That article was based on the dumbest study in the history of dumb studies.
Stock Market returns during WFH vs Stock Market returns during RTO. (free money, zero-interest rates, meme-stock mania had nothing to do with it apparently)
It's a click-bait article to attract gen-zers and HNers and it has worked like a charm
bingo. It's like measuring the effectiveness of my gardening by seeing how many vegetables I produce in the summer vs winter, and then blaming Santa Claus for poor performance.
a videoconfering system that is reliable and easy to use is essential to remote management. You need to have as little friction as possible to propose a 1-1 or a 15 min roundtable to quickly brainstorm something orally.
Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based on partial infos or misunderstandings. Such tools can be panopticon-y so you need to explicitly specify which convos "spaces" are private and which are subject to management interference.
All trash. A meeting in person is always shorter cos you don’t deal with audio issues a talking over each other and the mountain of other issues from remote calls. No amount of money in good hardware fixes this no matter what anyone claims.
Do you live in a region with poor internet, or do your coworkers? I've been fully immersed in Meet and Zoom calls for 6-7 years now, and all the issues that used to come up are now mostly gone as they were rooted in people not having the correct habits and setups.
Most people working for organizations with multiple offices have to videoconferencing all the time anyways. If video calls were really that big of an issue, having offices around the country/world would’ve stopped being a thing by now.
So what you’re saying is that if video conferencing works, regardless of it works well or poorly, it works therefore it’s not an issue. Even if a team worked faster, more efficiently, in person. It’s ok to be remote because it worked even tho they are less efficient and it doesn’t work as well.
Are you proposing that my management should be able to see my chat messages and email ad hoc and without approval or assistance from IT, legal, or their management? That seems bonkers to me.
That's not what I wanted to say. With remote teams, you need to establish a way to organize the work using written communications which are either mail/slack/sharepoint/whatever and within this framework management needs to have a "view" into what the team is doing.
It means for example being systematically in cc for mail exchanged and being in every teams discord channel. The new social contract when working remotely is "you (the manager) can't look over my shoulder to see if I'm working correctly so I (the employee) need to show proofs of communication instead".
I've seen too many juniors working remotely that just don't communicate on their day-to-day work, and completely blindside their manager/coworkers which understandably freaks out.
I can't reply to the reply to this comment, but you raise a key point. While employers control the data, they don't use it like people seem to assume. Managers are not managing if they attempt to resolve conflicts by attempting to decipher private conversations.
There are many ways to resolve these problems without resorting to spying on messages. In an in-person situation with a conflict, there may be no record. We know methods to resolve these conflicts, so I don't understand why people go immediately to "employers control the data so they can just use it."
I think in all team and project rooms/channels/email d-lists, yes, those should be easily readable by managers because they're not contemplated as private. I think DMs and individual emails should not be accessible to managers (absent a very specific legal/compliance/HR concern).
Bonkers or no, that is a current legal reality if you're talking about chat or email messages which are sent and received using employer-provided means. If an email address ends in your employer's domain, it's not your email account unless you're self-employed.
> Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in
Obviously no what I mean that is ok if your superior and his boss are invited in your team's slack channel even if they only lurks, and you don't create a "shadow channel" with your teammates to talk on the project without being read by your hierarchy.
Same thing with corporate internet, you accept to use the corp proxy DNS and firewall (which all logs infos) to browse the internet instead of using a separate GSM endpoint to circumvent the company's surveillance.
>> Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based on partial infos or misunderstandings.
How is that specific to remote work? People in the same building have the same misunderstandings with the same tools. The way to fix it doesn't involve management spying on the communications and attempting to decipher them.
Zoom has been far and away the best of the meeting tech I use. Excellent audio processing and generally reliable. (Also a nice convenient slack interface, so /zoom <RET> <RET> starts a Zoom meeting and pastes the connection info into the channel.)
Teams was okay. Meet was okay once I figured out how to grant it the MacOS access it needs. Chime started in early pandemic as a terrible, terrible joke of a product and then evolved to being a close 4th place.
