Ask Slashdot: Why Do We Still Commute? (citylab.com) 422
An anonymous reader writes: Over the last year, many companies have ended their liberal work-from-home policies. Firms like IBM, Honeywell, and Aetna joined a long list of others that have deemed it more profitable to force employees to commute to the city and work in a central office than give them the flexibility to work where they want. It wasn't supposed to be this way. In 1975, when personal computers were little more than glorified calculators for geeks and the Internet was an obscure project being developed by the United States government, Macrae, an influential journalist for The Economist who earned a reputation for clairvoyant prophesies -- including the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Japan -- made a radical prediction about how information technology would soon transform our lives. Macrae foretold the exact path and timeline that computers would take over the business world and then become a fixture of every American home. But he didn't stop there. The spread of this machine, he argued, would fundamentally change the economics of how most of us work. Once workers could communicate with their colleagues through instant messages and video chat, he reasoned, there would be little coherent purpose to trudge long distances to work side by side in centrally located office spaces.
cause my boss likes us here (Score:5, Insightful)
so he can lord over us
makes him feel special so we all drive an hour to get here
yay
Re: cause my boss likes us here (Score:2)
For the same reason people are forced to have "standup" meetings.
Fuck you, prole, that's why.
Re:cause my boss likes us here (Score:5, Insightful)
That solution is simple. Fire them. Promote good workers, fire bad; same as it's always been. In my experience you can't make a bad employee good by any means. Your best weapon is to most accurately just performance and attitude.
Re:cause my boss likes us here (Score:5, Insightful)
That solution is simple. Fire them. Promote good workers, fire bad; same as it's always been.
From my experience, management very rarely knows which workers are good and which are bad.
Re: cause my boss likes us here (Score:5, Informative)
From my experience, the worst workers are in management.
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Peter Principle applied I guess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Re: cause my boss likes us here (Score:5, Interesting)
In my experience, the Peter Principle is rooted in the culture of most companies. Promotions happen only by shifting people from production to management and the best and most productive workers are also often the worst manager.
We decided that we're better off by creating an "expert" promotion line for our technical workers where their promotion path keeps them in the technical area and away from management, their line leading to them shifting from everyday jobs to being the (now also official) go-to guys for problem or internal consultants.
That way we keep them in their technical line, can benefit from their advanced and often unique knowledge, keep them from turning from brilliant engineers to mediocre managers, and they have a career line ahead of them that isn't a dead end because they're "only" productive instead of managing.
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Actually so far the results are pretty convincing. Mostly because our top echelons have no problem bumping people back down that don't perform, and people actually ask to be returned to their previous positions if they notice that their performance isn't up to speed.
This is mostly due to the way our payment system works, which is quite heavily tied to your performance. A poorly performing team manager can go home with considerably less money than a very well performing person working under him. So your ince
Because management is as much skill as talent (Score:4, Insightful)
And almost no corporation puts effort into training for it. Every place I have ever worked never once made teaching how to manage people a priority for those they put into management roles. In retail it's doubly fucked because they expect management to do the same jobs as those on the floor on top of everything needed to manage the store.
I don't know if that's the way it's always been or not. Although I do kinda feel like it has been.
If managers were actually allowed and taught how to manage, I'd think they'd be able to tell the good workers from the poor ones. From there it would be reasonable to either manage people into working better or into leaving. But because managers aren't often left to manage their people they don't get to be reasonable about it. It's done by intuition and appearance more than results and effort.
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There are some companies that train leaders: GE, AT&T, McDonalds.
The military puts a lot of effort into leadership training. One of their best techniques is the "reaction course". I remember doing this at Marine OCS. You take a squad of a dozen Marines, pick one guy to be the leader, and then give them a task such as moving a 55 gal drum across a 15 foot ditch in 10 minutes, using some random lumber and rope. A dozen people are too many to manage directly, so the leader needs to delegate and coord
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Being a "Wally" is definitely a skill, taking training and attitude. Add to that that any number of Wallies have found that management can be the safest place to hide the fact that they do little/no work.
