Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

Right now, people went WFH without preparation and the first thing people (with no experience working remotely) is to replicate their office style. Almost everyone I talked to, talked about meeting/video calls throughout the day.

So, my question to them, "So, when do you work?"

Video Calls / Meetings should be the last resort. Working remotely (WFH) is not bringing the office work at home, it is an entirely different experience and should be approached thus.

Besides the many other advice floating around, some cores ones that works are;

- Communicate, communicate, over-communicate, mostly via email or other long-form writing).

- If you do the above (writing), it helps in the key element of working remotely - asynchronous. The day you can work asynchronous with your team, is the day you won in working remotely. If you write, then you can also share it anytime, to anyone.

View on HN

This rings true in my experience as well. When I work with external teams in companies with no WFH, there's a "cultural dissonance" I feel, as someone remote-working for a decade or more.

As you point out, the main difference I noticed was the regularity and frequency of video calls/meetings throughout the day, every day. And that's the expected norm with some (maybe the majority) of the people I've worked with, especially in corporate environments.

Often it's a struggle for me to adapt to the office culture, but I try to push back for a compromise, so that most of the communication is done in long-form writing. I find the asynchronous nature of email to be more suitable for in-depth discussions, allowing time to organize our thoughts - rather than the ad-hoc back-and-forth of chats. Sure, there's a time for that too, but it's highly distracting for my workflow.

I agree with everything you said, but would like to add that most people are terrified of writing, especially long-form.

For many jobs, meetings are a fundamental part of working.

Maybe they shouldn't be ... there's literally no reason for this when there are plenty of other collaboration methods that work just fine asynchronously. Yes, I understand that many of those jobs are just that way because that's the way they are, and people are used to it, and it's a core part of the way they work. But eventually, someone's gonna come along that's going to dare to do it differently, and they're gonna put them out of business

You can't erase tens of thousands of years of human socialization by hand-waving it away. Like it or not, we're herd animals and psychologically attuned to being in groups. Some people adjust well to doing that remotely, others do not.

This isn't just a technology problem; you also have to take the psychology into consideration.

>Like it or not, we're herd animals and psychologically attuned to being in groups.

I'm not a biologist, but I don't think primates are herd animals. We're more attuned to hierarchies than flat groups.

That might be a correct distinction, but I don't think it's a distinction that impacts the substance of the GP comment.

For many people, directly communicating with people is a fundamental part of their day. You can't just tell them to start communicating via long form email instead because it's much more efficient.

Even if you tell them "it's just as fine".

Maybe some legit, but I suspect more are dominated by social signaling sessions and talk therapy.

I think there's a social element of office work that can't really be replaced with WFH.

It can be replaced by local co-working spaces (or even coffee shops with the right community) ... very few reasons anyone on this earth should be traveling dozens and dozens of miles, for hours on end every single day, just to co-locate with people, when they live next to thousands

Reply on news.ycombinator.com