Yep, this is absolutely correct in my experiences. I'll chime in, since I'm a remote employee at a company that is hybrid remote/on-site but with the vast majority of employees being on-site.
Long story short: I actually started on-site but negotiated part-time remote. Then after about a year of that my spouse accepted a dream job offer on the other side of the state and so it was no question that we were moving. They wanted to keep me on and so I transitioned to full-time remote.
It has it's ups and downs. From my experience, it depends on the team and ultimately the lead and/or the manager. If they get it, it's good. If they don't, don't bother.
My last team, it was beautiful. Everything worked great. It became obvious to me after transitioning away from that team just how much extra work my manager was doing to keep his remote employees in the loop. With the team I'm on now, it's not working at all. Why? Because, as you so eloquently put it:
> the people who were remote were out of the loop on almost everything... If you have a watercooler chat with someone about a feature, it's easy to forget that a remote colleague wasn't there for the discussion/not document what was said.
This is exactly the problem I am facing down. About a month ago, I even tried talking to my manager about it. Even going so far as using this exact phrasing. His response was that I should come to office for 1 or 2 day trips! Completely missed the point. I'm not surprised, I guess I just expected some effort.
I'm trying to remain positive but it's tiring. I can do good work and make progress but I'm with a lead who is insulating me from meetings and it feels deliberate. The few times I am invited in to a meeting, it's easy to see that he accepts and assumes credit for _the teams_ efforts. He was hired recently as a Senior, our manager wanted him to transition to a Lead, and he's actually landed somewhere around trying to be an architect. Ranting aside, when I bring my concerns up to him it's obvious that there's no attempt to better understand the issues/challenges of the hybrid approach. It doesn't help that he's never worked with remote employees before, either.
>His response was that I should come to office for 1 or 2 day trips!
I understand he missed the point in this case. However, if a company is willing to pick up the travel costs associated with a partly distributed team getting together on a semi-regular basis, that's often a pretty good approach.
Yes, processes should be such that ongoing communication is good. However one of the costs of having a more distributed workforce (which has various benefits to the company, including financial) should be a bigger T&E budget.
It seems that having great speech to text would make remote teams workable. Meeting notes are automatically taken and organized into a searchable journal
If nothing else, that would at least be an improvement over "let's take a photo of the whiteboard after this one hour ad-hoc meeting and attach it to the jira ticket".
I do make trips up every quarter, and they do reimburse expenses, but they are unarguably disruptive and occasionally burdensome to my life and my family.
I think there are a couple of challenges. You are right that it is hard for people to understand how easy it is to get out of the loop. On the other hand too, if you are in a team with people who are politically motivated, it's pretty easy for them to actively exclude you if they think you are danger to their goals.
For me (being remote and even 9 time zones away), I've tried to scale back my own ambitions. It's hard because I've worked as an agile coach for a long time, so I'm used to having quite a lot of influence. I think trying to reinvent yourself to work for other people's success can be useful.
It can be a different style of political game. You need to show how they are better off with you than without you. It's not nearly as depressing as I'm sure this sounds. Just a different way of making a contribution.
I don't see why your manager missed the point. If the "vast majority" of employees are onsite, then it seems reasonable to expect the few who aren't to come visit, or otherwise change their working style, rather than the majority to change their working practices for the few. Particularly if it's the same state in the same country and not, say, a 20-hour flight from Bangalore to San Francisco.
Yes, I believe you must be. I'm referring to where the OP said that as a remote employee I feel out of the loop on a lot of things. So, I tell my manager that I'm missing important information about the projects I'm working on because people have these infrequent, but important, impromptu meetings and those details don't exist outside of those spoken words and their heads and his response is to tell me to come to the office more often. To do what, exactly? This is strikes me as missing the forest for the trees.
The fact is, this entire team is all on Slack and we all have email and we all use zoom. We have internal Wiki's for documentation. We have JIRA. And on and on. The point is, there are plenty of established avenues available for people to dissiminate this sort of information but it doesn't happen. I don't think that I'm asking them to modify their behavior by asking that they include their team members or to remember that they exist when they have those impromptu meetings.
You ARE asking them to modify their behavior when you say that they should use Slack/email/whatever other tool for your benefit, or that they shouldn't have an impromptu chat around the water cooler because you're not around.
