's hard to start removing these people from the company, but it's the only way to make it work.

It is all true, but it points to crappy management. You want to fire people, fire them. You can't keep them motivated, you failed as a manager. I keep saying this, but management class has gotten really used to easy approach to motivation ( pizza and threat of firing ).

[ipaddr]

Why not hire people who have proven they have done something by themselves like an open source project or business? Seems like something that's easy to filter for. Asking someone can only tell you things about their judgement not if they actually can do it.

If you have by yourself done something you can assume they can do something else on their own. The on their own is the important pieces.

[maxerickson]

So the best place for low performers and difficult employees is the office?