Comment by n4r9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by n4r9 | Hacker News Reader

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Having the tech to allow a few employees to work remotely is one thing. Having an organisational and operational structure to allow everyone to work remotely is another thing entirely. You have to transform a lot of things like:

* On-boarding - new employees are no longer able to suss out the company by chatting to people they bump into. They need well-defined ways to meet other teams and to learn how to communicate and collaborate within the company.

* Socialising - there needs to be a regular opportunity (not mandatory) to meet up in person, even if there's no office.

* Communication - this is a biggie. The company can't just install Teams/Slack/Skype everywhere and expect collaboration to continue as before. Instant messaging apps are terrible for building asynchronous communication habits, since they incentivise quickfire messages. The company needs to publish guidelines on how to give status updates and ask for support, and potentially make communication skills be part of employee evaluation (if not already).

* Evaluation - remote work gives senior management a bad feeling because they don't feel like they know what's going on in the company. The root cause of this is that they're not actually evaluating employee output, but rather something else (e.g. how the employee contributes to meetings or responds to in-person questions). This kind of works in the office since those things correlate somewhat with employee quality. But remote work forces managers to think about how to objectively measure employee productivity solely on their work output... and some of them either resent the extra effort or just aren't imaginative enough.

None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.

To add to that about Slack — speaking is a distinct skill from writing, engaging in different part of the brain. The skills you use for speaking in person does not automatically translates to writing, let alone the various social nuances that comes with text based communication.

The skills you might have picked up to be someone effective while in person doesn’t mean you will be effective working through Slack. Zoom is not a perfect substitute — much of the non-verbal communication that happens in person is no longer there; plus, if you’re not using the Zoom chat as the backchannel, you miss out on effective use of Zoom.

True. Anticipating context is one example of a skill that verbal communicators sometimes lack. For someone to understand your statement/question, it needs to be framed in the language they use everyday, and not to lack any crucial information.

In a verbal conversation, you can whittle down to this by asking questions and rephrasing the other person. In remote situations you need to spend time thinking about what information to include and how to phrase it, before even touching the keyboard.

I still get messages along the lines of "Hi, I'm trying to do X but it's not working! Can you look into it?". With a bit of forethought this can become "Hi. I'm trying to do X because client C wants to be able to do Y. I've tried action A but I'm getting issue I. I looked into the logs and found L, so then I also tried action A2 but ran into issue I2. Here is a screenshot of what I mean. I am on environment E and using configuration C. Do you have any suggestions for how I could proceed?"

> Having an organisational and operational structure to allow everyone to work remotely is another thing entirely.

It really isn't. Not for a lot of companies. Smaller, older, single-site operations maybe. Almost anything with more than one location is already intimately familiar with distributed communication, typically don't replicate HR everywhere so have all electronic onboarding anyway (aside from sending a laptop or whatever).

> None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.

Not sure what you mean by "worth it". It has some pros and cons, I work remote and that's great for me, I don't pretend to know all the details about financials and productivity impact across a significant organization. But for many it actually isn't as big a jump as they try to claim, let's not pretend that it is. Covid was a concrete demonstration of exactly that where I am, even very conservative companies and government orgs went to large fraction of employees remote in very short order.

> Smaller, older, single-site operations maybe

This accounts for around half of US employees and most US businesses. In the UK and other countries, it's even more.

> all electronic onboarding anyway

That's not true, you'll almost always be having in-person chats throughout your on-boarding if you're in the office. And anyway, the tech really isn't the issue here. As a new recruit in the office, you're usually sitting near your mentor/line manager. Every now and then they'll verbally check in with you, or you can tell them you're stuck on something and they'll tell you what to do or who to go to. As other colleagues approach your team area, your manager introduces you to them and explains what they do.

In a remote environment, all of this suddenly takes a lot more conscious pro-active effort. Check-ins have to be rigorously scheduled. New hires need to feel safe enough to approach anyone they need to, and to be told in writing who to approach and how. They need to be introduced to everyone explicitly via call or messaging. They need to be protected from falling "out of sight, out of mind", and encouraged to build personal connections with colleagues.

> This accounts for around half of US employees and most US businesses. In the UK and other countries, it's even more.

Right. Far from the "few and far between" narrative here, isn't it?

> That's not true,

I'm talking about HR onboarding. Signatures, payroll, boilerplate regulatory compliance training etc.

> you'll almost always be having in-person chats throughout your on-boarding if you're in the office.

Nope, not if HR is located elsewhere. It's phone, email, electronic meetings.

> And anyway, the tech really isn't the issue here. As a new recruit in the office, you're usually sitting near your mentor/line manager. Every now and then they'll verbally check in with you, or you can tell them you're stuck on something and they'll tell you what to do or who to go to. As other colleagues approach your team area, your manager introduces you to them and explains what they do.

"If you're in the office you'll be in the office".

All of this stuff is trivial to do online. I don't pretend it has exactly the same results, and one possibly valid concern is monitoring and hepling newer and less proven employees. It doesn't mean that just because there are certain pros and cons that the whole idea falls in a heap at the first hurdle though, so those kinds of anecdotes do not address what I wrote.

> In a remote environment, all of this suddenly takes a lot more conscious pro-active effort. Check-ins have to be rigorously scheduled. New hires need to feel safe enough to approach anyone they need to, and to be told in writing who to approach and how. They need to be introduced to everyone explicitly via call or messaging. They need to be protected from falling "out of sight, out of mind", and encouraged to build personal connections with colleagues.

None of this is rocket science, and all of the tools to do it trivially exist in any software suite any company uses even ones that aren't remote. Email, calendar, chat. Or a physical pen and notepad if you must. Checking in on people isn't some incredible and complicated new skill managers have to learn, that's what they do.

When most people use “on-boarding”, they don’t mean just the legal/HR/benefits paperwork, but rather the effective integration into the fabric of the company. The original post to which you replied even specified that as including “learn how to communicate and collaborate within the company”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503709

And there's nothing that's particularly prohibitive about doing that remotely. You can't just call a bunch of dot points like "on boarding" refuting what I wrote. Sure it's what you might read in your CEO's email or whatever, but that doesn't make it true.

The point you seem to be making - that remote working is a cinch as long as all the managers already know what they need to do and how to do it - is both correct and missing the point.

Studies in the UK demonstrate that feeling isolated and making connections with colleagues in a remote environment is a major concern for younger employees: https://universumglobal.com/blog/the-leadership-gap-young-wo...

This is an organisational issue which isn't solved just by making tools like email and calendar available.

That's not the point I'm making and I have to say it's pretty outlandish if it seems that way to you.

The point I'm making is that it's not because an organization is "not ready" that remote work is not permitted. Implying there is some set of steps or purchases they need to make and then they are ready. It's because the people who can make the decision don't want to.

I thought that I repeatedly made it clear that I made no value judgement on the remote work and didn't claim that is a bad decision to make.

You've consistently asserted that most companies would find it easy to switch to remote work.

I absolutely disagree with this. At least I disagree that most companies can do so and be confident of maintaining productivity. I believe it requires a big shift in organisational and operational processes and attitudes within the company.

No I haven't, and "easy" is not a well defined term here. What I said is that it's not a matter of being ready or not, it's a matter of choosing to or not. And lots of companies can and actually did choose to do that at very short order when covid was causing shutdowns, so if you want to make extraordinary claims to the contrary then you'll need to bring a lot of evidence.

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