Comment by __turbobrew__ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by __turbobrew__ | Hacker News Reader

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This is my experience as well. Companies are aiming for equality of outcomes even though WFH and office employees work in different environments.

I think it is totally fine for an employee to make the decision to work from home and obtain greater freedom at the cost of worse promotion outcomes.

The problem is that if employers say “hey you can work from home, but you are less likely to get promoted than your peers working in the office” they open themselves to discrimination lawsuits. What if there is a strong correlation between those who choose to work from home and a specific demographic? Well it turns out that women may be much more likely to WFH given the choice. Does this mean that the WFH policy is sexist given that women are much more likely to WFH and WFH employees have worse career outcomes?

I believe that this isn’t discrimination by the company because non-women who WFH have similar career outlooks to women who WFH, but there may be a case there and nobody wants to put that case to the test. Instead we get these WFH policies which bring everyone down — to accommodate those who made a choice to sacrifice their career prospects by working from home.

Disclaimer: I love working from home

Source: https://hbr.org/2021/05/dont-let-employees-pick-their-wfh-da...

Wouldn't it be simpler to declare everything "hybrid" and then you don't have to track who's in the office, even though you expect there will be stuff like better promotion outcomes for people who spend more time face-to-face?

Nowadays presumably you have someone making sure your promotions aren't lopsided enough to look discriminatory anyway.

> Wouldn't it be simpler to declare everything "hybrid" and then you don't have to track who's in the office.

That doesn’t fix the issue. Even if everything is declared “hybrid” there is still going to be an “in” group of people working in the office most days and an “out” group of people working from home most days.

> Nowadays presumably you have someone making sure your promotions aren't lopsided enough to look discriminatory anyway.

Having objective performance evaluations which are agnostic to WFH would be ideal but I am not sure if they are realistic. You are working against human nature and tribalism: it is much easier to have favourable opinions of those you interact with regularly. Not to mention that very few work places actually have objective measurements of employee performance, it is mostly all optics and how well the employee sells themselves.

I'm not sure about an increased risk of lawsuits, though worse promotion outcomes is a bad answer for other reasons. That sounds like remote employees are less productive than on-site employees. I don't think companies would want to design a remote-work policy with that belief.

> That sounds like remote employees are less productive than on-site employees

The linked study (in my comment) says otherwise. WFH employees were better performers on average. This means that WFH employees — when normalized for performance — had much worse promotion rates that their office peers.

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