
Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All - tmoaad
https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-start-to-think-remote-work-isnt-so-great-after-all-11595603397
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tmoaad
Archive link: [https://archive.is/KmHGU](https://archive.is/KmHGU)

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mderazon
We're in the middle of a world health and financial crisis so productivity
naturally goes down.

Also a lot of people have little kids at home, hard to get work done like
that.

These are not normal times, WFH has nothing to do with it

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vanusa
You just mentioned one of the greatest distractions caused by WFH:

 _a lot of people have little kids at home, hard to get work done like that._

And then you said "WFH has nothing to do with it."

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mderazon
Kids are at home due to the pandemic, If they were running around at your
office it would have been the same

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vanusa
_If they were running around at your office_

Which happens how often exactly?

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mderazon
I have been WFH long before the pandemic as well and have little kids. My kids
were at school / kindergarten and I had no distractions. I was saying that we
should compare this situation with little kids at home while WFH to a
situation of kids running around at your office. I agree it doesn't happen
often but having kids 24/7 at home while trying to work from home did not
happen often either, before the pandemic...

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bleah1000
I think the one thing that gets lost in the work from home push is that it
really takes good managers to make it work. You need a manager skilled at
making sure that people are working at a good pace. Doing one-on-ones in
person for a good people manager is a lot easier than over a video call where
only a portion of you is visible, so a remote manager needs to be really good
at remote one-on-ones. You need a manager that can fairly rate their reports
so they push for promotions/raises/rewards based on their accomplishments.
Without this, good performers get angry and leave. You also need a manager who
can figure out if someone is not doing a good job and how to help them or move
them out of the org. The manager also needs to have the skills to onboard new
hires since mentorship is going to be a bit more difficult when done remotely
since nearly no company has good documentation for new hires.

A decent manager might struggle with these skills when going fully remote. It
could be easy for them to fall back on some rudimentary metrics of
productivity because they have a hard time judging what people are doing. You
will probably see managers who have "favorites" lean more heavily on a few
people because they are a known quantity to the manager. You'll probably see
new hires take a lot longer to get up to speed with merely competent managers.

I wonder if we actually have enough good managers to make work from home scale
up.

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ABoldGambit
Lots of anecdotal experiences with no empirical data. I’m gonna chalk this one
up to clickbait.

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vanusa
You can't always wait for hard data.

Sometimes (especially when it comes to life-affecting questions like "will my
company / job survive or not?" it's necessary to draw inferences from
unstructured observation -- _a.k.a._ "anecdotal data".

It's a very useful cognitive skill, in fact.

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miga
Some managers find that their goals are reached fasters, some find that they
stop seeing certain kinds of issues.

Maybe we should rather say that some managers are skilled at managing all
kinds of teams, and some stop getting results with remote teams. Or that some
managers find themselves less lazy when communicating with people in person.
After all we rely on productivity as reported by managers, not an objective
measure per se. So managers must be skilled at measuring productivity in this
particular environment.

That may be a common thing: how much of the communication in any team is that
of coordination, and how much of it is that of maintaining status?

Also one cannot discard a totally different explanation: maybe it was the
_change_ in the mode of work that made people more efficient, instead of
remote work by itself. If it was true, then coming back from remote would also
increase efficiency for a short time.

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ThrowMeAwayOkay
Well, I refuse to work for anyone else unless it’s remote. Every single
colleague I’ve talked to said the same. I’ve been in the professional working
world for 22 years across many companies ...I have many colleagues.

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x87678r
Some people in my team are doing barely anything.

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protomok

      "One benefit of working together in person, many
      executives said, is the potential for spontaneous 
      interactions. 
      ...
      She noticed that she was soon having conversations 
      with peers that wouldn’t have happened in a remote 
      set up—a discussion sparked by a passing question 
      in the hall"
    

I can relate to this. I miss the impromptu conversation about idea ->
whiteboarding session -> JIRAs -> new features, new design, etc.

WFH was great for the first month or so but at this point I find myself
missing going into the office. Once the vaccine arrives I plan to switch to
around 4 days on site / 1 day WFH.

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jiveturkey
no surprises here

