> It’s a difficult topic to discuss on HN because few of us like to admit that WFH is, on average, a struggle for companies.These are all very contradictory hypotheses from presumed earlier assertions. I strongly suspect we're not analyzing the dynamics and variables at a sufficiently granular level to synthesize any useful hypotheses. I'm trying to reconcile a set of earlier assertions out of global corporate postures from these recent pronouncements that Covid-WFH (as opposed to true-WFH) leads to productivity declines.
If WFH is an intractable hit to productivity due to lack of butts in seats, then what is the salient difference from outsourcing / offshoring? If the productivity loss of the latter is simply more acceptable due to a cost differential, then we have thus established a clearing price for that productivity loss. Or are the positions not sufficiently similar to draw that parallel?
If so much fortuitous collaboration happens when on-prem that it becomes a compelling cited factor to go on-prem, then are we making the parallel assertion all the effort for planning is not capturing even a significant fraction of this fortuitous dynamic, much of our planning is compellingly guided by Organizational Physical Brownian Motion?
I don't have a strong preference either way. Pay me enough, I'll show up and do the work. But I cut my teeth in a consulting / professional services context where the WFH discussion was very different: pay a premium (weekly round-trip flights) to put butts in on-prem seats, or less for WFH-delivered skills.
From well over a hundred client engagements by now, my personal opinion is there is no one-size-fits-all unless leadership explicitly builds the organization for it. There are definitely different workers who thrive under the different models, and those who under-deliver and abuse their working conditions. It's an incredibly tough leadership decision. I think much of that decision hinges upon how well the organization is led and coordinated. I have observed from my set of clients that WFH done well requires disciplined teams who produce more communications artifacts internally and externally with other teams, and this longer-term tends to encourage more organizational flexibility (because the published information decouples from people and disseminates deeper and faster). For various reasons, on-prem tends to lead to an over-reliance upon verbal, tribal communication modalities in most organizations.