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Why Do We Still Commute?

citylab.com

101–110 of 400 posts

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#101

I worked from home for five years, and just this week started back into a job where I commute to an office. I don't love the commute, but I also don't agree that working from home is a universally better answer for me on a personal level. Everyone knows the benefits of working from home, but there are downsides as well. Fixable downsides, but they exist nonetheless -- it is easy to become a hermit. Easy to over-work.…

After working from home for 10 years, I am now seriously looking for opportunities where I can commute to work. Have to get out of the comfort zone.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#102
post #32
post #9

Because 'we' prefer it? I like going into the office. The morning walk to the office with its clear demarcation between work and not work, the ritual of grabbing a coffee in the morning with some colleagues and catching up on what's happening in their projects even if they're not directly related to anything I'm working on, having a dedicated space and a dedicated computer that's just for work, all those little thing…

I don't believe your "commute" constitutes a commute in the sense of what this article is about. Your commute is just a walk. People traveling for 30-90 (or more!) minutes to and from work, particularly the ones driving in traffic, are the commuters. And the ones I know that fall into that category hate it. Good for you that you have such a nice situation, though!

I actually commute by public transport. The 30 minute walk is something I do because I find it a nice way to start the day. Instead of changing busses, I just walk the last 2-3 km.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#103
post #32
post #9

Because 'we' prefer it? I like going into the office. The morning walk to the office with its clear demarcation between work and not work, the ritual of grabbing a coffee in the morning with some colleagues and catching up on what's happening in their projects even if they're not directly related to anything I'm working on, having a dedicated space and a dedicated computer that's just for work, all those little thing…

I don't believe your "commute" constitutes a commute in the sense of what this article is about. Your commute is just a walk. People traveling for 30-90 (or more!) minutes to and from work, particularly the ones driving in traffic, are the commuters. And the ones I know that fall into that category hate it. Good for you that you have such a nice situation, though!

I'd fall into that category. While I dislike the amount of time I spend travelling, I'd much rather do that than sit at home all day by myself. Honestly, I'm far more productive in the office where I can communicate face to face, explain things on whiteboards, ask quick questions and get some social interaction.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#104
In theory, both capital (money) and labor (people) can move freely around. Since capital is virtual, and labor real, it would make a perfect economic sense to move capital where it's needed instead of labor where it's needed.

But in practice, it's the other way around. Capital is lazy and concentrates in places like SV. People have to commute or even migrate to get better working conditions.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#105
post #2

I work from home as much as I can, but nothing trumps seeing your colleagues face to face. Text can also cause misunderstandings, and apparently no one likes video, at least in my company. I don't like video much either, though.

You can have misunderstandings face to face. This is a matter of communication skills. Having entire conversation in text form also means you can easily make references and go back to it even weeks later, whereas with face to face conversation you don't have that luxury.

I like remote work, but the benefits of searchable text barely materialized for us. There were a few times we needed to find some piece of information, especially from colleagues who had moved on. However, any moderately discussed topic just generated too much text to be quickly search able. Wed usually get thousands of results for any search term and whoever was looking for the necessary information had to not just look at those results, but the context they were in, to get the info they wanted. One time it took the course of a day

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#106
Working from home is often touted as a solution to all problems but it's just not that simple, and many people who do actually work remotely will tell you that.

Allowing remote work is not enough. It requires effort from both parties. The company needs to provide money for home office setup, and the employee needs to spend time and though setting one up, which might be tricky in places with insane real estate prices. Working from sofa is not really sustainable for long.

Although work from home eliminates distractions such as constant movement of people (although this is not unique to working from home and same could be done with private offices), it opens a plethora of new distractions, be it running errands, playing with pets, or just goofing off instead of TV while keeping an eye on instant messenger.

And the list goes on. But that's not the point. Sure, working from home has a lot of advantages and at the end of the day I am very glad that I made the switch. It's just not as simple as some might make it appear as.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#107

We commute because businesses can push off the cost of commuting to their employees. I'd personally be in favor of a "congestion tax" or somesuch for companies that force their employees to come in rather than work remotely. Commuting takes up energy and resources, and the congestion incurs costs on third parties (car accidents, higher gas prices, and the like). While it's debatable whether remote works for businesse…

I've thought about this in the past. What if companies had to pay for the time you spend commuting? They'd have an incentive to hire people as close as possible, and support local policies that make it easier to live closer to work.