I read an advice column in the Washington Post a couple weeks ago [1] in which the person writing in was asking for advice about implementing RTO mandates. They work for a non-profit and found it hard to manage people remotely. Their complaints were:
> 1. They have daily check-in meetings with everyone on the team to make up for the lack of impromptu chats in the office
> 2. Collaboration is harder over email than in-person. As an example, they have to produce reports for stakeholders regularly, which requires input from several people. They sync their work by frequently emailing each other changes to the document
> 3. Socializing with coworkers is more difficult, which results in less social capital for people to advance their careers with
For each point, the author pointed out that there are simple technological and management solutions for each:
> 1. Stop doing daily check-ins and trust your reports to do their jobs on their own time table. You didn't do daily check-ins in the office, so don't do them now
> 2. Stop using email. It's the worst format of online communication. Slack, MS Teams, etc. have been around for a while. Use them and the features available to you to collaborate. Additionally, use document editing software like MS Word or Google Docs to edit the same document within a cloud account simultaneously instead of sending files to each other. This tech has existed for sooooo long that it should be considered a bit of an embarrassment if a manager in 2024 doesn't know about it yet
> 3. Work socialization must become intentional, and opportunities for advancement should be based off of merit and output instead of personal relationships
But it seems pretty clear that companies which mandate RTO are simply not equipped, technologically or intellectually, to run such an organization. It's not that remote work is inherently less productive, it's that managers are unable or unwilling to adapt their processes and communication to make it work.
Final note: it seems like another big problem with managers is they find they have little work to do if they are not monitoring people all the time and dragging them into unnecessary meetings. I think they feel threatened by the fact that their jobs are being automated away by software
> 2. Stop using email. It's the worst format of online communication. Slack, MS Teams, etc.
The difficulty with this, is that work can spiral quickly into just spending the whole day responding to chat (slack/teams/etc) and no one ever gets any actual work done.
Thank you. I will fight this new trend of 100% Slack/Teams/Etc. as long as I possibly can.
Email provides a barrier between you and the work -- email isn't a real time form of communication. Chats, meanwhile, imply immediate response. Hell, these apps even show when you're active -- I've gotten passive-aggressive messages like, "I know that you have DND on, but can you confirm you're seeing these messages?" chats outside of working hours.
I get why Slack/Teams/Etc. is a great supplement to email, especially when it's a smaller internal team collaborating. But ditching email is a terrible idea.
My problem with email is the amount of spam makes it unusable, and I don't just mean unsolicited advertisements. I get spam from work in the form of notifications and unnecessary CC's, so I'm accustomed to ignoring all emails.
I think it may also be generational: at my previous job, I get chewed out by my manager for not responding to some question another coworker had sent me. I was confused because I don't remember getting any questions from them, and I was told that he had emailed it to me. He's in his 40s and I was 26. I told him I get so many useless emails I never check work email. And the best way to reach me is via slack. Still, some on the team continued to use email
Sounds like you need to learn to manage your email inbox.
I have dozens of filters set up to direct emails to particular folders before I ever see them. This is precisely the way to deal with automated notifications. They're always coming from the same source; in some cases, they're not going to your email directly, but to a group address that you can easily filter on.
If you're getting unnecessary CCs from particular people commonly, you can set up a filter to automatically route that category (from:thisuser@company, cc:me) to a folder of "check this once a day (or whatever timetable) to see if anything real got through".
The answer to "I have trouble with email," in an organization where email is a normal mode of communication, is not "so the whole rest of my team needs to change their workflow to deal with me." It's "so I need to pick up some skills and make checking my email part of my daily workflow."
The rest of the team didn't use emails, only the older team members did. Honestly, none of the companies I worked for used email for communication, I think it's abnormal to be the one using it on the team.
Slack doesn't require as much configuration as you described. I don't get the point of email when we have slack
This is just culture / familiarity. Absolutely nothing about chat implies immediacy by necessity. But I agree that expectations are often set badly, and that's an important cultural problem to solve.
In large organizations I always see the same bad outcomes.
1. Lots of random DMs/Group DMs. Everything is messy, and gets lost easily. The 'closed' nature of DMs and small groups then often builds up cliques and creates office politics.
2. Move everything into open channels -> descend into pure chaos with 1,000s of channels that no one can keep up with.
Yeah, in my experience, chat is way more useful for collaborating than email. But we also haven't built up as much tolerance to its distractions. I think this is in part the notification / filtering / snoozing tooling is still maturing, and in part it's just familiarity.
Granted, the person who wrote in to the Washington Post is well meaning and all and I know her write in was edited down for brevity, but it seems like this lady is bringing on alot of the problems herself and not seeing that.
Also, is there an underlying problem with retention, re this comment:
>Developing a rapport with “Bob” could help me anticipate when the lack of promotion opportunity is about to make him jump so we can line up potential replacements.
