Working From Home Megathread

They managed quite fine for two years.....

says who, and if they did why did they not continue to do it, in my company at least all the c levels were in over most of lock down so not even sure how true it is that they managed quite fine for 2 years.

Like renting a space at Wework kind of place .... I wouldn't make enough money to justify it.

That depends if you've built your career on "being seen".

Very interesting different points of view.

I think we all know remote work is here to stay to some extent, and so is in-office work. I think some of the posts show that management isn’t really ready for it yet, that in some organisations there’s at least a perception that in-office workers will get some career advantages. Obviously it’s more desirable if people working from home don’t lose out.

I closed down a fairly big office, it just made lots of sense to do so, but it sounds like some companies want to keep up offices. I think this will be less and less the case as time goes on. As well as the cost there’s also the fact that few people like commuting.

Even in the thread, I think it’s hard to see very definite benefits to in-office working for business. Obviously this thread is mostly from the employee point of view, and there are things mentioned like interaction and career progression, but it’s very hard to see how actual businesses rather than individuals benefit from owning or renting office buildings if work can be done elsewhere.

The thread is v interesting for company owners though, it gives an insight into what employees might be thinking and problems they could have.

I have a guy who works in a library a bit. His work is fairly predictable, and he would only have to be on the phone a few times a week. I'd say you'd be fine as long as you aren't talking. If you need to make calls go out to your car.

I take take your point. Stich in time etc.

But its "unplanned" work. What suffers with "unplanned" work is "planned" work. That would be my main problem with "less structured" approaches. It what project management and change process management strives to reduce to improve efficiency. Unplanned work makes you reactive. Planned work makes you proactive.

When was this happening? During the lockdowns, like? When the advice was "work from home if at all possible", these guys were swanning into the office, working away, and then perching on each others' desks (and those of any other staff who happened to be in) or bringing everyone into a room for a brainstorming session when issues arose? (I'll assume they didn't do so just for chats, like...)

Strikes me as quite reckless behaviour, needlessly risking spreading Covid like that. Not a very good impression of a management team, who you'd expect to be more risk averse when the risk was so easily aviodable.

You dont know what business they were involved in, suffice to say if they wanted to make a case for being in the case was easily made. And a lot of the scare mongering around covid had abated as well.

Firefighting is some excuse for poor planning.

The company I work for, which is the leader in the sector we work in, are entirely remote, the CEO worked from Europe this year, and works from different places on a regular basis. Executives had to meet, and still do meet, remotely like they did when Covid arrived. I don't think anyone is saying in person interactions have no value, but they don't have better value over remote, Zoom, Slack at all.

What proof is in this pudding you talk of?

This pudding paints a very different picture -

Possibly not, but you are implying in person interactions has some sort of 1-up over remote, when this isn't the case, at least in tech and support roles. Both my current and previous places of employment are entirely remote, my previous place didn't even have an office to go to to work from, it never had that. It was remote before it was cool, you could say.

And on that, everything was planned, every meeting had an agenda, we had OKRs for each quarter. One of your posts mentioned things coming up "more organically and in a sometimes less structured way.", this was avoided to keep teams aligned on what needed to be done and by when.

The water-cooler decisions or chats in the hallway are where teams lose sight of what is happening when decisions are just made adhoc. You saying it is some sort of advantage, it is a terrible way for a team to run UNLESS you are an early stage start-up of some sorts.

in my opinion, and my experience, in all walks of life in person interactions are better than remote, that study doesnt disprove that, it just says people like remote working.

Your experience differs thats fine, im not trying to convince you otherwise.

Your description of work sounds more like a remote assembly line type set up for the modern day to be honest, im sure its not, but thats how it sounds.

That's micromanaging. Should be no need for a CEO to deal with those kind of issues unless is a very small company.