> We've _heard_ from Googlers that those who spend at least three days a week in the office _feel_ more connected to other Googlers, and that this effect is magnified when teammates work from the same location,"
As an employee or an investor I would not want any of my CXOs to make major decisions based on hearsay and feelings, but it's guess it's different for WFH.
I also love the self-selected aspect. "The people who did X say positive things about X."
There are scenarios where WFH is an excellent away around socially awkward scenarios. If the guy in the next cubicle makes things subtly uncomfortable-- maybe you don't like his cologne, maybe he's just a little too friendly-- being able to just bail and limit your exposure to scheduled meetings in a videochat box can be a huge win. Or conversely, I'd expect WFH to appeal to many people with social anxiety issues and autism-spectrum conditions, as again, you can just exit an environment that makes you uncomfortable on a daily basis.
I'd also be interested to see how many on-premise perks they rolled back when nobody was in-office to claim them. That's a completely quantifiable number-- for the sake of "bringing people back to the office", you have to pay for a lot more catered lunches, probably way more claims for child care subsidies and transport reimbursements.
Don’t forget the confirmation bias too! Who would have thought the people that go to the office think going to the office is good?!? Perhaps ask the remote workers how connected they feel…
Just a theory but I would guess that investors are probably interested in the bottom line which may be impacted by tax incentives or lack thereof for having their multi-million dollar investments into buildings occupied by {n}% of staff for {y}% of the year. I don't have anything to back this up, just vague memories of articles discussing the effect Covid-19 had on real estate.
I believe there have also been real estate crashes predicted for large office buildings which could lead investors to hold on for dear life and double-down on utilizing the buildings for a few years. Otherwise people could just try to get out of contracts, write-down losses and sell their buildings fully embracing WFH.
Regardless of your opinion of WFH this sounds exactly like the kind of statement a company makes when they want to force their employees to deeply identify with their employer in an unhealthy way, or at least fake it. It's a great strategy for producing a monoculture of thought long term.
Google has the right to do this. Employees have the right to quit.
It’s okay to want your team to be an actual team and not just a group of people getting paid by the same employer.
Team building works better in person. Just because some aspects of it are inconvenient, it doesn’t make it not true. The fact that commuting sucks doesn’t remove the fact that in person interactions are important.
I suspect that at a fundamental level most people here know in-person adds an important quality that is missing otherwise.
IMO there’s more nuance to it than that. Is a team that works in person 5 days a week five times as cohesive as a team that meets once a week? I don’t believe so.
Pure anecdote but I currently work in the office two days a week and it could probably be one. That one day is productive in terms of team building, it’s basically an entire day of meetings, we all get lunch together etc. Most of the rest of the week is spent on more isolated work (including pair programming which I find works better remotely sometimes).
Of course Google has the right to fire anyone that doesn’t do what they want. But I also think it’s fair for employees to question the level of in person commitment required beyond just “more in person = better”.
(Not to mention plenty of FAANG teams are distributed. If you’re coming into the office just to join video calls with a different backdrop it’s fair to question why)
I think you’re bang on. it’s a lot more subtle than the hard and fast rule manner in which the notion is most often put forth. It’s definitely myopically maladaptive to view it as a binary—in-person is always better than remote.
There’s a spectrum—how frequently and in what amount is in-person interaction for a team actually needed to result in optimal productivity and collaborative workflow as a team collective? certainly not every marginal hour/day in person is accretive to the goal of optimal collective collaboration. so there’s an inflection point or plateau somewhere… which intuitively should vary depending on the underlying dynamics of a given team, are they a well oiled machine already? or is everyone just recently starting work together for the first time? what is the nature of the work process creative or technical or a mix? what are the inherent personalities comprising the team and how does that impact things?? etc.
the relative determination of finding the right balance is an important and worth doing carefully, regardless of the corporate culture. especially if the argument is that effective team collaboration is of SUCH high importance that companies are happy to let go of human capital that isn’t on board with their proscribed mandate around remote work on the basis of its impact to their work life balance… if thats the case, then surely something that important is worth determining a bit more scientifically than “3 days in person minimum or gtfo”— applicable for all teams. all employees.
surely if it is in fact so important, then it’s not credible to be so rigidly unthinking in determining the "optimal" policy. any company that isn't inclined to fully consider that notion, and establish a mandate "just because" shouldn't get to imply the mandate serves them best on any basis related to team productivity and collaboration, because its wholly unsubstantiated andnot credible. they are however free to establish any such mandate of course, without need substantiate it, but then i think we all need to be transparent about the factthat is is entirely arbitrary... not some baseless idealized notion of "optimal"
FWIW my personal view (not suggesting it’s a universally established truth with consensus, just my opinion based on experience) is that ~some amount of in-person interaction is beneficial and optimal, even for experienced teams with well established workflows and a long standing track record of collective work. eventually if you never see one another in person, sosci dynamics will change, perhaps not always to the detriment of team productivity, but at least in a manner worth evaluating/considering.
and I think the less time a team has spent together in person prior to collaborating remotely the more important it is to prioritize in person work. lastly i think the determination of the "optimal" policy mandate will necessarily be team-dependent.
as such, i believe team managers should be empowered by the powers that be to figure out what the best strategy is for their team specifically, and be held accountable to the results perhaps... as a far more sensible approach than it being a universal corporate mandate from the top of the house.
