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What if remote work didn’t mean working from home?

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Re: What if remote work didn’t mean working from home?

#171

Post by codyb »

nomoreplease wrote: post #21
geoduck14 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the Happy Hours: In 2019, my team would occasionally need to work long hours or would deliver something awesome. I would reward them with HH and dinner/late meal. It gave me a chance to say "thanks" and for us to bond over the challenge we overcame. I can't do that anymore! I've don't virtual HH, but it isn't the same! I would REALLY like a virtual solution to "bond with your team" and "say thanks in a mean…

> I would reward them with HH and dinner/late meal. Maybe your team would appreciate a $200 gift card instead of HH + dinner/late meal, especially when some people don't drink or prefer healthy meals instead of steakhouses.

Maybe just offer the option to accomodate people and how they feel at whatever moment you in time you’d like to reward them during.

Re: What if remote work didn’t mean working from home?

#172

Post by eddieroger »

dcolkitt wrote: post #57
leecarraher wrote: post #22

I think we will soon see a dip in productivity.whenever assessing trends, you should never base conclusions on outlier events and we are basing too much of the wfh success on this past year. A year when you couldn't go out and do things, when people feared for their jobs amid a global crisis and felt a call of duty to keep on working.

A lot of managers seem to have an unshakeable convention that as soon as workers are no longer cattle-penned into an office that they'll turn into lazy slobs. As if the only thing stopping them from vegging out on the couch, eating ice cream and watching Jerry Springer during the work day is the watchful and benevolent gaze of their adult supervisors from across the open office floor plan. Believe it or not, most pro…

I was remote working before the pandemic, and once it hit and people had to be home, I started hearing this argument. I looked at people leaders and asked them how they dealt with people who weren’t delivering in the office, and why that would no longer work. People who slack off were doing it before at the Starbucks or through walks, Internet browsing, etc, but when they’re home you can’t look over their shoulder while they do it. What you can do is continue to look for them delivering or not, and if they are, who cares where they do it?

Re: What if remote work didn’t mean working from home?

#173

Post by egypturnash »

shard wrote: post #163
egypturnash wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah all you people who Absolutely Require a giant screen, or multiple ones, are stuck at desks. Me, I like plugging my laptop into the 24" screen on my desk, but I also like sitting out in a park with birds and cicada singing, so I've got my tools set up for both ways.

I'm guessing you are young and have better eyesight than me. :) When I was young, I carried a little subnotebook with a 7.1" screen and really enjoyed it. Now I have to hold my phone at a certain exact distance, too close and it's burry, too far and it's blurry. I had to use the 13" work laptop for a few weeks without an external monitor and it was painful, the screen was small enough that I have to lean in to see th…

I am nearly fifty. :)

I'm also an artist, not a programmer, so I don't need to fill my screen with a ton of text. Plus my tools are pretty much designed around regularly zooming in and out.

Re: What if remote work didn’t mean working from home?

#174

Post by tjr225 »

agjm wrote: post #158
geoduck14 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the Happy Hours: In 2019, my team would occasionally need to work long hours or would deliver something awesome. I would reward them with HH and dinner/late meal. It gave me a chance to say "thanks" and for us to bond over the challenge we overcame. I can't do that anymore! I've don't virtual HH, but it isn't the same! I would REALLY like a virtual solution to "bond with your team" and "say thanks in a mean…

I am the type of person who appreciates this sort of thing, but it seems like we're in the minority. Growing up, I always loved getting to see people from school / school clubs (e.g. FSAE team, photography, etc) out of the normal context. It really opens up relationships and helps you figure out how to work better as a team. If someone's not there because they don't want anything to do with work after hours, it's har…

I don’t think we’re in the minority. The HN crowd that is pro WFH has been extremely vocal since even before the pandemic.

For what it’s worth I was remote starting a couple years before the pandemic. I can’t wait to go back in at least a couple days a week. I can’t wait to spend time with my coworkers in some capacity.

Heck, most of the newly remote have only been doing so for twelve months; wait until your life has been one context for 3 years. It becomes quite brutal.

Re: What if remote work didn’t mean working from home?

#175

Post by ecpottinger »

shannongreen wrote: post #143
legerdemain wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THIS, 100% this. I don't want to be "social" with you, I don't want to "bond" with you, and I don't care about you as a human being. You are 100% just a queue of work tasks and a source of pay checks. The less I see, hear, or know about the other people on my team, the happier I am and the better off they are . WFH forever, don't mess with a good thing.

FWIW, I would hate working with someone like this. You don't have to be super active, socially, but treating the other people (and they _are_ people) on your team as just drones is a) not conducive to good collaboration and b) pretty damn rude.

