
Why companies who don’t embrace remote working are wrong - simonhamp
https://medium.com/@isev/why-companies-who-dont-embrace-remote-working-are-wrong-e54389c638bd#.9rzzukyky
======
ascotan
Terrible article, however, as a remote worker myself I see both advantages and
disadvantages.

1\. Some people's lives are better suited for it. This is especially true in
the summertime when the kids are home from school all day.

2\. Having an office is still very nice. Sometimes you simply can't get work
done and home and need to come to the office.

3\. Collaboration tools are awesome. Working with remote teams has never been
easier if you have the right tools.

4\. When you work from home you actually get more done. This seems strange,
but you can actually get more done since there are no random impromptu
meetings nor is there the guy that chats you up all morning with a cup of
coffee in his hand.

5\. Design sessions are better done in person. White boarding remotely doesn't
work very well still.

6\. Remote workers work at night. Give an employee a laptop and he'll work
till 2:30 in the morning until the work is done.

7\. Meetings tend to be shorter and more well defined. When people are co-
located, there is a tendency to abuse people's time with meetings that have no
agendas. When you have to organize people for a meeting, your forced to do a
better job planning. That's been my impression at least.

I favor some sort of balance. 2/3 days in office 2/3 days remote seems like a
good balance. this allows people to collaborate in person when they need to,
but have a flexible schedule for the rest of the week. This sort of schedule
actually is a productivity boost and is better for employee morale.

~~~
mjevans
I have experienced far too many meetings without agendas.

I would __much__ rather see two types of meetings.

b) A brainstorming session where ideas are proposed (just exactly that, no
further discussion of them, even though that part is difficult).

v) A meeting where voting on pre-discussed ideas happens; this assumes you
have a discussion mechanism of some sort outside of meetings.

------
maxxxxx
I think larger companies don't like remote work because in such a setup a lot
of middle management has nothing to do. From my experience in remote setups
people communicate directly and there is less need for endless meetings. It's
also harder to micromanage people. There must be some level of trust.

~~~
at-fates-hands
This is a great observation and I can support your idea with some support from
my own experience.

I used to work at a large corporation who had a ton of middle management. For
a few years people had the ability to work from home in an emergency, but it
wasn't something normal and you were expected to be in the office otherwise.
At this point, people were working from home less than 2% of the time.

Then we got a new manager, who was a huge promoter of "ROWE" or Results Only
Work Environment. within 6 months, 90% of the office were working from home
90-95% of the time. I used to come in on Monday's and the office would be
empty, dead, not a peep and where six months ago, we had 15-20 developers
working, we now had one or two. You seriously could have mistaken the office
as being on holiday - it was crazy.

As such, the middle managers suddenly had a lot less to do. Since results were
all that mattered, their jobs of micro-managing all the daily/weekly/monthly
metrics they were following and tracking and emailing developers pretty much
went out the window. Three months later, 5 managers either quit or were laid
off because ROWE made their jobs essentially obsolete.

The funny part is the manager who was all about ROWE ran into some roadblocks
for his other initiatives and left shortly thereafter (he lasted just over a
year). Once he left, upper management quickly revoked ROWE (even though it had
been incredibly successful and raised production 11%) and required people to
be in the office 5 days a week unless it was for an emergency.

~~~
dudul
Interesting anecdote. Can you maybe provide details about this "raised
production 11%"? How was this measured? I'm baffled to see that they would
revoke the policy if it was so successful and removed useless positions.

~~~
pkaye
Yeah if it raised production 11% and 5 managers were no longer needed, that
would be a substantial savings. Why would upper management revert from ROWE?

~~~
Sacho
One reason would be an assumption that ROWE requires a manager like the person
that quit to maintain it, and without him, the production would drop through
the floor. Upper management were conservatively rolling back to what worked
before him.

------
niftich
Very light on facts. (Cherry-)picks a few companies which embrace telework
that are successful. Lists four collaboration apps. Fails to make a compelling
case that companies who don't embrace remote working are wrong,

Also author's affiliation is unclear. Retweets everything from PukkaTeam (a
product mentioned in article) -- which says © isev -- which author works for.
A disclaimer in the body or footer of the article would have been welcome!

~~~
joe563323
top of the head, duckduckgo , buffer

------
VeejayRampay
This trend of extremely polarizing and provoking headlines is getting out of
control.

Reading this headline, I feel like if you're not doing remote work, then
you're wrong. Aren't there shades of grey here? Is remote work the way for
EVERYONE? I understand that people need to get clicks but this is a worrisome
evolution.

~~~
ericbhanson
Agreed. It also completely glosses over the difficulties in managing
collaboration across time zones. Yes, software tools make this a lot easier,
but there is still the physical limitation of different members of a team
working at different hours. And guess what? Some of those team members may end
up working longer or later than they'd want to because they're farther away
than everyone else.

