Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company. People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason. Engineering is one segment where this penalty seems to be lower. However, engineers seem to be unable to understand that every other function functions better in person. The tradeoff you’re hoping to make is that the…
Not my experience at all. The last two companies I've worked for where 100% remote, in both of these places engineering was a lot more productive. I personally invested less total time in work (about 7 or 8 hours total) and got a lot more done. Both of these companies had a culture of writing things down, so everything was documented, an all important conversations where posted in the open for anyone to see. Everythi…
The reality is that most managers have done little to no thinking about (nor have they ever been formally trained on) actual management. So when taken out of the environment in which they "learned" to manage, largely through example, they have no framework or theoretical knowledge to fall back on for what effective remote working looks like.
We have a hybrid working model but some of our employees are genuinely remote and never come to our in-person offices.
It works well but it takes co-ordination effort by leaders to make it work.
I think there genuinely are benefits to in-person work for certain collaborative elements of work but it makes no sense to just say "there are productivity costs to remote work" without actually answering the key questions, namely:
-For what kind of roles?
-For what kind of tasks within those roles?
-By how much? Does any loss of productivity get made up for saving office costs, commute costs for employees, lower cost of living? If your productivity goes down but it's by less than costs... well maybe that's ok actually!
-Have you quantified other benefits like retention? Even if a remote employee is now less productive (not proven tbh) they are still more productive than the new hire who isn't up to speed on your tech yet, not to mention certainly more productive than the person who no longer works for you and the people who have to interview their replacement.
It's bizarre that people say, well there are costs and benefits to remote, without actually even attempting to quantify them.