Author Topic: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?  (Read 8014 times)

Valhalla

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With all of the talks about climate change and impact of jet travel, why isn't telecommuting more of a thing, especially enforced by governments to help reduce human misery in traffic and reducing carbon footprint?

Telecommuting saves employees time from having to drive in expensive cars to work.  Telecommuting saves companies money from having to have large expensive buildings to house all the employees and pay for the associated utilities, security, maintenance, parking, etc.  Telecommuting saves the environment with all of the carbon emissions being reduced from having people needlessly cram onto the roads roughly as the same time twice a day for perpetuity.

If people want to get more serious about saving the climate, why aren't people / politicians requiring companies to allow telecommute for administrative positions, office desk type jobs, cube-based jobs that can be easily done from home, with enhanced video conferencing and audio calls?

I have telecommuted the last few jobs and love it.  I am far happier, I produce a lot more, and I waste far less time on meaningless work / meetings for the same amount of time I'd have to spend against my windshield and in a cube every day.

I think it would be good to have a policy like charging companies money to force employees be on-site when the work could be done remote.  For those companies that deem it essential to have employees on-site, they'd happily pay the fee and have employees on-site.  For those who are able to adapt and embrace the telecommuting model, they could save a lot of money while having a happier employee force.

I'm puzzled by why this is something no one seems to talk about, in light of today's climate change crisis.  It's a win-win-win for almost everyone.

RWTL

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #1 on: January 17, 2020, 06:31:18 PM »
Companies and managers worry that employees won't be as productive.  It's also a control issue for many managers.

I telecommute occasionally and like you, I find I am more productive. 

joshuagraham_xyz

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #2 on: January 17, 2020, 06:38:29 PM »
The main reason is that any job that could be done by telecommuting could be done by someone telecommuting from India, etc., and thus those jobs are not for Americans.  You have a job because it has been determined that the worker needs to have his butt placed in a cubicle.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2020, 05:55:26 PM by joshuagraham_xyz »

mozar

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #3 on: January 17, 2020, 07:13:49 PM »
It's really hard to change "the way things are done" aka culture. Most managers are just trying to survive. They're not trying to change things.
The federal govt has a telework policy and at first people didn't take advantage of it so the fed came up with some stronger language and some requirements. Most fed employees take off Fridays now and traffic on the DC beltway has decreased and the metro loses revenue on Fridays.

Lots of things are win win but people don't do it unless forced or manipulated.  I think there is a book called Nudge about that, and the whole field of behavioral economics.

You yourself can write a proposal and work with local politicians to propose a bill. Why don't you do that?

What I want to know is why did everyone switch from telework to telecommuting? You work remotely, you don't commute remotely.

clarkfan1979

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #4 on: January 17, 2020, 08:05:03 PM »
According to the data within industrial/organizational psychology, job satisfaction peaks at telecommuting 2 days/week. Turns out people like to physically show up to the office and be social with other people.

Padonak

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #5 on: January 17, 2020, 08:13:00 PM »
Remote work is becoming more commonplace but on employers' terms, not employees' terms. They just hire people in countries like India or the Philippines to work remotely from their offices for a fraction of the cost and adjust their hours to the same time zone or at least so that there is a big enough overlap to have meetings. If there is no physical requirement for an employee to be in a particular place, might as well hire somebody in a very low cost location.

zolotiyeruki

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #6 on: January 18, 2020, 08:54:30 AM »
I work on the engineering team for a small startup.  About half the engineers are remote, i.e. >1,000 miles away.  In my experience, it has been tremendously detrimental to our team's productivity. 

Let me give you an example.  Two mechanical engineers, one local, one remote.  The local guy has some changes he needs remote guy to make.  If they were in the same place, the one guy could walk over to the other guy's office, point at something on the screen, and be done in 30 seconds.  With the geographical separation, the first guy has to take a screenshot or print something off, somehow annotate it, send it to the remote engineer, and hope it gets interpreted the right way.  Or fire up a video conference and try to explain it via webcam, and again hope it gets interpreted correctly.

Or, say it's time to start integration testing--housing, electronics, firmware, software.  This has to be done at the main office.  Remote guy is not in a position to help with the testing (3d prints require cleanup!), so local guy ends up having to do some of Remote Guy's work.  Local guy already has more than a full-time job's worth of tasks, so this results in delays.  The product we're working on started development in August.  We hope to be in production in about two months, so a 7-month total development cycle.  I estimate that we've lost at least a month of time, and possibly two, simply due to this one engineer being remote.

One of our app developers is other-side-of-the-world remote (globetrotting USian).  Time zone differences are brutal--minimum 24 hour turnaround times on even the most trivial of issues.  Got new hardware for him to test?  Well, he's renting an apartment in, say, Slovakia this month, and it'll take three months to get a prototype through customs to him.  So he has to build the app, send it to the Local guys to test, hope that it works, and wait for the Local guys to send back log files for him to analyze.  Compound the displacement of work responsibilities with the time difference, inefficiencies in non-face-to-face communication, and an unreliable internet connection, and it's awful.  I'd estimate 3-6 months worth of delays across a couple projects, just in the last year, due to this developer being remote.

There are some areas where telecommuting can be just fine.  When it comes to engineering, however, there is no substitute for physical presence, at least a few times per week.

John Galt incarnate!

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #7 on: January 18, 2020, 09:18:41 AM »
I adamantly oppose any statist mandate that compels employers to establish a telecommuter policy.

Employers and their employees have  hands-on understanding of what their work entails.They  are far better suited to understand the effects of a telecommuter policy than  bureaucrats who would inhabit a distant, command-and-control  cube farm from which they issue orders.

Let employers and their employees have the freedom to choose to devise a telecommuter policy or not.

Choice is the concomitant of liberty.
« Last Edit: January 18, 2020, 09:22:01 AM by John Galt incarnate! »

ChickenStash

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #8 on: January 18, 2020, 11:02:06 AM »
My current employer had a fairly open policy for telecommuting but it was heavily abused and productivity fell to the point hardly anything got done. Much of the job was supporting things as they break and it it became nearly impossible to find someone to respond timely to issues. Now we only allow 3 days per month except for rare circumstances.

