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Let employees work from home

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Re: Let employees work from home

#91

Post by barrkel »

mabbo wrote: post #67
barrkel wrote: post #45

I worked remotely, from home, for 5 years. These days, I work mostly in the office, with a 40 minute commute each way, despite the option for occasional working from home. There's a few reasons to prefer working in the office. The single biggest one is the hard delimiting of the work day; when I'm not in the office, I'm not working, I'm not available on email or chat, and unless it's an exceptional situation, nobody…

> when I'm not in the office, I'm not working This resonates very strongly with me. A "wfh" day for me means I get half as much done. My home is where I keep all my distractions! > You can put together a logical argument, a coherent or strawman proposal, and discuss things at length point by point. It's much higher bandwidth. But too few people read long emails My trick for this: I write the email, then I go back to…

Oh, I get more work done when I work from home; but worse, I also work longer hours. It's lose-lose.

Re: Let employees work from home

#92

Post by RHSeeger »

Morgawr wrote: post #41
brianwawok wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My overall impression that WFH is very frowned upon at Google. Sure, maybe you can use it 2 days a month. But no thanks, I get to WFH every day. Life is too short to commute.

From what I've seen in my team, it's very subjective. I think it's more of a "you need to have a reason to WFH", it's fine if once in a while you just stay home and work and all that matters is your deliverable, but ideally you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable. If you keep doing WFH every day then yes, that's frowned upon. I'm honestly neutral on this, I prefer when my coworkers are arou…

> you need to have a reason to WFH

Personally, I have reasons... I prefer it, I get more done, it cuts out the commute time (which includes a lot more than actual time in the car), it lets me work on things at night when I want to...

Sure, there are negatives too, but there's a heck of a lot of positives, too.

> you should attend to all the meetings you need to and be reachable

Working from home has no real impact on either of those.

Re: Let employees work from home

#93

Post by zip1234 »

intoverflow2 wrote: post #65
mcculley wrote: post #3

I've a contrarian view on this. Not all IT jobs are amenable to remote work. Some work benefits from tighter collaboration than current technology offers. Sometimes that collaboration is with folks other than IT staff, who may be less comfortable using technology solutions for collaboration. If the inputs and outputs of your job can be delivered entirely over email and version control commits, then work from home is…

Probably an unpopular opinion but as someone working in a creative side of a tech company, my interactions with remote workers are tedious at best. Discussions that would be counted in seconds sitting side by side turn into 10-20 minute long video awkward skype calls. There is so much anecdotal evidence in blog posts about how great remote is for your devs because "an interruption costs 15 minutes of concentration" y…

"having to work with these privileged employees"

That is a big problem with remote work--that it is viewed as being a privileged employee. If companies have remote workers, they should allow anyone to work remotely and design interactions around remote work. Otherwise, you end up with resentment and poor communication. By design interactions I mean figuring out a method/system of communication that works just as well as in the office. Some companies do this with video boards/google hangouts.

Re: Let employees work from home

#94

Post by RHSeeger »

maxxxxx wrote: post #60
Veen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow your logic. The vast majority of businesses aren't like Google or Facebook. The vast majority of the nation's GDP isn't created by companies like Google and Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of businesses are the size of Automattic, Basecamp, or smaller. Those businesses employ the the vast majority of workers. Therefore, Basecamp and Automattic are excellent role models. Unequivocal success does not mea…

I am a big proponent of remote work but I think it's harder to manage a remote company. Automattic and Basecamp have excellent people in leadership who have a clear understanding of their company. A lot of mediocre middleman managers in the typical company aren't capable of setting expectations and evaluating work results. You need very good workers and leaders in a remote company.

> You need very good workers and leaders in a remote company.

I think that's a point that some people miss. To have remote workers, you need people who can effectively work remotely. It's a learned skill, like any other, and not everyone will be good at it.

Saying "we're only local" or "we're only remote" is a bad idea, you can have both and call it a win on both ends.

