What one executive wishes they could tell employees about return-to-office plans
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Re: What one executive wishes they could tell employees about return-to-office plans
#2That awkward feeling is the employees being aware that the motivation of the people paying them and their own interests are in opposition.
In this business, in code and in management, Async is god. If it can be done async, it will be better done async plus or minus the social considerations.
Re: What one executive wishes they could tell employees about return-to-office plans
#3> We want to do the right thing by our employees. [...] And it’s really unclear what the right thing is. [...] We do have office space and we have welcomed people back to the office, but not many have been coming in.
It took me a while but I just did the complex analysis including some long division. It turns out the right thing by the employees is the thing they are freely choosing to do. So it appears the right thing is to give them that freedom, unless of course the premise is flawed.
Re: What one executive wishes they could tell employees about return-to-office plans
#4> We want to do the right thing by our employees. [...] And it’s really unclear what the right thing is. [...] We do have office space and we have welcomed people back to the office, but not many have been coming in. It took me a while but I just did the complex analysis including some long division. It turns out the right thing by the employees is the thing they are freely choosing to do. So it appears the right thi…
It sounds like junior employees are not coming in, and some are struggling. Anecdotally I’ve seen that too. Maybe some in this company do not know what they don’t know. Is the right thing to do just to let them fail? I don’t think so. The right thing could be a compromise.
Re: What one executive wishes they could tell employees about return-to-office plans
#5If they've identified juniors having issues, they should train managers to identify and solve for it. Ask them to come in or set up pair programming/joint work sessions like 'shoulder surfing'.
Tell people it's inappropriate to go to a museum during work or that they're underperforming.
Seems like we've got solutions to these issues
Re: What one executive wishes they could tell employees about return-to-office plans
#6some valuable insights in this critique
1. remote being best suited for those who have pre-built in-person networks
2. lack of osmotic information transfer for inexperienced staff
3. decline of social cohesion, especially for new joiners who never had in-person experience
I suspect that we will end up with many different flavours of working mode, we are in the pre-Cambrian explosion for working culture practices. The diversity should lead to self sorting along the way
Re: What one executive wishes they could tell employees about return-to-office plans
#7If they've identified juniors having issues, they should train managers to identify and solve for it. Ask them to come in or set up pair programming/joint work sessions like 'shoulder surfing'. Tell people it's inappropriate to go to a museum during work or that they're underperforming. Seems like we've got solutions to these issues
Some of the issue with junior employees is that what worked before won’t work as well now (or at minimum, won’t work the same way).
When I was a junior programmer, I ate lunch every day with junior and senior programmers. I developed a trust that let me easily ask one of them to “walk me through how a variable of char * and char[256] are related” or show me some trick in the debugger or help me get unstuck.
It’s not that you can’t do any of those things remotely. It’s that the social constructs are vastly different in the absence of repeated casual interactions.
In a remote-mostly world, a junior programmer is likely to struggle longer solo on any given issue (which brings along some benefits, of course), but once they get into a spot where they’re underwater, they don’t have an easy, low-stakes, smooth way to recover as “asking one of the 10 people you’ve eaten lunch with 100 times.”
Re: What one executive wishes they could tell employees about return-to-office plans
#8I completely understand their concerns about remote work long term. Maybe it really does make it harder for new employees to form networks, and productivity does take a hit. This might make the company less innovative, less competitive and even deliver a lower return on capital.
The thing is though, I don't give a shit. I am generally not rewarded for being productive.
Employees might be more inclined to think like owners if they actually reaped the benefits of ownership. Benefits like a share of profits or any semblance of decision making power for important decisions. All of this stuff is doable.
Until then, work from home sounds good because it's all upside for employees.
Re: What one executive wishes they could tell employees about return-to-office plans
#9I completely understand their concerns about remote work long term. Maybe it really does make it harder for new employees to form networks, and productivity does take a hit. This might make the company less innovative, less competitive and even deliver a lower return on capital. The thing is though, I don't give a shit. I am generally not rewarded for being productive. Employees might be more inclined to think like o…
But tech firms all give employees equity and are facing the same problems.
Re: What one executive wishes they could tell employees about return-to-office plans
#10From my first hand experience in managing teams, this article resonates well. The biggest problem my company sees is a low level of trust between team members now that a lot of the tenured engineers have left and new ones joined in a fully remote environment. More than half the team hasn’t met colleagues in person and the culture feels very transactional with shallow bonds, compared to old days when all of us were in office.
Organizing social events on Zoom very contrived and awkward. Chatting for 5 min at a water cooler was better to actually get to know someone and build trust. Of course, the company has no budget for physically bringing people together.
Fully remote doesn’t work and I am willing to bet on companies with some in-office presence beating fully remote companies in the long run.