I find it a heck of a lot easier to work with people in an office setting. It's nice when a complex project pops up or major issue occurs to just get the SMEs in a room and talk it over. Despite all the fancy teleconference equipment and digital whiteboards, it's just faster to handle things in person.

It's also really hard to build a good team atmosphere when the only communication is remote. I've been on teams with international members and it's tough to really be comfortable working together.

I can see it working for jobs that don't require much interaction with others. Jobs where there is just a task assigned and you're left alone to complete it except for an occasional check-in or stand up meeting.

Tris Prior

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #9 on: January 18, 2020, 12:50:32 PM »
It irritates me that my job can be done 100 percent remotely, I go literally entire days without speaking with someone in person (we are very much an email/IM/videoconference culture, if someone just drops by your cube that's considered really weird and out of touch, half the time your entire project team is scattered among other offices around the US anyway).... yet, it was like pulling teeth to get 1 WFH day per week approved. Full-time remote would never happen.

My boss doesn't care one way or the other as long as work gets done, but the execs above her were very much butts in seats. It sucks and doesn't make any sense, for my particular job.

nereo

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #10 on: January 18, 2020, 12:59:26 PM »
Spouses job is run by an old school guy who just doesn’t get telecommuting. It’s frustrating. He has openly mused that people would just sit around in their PJs (partially true) and not accomplish their work (false) if they were at home “surfing the net” ( who says that anymore?!!)

The end result is that positions go understaffed and they spend a ton on travel reimbursements. Such a waste. Ironically all work shuts down during inclimate weather even though most could continue to work from home

I agree that spending some time each week in an office is useful, but here we seem stuck into a 9-5, netting heavy culture that’s frequently counterproductive. Hi

Syonyk

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #11 on: January 18, 2020, 02:26:19 PM »
It depends heavily on the job and the person.

I've done quite a bit of remote work over the years, and one of the keys I've taken away from it is that you absolutely must have an isolated, "work only" space - mixing work and normal computer space is a bad idea, and having it be just a corner of the house, if anyone else lives there, just doesn't work out well.  It's too hard to keep work and not-work separated.  During the day, family distractions arise, and during the evening, work has a way of cramming it's way in.

So having isolated space is pretty much required.  Currently, my solution to this is an 8x12 shed on a corner of my property (complete with solar panels - the joys of off-grid power for my work) that's pretty well isolated.  I can easily walk back to the house during the day (and do, multiple times, for coffee/restroom/etc), but I'm "at work," and my wife/kids generally leave me alone unless they actually need something.  For me, at least, another aspect of that is trying to avoid burning the house down - I do, among other things, lithium battery pack rebuilding/R&D, and while I'm insanely conservative about how I do that, the reality is that if I've got a bad cell or something that lets go, it stands a tolerable chance of burning my office down.  I'd really rather it be an outbuilding and not the house.

I've seen rooms at the end of a basement work decently (with a door), but it really has to be a dedicated space or things don't work well.  The kitchen table is a horrid work from home location.

A few other people have mentioned this, but the type of work really matters too.  High-interaction sort of stuff can be done remotely, but it's hard, and requires an awful lot of deliberate thinking around how to do communication, notification, etc.  Some web dev companies have done a good job of this, but other companies that allow remote work don't have much infrastructure for it, and then it's on the remote worker to really ensure they're plugged in - whatever that looks like.  The downside is that the interactive stuff (Slack, IRC, group video hangouts, etc) can ruin the ability to concentrate that remote work really excels at.

If you have isolated tasks, especially what Cal Newport would call "Deep Work" sort of stuff, a remote/isolated workspace can work exceptionally well.  I've done work that substantially amounts to, "We have no idea if X is possible on Y platform, with Z constraints - can you look at that?"  That's very well suited to remote work, with the right person, because they can dive into something for 6 hours with no distraction, do that for many days in a row, and come up with an answer, proof of concept, or whatever is desired.  But that's also non-tightly-coupled work, and it's pretty specialized stuff as well.  But it also means you have to be properly good at staying on task, and keeping focused - open ended R&D stuff can turn into hours of mindless... whatever.  You have to aggressively schedule your time as well.

Remote work is definitely nice when the option exists, but it's actually quite hard to learn to manage it properly.  It took me about half a decade to really work out the details of how to do it well and effectively, without work taking over my entire life.

moneypitfeeder

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #12 on: January 18, 2020, 05:00:04 PM »
I'm a federal teleworker about 98% of the time. I have to go in for all-hands meetings and such. For me the telework is great, and it was a condition of me accepting my appointment. I took a reduced salary vs what I was making before because of the reduction of car wear and tear/clothing/food expenses. My previous job was in a cube, but I was still working remotely for another company, seemed like complete nonsense to drive in every day instead of log in from home. But I don't have any distractions that pull me away at home (no small children) except a cat, and hubs is really supportive of not interrupting my workday. I agree, for me it has been a win-win-win situation, and I wish it were a more globally accepted practice. There are still plenty of folks where I work that make enough waves (I guess they think we aren't working when we say we are) that it adds silly things we have to do to "prove" we are working, vs those in office that come and go without question. Is it fair, no, but do I care enough to jeopardize my work from home, no. I'll punch a clock from home vs driving 50 miles a day.

firestarter2018

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #13 on: January 18, 2020, 06:24:12 PM »
I had this idea myself and have wondered why progressive cities don't try and pilot a program where they require large employers to detail their % of workers with telecommuting privileges, how many days a week, etc., and what they're doing to increase that amount.  Telecommuting doesn't work for all industries and all roles, obviously, but for big corporate employers it's often a cultural thing - "butts in seats" = productivity (when that may not be the case).  Or give them some tax breaks or incentives if they increase their telecommuting rate to a certain percentage and take cars off the road during rush hour.  Governments can nudge companies in certain directions just like HR departments can auto-enroll employees into 401k's.

waltworks

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #14 on: January 18, 2020, 09:12:45 PM »
Just make a revenue-neutral carbon tax, have it ratchet up every few years so people can plan for and be more and more aware of the cost of driving to work every day. No need for making anything mandatory.