Re: Let employees work from home

#95

Post by overgard »

jasode wrote: post #7

>Objections to work from home fall apart Essays from workers like Jen McCown isn't going to work. What works is to have massively successful businesses that beat the competition because their employees work remotely . Since no multi-billion dollar business has demonstrated that specific cause & effect, the idea doesn't gain traction. Yes, businesses like Basecamp and Automattic have remote workers but I'm talking abo…

You could make this argument about any benefit, and it would be equally silly. "Blog posts about company provided snacks arent going to move the needle, we need a company that is massively successful because of free snacks before people take notice!"

Re: Let employees work from home

#96

Post by csorrell »

camelNotation wrote: post #4

I think WFH is a great idea, but until we can do multi-user video conferencing over the average home internet connection, it just isn't going to be as good as in-person interactions. However, once we can reliably see one another's faces in HD and share screens at the same time, it might even be superior to sitting next to someone and having them try to look over your shoulder as you show them something or ask a quest…

Screen sharing is an important feature, but is video conferencing really necessary or even something most people want? I WFH, and my team has bi-weekly meetings, but we don't do video conferencing. I quite prefer phone calls to video personally.

Re: Let employees work from home

#97

Post by dionidium »

I can't help but think that a lot of this desire is driven by the existence of far-flung suburbs and painful commutes. I was planning to work from home today to receive a delivery that now seems to be delayed, so, since I live within walking distance to the office, I decided to come in anyway.

I guess if I lived an hour away I'd have preferred to stay home.

Re: Let employees work from home

#98

Post by RHSeeger »

mabbo wrote: post #67
barrkel wrote: post #45

I worked remotely, from home, for 5 years. These days, I work mostly in the office, with a 40 minute commute each way, despite the option for occasional working from home. There's a few reasons to prefer working in the office. The single biggest one is the hard delimiting of the work day; when I'm not in the office, I'm not working, I'm not available on email or chat, and unless it's an exceptional situation, nobody…

> when I'm not in the office, I'm not working This resonates very strongly with me. A "wfh" day for me means I get half as much done. My home is where I keep all my distractions! > You can put together a logical argument, a coherent or strawman proposal, and discuss things at length point by point. It's much higher bandwidth. But too few people read long emails My trick for this: I write the email, then I go back to…

I had a manager that asked me to put summaries at the top of my emails. It was super effective.

I also label sections as to who they target (ex, when something is a technical explanation that not everyone needs) and add footnotes (with raw data and the like) when it's appropriate.

I'm a serial long-emailer, but I've learned how to interact with normal society ;)

Re: Let employees work from home

#99

Post by athenot »

barrkel wrote: post #85
athenot wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The days when people were trained on newsgroup netiquette are long gone. That is why it is hard to do decisions by email. Also, poor thread representation by email clients doesn't help. Chat has the potential of being used efficiently, where arguments are stripped of their emotion and converge faster to a point without rambling. To your point, chat can be made high-bandwidth, with multi-sentence points made in a si…

Chat (both video and text) also suffers from not having a easily usable whiteboard. And if you want to talk to someone about some code, hopping around between different bits, that needs screen sharing including remote access, so either person can hop around, highlight code, etc. It's all just fiddly.

We've had the same realization, so here's a shameless plug about how we are solving it. It will improve but it's already a big leap from what was previously available.

https://www.ciscospark.com/products/spark-board.html

Re: Let employees work from home

#100

Post by schtitt »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #47

I like working from home sometimes. A line is crossed for me when a company goes 100% remote. I would go crazy working from home day in and day out. I actually did have a borderline nervous breakdown years ago because I couldn't take being alone so much of the day. In fact if I have to work from home full time again I would pay to have a membership in a co-working space just to be around other humans. I think work fr…

Curious about the implied link between social-ness and creativity.. care to expound? I can think of several individuals who are highly creative but who prefer being alone.
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