[quote]There was also a drop in communication that happened in real time - meetings that would have happened in real life weren’t necessarily happening online. Instead, more emails and instant messages were sent.[/quote]
Yes, that's a good thing because you have searchable history [1] and can communicate asynchronously without interrupting anyone :)
After doing a WFH job for 2 years, and then going back to the office for a different job, what strikes me is how terribly everything is documented here--because when someone walks over and asks someone else how something works, that doesn't get automatically documented like it does in Slack.
At my WFH job, I spent a lot of time searching Slack, and reading through documentation which had been distilled from Slack conversations. I learned a lot faster than I have, so far, at this job.
Searchable chat history works when people communicate in public channels. My experience at large financial institutions is that the vast majority of chat is person-to-person.
I try to encourage public (or group) chats but I _think_ people, especially juniors or new-joiners, are reluctant to look unknowledgeable.
Teams encourages this awful pattern because their public “teams” don’t just have a normal-ass chat (and you can’t change it to be one), but a weird interface that seems to mainly be for announcements-with-comments. So 1-on-1 and ad hoc small group chats and chats attached to meetings are where everything happens.
And god help you if your org also has a short chat retention policy.
My employer had a great culture of talking things out in public channels, but after the acquisition, nearly everything is in private channels & DMs now.
For some things, I've explicitly told people: "can you copy and paste this question in our support channel, so I can answer there?" But for a lot of things, I've just accepted that this is the new normal, and for some of it, I even understand why it is the way it is.
Similar circumstances (but longer time wfh) and similar observation. The in-person place is full of these absurd chains of tracking down the person who knows the thing, terrible processes for communication and defining what work needs to be done, et c, in ways that would never survive in a remote company because you can’t work that way when you’re remote.
It’s a huge drag on their efficiency, in person or remote, and hurts hiring because they struggle to provide even a handful of of remote days per year in a market where every office worker I know (aside from here) is at least hybrid-leaning-remote (and most office workers I know aren’t in tech, nor is this a tech company). They have no idea that it’s bad, though.
We kind of have natural experiments: switching to WFH and then switching back (at least for some some), so there should be groups of companies that could be compared.
For companies like this one, WFH probably would look bad. It’d both be harder to work that way because they’re already dysfunctional, and it’d make the existing dysfunction more visible (and so probably be blamed for things that would have been going wrong even with everyone in the office).
This to me seems not a problem with remote vs. office, but a particular company culture. Meeting notes aren’t difficult to create.
The problem with chat-based solutions is people get lazy in articulation. So instead of a cohesive idea it’s spread across a giant thread. And instead of actually creating a proper document, it’s easy to say, “Meh, I’ll do it later it’s in slack.” But then it never gets done, and the info is privy to only those in the conversation.
It can be good or bad either way, but there’s no substitute for in-person communication; and there’s no substitute for a thoughtfully constructed document.
I'd say that, for people just starting a career who need to develop the illegible/intangible skills, in-person mentoring has no replacement.
But after that, it's a real tradeoff. You can't just expect people to create and publish meeting notes when they catch a senior in the hallway and get an explanation they need, even if it would help others in their situation (or help themselves, in 6 months when they need to do that again and can't quite remember the steps (Unless their mentor modeled this important skill, I guess?)). https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...
> instead of actually creating a proper document, it’s easy to say, “Meh, I’ll do it later it’s in slack.”
Seems like an actual use case for LLMs. Yeah I understand the potential issues but (worst case) confusing documentation with some errors and flawed assumptions yet proper citation and sources (so it can be manually improved and eventually turned into thoughtfully constructed document) seems better than having no docs or entirely outdated ones.
The life hack I've had to resort to for in-office days is wearing large over-ear headphones to signal I'm not available for interrupting. Half the time I don't even have them plugged in. It mostly works, but remote work is still more productive for me.
I can't agree more. I once had a lazy boss that hated putting his ideas in order and expected to act on oral orders that were vague on details. I would always ask at the end of his long stream-of-consciousness speech, "Oh, that's great! I have a big favor to ask you: could you briefly summarize what I have to do in a short email to make sure I haven't missed anything important?" He would look at me with contempt, "Can't you just remember these few simple things?" or would murmur "OK, OK" but never did.