-W

2sk22

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #15 on: January 19, 2020, 03:21:49 AM »
I have been fortunate to work in companies (software development) where working from home was absolutely the norm. Both at the megacorp I worked at until last year and the startup where I'm working now, nobody needs to ask for permission to work from home. Between video conferencing and Slack, I find very little need for face-to-face meetings. But the key thing is that you need a good home office which is very quiet with good network connectivity.

MayDay

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #16 on: January 19, 2020, 06:12:54 AM »
Having been 100% remote and now back in an office, I can say with confidence that I'd rather be in am office.

As previously stated, 2 days at home a week would be perfect, but I work in manufacturing so I do indeed need to be present most of the time.

nereo

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #17 on: January 19, 2020, 06:21:16 AM »
Having been 100% remote and now back in an office, I can say with confidence that I'd rather be in am office.

As previously stated, 2 days at home a week would be perfect, but I work in manufacturing so I do indeed need to be present most of the time.
What is it about being in office that you prefer, @MayDay ?

js82

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #18 on: January 19, 2020, 06:29:54 AM »
I work on the engineering team for a small startup.  About half the engineers are remote, i.e. >1,000 miles away.  In my experience, it has been tremendously detrimental to our team's productivity. 

Let me give you an example.  Two mechanical engineers, one local, one remote.  The local guy has some changes he needs remote guy to make.  If they were in the same place, the one guy could walk over to the other guy's office, point at something on the screen, and be done in 30 seconds.  With the geographical separation, the first guy has to take a screenshot or print something off, somehow annotate it, send it to the remote engineer, and hope it gets interpreted the right way.  Or fire up a video conference and try to explain it via webcam, and again hope it gets interpreted correctly.

Or, say it's time to start integration testing--housing, electronics, firmware, software.  This has to be done at the main office.  Remote guy is not in a position to help with the testing (3d prints require cleanup!), so local guy ends up having to do some of Remote Guy's work.  Local guy already has more than a full-time job's worth of tasks, so this results in delays.  The product we're working on started development in August.  We hope to be in production in about two months, so a 7-month total development cycle.  I estimate that we've lost at least a month of time, and possibly two, simply due to this one engineer being remote.

One of our app developers is other-side-of-the-world remote (globetrotting USian).  Time zone differences are brutal--minimum 24 hour turnaround times on even the most trivial of issues.  Got new hardware for him to test?  Well, he's renting an apartment in, say, Slovakia this month, and it'll take three months to get a prototype through customs to him.  So he has to build the app, send it to the Local guys to test, hope that it works, and wait for the Local guys to send back log files for him to analyze.  Compound the displacement of work responsibilities with the time difference, inefficiencies in non-face-to-face communication, and an unreliable internet connection, and it's awful.  I'd estimate 3-6 months worth of delays across a couple projects, just in the last year, due to this developer being remote.

There are some areas where telecommuting can be just fine.  When it comes to engineering, however, there is no substitute for physical presence, at least a few times per week.

I agree with you - at least for the *non-software* flavor of engineering that I'm involved in.  While I do a lot of work at my desk, I need to be on site regularly to maximize my effectiveness.  There's a lot that I'll miss out on if I'm never at the office - vital information that is exchanged in conversations outside the regular meetings.  Could I work from home a day per week without losing much, if I'm selective of which day that is?  Sure.  Could I pull off 80-100% remote?  No way.

Conversely, for *software* engineering I know people that work near 100% remotely and are quite successful doing so.  I don't think applying a one-size-fits-all solution makes sense since the needs of diverse industries vary so dramatically.

MayDay

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #19 on: January 19, 2020, 08:08:15 AM »
Having been 100% remote and now back in an office, I can say with confidence that I'd rather be in am office.

As previously stated, 2 days at home a week would be perfect, but I work in manufacturing so I do indeed need to be present most of the time.
What is it about being in office that you prefer, @MayDay ?

When you are with people in person it is much easier to develop relationships. Once you have an in person relationship you can maintain it, but it's hard to establish when you are 100% remote.

Teleconferencing is also inefficient. It works ok, it's obviously better than just a phone call, but it's not the same as in person meetings.

As a PP said, a lot depends on the type of job. I'm an engineer but I don't work on solitary tasks. I am interfacing with other people all day long, and being in person is more effective and more efficient.

I also felt extremely isolated when I WFH FT. And I am an introvert. I cannot imagine an extrovert enjoying 100% WFH.

PDXTabs

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #20 on: January 19, 2020, 08:22:40 AM »
Companies and managers worry that employees won't be as productive.

I telecommute full time. I have also normal-commuted full time in the past. There are very real challenges to telecommuting.

Telecommuting organizations need to get good at communicating without physical presence. Telecommuting organizations need to figure out how to deal with equipment problems when people aren't all in the same place. Some employees don't have a good place to work at home and you need to figure out how to deal with that.

Also, according to Gallop, the most engaged employees only telecommute part time. This finding is perfectly inline with my own experience.

Luck12

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #21 on: January 19, 2020, 11:20:55 AM »
All you people who are against working from home with your blah blah anectdotes.   The fact is there's a mountain of evidence that remote workers are more productive, society saves on environmental costs, companies save on real estate costs, workers are healthier and happier because they don't have to waste time commuting, workers save on commute costs, etc. 

I'm not going to suggest that there should be some gov't mandate, but it would be great if the big bosses quit being autocratic douches with respect to butts in seats since that doesn't help workers be more productive anyway.   Simply allow workers to WFH much more of the time should they want to do so.    If you can't trust your employees to be productive wherever they work, maybe that should tell you something about the way you choose your employees.   

It's simply about control since most high level bosses are control freak assholes.  I mean that is the nature of the capitalism we have where workers essentially have very little freedom in most workplaces.   It's one of the major reasons I FIRED myself. 