In the vacuum that is reading the article, this reads like there are problems at the organization with people getting promotions and the person writing in is willing to let them leave and replace them than work out how to keep them.
Something about the write in doesn't sit well with me more generally, but I can't put my finger on it.
There are limits to promotion at any company. Probably no limits from fresh-college-grad to the next level of software engineer (SWE-2 or equivalent). That becomes less true at higher levels. If Bob is a Vice President of Tech, reporting to the CTO, Bob may have no realistic prospect to be promoted to any position other than CTO and if the CTO is successful and not leaving, then Bob has a lack of promotion opportunity. If the CTO keeps working out, most companies would be rationally willing to let Bob leave and replace him if that's Bob's choice (and therefore want to know when he's contemplating that seriously).
Yes but the employee has no incentive to return to the office so that they can be more easily replaced. Return to office is one-sided: middle management think they will gain something (they won't), but the employee gains nothing and loses a lot.
daily checkin, in person can happen in a minute. It’s helpful. Teams succeed together, not at the direction of 1 person coordinating. Removing them is just dumb.
> 2
lol no. That’s a dumb suggestion. It makes people less productive. Trying to replace a 30 second conversation with slack/teams etc is really just dumb.
> 3
Teams that socialise work better together. Period. You remove any socialising factor and you end up with silos, lost knowledge, depression. Etc.
Soft tools for people. Some individuals need training on how to manage remote vs in-person effectively.
General discourse likes to identify the older generation as the ones who lose object permanence. The "if they aren't in a seat, they must not be working" mentality. Well, tomorrow's older generation is here today, learning to follow that same behavioral pattern. We have to begin training the culture today if we want to influence the future.
I've found it also needs to work both ways. My manager can only do so much, and if I don't communicate with them, they can't do anything about it. Some of my colleagues have been horrible at remote working, not telling anyone what they're doing, even after being asked multiple times, at appropriate times.
Some people are just really bad at remote working, on both sides of the manager/report relationship. It's not only bad managers at fault here.
One thing I've never seen work well is on boarding grads with no work experience.
During COVID I onboarded a few grads into my team (for context we managed paid media for a SaaS company). We had a good track record of bringing in grads and training them on the job, but the cohort that came in during COVID had a terrible experience, and despite our efforts I'm not sure we ever really provided a good onboarding experience for them, and I don't think the training they received was nearly as effective as the training we used to provide in person.
I think WFH is often great for experienced professionals, but ever since that experience I have felt really bad for young professionals trying to make a start in their careers.
We successfully onboarded a few grads and interns these last three years and all are productive team members today with a clear path for career progression as well. Some of them were already promoted to positions with more responsibility.
I always see these arguments and understand it can be hard. It can also not be hard and work well.
Sometimes I wonder if those of us who prefer remote work are just the same set of people who found "communicate organically with the humans around them" to be a major hindrance to their productivity.
Increasingly more over time, I have come to really miss the office I went to every day before I worked remotely. I miss having coffee and lunch with people, saying hi on the way in and out, and I really miss having team meetings and 1:1s and brainstorming sessions in person. But I don't miss my desk even a little bit. I spent as much of my time as possible working from private cubbies.
When I'm working, I don't want people around, and I don't want to be pulled into "organic" communication. In practice, the best process (for me) in an office setting was to ping people asynchronously - "hey let me know when you have a moment, I want to brainstorm about xyz" - and then get together when it works for both of you. But this is the same process used in remote work!
The downside is you can't walk-and-talk or get a coffee together or find a spot with a whiteboard, everything is soul-sucking video calls. But for me, losing the "organic"-ness of communication, specifically, is a pro, not a con.
Theoretically, sure, but in reality it's just that most managers are bad at their job. Knowing what your team is doing, knowing how to set priorities, knowing how to organize projects, making sure targets are being effectively met, etc. requires actual work.
It's much, much easier to count butts in seats and glance at badge swipe times and pretend like you're managing your team that way.
This one anecdotally seems to have been the biggest issue for some managers. Unless they are overhearing things (literally), they don't know what is happening.
Which is silly. I have worked in infra my whole career and just one of my job duties is to know what every single team is working on and shipping to provide operations guidance/support and to anticipate and be ready for risky changes.
It's so much easier now that we're remote-first. I'm in all their Slack channels, I can see and search every conversation the team has and I can teleport into all their stand-ups and read the transcript after if I miss it.
Most of the RTO conversation is happening outside of tech. While some is (e.g. Amazon, Zoom), we all started off in IRC or email in college or before. This isn't true for all areas of the business.
