Remote worker here, in a software development role. Most of my ~10 person team is remote, with other teams within the company working in-person. The company all uses Slack, so there really isn't much difference between working in the office and working remotely. It seems like the company culture of using Slack as a primary communication tool helps immensely.
Bottom line: there is no "one size fits all" as several people have said. Some work needs to be done in-person.
However, I have problems with a few of the anti-WFH arguments people are using. Most of these reasons boil down to some variation of "people abuse the system and do less work when they're at home".
Employees abuse telecommuting. They're getting paid the same amount whether they goof off all day at home or at work.
This may be true, but I don't see how the location of the employee plays a factor.
Part of the role of the boss is to create metrics for the employees. Since measuring success is difficult, most bosses default to some variant on "hours worked", which isn't particularly useful. A more useful metric is something tied to output. If you're a programmer, maybe that means setting deadlines on building x feature or resolving y ticket. If you're in sales, maybe it's hitting a quota. Tie employee success to something other than "hours logged", because at the end of the day, the number of man-hours doesn't matter to the business; getting stuff done is what matters.
A few responses talk about the value of face time/in-person interaction. This is very field-dependent; in some cases this is unavoidable. However, in many cases this is a solvable problem. Video calling is incredibly easy, and if you set the expectation that people need to be available on Slack/phone/[platform of choice] during working hours, it takes less time to video call somebody than it would have taken to walk over to their desk. Want to collaborate on something? Slack (and other similar tools) have collaborative screen sharing and you can draw on the presenter's screen; you can easily have a whiteboard discussion over the internet. The "we need face time" argument simply does not hold water in many cases because a physical presence is not required for a conversation.
Finally, a few people have mentioned some variant of "I'm not paying my employees to do their childcare/not work when they work from home". Again, this gets tied to the idea of better employee metrics. Of course you're not paying somebody to watch their kid. But you're also not paying them because having somebody sit at a desk is valuable to you. Employees are employed because they provide some form of value. If you (the employer) can't measure that value, what are you doing?
Hypothetically, if I built a software feature that makes my company millions of dollars, do you think my boss cares whether it took me all day or five minutes? I doubt it. Most cases are less black-and-white than this, but the point is that we ought to be valuing employees for their contributions, not for the hours of their lives.
Finally, I want to point out that
of course there can be crappy WFH arrangements. If something gets delayed a day simply because of a long communication turnaround, that's of course a problem. But that's more indicative that you need to change something about the arrangement than that working from home is bad. Some direct, actionable steps that employers can take include:
- Get all employees on an online communication tool. Whatever tool you use should have options for easily messaging and calling people, individually and as a group. At my job everybody is on Slack and it works really well.
- In addition to the above, establish lines of communication for different levels of urgency. This will vary depending on the company. But generally, there ought to be different channels of communication for "I need an answer right now" vs. "this can wait until you have a moment"
- Define clear objectives for your employees. If you're worried about employees abusing the arrangement, this is your best bet. Work should include deadlines, even if they're soft. That way you don't end up with employees slacking off all day. By doing this, you've actually incentivized their working faster, because the faster they finish their deadline, the faster they can stop working.