First, I made friends with most people I worked with. I still see them years after I left the company.

So who do I not see, the ones who insisted I must follow their favourite sport teams, the ones who got so drunk on the weekend they could not remember what they did but thought I should have been with them. The one (thank goodness it was only one) who keep eyeing the high school girls while we were in our 30s and 40S. And last the ones who always had to go out for a smoke, I don't want to imagine what their places were like.

You can like some people, but some people you just do not want to be around when you are not being paid to work with them.

Re: What if remote work didn’t mean working from home?

#176

Post by heavyset_go »

novok wrote: post #136
hparadiz wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop assuming people like to drink.

As someone who never has drunk, it's fine. You just drink fizzy water, diet coke and free food or whatever and nobody gives a shit. It's a work happy hour, nobody should be getting drunk and nobody notices.

It excludes people who have very good reasons to not be around alcohol, and not people who just don't like it.

Re: What if remote work didn’t mean working from home?

#177

Post by valand »

geoduck14 wrote: post #12
bluefirebrand wrote: post #2

As long as I still have a quiet, private office and don't spend an hour+ per day in traffic and am not expected to give up evenings for "not mandatory but really you should show up to play politics" office happy hours, I don't care where I work. Currently working from home gives me all of that and I haven't been happier with a job ever.

Regarding the Happy Hours: In 2019, my team would occasionally need to work long hours or would deliver something awesome. I would reward them with HH and dinner/late meal. It gave me a chance to say "thanks" and for us to bond over the challenge we overcame. I can't do that anymore! I've don't virtual HH, but it isn't the same! I would REALLY like a virtual solution to "bond with your team" and "say thanks in a mean…

Personal experience which is at the very opposite point of the spectrum from yours.

I have had the pleasurable working in a team where bonding is simply working toward a common goal. This was an extremely cohesive team. Our main motivation of working long hour was to push the company to a more beneficial position so that we are also benefited from it.

The reward is the good result of the work itself and going home/out knowing that it will benefit us in the future.

The experience was almost like playing a co-op game rather than doing typical office work.

Happy hours and additional recreational activity were a way to regulate stress rather than a main reward.

Of course this is pretty unique, and is a rare thing to happen, especially in big companies where profit and work rather detached.

Re: What if remote work didn’t mean working from home?

#178

Post by ecpottinger »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #55
kristjansson wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone of course, and one should be attentive to and accommodating of teammates that feel that way. But surely “let’s knock off at three today and go down the pub, thanks for all the hard work” is a positive for most people?

"Thanks for all the hard work, let's knock off at three today" Is a positive. "Let's go down to the pub" is still capitalizing on my time. It's still work, just the location has changed. And in the past it has often started at 3 and then kept going and going until way later than if I'd just worked out my day. There is always some idealism around it like "oh if you don't drink you don't have to, just come hang out for…

Exactly my experience.

Re: What if remote work didn’t mean working from home?

#179

Post by hinkley »

geoduck14 wrote: post #12
bluefirebrand wrote: post #2

As long as I still have a quiet, private office and don't spend an hour+ per day in traffic and am not expected to give up evenings for "not mandatory but really you should show up to play politics" office happy hours, I don't care where I work. Currently working from home gives me all of that and I haven't been happier with a job ever.

Regarding the Happy Hours: In 2019, my team would occasionally need to work long hours or would deliver something awesome. I would reward them with HH and dinner/late meal. It gave me a chance to say "thanks" and for us to bond over the challenge we overcame. I can't do that anymore! I've don't virtual HH, but it isn't the same! I would REALLY like a virtual solution to "bond with your team" and "say thanks in a mean…

Parties with my coworkers are often far enough from the office that we all have to drive anyway. That doesn't work for these impromptu things, but it does work for things you know a priori.

When you say reward people for working hard on something, you don't mean the same night, do you? That sounds like possibly fun for extroverts and no fun at all for everyone else.

Re: What if remote work didn’t mean working from home?

#180

Post by geoduck14 »

rewgs wrote: post #138
JohnWhigham wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic HN missing the point of social interaction and the benefits it provides.

I have 30+ food allergies that developed as an adult (which includes alcohol). Yes, it's ridiculous. I literally cannot eat food that isn't prepared by me from a hilariously small and ever-shrinking list of approved ingredients. I also can't prepare food more than a day in advance due to a histamine intolerance (food grows in histamine count as it sits in the fridge), so roughly 50% of my free time is spent cooking,…

That sucks. If I wanted to bond with you - what could we do aside from food and drinks?

Would you go bowling with me? Could we play cricket in a nearby field? Can we sing karaoke? Would it be better or worse if our coworkers were drunk while singing?

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