Being a good manager starts with a desire to experiment and constantly change processes to improve your team's happiness and productivity. So the 'good' manager should be able to make both work?
With RTO, however, there is A LOT more wasted time. With all that extra time walking to meetings, water cooler conversations, and the busywork of running an office I can definitely see how bad managers and employees can hide more.
It's absolutely possible. But if you're a really great "in-person" manager managing a remote team, calling that "poor management" is totally fair game, as far as I see it. That they're good at a completely different set of skills is pretty much irrelevant. I don't think there's much more nuance needed here.
perhaps the answer is not necessary, since either way the solution there is to hire managers that fit the company's design and IC's strengths vs accommodating managers with weaknesses such as being a "bad remote" managers
I think the analogy could be as follows: arguably most software companies could be powered by a dozen of really talented senior Common Lisp programmers. However when choosing a software stack for a company you have to consider how easy it is to hire and retain such developers vs hiring hundreds of average Java or Python or Rust programmers.
Does this logic work in reverse, should we accommodate ICs with weak working from the office skills?
I do agree though, the most important thing is to build a team and hire people that compliment the context the business operates in, instead of trying to mold the business around the people they happen to have working at the given time.
I’ve experienced this. Someone who fixated on back to office and hiring local devs because the only way he knew how to manage was coming to your desk and harassing you. He had trust issues.
Really good manager is highly context dependent. I had a manager early in the pandemic who was reasonably effective, but only because he was everywhere and picking up stuff via overhearing convos in our corner. It worked because he was omnipresent.
As soon as communication and the flow of information needed to be deliberate, he was more challenged.
In person, anything he wasn't present for never got considered or failed.
But isn't it management's inability to adapt to remote work signal that management's experience is poor? I get that we love to categorize argue about RTO vs no RTO but I think the real topic is how companies/organizations are deciding on which model to commit to and why -- the "why" helps with communicating and convincing adults to do something like commuting (management is hard work, right?).
I get that a contrarian stance can come up with an example to contradict what the article is trying to convey. However, I think the article more so tries to draw situations in which CEO/Management is failing generally (with WebMD) and is hoping that a forced in office environment would solve their management woes.
I do believe that a majority of organizations are in this bucket rather than the one you claimed.
If you're a poor manager of your organization's current style of work, is that still poor management, even if you're a good manager in a different setting?
To use a sports metaphor, if I'm a really good manager of a team in the German Bundesliga, but then I switch to manage a team in the English Premier League and I'm terrible at that, then that's still bad management, even if I'm not a "bad manager" in some universal sense. And it would be weird for the organization to try to fix that problem by moving the team I'm managing to Germany. They would expect me to figure out how to be a good manager in the new setting, or they would find someone to replace me.
> If you're a poor manager of your organization's current style of work, is that still poor management, even if you're a good manager in a different setting?
can we stop making excuses for people?
management is about people, unless you're literally moving to a different culture (and I don't mean company culture), your failures as a manager are yours.
I can tell you that my current manager is ruthless in that he has no issues getting rid of someone if they're not pulling their weight. I appreciate that about him. He also always has our back.
Put him in an organization in which it's more challenging for him to influence our work and I'm confident I would still enjoy him as a manager. The work might not be as successful but I'm smart enough to recognize the walls my manager runs into as well.
Sure, why not. People can have multiple skills and I'm sure there are bad eggs in the office and bad remote eggs that will chew up the majority of that manager's time and energy.
Not only is it possible but it's very often the case in my experience. A manager without any remote experience is going to have a hard time managing a remote organization or team.
If someone is a really good chef at a French restaurant, but you send them to a Thai place and they do poorly, is it lacking nuance to say the chef is doing a bad job?
There are different skills that are needed around structuring communications. Good remote work requires significantly more formal communications, while good in-person work merely benefits immensely from the same level of formality.
not only that, but they're making claims about research papers. What does that even mean?
It might even be true that some/most companies are doing it for this reason (I'm sure they wouldn't articulate it to themselves like that), but what the hell did they research exactly that came to such a qualitative conclusion? It smacks of a biased soft sciences approach to this as a means of fighting for the perception someone with money wants.
1. Be a really good 'in person' manager (able to foster a good in-office culture, motivate and coach people effectively in real time).
2. Be a really bad 'remote' manager.
Not saying RTO mandates are a good idea, but to say it's masking poor management as a black and white statement lacks nuance.