I disagree. Some of the best teams I've been on are full remote teams. Some of the worst teams I've been on were in person teams.
It depends on the people and the company culture.
I'd argue if a remote team is having problems, they'd have the same problems in person.
I'd love to see some studies on it though I imagine it's tough. Take a team that's doing bad remote, bring them in, see if they improve. Or take a team that's high performing, make them remote and see if things go south.
I'd be surprised if they did, my guess is great teams are great teams.
I’d point to all team / guild / corp based online games and almost all OSS as counter examples. I’ve worked in remote or distributed teams all my career. What you refer to is an emergent reality and what you’re used to. It doesn’t make it invariantly true, and there are so many obvious counter examples of highly effective teams and organizations that are socially robust and incredibly more productive than corporate organized teams that it’s hard to take seriously that collocation on a daily or even regular basis is crucial for anything other than management feeling in control and people feeling comfortable that things haven’t changed.
Reality is metrics over 2020-2022 don’t show a decrease in any aspect of productivity. As such, once the passions have cooled, companies will have a real uphill battle demonstrating corporate real estate expenses, which can be a significant percentage of expenses and capital tie up, are justified because “I suspect” and “I feel” and “our corporate culture” and all the other vague hand waving in the face of hard numbers.
If google wants to get rid of more employees they can just fire them, but that costs them money, hence this BS.
> Team building works better in person
Can you cite the studies showing that this is (a) true, and (b) that better "team building" results in better output? Every actual study I've seen says that open office plans (what google uses) are objectively terrible for productivity, morale, and employee health, so if you're going make a claim you should be able to point to _some_ study supporting this.
For (b) above, once of the biggest reasons for "team building" is to induce lower employment mobility so you can pay people less.
> I suspect that at a fundamental level most people here know in-person adds an important quality that is missing otherwise.
The whole reason this is a problem is that that is a fundamentally untrue statement. There are clearly people who prefer working in an office, and what we are getting here is that those people go "I can only do my job in an office, therefore everyone else needs to be in the office as well".
I don't know how many times I'm going to need to say this: just because one group of employees isn't able to work without constant supervision, or depends on office life to provide a surrogate social life, or whatever, doesn't mean that isn't true of everyone.
There's zero business person in having an effectively remote worker go into the office when there team isn't anywhere in proximity. This is idiotic ass-in-seat mentality that doesn't scale compared to the globalized and mobile nature of modern workers.
They’re important, but not important in any sense that a company normally cares about. We saw during the pandemic that output/profits can skyrocket when people are remote (contrary to the prevalent claims). It’s therefore not on the business to push forward.
So are facts and hard data proving one thing is better than the other.
Most of us here are engineers of some description. I don't need some promotion-hunting manager obsessed with "optimizing team building" to micromanage how I work.
Of course they're not. But when the conditions in my work are looking likely to change I'm going to want to know why. It's not much of an ask for these things to actually make sense when they effect our quality of life.
> The offices for Google Cloud were described as a "ghost town" by Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai in March, which he said some employees had complained about. "It's not a nice experience."
So the office people were unhappy with other people not coming in to the office, and now they get hotdesking which is being spun as a perk?
When I read this I thought that some clever engineer is going to start an external web app to rotate badges around to volunteers who can scan them intermittently to make it look like they are in the office. Then I realized that Google is all in with AI and probably has cameras everywhere on campus. All that investment will pay off and permit Google to really see who came in and who handed their badge to a mule. I expect that there will be incredible breakthroughs in disguises that, in the end, will allow employees to fake their own commute. It'll be an epic battle and perhaps there will be a Marvel movie made out of those superheroes and villains.
They don't need fancy AI and all that. At some point someone will realize that there is a discrepancy between who badged and who is actually there, that 3 people badged and only one crossed the door, or maybe an employee will be caught red handed by a security guard.
It will be treated as a serious security incident. Slacking off may be tolerable if the slackers otherwise bring value to the company, handing out one's badge, potentially letting unauthorized people in is something else. It will result in people getting fired on the spot, maybe even lawsuits.
Engineers doing that would be anything but clever. And the "epic battle" will most likely be hopelessly one-sided and the movie will be about a bunch of people struggling to find a new job. If you don't want to commute, just stay at home, make up all the excuses you want, but don't play shenanigans with badges. If you bring enough value for the company despite "slacking off", you will get a pass, but if you mess with security, you won't.
I was joking with my statements. But, maybe Google has entered another realm where the tension between employer and employees is going to shift permanently. And then, who knows? It's a company of hackers, or at least it was long ago.
As an employee or an investor I would not want any of my CXOs to make major decisions based on hearsay and feelings, but it's guess it's different for WFH.