At my last workplace we officially were supposed to WFH only 2x a week, but I didn't give a shit since I had FU & FIRE money so I WFH whenever I felt like it which was pretty much every day LOL. 
« Last Edit: January 19, 2020, 11:27:29 AM by Luck12 »

Noodle

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #22 on: January 19, 2020, 11:58:04 AM »
I have a BIL who works from home and loves it, but interestingly he also has strong feelings about how to make it work...he feels that when regular communications loops get bigger than 2-4 people, you need to get back into a physical space because too much gets lost, or the efforts to keep up get too distracting.

Personally, I wouldn't work from home because

1) my job is very place-based and involves working with a revolving cast of staff and community partners with varying degrees of comfort with technology, who would not do well with remote communications
2) I live in multi-family housing which is pretty noisy during the day, when all the renovations/landscaping/construction in the neighborhood are going on--seriously, when I have to stay home to wait for a repair person and think I might get a little work done in the interim, it NEVER works
3) I am only a semi-introvert and need a certain amount of human contact, and work is great for that. A few years back we had a natural disaster where my workplace and I were both fine, but we were closed for a week while a lot of staff were dealing with their personal situations and travel was problematic. I nearly went crazy.

So I would hate to see requirements, but I think incentives (either for the employer or employee) could be great to encourage situations where it could very well work but a push is needed. I think part of the problem is that telework is so new that best practices haven't really been established yet in terms of what jobs are suited to it, how to measure performance, and how to hire and manage people for those positions, especially in smaller companies that don't have robust HR, and every time someone tries it the "wrong" way and it fails, it adds ammunition for people who are against it.

bacchi

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #23 on: January 19, 2020, 12:24:01 PM »
Conversely, for *software* engineering I know people that work near 100% remotely and are quite successful doing so.  I don't think applying a one-size-fits-all solution makes sense since the needs of diverse industries vary so dramatically.

Yeah. I've been in a few WFH environments and it was fine. Products were delivered and bugs were fixed. There were occasionally slackers but, then, slackers are found even in an office environment (the bigger the company, the easier it is to hide).

I'd guess that most people don't want 100% WFH because, as Noodle mentioned ^^, they need some interaction during the week.

roomtempmayo

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #24 on: January 19, 2020, 12:55:42 PM »
Having been 100% remote and now back in an office, I can say with confidence that I'd rather be in am office.

As previously stated, 2 days at home a week would be perfect, but I work in manufacturing so I do indeed need to be present most of the time.
What is it about being in office that you prefer, @MayDay ?

When you are with people in person it is much easier to develop relationships. Once you have an in person relationship you can maintain it, but it's hard to establish when you are 100% remote.

Teleconferencing is also inefficient. It works ok, it's obviously better than just a phone call, but it's not the same as in person meetings.

As a PP said, a lot depends on the type of job. I'm an engineer but I don't work on solitary tasks. I am interfacing with other people all day long, and being in person is more effective and more efficient.

I also felt extremely isolated when I WFH FT. And I am an introvert. I cannot imagine an extrovert enjoying 100% WFH.

I agree, for many of the same reasons.

I need to be physically present about 20 hours a week to interface with people.  I elect to be present the other 20 hours or so because I'm productive in my office.  As for distractions, I close my office door when I don't want to talk to anyone, and nobody will knock on my door without an appointment.  I don't find my office to be distracting at all because I choose my level of interaction with others.

My job has too much baked-in email and written communication as it is, so being able to talk to someone about an issue in person is not only an efficiency gain, it also reduces the email overload. 

I'm also very inclined to pick up the telephone whenever possible to avoid writing yet another email.  If someone at roughly the same rank or down in the organizational hierarchy sends me an email, I'm probably going to call them back if my response would require writing more than about two lines.  It's quicker, and there's more nuance to the language.  However, lots of people seem shocked to have me call them during the work day.

The short answer is that there's only so much writing I'm going to do in a day.  Verbal communication, either by phone or in-person, lets me do more work, and do it faster.

At some points in the year I also do a fair bit of WFH, and no only do I not get as much done, even as a pretty introverted person I find it lonely and isolating.

habanero

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #25 on: January 19, 2020, 01:25:35 PM »
I never work from home because I can't. It would be a violation of a lot of regulations at my workplace and local jurisdiction for the core of my job to be performed at home. I can't even have access to the most important systems I need to use because it is, well, illegal. I'd like to have the opportunity to do it every once in a while, but it's just not possible. Anyway my commute to and from work is a very fine time of the day for me (I run or ride a bike) and I like being at work and interact with other people. Plus the lunch deal is great. Not free but pretty damn close.

My GF works quite a bit form home and she is way more productive at home than in the office. The one and only reason is abscence of interruptions at random time. She does work that requires concentration and following long and complex lines of thought and any interruption in that process is a major PITA.

So I guess the bottom line is that telecommuting is good for some jobs, not for others. And who reaps the greatest benefit can vary as well. My crystal ball tells me that whenever the next downturn comes, telecommuting is gonna be offered a lot less than what it is now.

roomtempmayo

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #26 on: January 19, 2020, 01:33:22 PM »
All of the discussion of interruptions and distractions at work seems like a good case for ditching open workspaces and cubes.  I've never heard anyone say anything good about them as a work environment.

Padonak

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #27 on: January 19, 2020, 01:37:08 PM »
All of the discussion of interruptions and distractions at work seems like a good case for ditching open workspaces and cubes.  I've never heard anyone say anything good about them as a work environment.

Employers want obedient wage slaves. Someone who agrees to work in a shitty and loud open space is a good corporate bitch. It's basically a screening process.

roomtempmayo

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #28 on: January 19, 2020, 01:44:21 PM »
All of the discussion of interruptions and distractions at work seems like a good case for ditching open workspaces and cubes.  I've never heard anyone say anything good about them as a work environment.

Employers want obedient wage slaves. Someone who agrees to work in a shitty and loud open space is a good corporate bitch. It's basically a screening process.

