111–120 of 186 posts
It seems unlikely to me that the disaster that's been schooling-from-home has somehow been a stunning success for work-from-home, and I think most employers see it.
My country has new rule about minimal square space per employee. Capacity of our office is now reduced to 20%. 80% employees have to work from home, they do not fit into our office. If this rule is permanent, companies may not be able to afford office space. WFH may become "new normal" bcos it is only thing company can afford. In old days, flu spread in office like wild fire. Companies outsourced negative externaliti…
> Now we have way more transmissible viruses and probably new regulations. That’s incorrect and largely irrelevant. We have one virus that’s more dangerous, but not necessarily more transmissible than the flu, measles, or the common cold (and demonstrably less transmissible than many viruses). Unless you are of the irrational belief that we have somehow reached a point in history when serial deadly pandemics are the…
My partner works in operations for [fairly large company]. Her job is to min/max space use, organize for hiring pushes, keep the office space humming, revamp existing space as needed, plan out new space... etc. etc. etc. It's an interesting job, she's probably the person you're pissed at when your desk gets seemingly randomly moved to another floor. Right before COVID, she was managing a HUGE densification project to…
This really is the worst of both worlds for the employees. Employees are still bound to a physical location, but you also have to maintain a home office and heterogenous communications stack [0]. Also, coordinating who is in the office when is a nightmare and can often lead to oversubscribed days. The only utility I can see is if you need to run for appointments that are easier to do when working from home, but this…
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Can you expand on "[The executives have] seen enough they don't like about full WFH"? I'm trying to gather enough anecdotal and "research-y" data to make decisions around this for myself and friends/co-workers.
Despite all the individual cases of people claiming WFH makes them more productive, in the aggregate employees are not. In the particular data I've seen, new employees and more junior employees suffer significantly, even while more senior engineers hold steady or improve, perhaps because their responsibilities shift to more easily quantifiable metrics than knowledge sharing, mentoring, and onboarding.
Weird sentiment in this thread. Regardless of the survey i have only seen positive reactions to working remote, and hope remote is here to stay.
My employees love the camaraderie and face-to-face adhoc conversations that come from everyone being on the same floor. However no one likes the new workstation layout our company employs; people are on top of each with other minimal partitioning for those that face each other, and no partitioning at all side to side. It's noisy and hard to concentrate and the fact you have a locker and may keep nothing personal on y…
My partner works in operations for [fairly large company]. Her job is to min/max space use, organize for hiring pushes, keep the office space humming, revamp existing space as needed, plan out new space... etc. etc. etc. It's an interesting job, she's probably the person you're pissed at when your desk gets seemingly randomly moved to another floor. Right before COVID, she was managing a HUGE densification project to…
> With that comes some unique space challenges, including but not limited to how does having a desk work if only 50% of people are in the office on a given day. I've heard of companies hot-desking like this so they can have fewer desks than total employees, splitting each desk between people whose schedules are "out of phase" with each other. It sounds basically intolerable. I'm somewhat less sensitive to many common…
But if you're doing two days a week in the office, all your meetings will move into those days so they can happen in person, so you'll miss having your own desk less.
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In my experience, there are two ways for a company to be successful at having remote employees: 1. everyone is 100% remote 2. everyone comes into the office occasionally Anything else leads to a two-tiered system.
You mean, you can't have some that are always remote and some that are in the office? Like a split?
Remote work forces everyone to contribute to the burden of documenting what's happening.
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In my experience, there are two ways for a company to be successful at having remote employees: 1. everyone is 100% remote 2. everyone comes into the office occasionally Anything else leads to a two-tiered system.
I don't think so. My company was remote-first before the pandemic, but we still had about 25% of our staff or so go into an office regularly. The key is to have that remote-first attitude in spite of there being an office. One of the rules we had was "if one person is remote that's supposed to be on a meeting, then everyone has to treat that as a remote meeting and Zoom in". In other words, no one was on unequal foot…
The other thing to consider is that many of us routinely work with people across much of the world on a day-to-day basis. Even if everyone were in office--some are, some aren't--almost every meeting I'd be in would have people from 2 or 3 different offices. One office I work with a lot is in the same time zone. The other is 6 time zones away but that still works pretty well because we have meetings early in the workday our time, which for them is mid-afternoon.
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I think all or nothing is not realistic for most companies unless the CEOs are very progressive and just deeply believe in it. A decent workaround is to have entirely remote teams and entirely in-office teams. That way people can be on teams where they feel like being remote is not a detriment to their careers (because ALL discussion takes place online) and people who prefer working in-person don't have to force ever…
At my company we’ve always had teams that appeared “all remote”. They just were teams not stationed in the HQ and they were clearly less important (or that was the vibe) and they were usually in a low COL country instead. The mix definitely will make a cohort of “second class citizens”