Since you're in the minority, you can't demand the majority change their working style for you. It's up to you to fit in to how the majority works, say by showing up in the office. Or you'll miss out important information, which will be to your detriment, not theirs.
> To do what, exactly?
To communicate with others the way they apparently prefer to communicate — in person.
And to build relationships, which lead to working smoother, and prevent misunderstandings from snowballing. It's easier to get pissed off with someone over email than in person.
There are many advantages to facetime. You can decide to forego those, but you can't tell others to, just because you want to.
> You ARE asking them to modify their behavior when you say that they should use Slack/email/whatever other tool for your benefit, or that they shouldn't have an impromptu chat around the water cooler because you're not around.
No, he was asking that already when he asked if he could work remotely. And the company said yes.
> Since you're in the minority, you can't demand the majority change their working style for you. It's up to you to fit in to how the majority works, say by showing up in the office. Or you'll miss out important information, which will be to your detriment, not theirs.
Then they shouldn't have agreed to let him work remotely. Majority or minority doesn't matter after that decision has already been made.
Maybe they should revisit that agreement if apparently they can't make remote workers fit in the team.
"No, we believe we can't make it fit with the way our teams are currently communicating" (and do not want to change that) is a perfectly legit answer to the question if remote work is an option.
However, once the decision is made, of course effort is required from all sides.
Otherwise, why even bother asking about it.
It's like applying for a job on the condition that you can't work Wednesdays because of allergies. The boss is perfectly fine with this, you can work the other 3.5 days, you're hired. And then it turns out the most important crucial meeting of the week, of which no minutes are kept, is on Wednesday. Now this is your problem, somehow. Who messed up here?
This all seems to boil down to unstated expectations from both sides, which is a no-win situation. My last boss's attitude to people who wanted to work remotely was "You can do whatever you want as long as your work doesn't suffer or you don't end up disconnected", making it explicit than the onus is on the remote worker to fit in to the team.
scruple's boss should have told him that right at the interview stage, before a job offer is made. Maybe say that he expects scruple to turn up in the office for a few days every month. Or whenever a major decision needs to be made and scruple is out of the loop. Or have regular one-on-one meetings over video-conference with everyone in the team to remain connected, making up for his physical absence.
Whatever the details are, scruple's boss should have told me he'll need to make an extra effort to make up for his remote work, and both sides can then decide whether to go ahead with the job.
In the absence of that, both sides end up holding the other responsible for the problems, which is a no-win situation.
> scruple's boss should have told him that right at the interview stage, before a job offer is made.
Well, this is awkward. I don't think you even read my original post. I literally said that I transitioned from on-site to part-time remote to full-time remote. I've been with this company for many years, it's gone exceptionally well until very recently.
> Maybe say that he expects scruple to turn up in the office for a few days every month.
We've had the working agreement ever since I went full-time remote, back when I was on a different team, that I am unequivocally full-time remote with no obligations to turn up in the office. *editing this to add: If that needs to change because of new team dynamics, that's fine, but it's going to be awfully hard on my colleague in Mexico.
> Or whenever a major decision needs to be made and scruple is out of the loop.
Major decisions should NEVER be made in isolation or with team members who aren't even sure what is being tabled. Why do we need to play "catch up the other 3 team members" when we're having a discussion about a major decision? Oh, because another team member keeps having side conversations with product people or customers and not relaying the information back to the rest of their team? Hmm, sounds like a personnel problem to me -- and not with the "out of the loop" team members, either.
> Or have regular one-on-one meetings over video-conference with everyone in the team to remain connected, making up for his physical absence.
Myself, my other full-time remote colleague, and my other 2 team members who are on-site meet every single working day. We scrum, we go our agile rituals, we pair remotely, etc... We meet with our product people over video conference twice a week. We meet with our managers infrequently but I personally talk to my manager over the phone at least once a week.
> Whatever the details are, scruple's boss should have told me he'll need to make an extra effort to make up for his remote work, and both sides can then decide whether to go ahead with the job.
Sorry for getting that detail wrong. I re-read your original post to make sure I didn't miss anything else.