OTOH, working from home is like schoolteachers. One can say, "six hours a day, summers off," but anyone who knows a good teacher knows that they work their butts off, putting in a lot of what people with normal work hours would consider overtime. It can often be hard to measure work output, and measuring
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Say it like it is, management very rarely knows what their workers are actually really doing, or how much time a given task really takes. If they did, they could easily gauge which workers work and which slack.
Since most managers have no clue what they're managing, their only way to at least have an idea whether the people are working is whether they're staring at a screen.
Fire the manager, get one that knows what you're doing and let your workers telecommute.
Re:cause my boss likes us here (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure. Let's do that. You have never been in management, have you?
Let's say you have four workers. Let's say these employees work in the same department. Let's apply your idea. Here are the rules:
1) Any two employees will never do exactly the same job. You can' just fire the bad ones because then someone else needs to be trained to do that job.
2) Even if everyone is cross-trained to do everyone else's job employees will ALWAYS seek to specialized in order to invoke rule number 1.
3) If you manage to get everyone to document every aspect of their jobs so that everyone is performing the same way, then upper management will always seek to trim extra workers. If you as a manager have four workers doing the same thing AND those workers have vacation days that means you can operate with three workers. Need to justify keeping an employee? Invoke rule number 1.
4) It is in the best interest of every manager to expand his or her group and scope at every opportunity. If you have a $25k budget you need a $30k budget. If you have four workers you need six. You need a bigger budget and more people because... rule number 1.
As a manager, just keeping the budget and the people you have is a struggle. Firing a marginally underperforming worker constitutes insanity. Cross-training for efficiency is a form of suicide. Smart employees know this. Lazy employees know that the bare minimum they need to do is keep people from complaining to their boss's boss and they probably have a job for life.
Re:cause my boss likes us here (Score:4, Informative)
Mod parent up!
Sure. Let's do that. You have never been in management, have you?
Let's say you have four workers. Let's say these employees work in the same department. Let's apply your idea. Here are the rules:
1) Any two employees will never do exactly the same job. You can' just fire the bad ones because then someone else needs to be trained to do that job. 2) Even if everyone is cross-trained to do everyone else's job employees will ALWAYS seek to specialized in order to invoke rule number 1. 3) If you manage to get everyone to document every aspect of their jobs so that everyone is performing the same way, then upper management will always seek to trim extra workers. If you as a manager have four workers doing the same thing AND those workers have vacation days that means you can operate with three workers. Need to justify keeping an employee? Invoke rule number 1. 4) It is in the best interest of every manager to expand his or her group and scope at every opportunity. If you have a $25k budget you need a $30k budget. If you have four workers you need six. You need a bigger budget and more people because... rule number 1.
As a manager, just keeping the budget and the people you have is a struggle. Firing a marginally underperforming worker constitutes insanity. Cross-training for efficiency is a form of suicide. Smart employees know this. Lazy employees know that the bare minimum they need to do is keep people from complaining to their boss's boss and they probably have a job for life.
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If you measure performance, that just means that a good worker only has to put in 4-6 hours a day to achieve the performance required to keep the job. In the remaining time he can read slashdot, or get a second job.
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Funny thing that - when enough people abuse power long enough and blatantly enough, eventually society gets fed up with it and starts fighting back. The backlash does tend to make legitimate uses of power more difficult, but we only have to look at the news to see that the abuses that caused it on remain largely an ongoing problem.
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That was pretty much my take on it as well.
The workplace is just all kinds of retarded. They will hire a hundred Indians just to keep from paying a single non-Indian $10 per hour more. Then they can't figure out why costs are exploding and performance is in freefall.
Re:cause my boss likes us here (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the post is correct. For most of us the answer to why we still commute is buried in organizational resistance to change.
Old world management philosophies, equating occupied chairs and parking spaces with productivity, not wishing to let go of the ability to micromanage, etc...
Re:cause my boss likes us here (Score:5, Insightful)
For most of us the answer to why we still commute is buried in organizational resistance to change.
That doesn't explain why many companies tried telecommuting, found the results disappointing, and went back to requiring everyone to come to the office.
Companies are driven by profit. If they could get the same productivity without paying rent and utilities, most would do it. But productivity is not the same.
