You've been lucky and haven't experienced a regular company that is not remote ready. I'm sure most tech companies are in a much better position then the ones where the only communication software is Skype. It's a serious uphill to convert such a company to a remote one.
I have been working remote for years before the pandemic made it mainstream. In one of the companies I worked for, I was not the first remote worker. The first person in the company pioneered the tech, practices, and culture to make it work as a hybrid. After I came in, bit by bit, the engineering team went remote. So when the pandemic hit, the company had already had a mode of work that more or less helped out the rest of the company.
These things were not free. The pioneer had to really put himself out there to implement the remote best practices. By the time I got there, most of that was in place.
I think I have only read a couple articles about it, but I don’t have them.
Just off the top of my head, unorganized:
- manage outcomes instead of time spent
- Explicit presence: as a remote worker, you have to be explicit and deliberate about making your presence known. Status emojis, socialization, and “thinking out loud” threads
- Use [async] tags in messages whenever you can to help manage urgency of reply. Same with statuses
- Daily standups become even more important in order to promote social bonding, including brief chit-chat right before everyone shows up. Video if you can. It is about the only time the team bonds together
- Use the zoom chat for backchannel, so that you can still get something out without interrupting the speaker
- Having said that: Slack history records everything. Do not use Zoom chat as meeting notes. Put that into Slack, and then into Confluence/Notion/OneNote.
- Shared documents to work out a plan over Zoom helps keeps things focused
- You will be exercise writing a lot more. Leverage that. Be more thoughtful about replies. You can always link to conversations in tickets and documents
- Make use of do not disturb and periods when not to recieve notifications
- Keep your calendar up to date. Make sure to block out maker time (focus time), lunch, async times, and when you are running errands. That way, people can quickly schedule a time with you if needed
- Slack huddles in open channels can simulate drop-in calls. If you like pairing, you can start a huddle with yourself and work there. Rename the huddle to make it clear that you are open to drop ins, add a summary in the huddle thread to make the work visible
- hybrid meetings suck. People in person have to make more of an effort to make people who are remote in known. Conference rooms should be setup to put zoom folks on the wall, and zoom folks should put their video up. (It works better as all in person or all zoom meeting)
- team, dept, and maybe company should periodically bring everyone together onsite to do the things you cannot do remote
Most IT and engineering (and probably other "IP based") companies are "remote ready" for the right person. It's not some vast change or investment they have to make, really. You use the laptop they give you and connect from a different place, and continue to go about your job more or less the same way as does everybody who works with you, since most places are perfectly used to remote meetings and have been for decades. If they want you they'll make the accommodation. That goes for prominent companies that have been implementing strict back to office policies.
There's no "not ready", it entirely a choice by management.
Having the tech to allow a few employees to work remotely is one thing. Having an organisational and operational structure to allow everyone to work remotely is another thing entirely. You have to transform a lot of things like:
* On-boarding - new employees are no longer able to suss out the company by chatting to people they bump into. They need well-defined ways to meet other teams and to learn how to communicate and collaborate within the company.
* Socialising - there needs to be a regular opportunity (not mandatory) to meet up in person, even if there's no office.
* Communication - this is a biggie. The company can't just install Teams/Slack/Skype everywhere and expect collaboration to continue as before. Instant messaging apps are terrible for building asynchronous communication habits, since they incentivise quickfire messages. The company needs to publish guidelines on how to give status updates and ask for support, and potentially make communication skills be part of employee evaluation (if not already).
* Evaluation - remote work gives senior management a bad feeling because they don't feel like they know what's going on in the company. The root cause of this is that they're not actually evaluating employee output, but rather something else (e.g. how the employee contributes to meetings or responds to in-person questions). This kind of works in the office since those things correlate somewhat with employee quality. But remote work forces managers to think about how to objectively measure employee productivity solely on their work output... and some of them either resent the extra effort or just aren't imaginative enough.
None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.