Ha!  I don't doubt there's some truth to it. 

I love my office.  It's larger than my living room. 

But what I really want is a personal secretary to manage my scheduling and communications.  How did previous generations willingly let that go?  It seems like the ultimate lynchpin in a high quality of work-life that used to be common.

habanero

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #29 on: January 19, 2020, 01:52:46 PM »
All of the discussion of interruptions and distractions at work seems like a good case for ditching open workspaces and cubes.  I've never heard anyone say anything good about them as a work environment.

My GF has her own office with a door which can be closed. But even a closed door does not stop people from interrupting or stopping by for questions (work-related, but still an interruption). I work in a massively open enviroment because it's the only way it can work and I kind of enjoy it. But it would be a nightmare if my work mostly required long and deep attention to complex stuff.

joshuagraham_xyz

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #30 on: January 19, 2020, 06:07:31 PM »
I work on the engineering team for a small startup.  About half the engineers are remote, i.e. >1,000 miles away.  In my experience, it has been tremendously detrimental to our team's productivity. 

Let me give you an example.  Two mechanical engineers, one local, one remote.  The local guy has some changes he needs remote guy to make.  If they were in the same place, the one guy could walk over to the other guy's office, point at something on the screen, and be done in 30 seconds.  With the geographical separation, the first guy has to take a screenshot or print something off, somehow annotate it, send it to the remote engineer, and hope it gets interpreted the right way.  Or fire up a video conference and try to explain it via webcam, and again hope it gets interpreted correctly.

Or, say it's time to start integration testing--housing, electronics, firmware, software.  This has to be done at the main office.  Remote guy is not in a position to help with the testing (3d prints require cleanup!), so local guy ends up having to do some of Remote Guy's work.  Local guy already has more than a full-time job's worth of tasks, so this results in delays.  The product we're working on started development in August.  We hope to be in production in about two months, so a 7-month total development cycle.  I estimate that we've lost at least a month of time, and possibly two, simply due to this one engineer being remote.

One of our app developers is other-side-of-the-world remote (globetrotting USian).  Time zone differences are brutal--minimum 24 hour turnaround times on even the most trivial of issues.  Got new hardware for him to test?  Well, he's renting an apartment in, say, Slovakia this month, and it'll take three months to get a prototype through customs to him.  So he has to build the app, send it to the Local guys to test, hope that it works, and wait for the Local guys to send back log files for him to analyze.  Compound the displacement of work responsibilities with the time difference, inefficiencies in non-face-to-face communication, and an unreliable internet connection, and it's awful.  I'd estimate 3-6 months worth of delays across a couple projects, just in the last year, due to this developer being remote.

There are some areas where telecommuting can be just fine.  When it comes to engineering, however, there is no substitute for physical presence, at least a few times per week.

But the fact is that the startup is paying relatively low to "equity only" compensation to these folks, and thus the only folks that will work for it are folks that are willing to put up with such low compensation if they are given the ability to completely telecommute, even while, for some, globetrotting.  It's the same reason (in reverse) that the unskilled job of garbageman or Alaskan fishing boat crew pays so well - the only way to motivate someone to do those nasty & brutish jobs is to pay a lot more than what a dumb but relative easy would pay to get folks to take it.  Employers must do an efficiency analysis to see if the low-efficiency/remote/cheap workforce has better output than the high-efficiency/onsite/expensive workforce.

I remember a recruiter calling me about a job (full-time, so I wasn't really interested) where the pay would be about $5/hr (or was it $10/hr?) less if done as telecommuting.  Management had figured out that this is the price differential of the market for the programmers it was hiring.  Perhaps what employers that could consider telecommuters could do is have most everyone be default telecommuting, but then offer an on-site bonus to those that come onsite.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2020, 06:22:59 PM by joshuagraham_xyz »

joshuagraham_xyz

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #31 on: January 19, 2020, 06:21:34 PM »
All you people who are against working from home with your blah blah anectdotes.   The fact is there's a mountain of evidence that remote workers are more productive ...

I believe that if that were truly the case, we'd be seeing a lot more telecommuting, onsite managers be damned!  The big management consultancies would be able to sell their services to firms wanting to transition to this.  Perhaps part of this analysis is that remote workers, because they can be hired for less and are less likely to leave, are more productive per unit to compensation than onsite workers.

... saves on environmental costs, companies save on real estate costs, workers are healthier and happier because they don't have to waste time commuting, workers save on commute costs, etc.

I totally agree with this part.

Valhalla

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #32 on: January 20, 2020, 12:42:18 AM »
All you people who are against working from home with your blah blah anectdotes.   The fact is there's a mountain of evidence that remote workers are more productive, society saves on environmental costs, companies save on real estate costs, workers are healthier and happier because they don't have to waste time commuting, workers save on commute costs, etc. 

I'm not going to suggest that there should be some gov't mandate, but it would be great if the big bosses quit being autocratic douches with respect to butts in seats since that doesn't help workers be more productive anyway.   Simply allow workers to WFH much more of the time should they want to do so.    If you can't trust your employees to be productive wherever they work, maybe that should tell you something about the way you choose your employees.   

It's simply about control since most high level bosses are control freak assholes.  I mean that is the nature of the capitalism we have where workers essentially have very little freedom in most workplaces.   It's one of the major reasons I FIRED myself. 

At my last workplace we officially were supposed to WFH only 2x a week, but I didn't give a shit since I had FU & FIRE money so I WFH whenever I felt like it which was pretty much every day LOL.
Agree 100%.  I remember when I worked in an office, I'd waste 30-40% of the day in useless meetings, people stopping by for irrelevant stuff, and me taking longer lunches because I couldn't stand the cubed environment.  Then add in another 1-2 hours per day for commute, it was nearly unbearable.

I'd rather work from home for 10 hours per day than be in the office for 8 hours for the same pay.  I can set aside a small area for telecommuting with no issues.

Plus with all of the video conferencing tools, instant messaging, VPNs, etc., there is virtually no loss of productivity when working from home vs on-site, in most commercial settings, in my experience.

