To each their own. I find that WFH makes me incredibly unproductive, I'm glad I'm able to return to to the office. I think there are a lot of factors that affect this (e.g. I have a family with small children at home, and my commute is <15 minutes by bike).
I think that's a small but significant part of the issue for businesses.
There are some workers who are more productive at WFH, some who are equally productive in either setting (but prefer WFH for personal reasons), and some who are less productive at WFH. Ideally everybody should just do what they're best at. If you're productive at home, work from home. If you're most productive at work, go into the office. Everybody's happy.
So where's the problem? It's that among the group that is most productive at the office, some of them still prefer to work at home where they fall prey to distractions and their output suffers. And rather than just coach those people appropriately, management finds it easier to just try and make everyone come in.
Which points to an even larger problem. That some managers are struggling with how to do their jobs in the WFH environment. And rather than acknowledge that they are the source of their own troubles, it's easier to pretend that the business is unmanageable remotely and everybody needs to come in.
That's exactly my point! I find it ridiculous that CEO's think they somehow have to create the same policy for everyone, as if giving people a choice was somehow a taboo. We've come a long way realizing self-organizing teams work better than micromanaged ones etc., I wonder how long it will take PHBs to understand that giving people a choice is not just good for them but it's overly beneficial to the whole company.
I agree, but there are very real costs to having teams (at different levels) doing different things. A team with 8 people in-office and 2 people WFH is pretty crappy. The in-office people end up feeling put-upon to have to go out of the way to include the WFH people in things, and the WFH people inevitably end up feeling left out of a lot of things, because they are. At the very lowest level, it works best to have a single team all working the same way. At some level up the hierarchy it becomes more ok to have a mix; if five teams are collaborating, it doesn't matter so much whether two of them are in-office and the other three are WFH focused.
> A team with 8 people in-office and 2 people WFH is pretty crappy.
It doesn't have to be crappy; I spent several years as one of the remote participants in a team like that, and it was one of the high points of my career. We made heavy use of instant messaging, and we met up in person for a week every quarter. People kept in touch well enough.
While I agree, it all depends on the methods of communication. In a more or less standard scenario, with a daily sync with video and then async like Slack, it doesn't matter that much who's in the office. I tend to message my colleagues on Slack even if they are sitting next to me, for the same reason that public channels are recommended over private ones - nobody is excluded and it's easy to find information that would otherwise be lost.
> with a daily sync with video and then async like Slack, it doesn't matter that much who's in the office
Unfortunately I think this is kind of a cope the remote people on the team use to feel ok about it (I've been that person quite a bit). But the people having coffee and lunch together more regularly just do form closer bonds and that matters. I don't think it matters as much as a lot of executives want everyone to believe it does, and I think remote work has giant benefits that aren't obviously or always or even usually overcome by "face time", but it's not not a real thing.
I personally believe some sort of bonding period is great for remote people. I've worked in a kind of "worst of both worlds" setup where I went to an office 8-5 but I worked with a completely remote team (the office was basically a place for me to put on a headset and ignore everyone else).
But we met on a planned company trip (with the excuse of a Vegas trade show, we went and met one week early) and that helped immensely with bonding and team building.
If I manage a remote team, I'll push for a similar team bonding exercise whenever possible.
Yep, this sort of bonding is very important IMO. But it's also a giant trade-off. I can bond with people I work locally with at lunch, I have to leave my children for a few days to bond with people I work remotely with. It's a much heavier burden. I think it is often worth it! The town I live in doesn't have offices for every interesting company in the world, so I have to compromise on who I can work for if I'm not willing to work remote, which I currently feel is an even heavier burden. But if my perfect job also had a local office, I would be very pleased!
That’s totally legitimate, and working from “the office” is a potential solution. An alternate is to work from “an office”. That doesn’t need to be the right solution for you specifically, but I hope it becomes part of the evoked set in general.
If you or some subset of your workforce has a suboptimal home situation, look at arranging individual coworking spaces. Everyone can shorten their commute by picking whichever space is conveniently located. You also sidestep the challenges of having some team members collocates while others are remote.
Really done with this take. Show some solidarity for your peers. So you like working from the office -- good for you! Do that! But also stand up for your colleagues who don't want that. When your colleagues have fewer choices, when things like this are imposed on them, well, your preferences are not far behind from being managed themselves.
Where did the person you’re replying to imply they didn’t have solidarity or wanted office work imposed on everyone?
The parent poster simply said “Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back.”
And the reply was essentially “to each their own but my WFH experience was different “ and you’re ready to jump down their throat with accusations of lack of solidarity.
It's just such a pointless distraction. Don't make it about you? It reminds me of men who hear that women get paid less and start complaining about their own salary.
"Hey, we have this problem." "To each their own but it doesn't affect me!"
You’re adding a lot of baggage to the poster here that they never implied. It’s pretty important to have a pulse on what’s important to employees.
Employers taking the posters point into consideration may mean that they’re a remote first company, but they also provide coworking passes for people that appreciate not working from home.
In the same way that pre-covid management monoculture was “WFH could never work”, the monoculture now risks being dominated by people who have dedicated home offices who seemingly can’t empathise with people who appreciate commuting somewhere, feigning outrage at anyone who could dare suggest that there are multiple perspectives.
They didn't say that? They directly replied to the claim that once you tried WFH you would never go back. Sounds like they were directly affected by it, and had a different experience.
Everyone is entitled to their personal preferences. You're attacking this guy for having a different preference than you, and you're filling in the blanks to make them seem hostile when they only expressed their personal preference. I dislike your rhetoric here as much as those of the forced return to the office crowd and for the exact same reason.
Well said! I'm a manager that strongly prefers to work from the office but fought hard for my team to WFH if they preferred to do so. So now about 20% of my team comes into the office (by choice) while the others WFH. Was lucky to have a boss that supported this and allowed me to craft our role definitions to support this with the global HR but was filling to fight as long as I could for this..
Same - I had to rent a place outside for the mornings, when my kid is at home. Its great to know I won't be interrupted, I focus much better. Still miss some coworkers though. (Coworking spaces open much later than I like etc)
I have no idea whether that's true, but it is not necessary for the comment to say "to each their own" for the commenter to have just been expressing a personal preference. They weren't making an "argument".
Since it seems I wasn't clear, the parent comment we're currently discussing has been considerably modified compared to what it was at first. You're free to disagree, but in my opinion the original tone of their comment very much did make an argument. But I do suppose you could label every comment as just a personal preference, because that's what they are at the end of the day.