Re:cause my boss likes us here (Score:5, Insightful)
There is an explanation as to why companies are beginning to mandate work from offices.
Companies with a multitude of remote workers can state: All workers must now work from an office... effectively getting a layoff that isn't legally a layoff.
They are giving employees a 'choice' to either commute or relocate (or not be employed). They are certain to get a RIF without all of the normal protections employees would otherwise have.
Re:cause my boss likes us here (Score:4, Interesting)
That doesn't explain why many companies tried telecommuting, found the results disappointing, and went back to requiring everyone to come to the office.
This seems far more likely to be the real explanation. Remote working has benefits, sometimes for both employer and employee, but it also has costs and it's possible that when companies that do it succeed it is despite the remote work rather than because of it.
The interesting questions IMHO are why some organisations seem to do much better with a lot of remote work than others. Is it about the nature of the organisation's work, so maybe some things are more amenable to being done remotely? Is it about the staff hired and their work ethic? Is it that some stages in a task require a lot of interaction that is more effective with everyone in the same place but other stages can be done just as well or even better from a distance and with fewer interruptions? Is it a case of needing the right processes and communication tools to support remote working, which some organisations have provided where others have not?
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One word: Windows.
In my last job I had a linux desktop and when I worked from home it was almost like being at my desk. I only tended to do occasional days from home, if it had been for weeks or months at a time I'd have got a better graphics card and more screens at home but a dual screen setup was almost as good as a four screen setup that I had at work.
In
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Then I would ask your IT department why they go through citrix rather than just letting you VPN in and remote desktop to your machine in the office. I do this all the time, and it supports multiple monitors just fine. I have two monitors at the office, and two at home, although the ones are home are larger with a higher resolution.
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That doesn't explain why many companies tried telecommuting, found the results disappointing, and went back to requiring everyone to come to the office.
My guess is that in every job there's a decent amount of slack between expected performance and how a really good/poor day is. At the office, you keep working until it's time to go home because there's not much else to do. At home I'm guessing many get tempted to say that even though you took an hour's lunch, surfed the net, ran a few errands and did a bit of housekeeping you still pulled off what you consider a full day's work. And you'd have days like that at work where you didn't get more done either, bu
Re:cause my boss likes us here (Score:5, Insightful)
There may indeed be a perception that productivity can't be the same
It is much more than just a perception. Some people will be more productive when telecommuting. Many more will see their productivity drop, in some cases to zero. This is partly due to laziness and distractions, but also due to miscommunications and lack of coordination.
or that any lessening of productivity is not management's fault
There is no magic pixie dust to create perfect managers. Policies should be designed for people as they are in reality, not for some unobtainable ideal. Failure is not okay just because you can put the blame on others. You still failed.
Re:cause my boss likes us here (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:cause my boss likes us here (Score:5, Funny)
Re:cause my boss likes us here (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't trust your employees, why are they your employees?
Re: cause my boss likes us here (Score:3)
HR decides, not you! And they simply see hiring as some burocratic thing.
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Because Our Dormitories Are Not Ready (Score:5, Insightful)
Our dormitories in the company towns are not ready yet. When they are, our commute will be four floors down from our cell to our cubicle.
The broadband connectivity will be awesome. And we'll be able to go outdoors into the courtyard every other Sunday.
Re:Because Our Dormitories Are Not Ready (Score:5, Funny)
And we'll be able to go outdoors into the courtyard every other Sunday.
That's not mandatory is it?
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Done? Certainly.
Done right? How much are you willing to spend to bridge wildly different languages, cultures, and work ethics?
Besides, by this point I think it should be obvious that if you work in the information economy your job can be moved overseas without much trouble. Better than manufacturing at least, where your job has *already* moved overseas and can't move back without major investments.
But hey, service jobs are booming, and if you work two of them you can probably live above the poverty line!
My reasons (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't do audiobooks, but my car stereo is by far my best quality audio equipment, and the car is the only place I can listen to music at a decent volume without pissing someone off. I enjoy my (admittedly short 25 minute) commute, and I prefer leaving the house to work. I have a very clear mental distinction between work mode and relax mode, and the commute makes a nice transition between the two.
