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Work from Home and Productivity

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Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#111

Post by UnpossibleJim »

oldprogrammer2 wrote: post #35
macd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (They) would fully expect that by early July, all U.S.-based employees will be in the office on a consistent rotational schedule. > Employee rotations at JPMorgan will be subject to a 50% occupancy cap until U.S. authorities revise their social-distancing guidelines, according to Tuesday’s memo. The bank advised workers that “with this time frame in mind you should start making any needed arrangements to help with…

If I had to guess, it's overzealous middle management layers wanting to show Jamie that their teams are proactive and doing more than the minimum. You know, because of their exceptional leadership qualities.

If workers were suddenly doing their jobs with simple emails and independence instead of micromanaging, why, what need of stratified layers of middle management would their be? You could cut down two or three useless layers of corporate administration altogether and have people that actually did work. What kind of a world would that be?!

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#112

Post by rvba »

mekkkkkk wrote: post #87

It seems like the overwhelming majority of people here are positive to WFH. I can't stand it. To me, a "remote first" workplace sounds abysmal. I like to have a physical workplace where our company can gather and focus on our goals together, in person. Picking up business related discussions, small talking, sharing music, joking around. Attempting this through video meetings or voice chats feels like a bad simulacrum…

> I like to have a physical workplace where our company can gather and focus on our goals together, in person

I dont want to sound rude, but most people here seem to focus more on actual work output.

> discussions, small talking, sharing music, joking around.

This doesnt sound like work at all, only busywork; what negatively affects those around.

Most people prefer to do get shit done and go home (when you work from home, you remove the commute part) and then spend time with real friends, since people at work very often are not your real friends.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#114

Post by ashtonkem »

mekkkkkk wrote: post #87

It seems like the overwhelming majority of people here are positive to WFH. I can't stand it. To me, a "remote first" workplace sounds abysmal. I like to have a physical workplace where our company can gather and focus on our goals together, in person. Picking up business related discussions, small talking, sharing music, joking around. Attempting this through video meetings or voice chats feels like a bad simulacrum…

Then don’t join a remote first company? It’s not like that’s going away anytime soon.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#115

Post by nucleardog »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #99
mekkkkkk wrote: post #87

It seems like the overwhelming majority of people here are positive to WFH. I can't stand it. To me, a "remote first" workplace sounds abysmal. I like to have a physical workplace where our company can gather and focus on our goals together, in person. Picking up business related discussions, small talking, sharing music, joking around. Attempting this through video meetings or voice chats feels like a bad simulacrum…

It's possible to have that remotely! It takes effort and requires intentionality, but you can make it happen. We do daily 30 minute standups - which we intentionally run inefficiently at this point. It's a great time for watercooler talk, catching up, and generally building rapport that's hard to build at remote companies. We also do twice weekly hang-out sessions. It takes some time to develop the habit. It's probab…

Seconding this. WFH is more conscious effort in this regard, but you don't _have_ to lose those things. The biggest difference is organic conversations will not happen in big meetings. When only one person can talk at a time, you lose all those side chats, etc. So you need to book a lot of smaller meetings with people.

I have daily stand-ups with my team. I've never made it explicitly clear but kind of driven it towards a routine of "get the work out of the way, then we have until X time to chat and bullshit".

I have a weekly planning meeting with a few members of the team. Same deal. Get the planning out of the way, then the remainder is for general chit-chat, talking about personal projects, etc.

Every week I have three hours blocked off where I do a "check-in" with a bunch of other team leads. It's dual-purpose: There's a lot of things they might be dealing with that they'd never feel rose to the level of scheduling a meeting to discuss (whether problems or just wanting input, etc; this was previously a lot of the water cooler talk), but when the time's already there then they'll find all sorts of productive ways to fill it. And chit-chat once that's all out of the way.

I do an hour once a week with my boss one on one.

The entire office does a monthly-ish hour to play some silly online games and hang out as well.

We've been hiring like crazy so at this point a lot of these people are people I've never met in person but I've built a pretty good rapport and relationship purely over video chat and Slack.

All-in, I spend like 6 hours a week on this. And most of it's scheduled around the beginning/very end of the day where most people aren't as interrupted or super productive to begin with. Truth be told, this is barely more (if any) than the amount of time that we were spending previously on socialization at work. If we account for the _lost_ productivity of being distracted in the office, then I've definitely gained time.

The hardest part was just accepting that I was going to have to let some relationships go. As much as I really enjoyed talking to that one frontend engineer and it _occasionally_ resulted in some sort of productive action, the trade-off just isn't there so I need to rely more on the team leads to solve and communicate those issues.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#116

Post by crossroadsguy »

I see the point of employees’ well being is always missing from these conversations as the main topic.

Across companies I’m seeing it’s getting increasingly difficult for people who liked a simple 9-5 or 10-6 in the pre-pandemic days. On most days they could just switch-off from work in the early evening by leaving the work place.

That boundary is now constantly stretching. Someone has a kid so they want a different time, someone has daily house chores so they’d rather take that 3-5pm off and then extend to 5-8pm and they’d expect others to adjust around it.

It’s especially bad in my country, India. This place already had a chronic national work-life balance issue and it’s limitless in many ways now. US companies anyway treat this place as offshore software worker colony no matter how you’d want to dress this in words. I recently switched from an Indian startup (quite bad work-life balance) to a US firm and I could never imagine it would have changed for the worse. Anyway I’ve resigned and I’m interviewing only for very large MNCs where I know multiple people personally who can vouch for this part of work culture.

Now of course you can be strict about your time and slowly become “that uncooperative person” in the team. Or you can just bleat about how that’s just company failing to streamline things.

Problem is majority seems fine with not having a work boundary in their lives that used be a hard stop early in the evening and then everybody else is automatically expected be okay with this.

There is no fix of this other than very clearly separating work and home.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#117

Post by ptmcc »

hvocode wrote: post #7

It’s a shame the WFH experiment is blended with the pandemic. It’s hard to decouple the “effectiveness of WFH” from the “pervasive impact of a global pandemic on all aspects of daily life”. I think a lot of people got a negative taste for WFH for reasons that are less WFH and more pandemic.

For sure. I feel like I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about work (in general, but especially remote work) if I, and my coworkers, had a normal social and family life along the way. It'd be a lot less exhausting and monotonous.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#119

Post by saurik »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #90
christophilus wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d put money on it being the case everywhere.

I mean not really. I have 2 one hour meetings per week. One is a 1on1 with my boss and one is with my team. That is about perfect

That just means you already managed to not have those meetings that the average company is apparently wasting time on, not that those meetings you already don't have are beneficial.

Re: Work from Home and Productivity

#120

Post by saurik »

hvocode wrote: post #7

It’s a shame the WFH experiment is blended with the pandemic. It’s hard to decouple the “effectiveness of WFH” from the “pervasive impact of a global pandemic on all aspects of daily life”. I think a lot of people got a negative taste for WFH for reasons that are less WFH and more pandemic.

Yeah: I have always worked from home and nothing about my job has changed, but omg has life gotten harder even for me recently; it is also worth noting that the pandemic affects not only work life but also social life, which means that suddenly work almost automatically takes up a lot more time as there has often literally been nowhere else for me to go or people to see than "maybe my work colleagues would be willing to talk about our product... in the middle of the evening... oh, yep, they are, as they are just as bored and lonely as I am right now".
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