To add to that about Slack — speaking is a distinct skill from writing, engaging in different part of the brain. The skills you use for speaking in person does not automatically translates to writing, let alone the various social nuances that comes with text based communication.
The skills you might have picked up to be someone effective while in person doesn’t mean you will be effective working through Slack. Zoom is not a perfect substitute — much of the non-verbal communication that happens in person is no longer there; plus, if you’re not using the Zoom chat as the backchannel, you miss out on effective use of Zoom.
True. Anticipating context is one example of a skill that verbal communicators sometimes lack. For someone to understand your statement/question, it needs to be framed in the language they use everyday, and not to lack any crucial information.
In a verbal conversation, you can whittle down to this by asking questions and rephrasing the other person. In remote situations you need to spend time thinking about what information to include and how to phrase it, before even touching the keyboard.
I still get messages along the lines of "Hi, I'm trying to do X but it's not working! Can you look into it?". With a bit of forethought this can become "Hi. I'm trying to do X because client C wants to be able to do Y. I've tried action A but I'm getting issue I. I looked into the logs and found L, so then I also tried action A2 but ran into issue I2. Here is a screenshot of what I mean. I am on environment E and using configuration C. Do you have any suggestions for how I could proceed?"
> Having an organisational and operational structure to allow everyone to work remotely is another thing entirely.
It really isn't. Not for a lot of companies. Smaller, older, single-site operations maybe. Almost anything with more than one location is already intimately familiar with distributed communication, typically don't replicate HR everywhere so have all electronic onboarding anyway (aside from sending a laptop or whatever).
> None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.
Not sure what you mean by "worth it". It has some pros and cons, I work remote and that's great for me, I don't pretend to know all the details about financials and productivity impact across a significant organization. But for many it actually isn't as big a jump as they try to claim, let's not pretend that it is. Covid was a concrete demonstration of exactly that where I am, even very conservative companies and government orgs went to large fraction of employees remote in very short order.
This accounts for around half of US employees and most US businesses. In the UK and other countries, it's even more.
> all electronic onboarding anyway
That's not true, you'll almost always be having in-person chats throughout your on-boarding if you're in the office. And anyway, the tech really isn't the issue here. As a new recruit in the office, you're usually sitting near your mentor/line manager. Every now and then they'll verbally check in with you, or you can tell them you're stuck on something and they'll tell you what to do or who to go to. As other colleagues approach your team area, your manager introduces you to them and explains what they do.
In a remote environment, all of this suddenly takes a lot more conscious pro-active effort. Check-ins have to be rigorously scheduled. New hires need to feel safe enough to approach anyone they need to, and to be told in writing who to approach and how. They need to be introduced to everyone explicitly via call or messaging. They need to be protected from falling "out of sight, out of mind", and encouraged to build personal connections with colleagues.
> This accounts for around half of US employees and most US businesses. In the UK and other countries, it's even more.
Right. Far from the "few and far between" narrative here, isn't it?
> That's not true,
I'm talking about HR onboarding. Signatures, payroll, boilerplate regulatory compliance training etc.
> you'll almost always be having in-person chats throughout your on-boarding if you're in the office.
Nope, not if HR is located elsewhere. It's phone, email, electronic meetings.
> And anyway, the tech really isn't the issue here. As a new recruit in the office, you're usually sitting near your mentor/line manager. Every now and then they'll verbally check in with you, or you can tell them you're stuck on something and they'll tell you what to do or who to go to. As other colleagues approach your team area, your manager introduces you to them and explains what they do.
"If you're in the office you'll be in the office".
All of this stuff is trivial to do online. I don't pretend it has exactly the same results, and one possibly valid concern is monitoring and hepling newer and less proven employees. It doesn't mean that just because there are certain pros and cons that the whole idea falls in a heap at the first hurdle though, so those kinds of anecdotes do not address what I wrote.