Re:My reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
I prefer leaving the house to work. I have a very clear mental distinction between work mode and relax mode, and the commute makes a nice transition between the two.
I've known people with a similar attitude who solved it by adding a fake "commute" to their working from home. They'd get ready for work, hop in the car and drive around for 5-10 minutes. Or go pick up something from Starbucks. Something that was a similar "and now it is time to work" flag.
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That sounds silly to people who have never worked from home, but it is such a good idea. I worked from home for a few years, and while it sounds great to roll out of bed in your PJs, log in, and be at work, there is a real-world downside. Work never ends. Work stress comes home. I go from work, to coming home and playing a video game -- but IM is still online. Other people in other time zones are still IMing me. I felt *guilty* having fun on my home computer, almost like I should be working. It was s
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Everyone keeps suggesting audiobooks but I simply cannot focus on a spoken novel while driving.
Not everyone is like you - which is why traffic deaths have been going up over the past several years, after steadily heading down for decades.
Fortunately when one of those inattentive drivers meets my train, the train wins. Every time.
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Maybe try books targeting the young-adult audience? Far less to keep track of, and still a far deeper storyline than most TV shows.
Re:My reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you want to listen to a synthetic voice producing comprehensible but uncomprehending speech rather than a professional reader whose voice is pleasant to listen to and conveys the emotional context of the book?
I mean, while you're at it why watch movies when you could just have your computer emotionlessly read the screenplay instead?
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Why would you want to listen to a synthetic voice producing comprehensible but uncomprehending speech rather than a professional reader whose voice is pleasant to listen to and conveys the emotional context of the book?
Maybe that voice better matches the characters in his book?
Re:My reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
Err... why an audio book? If you cannot make your computer read any book to you, then you have to hand back your geek card.
Have you ever listened to a real audiobook, Anonymous Coward? They're presented by skilled actors who manage the accents and cadence of the book.
Listening to a computer-read audio book is like hearing a Cylon get directions from the Imperious Leader back in1978,
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The root cause of this problem is the (post-WW2) urban design and layout of most (North) American cities, not in the fact that employers require workers to be physically in the office.
There are places on this Earth where living (relatively) close to work is possible and affordable, where commuting is a 15 min. walk or a 30 min. bus/subway ride, or a 20 min. drive, or some such thing.
To eat. (Score:3)
One Example Where Commuting Doesn't Work (Score:5, Insightful)
I work in a company producing IoT, internet of things, devices that use RF.
The reason that I still commute is that I don't have access to RF test equipment or RF chambers at home. The equipment that I need to use to validate my software simply isn't practical to have at home. I suspect that anybody doing software development for the embedded device marketplace faces similar constraints.
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So then wouldn’t that be an example where commuting does work?
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So then wouldn’t that be an example where commuting does work?
Clearly not, if he's spending his day dicking around on /.
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Yup, that's a huge reason. Maybe a lot of slashdotters don't realize this, but there are more to many jobs than just reading and forwarding email. Sometimes you need lab equipment, you need the devices or components that you are designing or building, you need face to face time with actual customers, and things like that. Does anyone really think a security guard could work from home? But it's slashdot, so many readers assume everyone must follow their example.
Also good reasons for commuting for many:
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Blame the Boomers (Score:5, Interesting)
We still commute because the Baby Boomer generation is still disproportionately represented in the C level positions. They grew up in an era where you had to physically see a worker to know they were actually working. If you did not see them, then they must be slacking. Even those who are somewhat technologically savvy grew up with that ingrained in how management worked. Even some of the early Gen-Xers, those in their early fifties now, picked up this attitude just because they started working in a time before computers were so pervasive.
I think you will see this change as the later Gen-Xers and millennials begin to take management positions, but with Gen-X likely being the first generation that will not be able to retire (in general) this may be a long time coming
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By your logic, Facebook shouldn't even have an office.
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If you don't think people slack more when they're working from home - especially if they have family distractions around such as kids or a wife who needs some help etc etc - than when they're in the office then I've got a bridge for sale you might be interested in.
Its nothing to to with generations - its everything to do with human nature and thats not something technology can - yet - solve.