On the other hand, employees would have an incentive to try to stretch out their commute as much as possible, to get extra pay for time "not working". I don't know how rampant that would be. I like to think most people hate commuting enough that it wouldn't be worth it to make an extra $20 sitting in traffic when you could just be home faster, but who knows.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#108
post #2

I work from home as much as I can, but nothing trumps seeing your colleagues face to face. Text can also cause misunderstandings, and apparently no one likes video, at least in my company. I don't like video much either, though.

You can have misunderstandings face to face. This is a matter of communication skills. Having entire conversation in text form also means you can easily make references and go back to it even weeks later, whereas with face to face conversation you don't have that luxury.

Face to face means seeing the other person's face. You have instantaneous feedback when their face shows signs of confusion, excitement, boredom, maybe unhappiness at your words. Misunderstandings can be cleared up immediately.

Searchable conversation history is certainly extremely useful. But today, that's at the cost of needing to regularly go back and redo text discussions from 5 or 15 minutes ago because it becomes clear that we initially hadn't understood each other at all.

So I dream of a Black Mirror style future with an indexed video archive of what my eyes had seen.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#109
post #83

I think that the 'importance of face-to-face interaction' argument is a helplessly contrived one, an attempt to avoid the elephant in the room. There are plenty of examples that show that working remotely without daily face-to-face interaction can work very well. What's markedly different about environments that successfully adopted remote work are aspects like: - a lack of cargo cult work organisation and office pol…

> When people say that they can't communicate as well with someone who isn't in the same room that doesn't necessarily mean that a remote setup doesn't work. It could simply mean they're just lazy and not willing to adjust to a different kind of work environment. Let's say you're right and people are to blame for being lazy. How would you address this?

Mainly by advocating a different style of work and communication. By teaching and coaching people how to communicate in a more organised rather than haphazard manner.

This isn't all that different from what in larger organisations is nowadays called agile transformation. How often do we hear "Yeah, that whole agile thing is nice but it doesn't work for us."?

The reason why 'agile' (or any other new approach for that matter) doesn't work in these cases often is that people are only used to doing things a certain way and are too lazy or otherwise unwilling to let go of that way and try a different approach.

Bringing about change on that scale is a long and often painful process. It's not that people are inherently lazy or stupid. It just can take considerable effort to unlearn habits you've gotten used to over a long time.

The crucial difference - at least so far - between the adoption of remote work and that of agile methods is that the latter for better or for worse nowadays seem to be largely accepted as the common approach for organising work (in the software industry at least).

As for remote work on the other hand there's no large-scale buy-in by (middle-)managers. I think this points to a larger issue at play here: Implementing remote work can surface shortcomings and waste.

If remote work requires workers to proactively communicate amongst themselves anyway what do you need traditional facilitators like middle-management for? With agile software development methods there are at least still roles like Scrum master or product owner that to some extent still resemble those traditional roles.

With remote work implemented properly we could very well arrive at a point where those roles aren't needed at all anymore.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#110

We commute because businesses can push off the cost of commuting to their employees. I'd personally be in favor of a "congestion tax" or somesuch for companies that force their employees to come in rather than work remotely. Commuting takes up energy and resources, and the congestion incurs costs on third parties (car accidents, higher gas prices, and the like). While it's debatable whether remote works for businesse…

Who ultimately pays for this congestion tax? The employees in the form of lower salaries, the customers in the form of higher prices and the shareholders in the form of lower profits.

I prefer an alternative approach: a telecommuting incentive tax credit. Telecommuters themselves get a tax credit and companies also get a tax credit.

That would be the fastest way to spur more remote friendly workplaces. Then the environment, congestion, commute stress, etc will all be reduced. The "cost" of the credit would be more than offset by reduced road maintenance costs, lower pollution, fewer accidents, etc.

Unless you're dealing with customers directly, or making a physical product, there's no reason that offices in their conventional form should exist.

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