Study Shows a Productivity Boost of Working From Home

I have been working remotely in a large company and allow me to refute your points.

> - To more effectively add to the culture of the company.

If your culture is already remote, or shifting towards it, then it's a non issue.

> - To take part in ad hoc training opportunities, either to teach someone who needs help, or to learn something from someone when an obstacle is encountered.

This works just as well remotely. In fact I would argue it's even more efficient, one can take advantage of super quiet places in a private video chat.

> - To be able to attend in-person meetings or stand-ups when urgent things come up - without the awkwardness and delays of conferencing in multiple people.

In person meetings, stand ups, team sync meetings are 90% waste of time. Short meetings can be performed quickly in a video call. Notifying team members of something urgent is also very easy.

> - To provide mentorship to junior staff.

Again, the point is passing along information, whether it's done in person or online makes little difference. In fact if it's done online, I would argue it's more efficient because is a digital trail that one can trace back

> - To collaborate more effectively.

If your team members fail to collaborate remotely, they will fail to do so in person. Remote has nothing to do with it.

> - To show clients/prospective clients, partners and recruits, a vibrant and energetic team and working environment that is worth investing in/joining.

Partners and clients don't care how "vibrant" your team is.They care about how good your product is. This point makes no sense

> - To build morale and a sense of teamwork and camaraderie.

This is hands on SV startup mentally. In person office drinking parties does not create morale. Morale is created by hard work, strong vision and leadership. All of which can be accomplished remotely.

The point I'm trying to get across is this: It all depends on the organizational structure. If it's correctly in place, it works very well. As long as there is a clear communication hub between all members, a company can succeed remotely.

[EDIT] spelling

When employees are remote, they are in essence contractors, with less emotional commitment to a company. When employees aren't as invested (other than financially), retention can be harder.

But...it is their point. They are claiming that this laundry list of desirable things are all lost if you support remote work. If they are achievable with remote work the post is irrelevant.

I've worked in offices where there was low morale, zero information sharing, little collaboration, and where the meetings were overwhelmingly just a giant waste of time (in the absence of productivity, meetings become a surrogate where you can point to the `accomplishment' of a meeting). I've worked with a remote team where we had fantastic morale and ridiculously good information sharing and cooperation/coordination. Vice versa. None of these things have to be limited to one choice.

But it makes a huge difference for some people like me. Information passed verbally just doesn't stick for me. For some reason it's not properly recorded in my memory and if you ask me about if half an hour later I would have forgotten 80% of what I was told.

Now give it to me in writing, and I'd probably remember it until the end of days.