Re:Blame the Boomers (Score:5, Insightful)
I manage people. Some of them work remotely for a span of weeks-to-months from time to time.
If we interact face-to-face, everything is good. If the worker is remote, their productivity goes down the tubes, even when I get daily progress reports. When I don't get daily progress reports, essentially nothing gets done.
I have enough experience to be able to see a trend in the 15 or so people I've had work for me, but it clearly isn't enough to generalize to everyone outside my laboratory, nor outside my field, nor to other managers. It doesn't apply to all of the people I've had work for me (and the ones who remain productive while remote are true gems), but the trend is very, very clear.
Re:Blame the Boomers (Score:5, Interesting)
I tend to agree with this. My wife has a good job that pays well, but has a crazy commute and the company has an absolute rigid no-work-from-home policy, with work hours that are actually enforced. They're essentially stuck in the 70s when it comes to management of personnel...if you're not there, you're not working because I can't see you. So she has to drive almost an hour each way and is basically one step away from leaving because it's rapidly becoming not worth it anymore.
Part of it is the nature of the work...the company she works for has lots of front-line workers who do actually need to be there, and lots of call center type jobs where a large fraction of people can't really be trusted to work without supervision. I get that...I used to work for an airline and back-office positions like IT were heavily influenced by the fact that there were pilots, flight attendants, airport agents and mechanics working on location 24/7/365...we never got "holidays", it was only a PTO bucket so you could pick the holidays you weren't working.
I do think a lot of it is senior management hanging onto the old ways. I wouldn't mind some of the job security of working back in that era, but certainly having to come into an office, wear a suit and crank out manual paper pushing tasks all day would drive me nuts. I think that constant supervision would drive anyone who was slightly independent to drink, but I don't know if _everyone_ can handle not being watched at least some of the time.
San Jose (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the housing infrastructure of Silicon Valley is insufficient to support the Human workforce.
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What? There aren't enough RV dealers?
collaboration and trust (Score:3, Insightful)
We go to an office because (a) you get better team collaboration that way and (b) management frequently, and somtimes with good reason, has doubts about whether a person is really working when not physically present.
I think pervasive, high quality, always-on video conferencing could address both of these problems, but that's not really (inexpensively, easily) available today.
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
...because, outside of some utopian fantasy, most work still requires either physically being present, or at least collaboration with a number of other people, and no amount of Skype, VR, or what have you can replace the communication bandwidth and efficacy of actually being there.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Found the manager!
True in Academia (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that the cost of travel to these meetings means that we have less money for grad students, postdocs and equipment shows that the majority think that there is a clear benefit to these meetings and with the state of modern air travel there is no way you can accuse us of "just liking to take trips" - academic grants all require cheap, economy class travel (and even if they didn't most of us would because every dollar saved is more for people and equipment) so many of us now hate getting on a plane! We use virtual meetings where possible to reduce travel costs and avoid air travel but there are somethings for which you need a physical meeting.
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... being physically present increases both the communication bandwidth but also the ease of communication which means that things get discussed which would not if the only meetings were virtual. ...
I actually agree with you on this. I currently work from home one day a week; and, for my job, doing that five days a week would not be the best allocation of my time. I do need to meet with people to discuss projects occasionally, and that does work better face to face. However I am *supposed* to be coding the majority of the time, which I invariably am able to focus on more when I'm at home - for one thing, faculty aren't popping into my living room unannounced, like they do at my office (sometimes to as
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly.
Not to mention that, outside of the Slashdot-type crowd, most people are not a/antisocial geeks that choose jobs that require minimal meaningful interaction with other people (I'm among the more antisocial types myself, but I realize that in wider society, I am in the minority). Maybe many or even most IT/tech jobs can mostly be done from home, but in other fields (think e.g. marketing, branding, event management, such things...then things like auditing...and lots of other examples) it is not possible.
Finally: slackers/abusers removed, the people who complain about not being able to work from home are the ones who like working from home and are productive doing so. Not all of us are productive working from our living room or bedroom (and actually few of us can afford the space for a dedicated home office), and we prefer to spacially separate our work and home lives, and not be distracted by the cat/dog/wife/kids/neighbour mowing the lawn/etc. while working, enjoy, if just for the sake of changing the scenery, getting out of the house and meeting our colleagues, etc.