~~~
gryphonshafer
I've worked for companies as a remote worker, and I've owned a company that
for its entire lifetime hired remote staff. In my experience, as long as you
hire good people, the time zone delta is the only limitation that's extremely
difficult if not impossible to overcome. Everything else can be solved with
good communication (which should exist anyway), good requirements (which
should exist anyway), and good process (which should exist anyway).

If the time zone range of a team is less than about 4, then in my experience
the team works quite well. If the range is greater than 5, it almost always
encounters problems that even good process, requirements, and communication
struggle to solve.

There are always exceptions, of course.

------
allsystemsgo
Okay, I get the article is a bit polarizing. I've been wanting to work
remotely for about a year now. Remote jobs are hard to get. Here's what I
think about remote workplaces though:

\- Remote work is hard. It's tough to get right. However, remote work is worth
it. It's worth putting in the extra effort to try and get it right for your
work place and your job. You get to spend more time with your kids, your SO,
and you can travel.

\- Face time is still important. Remote work makes face time a pleasant treat
that you look forward to.

\- Remote work makes financial sense.

\- Good remote workers have to be excellent communicators.

It's not for everyone, but it's important that most organizations at least try
and make it a reality for those that want it. Everyone will be the better for
it.

------
davexunit
I would be happy if more companies were open to giving 1 or 2 remote days per
week. Breaking up the daily monotony of a commute for even just a single day
makes me feel a lot better and less stressed. Makes it easier to do things
like pick up your kid after school.

~~~
xythian
This is an accepted, if not encouraged, practice at my employer and it is much
appreciated. Entire teams tend to schedule their "WFH" days together as a
general time to focus, no meetings, etc. And, the teams that don't schedule
together almost always have most members taking 1-2 WFH days a week.

For context: Employer is a late stage startup with ~500 employees that
generally embraces remote work with many full-time remote employees.

------
bluedino
Since this article uses Spotify as an example, I'll use a Quora reply from a
Spotify Employee

 _Does Spotify hire remote employees?

If you have something spectacular to bring to the table and absolutely won't
come aboard otherwise. Otherwise, no.

Spotify is not 37Signals - we work in small units called squads, and each
squad fits into a medium-sized room. It extremely efficient, but totally
suboptimal environment for remote workers, because we cannot shoot you with
nerf darts to call your attention when it's time for the daily standup._

~~~
eip
> _but totally suboptimal environment for remote workers, because we cannot
> shoot you with nerf darts to call your attention when it 's time for the
> daily standup_

[http://i.imgur.com/TIVp2.gif](http://i.imgur.com/TIVp2.gif)

Do they have tickling contests too?

------
jstelly
The headline makes a strong claim and the article actually makes this much
weaker claim:

Of course, there will be jobs where telecommuting isn’t practical, but in
situations where all you need is a computer and an internet connection, then
telecommuting is something to try.

------
sevenless
Good virtual reality could make remote working a lot easier. Face time is
important. I don't know if VR meetings could fully replace face-to-face, but I
feel they'd go a lot further.

------
dkersten
My biggest question about remote work is how do you get the culture and
knowledge-sharing-through-osmosis (that is, unconference style chats at the
watercooler or the pub after work or whatever informal knowledge sharing that
happens)?

I work from home 3 days a week, so I still have enough office-face-time for
that not to be a problem, but we have a lot of 100% remote workers too (who
aren't even in the same country) and who get left out of a lot of informal
conversations just because they don't happen to be there when a group of us
walks to the shop or whatever it is. We do fly everyone over every few months,
and those periods are fantastic, but I still can't help but feel that the
remote people are losing out and the company is losing out on their input
outside of the normal work stuff.

Would love to hear others thoughts and experiences on this and ideas on how it
could be remedied!

~~~
votr
In a mixed on-site/remote culture, I don't think you do get fair knowledge
sharing. In that culture, the on-site workers will always have an edge. And
they will be more likely the ones to get promoted.

For anyone looking for remote work, I suggest finding a "remote first" or
"100% distributed" company.

~~~
dkersten
In a 100% distributed environment, how do you get the same knowledge sharing
and culture? Or is it largely not an issue, because everybody communicates the
same way (text chat, video chat, voice chat, screen sharing, email)?

Is company culture and the connection that people have as strong? What about
the random after-work-pub-chats where people say whats on their minds or
otherwise talk about things that they might not during the normal course of
the day?

Maybe its not an issue when everyone is in the same boat.

------
dudul
I think there would be value in distinguishing fully remote from occasional
work from home.

I can see reasons to reject the former, but the latter (at least to me) should
be a given. If you don't do it, you are losing a significant competitive
advantage over the competition to hire great people.

I used to work at a company where WFH was not allowed. We were working with a
recruiter to fill a few positions, and the guy was pretty honest, it told us
"you guys are at the bottom of the pool because you don't allow WFH".

------
Pica_soO
well they have to pay the comute costs, if you ignore everything else