So after this kind of conversation I would compose a short email to him, "As agreed during the conversation today, I will do this and that within given period." He hated these emails, I could tell. I'm so glad this shit-show is over.
It does seem that you need EITHER a very particular combination of things for "Guess culture" to be more effective than "Ask culture", or you need a system that is so irrevocably corrupted by its faulty incentive structures that it can't function as a bureaucracy without lots of plausible deniability.
My boss at this point understands that he's often putting me in a double or triple bind, but is obligated to do so and is never going to get approval for not doing so; My attempts to acquire verbal directives as to priority are met with "figure it out" and a grin. But then he's also extremely forgiving about accountability, doesn't attempt to apply metrics, because he understands that I'm going to be working on it all day anyway.
Sometimes the bureaucratic style, enforced from the top down, is "Ask for unreasonable things in order to attain reasonable outcomes".
I do not work with life-critical systems, where this sort of thing absolutely would not fly.
> My boss at this point understands that he's often putting me in a double or triple bind, but is obligated to do so and is never going to get approval for not doing so; My attempts to acquire verbal directives as to priority are met with "figure it out" and a grin. But then he's also extremely forgiving about accountability, doesn't attempt to apply metrics, because he understands that I'm going to be working on it all day anyway.
Seems like at this point, you two have trust which has been built up based on respect/maturity, evidence of honesty/sincerity and delivery. You two are more or less a well oiled machine.
Async communications can be exhausting. It’s infuriating to need some bit of information and be stuck with chat because
1. People are terrible at organizing things like slack as far as I can tell.
2. Walking over to someone and having a 15 minute conversation is less disrupting to the day than tossing a mention into the void and then having responses dribble in over the next hour and a half.
A work from home full time and don’t want to go back to the office, but the periodic need for unscheduled ad-hoc communication is absolutely the most exhausting part of it.
> Walking over to someone and having a 15 minute conversation is less disrupting to the day than tossing a mention into the void and then having responses dribble in over the next hour and a half.
There’s a balance here, as the 15 minute conversation is often a 45 minute disruption for the target and often the people around them. The other challenge is in my experience the trade off wasn’t “this information cannot be obtained any other way” but more along the lines of “it’s easier to walk over than read the documentation/make any attempt to answer the question on my own”.
Asynchronous shifts the downsides to the person asking, so people tend to have strong opinions if they tend to be on one of those sides a lot more than the other.
Of course, you can also ask about the blockers ahead of time or just do something else. This does require your org to trust you with more than one strictly defined ticket at a time though.
> Of course, you can also ask about the blockers ahead of time or just do something else
Sure, but that’s going to impact the claimed time differential if you have to schedule it and wait.
I think both approaches have their merits but unless you’re in a group focused on the same goals I prefer the approach of trying to solve it yourself and trying an asynchronous message first, possibly turning into synchronous if needed, because the first two steps don’t have dependencies and will make the last more productive.
I mean you ask away... asynchronously... then do some other task or part of task that doesn't require the blocker. By the time you're done with that you may have your answer or whoever's attention that you need.
> 2. Walking over to someone and having a 15 minute conversation is less disrupting to the day than tossing a mention into the void and then having responses dribble in over the next hour and a half.
I fucking hate this, it's less disrupting for you but the person you asked might be like me and need another 15-30 min to get back into the same focus state they were before your question came through.
If you think it's hard to go do something else while you are waiting for a response to not lose context the same applies to the other side, it can be hard to get back into the context they were pulled from.
At least with async communication I can reply when I get unfocused or finish what I was working on, even just saying "sorry, can't answer you right now" when in a state of deep focus takes me out of that state...
It's extremely exhausting being the person who gets asked multiple times a day about things outside of the current context, switching them to answer your inquiries is not effortless, it just looks that way to you.