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #33 on: January 20, 2020, 06:52:43 AM »
I work on the engineering team for a small startup.  About half the engineers are remote, i.e. >1,000 miles away.  In my experience, it has been tremendously detrimental to our team's productivity.
.... <snipped for brevity>....

But the fact is that the startup is paying relatively low to "equity only" compensation to these folks, and thus the only folks that will work for it are folks that are willing to put up with such low compensation if they are given the ability to completely telecommute, even while, for some, globetrotting.  It's the same reason (in reverse) that the unskilled job of garbageman or Alaskan fishing boat crew pays so well - the only way to motivate someone to do those nasty & brutish jobs is to pay a lot more than what a dumb but relative easy would pay to get folks to take it.  Employers must do an efficiency analysis to see if the low-efficiency/remote/cheap workforce has better output than the high-efficiency/onsite/expensive workforce.

I remember a recruiter calling me about a job (full-time, so I wasn't really interested) where the pay would be about $5/hr (or was it $10/hr?) less if done as telecommuting.  Management had figured out that this is the price differential of the market for the programmers it was hiring.  Perhaps what employers that could consider telecommuters could do is have most everyone be default telecommuting, but then offer an on-site bonus to those that come onsite.
What gives you the impression that my employer is compensating its employees this way?  They aren't--AFAIK, all the employees are salaried (or hourly, for the contract engineers).

Luck12

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #34 on: January 20, 2020, 09:30:30 AM »

I believe that if that were truly the case, we'd be seeing a lot more telecommuting, onsite managers be damned!  The big management consultancies would be able to sell their services to firms wanting to transition to this.  Perhaps part of this analysis is that remote workers, because they can be hired for less and are less likely to leave, are more productive per unit to compensation than onsite workers.


Companies love metrics, but as soon as those metrics show employees are more productive given the freedom of WFH, they just ignore them.  Why?  Because of autocratic capitalism.   It's as simple as that, you would think it'd be obvious on a board like this where most people want to GTFO and seem to lean left much more than the populace at large. 

PDXTabs

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #35 on: January 20, 2020, 09:34:06 AM »
All you people who are against working from home with your blah blah anectdotes.   The fact is there's a mountain of evidence that remote workers are more productive, society saves on environmental costs, companies save on real estate costs, workers are healthier and happier because they don't have to waste time commuting, workers save on commute costs, etc. 

Could you please post links to the productivity data? I'm very curious as I'm mostly familiar with the Gallop data that shows maximum engagement WFH 20-80% of the time, but not 100%.

EDITed to add - I'm a software engineer and if I had to guess I would say that I would be most productive WFH 60~80% of the time.
« Last Edit: January 20, 2020, 09:54:56 AM by PDXTabs »

Syonyk

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #36 on: January 20, 2020, 09:46:00 AM »
Companies love metrics, but as soon as those metrics show employees are more productive given the freedom of WFH, they just ignore them.

It's not just on remote work.

The metrics on "open office floorplans" are similarly bad, but everyone's doubling down, because cutting the productivity of your (often rather expensive) employees to save a bit on office space is... apparently amazing?

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #37 on: January 20, 2020, 09:52:13 AM »

I believe that if that were truly the case, we'd be seeing a lot more telecommuting, onsite managers be damned!  The big management consultancies would be able to sell their services to firms wanting to transition to this.  Perhaps part of this analysis is that remote workers, because they can be hired for less and are less likely to leave, are more productive per unit to compensation than onsite workers.


Companies love metrics, but as soon as those metrics show employees are more productive given the freedom of WFH, they just ignore them.  Why?  Because of autocratic capitalism.   It's as simple as that, you would think it'd be obvious on a board like this where most people want to GTFO and seem to lean left much more than the populace at large.

What the studies actually show, is "it depends." The most commonly sited studies show that WFH log more hours. OK, that proves nothing. There are studies that show that people in some types of jobs are more productive by objective standards. These tend to be sales jobs and similar where a worker's primary contact is with people outside of the company. There are just as many jobs for which it is less productive.

What does not come up in the few studies I have looked through is whether or not family circumstances have an effect on WFH productivity.

GuitarStv

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #38 on: January 20, 2020, 10:11:29 AM »
It's hard to manage people, especially information type workers.  It's easy to note if there's an ass in the seat every day, and occasionally walk by to check for youtube vids.  My experience has been that most of the push back against WFH is from shit managers.  They are unable to use their terrible metrics to gauge performance when people work from home.  YMMV.

mathlete

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #39 on: January 20, 2020, 10:28:37 AM »
I have WFH flexibility but I'm much more productive at the office. A two minute conversation can clear up a logjam so that I can continue work on a project. While working from home, that's usually addressed via email. Depending upon the person, they may take hours to give me the information that I would've gotten in the informal two minute conversation.

I also have difficulties with the allure of doing things that aren't work while at home.

norajean

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #40 on: January 20, 2020, 10:43:25 AM »
If your job is 90% isolated programming with no interaction with others whatsoever, it can work.  Most of that can and should be outsourced or automated.  But the moment you need interaction, it all starts to unravel. In my experience, the biggest value adds occur in live face-to-face meetings, interactions, discussions, arguments, collaborations, etc with full body language, animated behavior, white board pictures, etc.   That goes for internal work as well as customer interaction.  Value-boosting interaction can be planned (eg meetings, workshops) or spontaneous (stomp into another office, bump into someone getting coffee).  If you work is not about people, I doubt you are adding any significant value for your employer.  You are a replaceable widget maker.

mm1970

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #41 on: January 20, 2020, 10:55:19 AM »
All you people who are against working from home with your blah blah anectdotes.   The fact is there's a mountain of evidence that remote workers are more productive, society saves on environmental costs, companies save on real estate costs, workers are healthier and happier because they don't have to waste time commuting, workers save on commute costs, etc. 

