I have been in two companies that went remote, and the bosses don't want to, until they try and realize the convenience.
I am hesitant to draw too many conclusions from this work at home experience because the pandemic is providing so many complicating factors that end up distorting both the benefits and downsides of working from home. Some examples to mind:
* It often is a benefit to get out of a distracting office, but now people are at home being distracted by kids who would otherwise be in school under normal circumstances.
* Work from home allows people the freedom to work form wherever they want. Now we are all stuck at home.
* Every company is being forced to be a remote-first organization so there is no face to face communication happening in the office that someone working from home might miss.
* The pandemic takes a mental toll on everyone. Many of us are probably not as productive right now as we would be otherwise and that has nothing to do with working form home, but will that decreased productivity be blamed on working from home?
I've been working fully remote for 18 months now, and the last few weeks have been unusual and more isolating than normal due to everything being closed. No coffee shops, no library, no working lunches, etc.
I suppose it's a smaller jump for me than most people, so I'm not complaining, but it's definitely a misrepresentation of WFH.
However, there is still so much knowledge / creative work that is best done face to face. What I can see happening in my work place is more people might take work at home days. There is no way we will want to keep taking important meetings on Zoom.
But what does suffer are all of the creative processes. Zoom meetings are not the same as real-person meetings. The cadence and flow is off, and it interrupts the creative processes. Maybe that will get better over time, now that we have a whole month to get used to it, but I doubt it.
I'm with you, I look for all of my salaried folks to have the opportunity to take work from home days occasionally. Honestly, I've been pushing that for years, so I'll count it as a win.
My company was ~50% remote across the US and adjoining countries before, and now we’re 100% remote and the transition has been relatively seamless.
Some things that help:
1) Over-communicate. Don’t be afraid to sound stupid or think that your ideas have to be fully baked. Share early and often. Whether that’s a message, a doc, an idea, anything. Blast it out and organic conversations will usually flow from there.
2) Foster a culture of popping open a video chat when there seems to be a misunderstanding after two back-and-forths. This comes from Gitlab’s principles, I forget the actual wording, but the spirit of the principle has helped me numerous times from having long, dragged out conversations through text when a simple 3min video chat will resolve the issue. Integrating your video conference solution with your chat client works wonders here. We have Slack+Zoom so a video chat is a simple text command away.
3) Establish some loose SLAs for communication like “will respond to comments within X period of time.” (Be as detailed as you like.) But let people know when they can expect a response from you generally based upon the medium.
4) With the above, embrace a RFC (request-for-comments) culture where people can give feedback and have organic conversations on anything WIP. And then follow-up with a scheduled 30min meeting to resolve any outstanding ambiguities.
There are probably a few other things I’m forgetting, but the above has served myself and our company so well that I honestly feel more productive working remotely than in an office. The meetings are shorter and more focused, there’s more documentation, and there’s less shoot-the-breeze interruptions.
All the above isn’t to say there isn’t merit to working in an office. There absolutely is! Just that I think it’s normal to have some growing pains when transitioning to remote work, and I hope that people won’t write it off entirely before giving some amount of intentional thought to learning, adapting, and building an equally productive remote workflow.
It starts with an async slack conversation. 90% of conversations go well and end with a shared understanding without much back-and-forth. Done.
For the odd 10% of conversations where you've gone back-and-forth a couple times, you ask the person whether they're available for a videochat. They either say yes, at which point you join a 3-5min videochat, or no they'd prefer to put a time on the calendar.
The above is not an immediate popup video.
First, I think all companies that do a lot of technical calls right now should provide their employees with iPad pro. The drawing feature is just so good that it replaces any whiteboarding.
lol, as if our company's bean counters that bought us the cheapest, crappyest Lenovo laptops they could find are suddenly gonna justify shelling out the cash for iPad Pros for everyone. That's a good one, thanks for the laugh.
My employer has been going this direction for almost 20 years. It started with allowing remote employees before I started 18 years ago. Then a merger with another company 7 years ago forced everybody to adopt good "remote" meeting practices. And since then, people have been a lot more comfortable working remotely, part-time or full-time. If 100% of meetings have at least 1 remote, it's a lot less stressful to be remote yourself.
Could also be that employees, as a whole, are more worried about losing jobs in this environment and are producing more to protect themselves.