> In a remote environment, all of this suddenly takes a lot more conscious pro-active effort. Check-ins have to be rigorously scheduled. New hires need to feel safe enough to approach anyone they need to, and to be told in writing who to approach and how. They need to be introduced to everyone explicitly via call or messaging. They need to be protected from falling "out of sight, out of mind", and encouraged to build personal connections with colleagues.
None of this is rocket science, and all of the tools to do it trivially exist in any software suite any company uses even ones that aren't remote. Email, calendar, chat. Or a physical pen and notepad if you must. Checking in on people isn't some incredible and complicated new skill managers have to learn, that's what they do.
When most people use “on-boarding”, they don’t mean just the legal/HR/benefits paperwork, but rather the effective integration into the fabric of the company. The original post to which you replied even specified that as including “learn how to communicate and collaborate within the company”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503709
And there's nothing that's particularly prohibitive about doing that remotely. You can't just call a bunch of dot points like "on boarding" refuting what I wrote. Sure it's what you might read in your CEO's email or whatever, but that doesn't make it true.
The point you seem to be making - that remote working is a cinch as long as all the managers already know what they need to do and how to do it - is both correct and missing the point.
That's not the point I'm making and I have to say it's pretty outlandish if it seems that way to you.
The point I'm making is that it's not because an organization is "not ready" that remote work is not permitted. Implying there is some set of steps or purchases they need to make and then they are ready. It's because the people who can make the decision don't want to.
I thought that I repeatedly made it clear that I made no value judgement on the remote work and didn't claim that is a bad decision to make.
You've consistently asserted that most companies would find it easy to switch to remote work.
I absolutely disagree with this. At least I disagree that most companies can do so and be confident of maintaining productivity. I believe it requires a big shift in organisational and operational processes and attitudes within the company.
No I haven't, and "easy" is not a well defined term here. What I said is that it's not a matter of being ready or not, it's a matter of choosing to or not. And lots of companies can and actually did choose to do that at very short order when covid was causing shutdowns, so if you want to make extraordinary claims to the contrary then you'll need to bring a lot of evidence.
I'm not talking about IT or engineering. Anyway, it's not as easy as you say and I have the result right in front of me. The company has not mandated return to office but is still struggling a lot with this so what exactly is the choice by management here? They clearly want it to be a remote company.
Another example is my SO who works for a now-flex remote government agency where they are not authorized to use any of the normal software. It's even worse there. Their remote culture is highly dysfunctional and she goes into the office 5 days a week even though she doesn't need to.
> Anyway, it's not as easy as you say and I have the result right in front of me. The company has not mandated return to office but is still struggling a lot with this so what exactly is the choice by management here?
I don't know what you're talking about. What result? What company? Can you give some more detail or did I miss a post?
I have many concrete examples right in front of me, which is the number of companies and government agencies that went to remote extremely rapidly during covid shutdowns.
> Another example is my SO who works for a now-flex remote government agency where they are not authorized to use any of the normal software.
Like I said, that's just a simple choice. Most probably by some self-important bureaucrat who wants to sabotage the remote work scheme. All they would have to do is use normal software like many other places permit, and that would be most of the battle.
Remote work and collaboration requires a very different skillset in order to be effective. So if a company clearly wants to do that (both leadership and staff trying to make things work), it is probably time to bring in a consultant — maybe someone with an anthropology or sociology background that can look at how everyone interacts together with the technology, and can suggest gradual changes there.
An example: in some companies, the receptionist knows who has entered and exited the building, and can sometimes become the defacto person that can help people find each other. Someone whose effectiveness depends upon this informal role of the receptionist will find that they can’t work like this anymore when the company goes remote.
Lots does. I work for a company that among other things makes leading edge ASICs. The tools and probes and things required to test and handle wafers and the chips that come back from packaging can't be sent to peoples' houses. Some people have to work various manual steps in that process at times. It's surprisingly hands-on, especially in early stages of characterization and yield and performance tuning.
The vast, vast majority of person-hours required to go from drawing board to bits of silicon running in customer's computer can be done entirely without physical presence though.
I know mechanical and structural engineers and it's much the same for them.