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So, basically people whose livelihood exists via social manipulation of actual producers, i.e. engineers.
Do you place auditors, retail workers, store managers, call centre workers, post office workers, garbage collectors, grad school administrative workers, lab technicians, etc. etc. in the same category? What about other engineers (see more below)?
Also, let's assume people are forced to come to the office rather than work from home just due to management paranoia. Why then do people from different partner companies fly half-way around the world (e.g. from Europe to Japan or vice-versa) to meet each other face
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I don't know whether most work requires physical presence. Perhaps. Certainly there is quite a lot that can be done without it -- far less than is currently being done remotely. There may be some debate about what is most effective, but that depends on too many variables to make a blanket statement, IMO. Call center work, for instance is a great candidate for remote workers where the option is probably under-utilized. The software used already tracks all the details of when the worker is online (if he start
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, honestly I think there are a couple of types of people who think that there's no reason to actually come into the office:
* Young people severely lacking in experience.
* People who have jobs that require no physical presence, and who can work without much collaboration (email and IM are generally sufficient), and assume everyone's job is like that.
For the second item, I'm sure I'll get some people yelling at me saying, "I'm a programmer, and I collaborate all day long! There are a bunch of other programmers working on my project, and we're constantly sending IMs back and forth. We even do Hangouts." Yeah, but still, the information you get from collaboration is largely that: information. You get the information you need, and then you can go on doing fairly isolated work.
There's something else that happens when you get a bunch of people in a room together, where you can read body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice. A person's physical presence changes things. There are times where I'm having an IM or even phone conversation with someone, and the message just isn't getting across, and so I go and walk over to their office. The direct, face-to-face communication allows for something that just doesn't happen over phone or video chat. In person brainstorming sessions can be more productive than conference calls. It might be purely psychological, but if so, the psychological effect is real and not to be discounted.
Some jobs don't need that. A lot of jobs don't need that all the time, every day. But for some jobs, it's important that it happens.
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I don't work from home often, but when I do I tend to get about 2 days of work done in 6 hours, and then I run out of stuff to do. I have worked remotely before, and I've been paired with a coworker who did as well. In both cases, working remotely was massively productive at the start, then the lack of human contact crushed productivity.
I really think the happy medium is a day every week or two. Give your employees an uninterpreted day to crank through work, and they'll be amazingly productive. I don't unde
I don't. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't... (Score:5, Funny)
The reason why.... (Score:5, Interesting)
As it happened not long after I left they outsourced almost every job anyway. So kind of surprising they later allowed people to work from home and then reversed it again.
Virtual is inferior to the real thing (Score:5, Insightful)
most people are animals (Score:2)
Video conferencing is great, but we're still social animals that interact better when we can shake hands, read body language, share a meal, etc.
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Face Time (not the iOS kind either.) (Score:3)
The company I work for allows _some_ WFH days, but you can tell they're not happy about it. The only reason they do it is because they're trying to remake themselves as "hip" and "with it" so they can attract Millenials. The company used to have a very liberal work-from-anywhere policy, but it turned out that a very large percentage of people abused it and never showed up to the office.
Management still doesn't believe people can be productive without sitting on top of one another in an open office setting. That's because of "collaboration" and "synergy" but IMO bad managers are still hanging on to the idea that you need to be present during working hours, or they can't trust you to produce on your own. In my case, they get plenty of out-of-hours work from me...just yesterday I left early to attend a school thing and worked on my stuff after everyone went to bed.
Personally, I like a mix. I'm not exactly an extrovert so commuting just to talk to colleagues doesn't have the same effect it would on a hyper-outgoing type-A management or marketing person. But, I can also see how someone who isn't as self-directed would just WFH as an excuse to slack. I think management is stuck in the old days when office work involved getting off the train, walking to your desk in a sea of hundreds of desks, and working on the piles of paperwork in your inbox until your shift was over.
In my case, I actually accept a lower salary so I don't have to commute crazy distances. I live "near" NYC but the train ride to the city is almost 90 minutes and driving is nearly out of the question. I've done it in the past, and will only do it again if I have no choice or really need the extra money.
