I don’t care if I have to go into an office. I like offices. What I care about is that you don’t mind if I work from home every once in a while. I care that it’s okay for me to leave early or come late.
It doesn't work for everyone, but a way I've seen remote-first companies get around that is to offer to rent a desk in somewhere like WeWork, so you can choose to be around other working people, away from home and then look to hire others in the same city who might opt for a desk there too, at least some of the time.
If the article is right that remote working works for, say 50% of people, a company able to attract remote workers is going to have a vastly bigger talent pool to fish in.
Employers that actually want workplace diversity should really consider how many lifestyles their work culture can accommodate. Some people adopt lots of kids and need more room. Some people love their families and won't move more than a few hours from them.
Nearly everybody needs flexible work arrangements from time to time: health problems, ailing family members, young children, everyone's-getting-married-this-summer, etc. Talking to your employer about a different pattern of availability is professional. But having to ask permission with forms and HR people in the room is not decent or necessary. If someone isn't earning their paycheck, that's a reasonable conversation to have. But assuming that's not the issue, let's just be decent human beings.
If one person in a group takes unfair advantage of flexibility by e.g. only going to the office half as much as the rest, it sure will have an effect on the "other apples".
I generally work alone when I want to think, but I loved the interaction with excellent colleagues and sitting at home with skype wasn't exactly the same.
I would still work remotely for 2-3 days a week, because it's so much more productive for certain tasks, but no more. I do not consider full-time remote jobs.
I do have an active social life, but I expect my work to be something more than "just work". I enjoy what I do, and working at a distance detracts from the experience.
Just make sure that overall your total hours are what we agreed to in the employment contract.
What's the justification for monitoring total hours and not something more directly tied to business success? End users and profit margins (assuming your engineers are salaried) don't care about whether your engineers had consistent 40+ hour work weeks.
- Inputs are the things employees can act on easily, like the number of LoC written or the number of features developped.
- Outputs are related to business success, for example the number of customers, or the revenue.
The key here is to consider the external business environment as a complex machine, in which you put some effort, measured by inputs, and you observe the outputs as a result (reward). Because you don't know how the environment is going to respond, running the activity consists in adjusting the measures of inputs according to previous results, and trying to maximize those.
This is sane for business because executives can focus on maximizing the input metrics, without caring too much about the outputs, and evaluate separately the assumptions they made about the business (e.g. that x number of features requested by customers developped within 1 month increase the userbase).
It kind of looks like a reinforcement learning process actually.
That's basically the problem right there. If you treat the employees as a giant black box, you don't observe when workplace policies (that might not even work!) get in the way of human decency, let alone helping a diverse group of employees each flourish in their own way.
Employers instead sit around wondering why there aren't enough Latino engineers without even considering a remote work policy that would let engineers live in El Paso, Phoenix, Los Angeles, or Miami.
Imho flexible hours are a good thing as they remove the pressure to stay around doing nothing until late because you can't be seen leaving before 7pm.
As a society, we agree on pay for hours. We pay more for folks who bring more, better solutions during those hours. How they do that is beyond the employment agreement's scope.
Short of being a contractor with a fixed-price-on-delivery contract, we'll have to be content with that.
it sounds great in concept but in practice it gets really lame after extended periods of time