Since you now say that you agreed ahead of time that you had no obligation to turn up in the office (that information wasn't there in the original post), I now agree with you that your manager was wrong. (This is something I've seen happen over and over again with managers — they say yes without thinking things through.)
If people are deliberately withholding information from you, as you said you suspected in your original post, that's obviously a bad thing.
Regarding my suggestion to have regular meetings, you're already doing it, so that's good.
Speaking as a manager here, what am I supposed to do when a valuable on-site employee approaches me and asks if they can transition to full-time remote?
If I say yes, I get skewered later when people on both sides aren't adapting to the new situation.
If I say no, them I'm a do-nothing windbag who can't feel like anything is getting done unless I can physically see the people typing and clicking.
If remote work is the minority situation, you're going to see challenges. Even if it's the norm, there are decisions that are time-sensitive and you're going to sometimes be dropped (same as if you were on PTO that week; you're just more exposed to it as a remote worker in a predominantly co-located team).
I have teams all around the world; even with that, we still bother to move desks to put squads all together in the same location. If you agree with the latter practice, I think you have to give some nod that co-location matters, even if only a little bit.
I think you still missed the point: If he is there every now and then, then he still has missed all the water cooler discussions that happened while he was not there. It's not as if they will see him and say "ah, right, now that I see you, we discussed this and this last week when you are not here.".
The only way to fix this is with some concious effort to reproduce the results of water cooler discussions explictly -- and if you spend that effort anyway, you might just as well do it via Skype or Slack... He doesn't have to be on-site.
It's not all or nothing. If he shows up every once in a while, he's better connected than if he never showed up. People tend to forget people who they don't see.
I'm not for one second suggesting they don't talk to each other and have impromptu meetings. That is absolutely ridiculous. I'm just asking that important details from those discussions find their way to the rest of the team members. I don't think that's asking a lot.
And, going to the office, those conversations will only happen to include me if they happen (they're impromptu, somewhat random) and when I'm there for 1 or 2 days at a time. When I go back home and to my co-working space I'll continue missing things. That's the point.
If the project suffers as a result of all of this, which is what is actually starting to happen, then I suppose by what you're saying here I shouldn't actually care? Heaven forbid I ask _individual people_ to keep _the team_ in the loop about the thing we're all trying to _collectively_ build.
Usually the modifying of behaviour in these cases just means writing down stuff more, which is usually beneficial to everyone.
On another note, having remote employees without supporting that type of working company wide is just silly squandering of resources. Sadly that is fairly common anyways.
I agree that writing down stuff more is usually beneficial to everyone, but at times, it has felt like rehashing things that everyone who was present in person already knows, just for the benefit of remote people. That's a cost at times.
Long story short: I actually started on-site but negotiated part-time remote. Then after about a year of that my spouse accepted a dream job offer on the other side of the state and so it was no question that we were moving. They wanted to keep me on and so I transitioned to full-time remote.
It has it's ups and downs. From my experience, it depends on the team and ultimately the lead and/or the manager. If they get it, it's good. If they don't, don't bother.
My last team, it was beautiful. Everything worked great. It became obvious to me after transitioning away from that team just how much extra work my manager was doing to keep his remote employees in the loop. With the team I'm on now, it's not working at all. Why? Because, as you so eloquently put it:
> the people who were remote were out of the loop on almost everything... If you have a watercooler chat with someone about a feature, it's easy to forget that a remote colleague wasn't there for the discussion/not document what was said.
This is exactly the problem I am facing down. About a month ago, I even tried talking to my manager about it. Even going so far as using this exact phrasing. His response was that I should come to office for 1 or 2 day trips! Completely missed the point. I'm not surprised, I guess I just expected some effort.
I'm trying to remain positive but it's tiring. I can do good work and make progress but I'm with a lead who is insulating me from meetings and it feels deliberate. The few times I am invited in to a meeting, it's easy to see that he accepts and assumes credit for _the teams_ efforts. He was hired recently as a Senior, our manager wanted him to transition to a Lead, and he's actually landed somewhere around trying to be an architect. Ranting aside, when I bring my concerns up to him it's obvious that there's no attempt to better understand the issues/challenges of the hybrid approach. It doesn't help that he's never worked with remote employees before, either.