Personal contribution (Score:2)
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Teleconferencing simply isn't as effective as in-person meeting. Happenstance meetings in hallways tend to accomplish a lot more than structured periodic gatherings. The ability to lean over and chat with a coworker about a problem is superior to using email or your phone.
And then there's people like me, who simply need a distinct work environment to be mentally in 'work mode'. I can (and have) worked from home, but unless I have something fascinating to focus on, I tend to be less productive outside the
And When Slack Goes Down? (Score:5, Insightful)
Telecommuting is still not ideal. Even with a decent setup like FiOS, Skype, Slack, etc, there is something to be said about physical presence that the current system simply doesn't support.
I personally don't foresee the day of true telecommuting being the norm again until the infrastructure is much more robust and the tools allow for no distinction of presence and telepresence. That includes technologies like Halolens, backbones of all fiber, and redundant cloud services.
Just as an example, look at how horrible many shows TWiT.tv get when someone is trying to Skype in over WiFi from some Google or Facebook event. Sure, they conference is getting hosed, but they're just trying to have a single conversation. I certainly wouldn't want my Fortune 500's... fortune... resting on the, excuse my language, CRAP infrastructure that we have today.
Think several factors are in play here (Score:2)
1) No partition cubes are now trendy because pointy haired bosses have seized onto it as the key to greater productivity. My current employer has experimented with that and while some groups of customer service people do now have cubicles like that, at present it looks pretty much dead in the IT parts of the office because it just seems unnecessary and maybe even counterproductive. Peo
Not all work can be done remotely (Score:5, Insightful)
At least in my experience:
1. The IT infrastructure isn't there yet. I regularly deal with large files. Transferring those from home to the work server can take an hour. At work the same file transfer is a question of minutes. And I live in a major city in north america, for those who live in rural locations with limited broadband working at home is not a feasible option.
2. Office politics. My wife tried working from home full time after her maternity leave. Then she got passed for a promotion by a coworker who was at the office and developed a better relationship with the senior managers. Personal relationships matter in the workplace, and for that you need face-to-face interaction.
3. Not all work is done on a computer screen. Most of my work is done on a computer, but as an engineer I often deal with testing of mechanical system components which need to be done on-site. And I imagine for those working in the service sector, which are the majority of jobs in North America, there is no choice. You can't be a waiter from home, for example.
Because working from home sucks? (Score:3)
Secrets, equipment, zoning, and distractions (Score:3)
A few reasons:
1. It's not quite as easy to keep trade secrets secret when employee-owned equipment in a residential area is involved. This extends to both the employer's trade secrets and those of its suppliers. Confidentiality is often cited as a reason that video game console makers didn't open up their platforms to individual developers working from home until a couple years ago.
2. Lab or manufacturing equipment may be too expensive for an individual to purchase.
3. Local, state, or federal zoning regulations require certain jobs to be performed in a commercially zoned area. Good luck running (say) a restaurant or a pharmacy out of your home.
4. Local zoning regulations make it difficult for a wired broadband ISP to lay cable or fiber. This has been the case for Seattle proper, where utility installation requires permission from a supermajority of landowners, and absentee landlords and vacant lots count as a no vote.
5. Distractions from other members of the household, such as demands to do housework. "I 'didn't know' you were on the clock. But could you get off the clock for one minute?" which turns into fifteen.
Too many distractions at home (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was younger I thought being able to work from home was a great perk. Now that I'm 20 years older and work at a place where I can choose to WFH pretty much whenever I want, I realize it's not so great.
I have a lot of distractions at home and I'm single. It's very easy to start wandering around the house, doing laundry, cleaning up the kitchen, petting the cats, watching something on Netflix, etc. When I'm at the office there's a more limited number of things to distract myself with. If the environment starts getting too loud with people talking I just put on my noise-cancelling headphones and zone out.
It's also a lot easier to troubleshoot a problem someone is having when I can just walk over to their desk and watch what they're doing. I suppose video chat would work, but it's a lot more cumbersome. I work for a start-up, so there's a lot of ad-hoc conversations between the different groups and decisions are made quickly. Chat works pretty well, but it's definitely inferior to a face-to-face conversation.