I'm not going to suggest that there should be some gov't mandate, but it would be great if the big bosses quit being autocratic douches with respect to butts in seats since that doesn't help workers be more productive anyway.   Simply allow workers to WFH much more of the time should they want to do so.    If you can't trust your employees to be productive wherever they work, maybe that should tell you something about the way you choose your employees.   

It's simply about control since most high level bosses are control freak assholes.  I mean that is the nature of the capitalism we have where workers essentially have very little freedom in most workplaces.   It's one of the major reasons I FIRED myself. 

At my last workplace we officially were supposed to WFH only 2x a week, but I didn't give a shit since I had FU & FIRE money so I WFH whenever I felt like it which was pretty much every day LOL.

This is kind of rude, and ignores the fact that ... it depends on the job and the person.

Quote
Let me give you an example.  Two mechanical engineers, one local, one remote.  The local guy has some changes he needs remote guy to make.  If they were in the same place, the one guy could walk over to the other guy's office, point at something on the screen, and be done in 30 seconds.  With the geographical separation, the first guy has to take a screenshot or print something off, somehow annotate it, send it to the remote engineer, and hope it gets interpreted the right way.  Or fire up a video conference and try to explain it via webcam, and again hope it gets interpreted correctly.

Yep.  I'm in engineering.  In the past, when I was a fab engineer, I had to be in the fab.  There's no "remote" when you are qualifying tools and running experiments, though the occasional WFH day was helpful to get caught up on paperwork.

Even now, I no longer work in the fab, and could probably WFH a lot BUT it just wouldn't be as effective overall.  I need to talk to people face to face, review data, look at qualification plans, discuss plans and results - and that is SUPER hard to do over the phone.  We do it - we have some people call in, and we have regular meetings with Asia but it takes a GREAT deal of extra work and effort and TIME to get things to happen.  I've been in meetings where 15 minutes were wasted arguing over the phone about a plan when it would have taken only 5 if everyone was in the damn room.

Now, that's not to say that never WFH is bad.  I WFH on Monday mornings, and I really can get a LOT accomplished in just a few hours.  I can focus with no interruptions and accomplish a LOT.  That's not true for everyone - some people insist that "WFH" means watching TV, cooking dinner, folding laundry, or whatever.  And that may actually be true.  For some jobs it only  matters what you get done.  If at home, I can get X amount of work done in 2.5 hours and spend 1.5 hours folding laundry, does anyone really care if I'm getting the same amount done as 4 hours at the office with interruptions? 

(I liken this to my kids and homework.  If I ignore the teen and "I need help" then he'll figure it out in 10 minutes.  If I'm at the office it is FAR too easy for my coworkers to rely on me because I know almost everything and can do things much faster than they can.  Teach a man to fish...)

So yeah, for me it's a balance.

mathlete

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #42 on: January 20, 2020, 01:16:57 PM »
Another thing to consider; my job, like many of yours, is to be a smart person who sits at a computer. In light of the fact that China will start graduating 10 million people a year from college at some point this decade, I'm reticent to push for a future where telecommuting is mandatory.

GettingClose

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #43 on: January 20, 2020, 01:41:38 PM »
Quote
I work on the engineering team for a small startup.  About half the engineers are remote, i.e. >1,000 miles away.  In my experience, it has been tremendously detrimental to our team's productivity.

Let me give you an example.  Two mechanical engineers, one local, one remote.  The local guy has some changes he needs remote guy to make.  If they were in the same place, the one guy could walk over to the other guy's office, point at something on the screen, and be done in 30 seconds.  With the geographical separation, the first guy has to take a screenshot or print something off, somehow annotate it, send it to the remote engineer, and hope it gets interpreted the right way.  Or fire up a video conference and try to explain it via webcam, and again hope it gets interpreted correctly.

I'm the lead software engineer for my company and couldn't agree more.  About half my team works remotely and it's about a 20-40% productivity hit for the entire team, although it's possible that if each member were measured individually they would appear more productive.

The biggest barrier is communication - especially when doing design and code review.  If I have questions and the programmer is in the office, I can call him in and point to the screen and get answers, explanations, and usually a resolution within 10 minutes.  This often involves pulling up screens, searching through other similar code, and the quick sketching of diagrams.  If the programmer is offsite, this easily takes an hour, frustratingly spread over several days.

Agreeing with norajean, I can't tell you how many times random comments in a morning meeting have saved someone hours of work.  It just rarely happens with the remote workers, even if we Skype them in.

Also, some people do goof off at home.   I can be one of them ...  Especially because my so is FIREd and has already forgotten what it's like to work ;-)

My strong preference would be to have everyone working in the office 4 days a week, with two afternoons at home or with closed office door for "deep thought" work.  It's not about control, but about what's best for the team as a whole.


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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #44 on: January 20, 2020, 01:45:39 PM »
I'm glad that my career was in sales. I think it's one of the last professions that will be automated or outsourced. Especially considering that I was in the outside sales division, since my core day-to-day duties were making in-person sales calls and establishing and fostering human relationships.

But even our inside sales department, which made contact with customers via telephone calls, video-conferencing, e-mails, virtual meetings, would not easily be replaced either. Time and time again, my company experimented with outsourcing/centralizing the inside sales team, perhaps even basing it in a country where English was the first language. But because they weren't familiar with the local/regional culture, they were never as successful as competitors with reps that could talk easily about how well the local sports teams were doing, the crappy weather that day, etc.

And back to the topic at hand: these inside salespeople could work from home if they could provide a quiet and non-distracting environment to do their jobs. It's because the performance metric was quite simple, it wasn't how long you spent in your chair in front of a screen. It was, "Did you close business? Did you make quota?" Yes or no. How you did it, where you did it and when you did it (though it pretty much mandated a 9-to-5 presence) was irrelevant.

Just Joe

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #45 on: January 20, 2020, 02:35:57 PM »
I'm glad that my career was in sales. I think it's one of the last professions that will be automated or outsourced. Especially considering that I was in the outside sales division, since my core day-to-day duties were making in-person sales calls and establishing and fostering human relationships.

Do you not worry about self-service sales aka Amazon, McMaster-Carr, Uline, etc?