A happy, independent employee is a creative employee, and if your business is such a heavy monopoly that it’s in your interest (if not your primary market strategy) to arrest and interrupt the development of competitive alternatives, keeping your employees in cycles of misery (long commutes, oral culture heavy on tribal knowledge and who-you-know) is no longer a “tradeoff” to be balanced, it’s how you keep competition from cropping up.
I know this theory is being put forward but it never made sense to me as 1/ severance is at most a few months of salary, and forcing people out this way will also take months, during which time employees will be much less productive, and /2 this approach will skew the population that leaves to those with better options (ie your high performers.)
I think people are too quick to think it's only one reason. It can be a mix of all the reasons. Amazon has expensive offices, deals with cities, poor communication, and also wouldn't mind some percentage of people choosing to move on.
I did recently this “back to the office” thing. At the same time layoffs were happening. It was super obvious that not complying with new rules will bring first warning, second warning and layoff without any package.
The packages were tailored for greenhorns, as low as possible to be enough for junior engineers to leave quickly. It was obvious again, that the return to the office for older and experienced folks will cause natural attrition and some 5% of expensive people will leave without severance package by quitting like I did. 200 got packages, 300 quit voluntarily. It was one third of workforce in that particular location. I heard it was celebrated as a success in the highest floor.
For big organizations these high performers are not important. Good presenters are what matters. Things are achieved by a mass. Sometimes having few departments to do basically the same development. Because somebody on the top of command chain didn’t align properly. Or higher ups just don’t care.
It's pretty much exactly this. superstars matter when management can properly direct them, which is almost never big companies (it's very often small companies/startups though). The past decade of superstar hiring in tech was so obviously a raising rivals cost/ monopolizing talent so said talent won't go start a startup that unseats the large company from its excess oligopoly profits strategy. When interest rates got high enough to make yield matter and all of a sudden these big guys needed to actually perform quarter to quarter they started cutting all these excess, expensive people loose and this is just one of the ways to force that attrition. (consequently, I expect the company(ies) that will unseat the big tech guys has already/will be shortly created by some of these downsized staff and the next 10 years will be very interesting.
I'm not saying they're doing this to reduce headcount but if they are, it does make sense. They're a company with 300,000 corporate employees making over $600B/yr in revenue. They survived the dotcom bubble, the Great Recession, and a global pandemic. My point is they should be viewed as a well oiled money making machine, not a small business where the owner directly hires and manages people. Their executives and importantly, their investors, don't care about individuals or short term blips in headcount or financial impacts. They'll recover and move on.
This approach will skew the population that leaves to the "troublemakers" who insist on working from home, so if those leave (from the WFO advocates' perspective), all the better...
Some people prefer working from home; others prefer office full time. I think hybrid orgs are going to be viable in some cases, but it’s harder to reap the benefits of in-person if only some are standing at the whiteboard.
In particular if you are a startup and can all fit in one meeting room, the opportunity cost of going remote is huge. For huge companies that need to train lots of new grads, remote can be painful for other reasons. But there are benefits too, and the optimal decision is going to depend on the company culture and work style.
I think it’s a terrible idea for government to step in and define universal rights to flexible work; this is a place where labor supply and demand should price in the preferences.
The government already mandates all sorts of conditions around work practices, right to breaks and special provisions. Given the dissolution of the Unions by vested interests like Amazon, combined with their refactoring and min/maxing things like performance metrics and KPIs for use in downsizing and PIP scenarios, the government is probably exactly the appropriate entity to step in.
> I think hybrid orgs are going to be viable in some cases
I think it depends a lot on the company. If your company was remote to begin with and you go hybrid, unless you happen to have team mates who are local to you, it's very possible you'll still never meet them in the office.
This place I'm at recently mentioned if you're > 50 miles from an office and within a 3 hour 1-way commute it's expected you go into the office at least once a month.
No one from my team is near the office I'd go to, I'd basically be working alone in an open floor style layout while I work remotely with my team mates in the same way I would at home.
Except now there's an extra 4 hour round trip commute and $65 cost ($40 train + 2 meals for a 14 hour day) per visit. Over the year that's $780 and 6 extra work days from travel time just to go in once a month.
