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Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All

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Re: Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All

#11
I think the one thing that gets lost in the work from home push is that it really takes good managers to make it work. You need a manager skilled at making sure that people are working at a good pace. Doing one-on-ones in person for a good people manager is a lot easier than over a video call where only a portion of you is visible, so a remote manager needs to be really good at remote one-on-ones. You need a manager that can fairly rate their reports so they push for promotions/raises/rewards based on their accomplishments. Without this, good performers get angry and leave. You also need a manager who can figure out if someone is not doing a good job and how to help them or move them out of the org. The manager also needs to have the skills to onboard new hires since mentorship is going to be a bit more difficult when done remotely since nearly no company has good documentation for new hires.

A decent manager might struggle with these skills when going fully remote. It could be easy for them to fall back on some rudimentary metrics of productivity because they have a hard time judging what people are doing. You will probably see managers who have "favorites" lean more heavily on a few people because they are a known quantity to the manager. You'll probably see new hires take a lot longer to get up to speed with merely competent managers.

I wonder if we actually have enough good managers to make work from home scale up.

Re: Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All

#12
post #4

We're in the middle of a world health and financial crisis so productivity naturally goes down. Also a lot of people have little kids at home, hard to get work done like that. These are not normal times, WFH has nothing to do with it

You just mentioned one of the greatest distractions caused by WFH:

a lot of people have little kids at home, hard to get work done like that.

And then you said "WFH has nothing to do with it."

Re: Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All

#13

Lots of anecdotal experiences with no empirical data. I’m gonna chalk this one up to clickbait.

You can't always wait for hard data.

Sometimes (especially when it comes to life-affecting questions like "will my company / job survive or not?" it's necessary to draw inferences from unstructured observation -- a.k.a. "anecdotal data".

It's a very useful cognitive skill, in fact.

Re: Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All

#14
post #12
post #4

We're in the middle of a world health and financial crisis so productivity naturally goes down. Also a lot of people have little kids at home, hard to get work done like that. These are not normal times, WFH has nothing to do with it

You just mentioned one of the greatest distractions caused by WFH: a lot of people have little kids at home, hard to get work done like that. And then you said "WFH has nothing to do with it."

Kids are at home due to the pandemic, If they were running around at your office it would have been the same

Re: Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All

#15
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just mentioned one of the greatest distractions caused by WFH: a lot of people have little kids at home, hard to get work done like that. And then you said "WFH has nothing to do with it."

Kids are at home due to the pandemic, If they were running around at your office it would have been the same

If they were running around at your office

Which happens how often exactly?

Re: Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All

#16
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids are at home due to the pandemic, If they were running around at your office it would have been the same

If they were running around at your office Which happens how often exactly?

I have been WFH long before the pandemic as well and have little kids. My kids were at school / kindergarten and I had no distractions. I was saying that we should compare this situation with little kids at home while WFH to a situation of kids running around at your office. I agree it doesn't happen often but having kids 24/7 at home while trying to work from home did not happen often either, before the pandemic...
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