EndlessJourney

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #46 on: January 20, 2020, 02:53:59 PM »
Do you not worry about self-service sales aka Amazon, McMaster-Carr, Uline, etc?

No government organization, bank or insurance company is going to buy $3M a year worth of vendor-sourced IT SW and services through Amazon...

:)

PDXTabs

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #47 on: January 20, 2020, 03:43:29 PM »
I'm the lead software engineer for my company and couldn't agree more.  About half my team works remotely and it's about a 20-40% productivity hit for the entire team...

The biggest barrier is communication - especially when doing design and code review.  If I have questions and the programmer is in the office, I can call him in and point to the screen and get answers, explanations, and usually a resolution within 10 minutes.  This often involves pulling up screens, searching through other similar code, and the quick sketching of diagrams.  If the programmer is offsite, this easily takes an hour, frustratingly spread over several days...

My strong preference would be to have everyone working in the office 4 days a week, with two afternoons at home or with closed office door for "deep thought" work.  It's not about control, but about what's best for the team as a whole.

You can't just put your headset on and do a shared slack call for your code reviews? I do understand that design can be a little harder, at my office we are experimenting with online shared whiteboard solutions.

As for the velocity of your team, it is my strong belief that at least 50% of your team's time should be in those "deep thought" work-times. Maybe you as the lead can't be in flow 50% of the time, but that doesn't mean that your team can't be. Seriously, all it takes is a little bit of planning to not interrupt your people all the time.


Dave1442397

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #48 on: January 20, 2020, 04:29:17 PM »
All you people who are against working from home with your blah blah anectdotes.   The fact is there's a mountain of evidence that remote workers are more productive, society saves on environmental costs, companies save on real estate costs, workers are healthier and happier because they don't have to waste time commuting, workers save on commute costs, etc. 

I'm not going to suggest that there should be some gov't mandate, but it would be great if the big bosses quit being autocratic douches with respect to butts in seats since that doesn't help workers be more productive anyway.   Simply allow workers to WFH much more of the time should they want to do so.    If you can't trust your employees to be productive wherever they work, maybe that should tell you something about the way you choose your employees.   

It's simply about control since most high level bosses are control freak assholes.  I mean that is the nature of the capitalism we have where workers essentially have very little freedom in most workplaces.   It's one of the major reasons I FIRED myself. 

At my last workplace we officially were supposed to WFH only 2x a week, but I didn't give a shit since I had FU & FIRE money so I WFH whenever I felt like it which was pretty much every day LOL.
Agree 100%.  I remember when I worked in an office, I'd waste 30-40% of the day in useless meetings, people stopping by for irrelevant stuff, and me taking longer lunches because I couldn't stand the cubed environment.  Then add in another 1-2 hours per day for commute, it was nearly unbearable.

I'd rather work from home for 10 hours per day than be in the office for 8 hours for the same pay.  I can set aside a small area for telecommuting with no issues.

Plus with all of the video conferencing tools, instant messaging, VPNs, etc., there is virtually no loss of productivity when working from home vs on-site, in most commercial settings, in my experience.

Also agree 100%. The soul-sucking commute I go through on the couple of days a month that I go to the office is just insane. I leave my house at 5am to beat the traffic (it's still heavy, even at that time), and coming home is a crapshoot - road works, accidents, weather...always something.

I get so much more done at home. I can instant message, share screens, give control or take control of other people's screens when I need to. It's actually easier and more efficient than trying to read over someone's shoulder in a cubicell. If I need to monitor something after my usual work hours, I don't mind doing that. I can go exercise, come back, take a few minutes to check on things, whatever.

Being in the office means being cold, listening to the customer service crew in the next aisle shrieking about last night's TV, people yakking all day long, and me doing maybe half of what I'd usually get done at home.


roomtempmayo

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Re: Why isn't telecommuting more mandatory since it is a win-win-win?
« Reply #49 on: January 20, 2020, 05:13:05 PM »

I believe that if that were truly the case, we'd be seeing a lot more telecommuting, onsite managers be damned!  The big management consultancies would be able to sell their services to firms wanting to transition to this.  Perhaps part of this analysis is that remote workers, because they can be hired for less and are less likely to leave, are more productive per unit to compensation than onsite workers.


Companies love metrics, but as soon as those metrics show employees are more productive given the freedom of WFH, they just ignore them.  Why?  Because of autocratic capitalism.   It's as simple as that, you would think it'd be obvious on a board like this where most people want to GTFO and seem to lean left much more than the populace at large.

What the studies actually show, is "it depends." The most commonly sited studies show that WFH log more hours. OK, that proves nothing. There are studies that show that people in some types of jobs are more productive by objective standards. These tend to be sales jobs and similar where a worker's primary contact is with people outside of the company. There are just as many jobs for which it is less productive.

What does not come up in the few studies I have looked through is whether or not family circumstances have an effect on WFH productivity.

It's MLK day today, and the kids are off school.  How many hours of WFH time do you suppose was billed today that was actually childcare?  I expect the number was incredible.
 
Friends who are a couple with two pre-school children have the following child care arrangement:

Monday grandma comes over and watches the kids while both parents go to work.
Tuesday and Thursday mom is WFH with the kids.
Wednesday and Friday dad is WFH with the kids.

Voila, no daycare bill.  Both parents are working about three days a week and getting paid for five.  They're not lazy, they just know what they can get away with and they maximize it for their advantage.

The strong argument for allowing WFH isn't that the above is uncommon.  Looking around at people I know, I'd say some version of the above, to a greater or lesser extent, is extremely common. 

The strong argument for WFH is that using work time for personal tasks doesn't matter, because lots of people aren't really working more than 20 hours a week anyways, so it's better to let them use the other 20 for whatever they want than force them to sit at the office watching sports reruns on their second monitor.  WFH might be an implied acknowledgement of that reality, but in that case let's just chop the work week back to 20 or 25 hours and quit pretending people are really working 40 or 50.

 

Wow, a phone plan for fifteen bucks!