I don't personally have any special knowledge but...
I've read, in numerous places, that Amazon is attempting to use this as a way to alter their finances. To draw people into locations with tax advantages, reduce staff count without paying severance, etc.
It seems like this is something that warrants a personal approach? Just ask what employees would like to do and why and then work out a schedule that works for both employer and employee. Simply retracting freedom is obviously not going to be a popular measure. And happy employees are better for everyone I'd say?
The logical conclusion from statistics is hybrid work. I am full remote because of the distance, bust most of my company is hybrid, and my experience is exactly as described by the results of the Microsoft studies.
I go on site 3-5 days per month, and I always connect more (more than 0) with people outside my team and happens, even on work related topics which enable new interesting findings and what not.
It helps that the company where I work has a culture that make people want to go to the offices even if they are not required to do so. There are pics days when the office is full because people want to see each others, then they are free to remote work any time it is wanted/needed.
I'd be curious to see whether all UK government employees will have the same benefits as the ones being imposed on how Amazon decides to employ its staff.
I’ve created hundreds of millions of dollars of value working remotely over the past 10 years of my career. Companies are entirely free to skip out on that if they like. Fine by me :)
While YouTube binging days happen, in general there's a higher expectations for results and more pressure.
At the office you could do 2000 breaks for coffee and smoke and it was more relaxed. If I was missing at my desk people would assume I was in a meeting or had some call or was on a break.
But online? Don't answer someone in 30/40 minutes and there was an instant assumption you were not working.
I don't believe that remote working is for everyone, it's tough, and I believe that many are less productive (countless coworkers I could see playing videogames on discord during the day). They pay the price at some point, but I don't judge.
But for many others the reality is tougher than office days.
Especially the first 18 months after COVID hit were hell for me.
That's not even counting the mental toll of isolation and lower socialization. Again, good remote work is not for everyone and I understand companies that oppose it.
But I don't share any view implying that it's less productive or less stressful, in many many ways it isn't.
Spot on. Things are actually MUCH more relaxed in the office, which is why some people don't want it (e.g. people with caregiving responsibility). Everyone I know with children 0-10 wishes there was some more flexibility in scheduling. RTO just steals that from you. It has nothing to do with the amount of work.
From observation my belief is that in-office work selects for slackers as equally as wfh work does, they just slack differently.
One of our well respected product owners was always so very busy, with back to back meetings when working in office. Then we started WFH and all figured out she was a Costanza - all those meetings were her way of looking important, while everyone routed work around her.
On the other hand, some of our more neurodivergent engineers benefited from the rigidity of sitting at a desk where they are too afraid to pick up their Switch and just game.
When slacking in the office, it's essential to find other slackers to slack with. At home, I can slack alone just fine doing all the stuff that I normally do at home.
That’s not what the government is proposing though - they are proposing working from home options and flexibility of working 5 day hours into 4 days (so, 4x10 hrs rather than 5x8).
Also though - studies have been conducted and companies shrinking days to 4 whilst keeping 5 days have seen an increase in/same productivity.
So, depends on whether the company is after results or presenteeism.
The failure of the organization to meet productivity expectations without questionable forms of psychophysiological manipulation of employees should not be met with open arms.
Yes, it can be effective to deploy such methods over the limited physical access to employees, but ultimately it is an unsustainable method of control that arguably breeds a cohort of disinterested middle managers over time. A successful organization for its goals has the most motivated workers, needless of such methods of control.
I don't know if most people's work ethic is that high. At least mine isn't as I'm writing this from my home office during working hours while having basically procrastinated all day today.
Exactly. I am full remote and this is the only thing I miss about the office.
The social aspects that have nothing to do with working or productivity. What comes with that though are massive distractions that don't exist remote.
I suspect the productive workers are much more productive remote and the unproductive workers are equally unproductive. The big difference is that the unproductive workers don't have to pretend to be working like they do in the office but at least they aren't such a distraction to the productive workers.
Yes, that's a good thing because you have searchable history [1] and can communicate asynchronously without interrupting anyone :)
[1] Although that may be bad for CYA purposes.
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