I'm fortunate to live in a large city with a great public transportation system. My current commute involves a 20 minute walk to a train station followed by a 15 minute ride and a two block walk to the office. I watch all of the cars queued up to enter the expressways in the evening and just shake my head. I had a 90 minute commute many years ago and it was a killer. I'd get done with work and then be pissed off that it's going to take me another hour and a half to get home; and I didn't have to drive. There is just no way that I'd ever live somewhere where my only option for a commute was driving. I have family in Sarasota and they have to drive everywhere. No thank you!
It's not easy to communicate remotely.. (Score:2)
I know, you can leave a chat window open, I know you can have voice calls and screen sharing and video calls (though that last one has never added anything).
Ultimately, however, casual interaction in person is extremely valuable. A large percentage of things I address are things I overhear that folks wouldn't have thought to ask me about. Or else something that someone is comfortable bringing up face to face, but when I'm not there, they are more afraid of 'wasting my time' because they have no way to jud
Easy metrics that measure the wrong thing (Score:2)
Measuring attendance, hours worked, hours in the office is easy.
Measuring productivity is hard.
Previous job, I worked at home because all my time was billed. Measuring productivity was easy.
Current job, I work from work because none of my time is billed. They see me, they say they're validating that I'm working. But none of my output is measured in a meaningful way.
I suspect (Score:2)
Short Answer: Class Warfare (Score:2)
The wonder of immeasurable and intangable (Score:2)
More because there IS value in casual communication that just DOESN'T happen over IM, email or phone... When we wander into the break room or just over hear a conversation.
It's because it's cheaper than layoffs (Score:5, Interesting)
The REAL reason they force folks back into the new office is:
A) they know people have come to love working from home, and many will not be able to handle a long commute after working from home for years, so they'll quit....which is much cheaper than laying them off (and paying severance) or even firing them (and potentially paying unemployment)
B) those folks who stay can now be squeezed into a smaller footprint because they've removed all the bulky cubes and offices, thus less real estate costs because they've reduced the amount of square footage they're occupying.
This is a finance exercise pure and simple.
IBM shifted away from remote working in May. (Score:2)
Wait up - back in May IBM reversed their remoting policy and shifted to bringing people back into the office. Did anyone ever get a solid reason why they opted for this route?
http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/1... [cnn.com]
https://www.bloomberg.com/view... [bloomberg.com]
Manager's can't gauge performance (Score:2)
Global Warming posers (Score:2)
I dont care what anyones position is regarding is there, or isnt there, any sort of man made effect on global warming, I really dont. But most of these Corporations whine ad nauseam about the impact of global warming and insisting someone do something about it. Yet they put their offices in some of the most densely populated areas which 1-2hr commute times. Then they kill telecommuting and put that many more cars on the road, often idling, for 1-2hrs. Fuck them. They should be called out for the 2faced sac
WFH is no panacea. (Score:3)
I've been on highly-distributed teams (no two people co-located), and on teams with one or two far-flung elements, and everything in between. Working from home can work very well, if the team is focused and actively maintains contact, even on days when they don't feel like it, even when things aren't going well. But many workers simply don't work that way, in which case working from home can become a way to hide things and avoid things. Same can happen in an office environment, it's just a little harder at the margins.
Also, the team has to be committed to working from home, you can't just wave a wand on it, they need to be actively on top of broadly communicating things. Otherwise you end up with "in" groups and people get cut out of the loop and everyone gets upset. Again, that can totally happen in an office environment, too, but in my experience it's SO much easier to happen accidentally in a mixed group. Sometimes something will get ironed out over lunch or a quick bull session, and nobody thinks to send the minutes to the offsite people. If that happens too often, the offsite people will find themselves routinely behind the curve, finding out about decisions after they're already being implemented, which can really chip away at their morale.
Lastly, it's really really hard to successfully add new people to a team who work from home. Basically, they need good referrals from trusted sources, and the team needs to really focus on integrating the new person.
Just to be really really clear - I'm not saying work-from-home cannot work or anything like that. I did it for a decade before getting a "real" job, and I quite enjoyed it, it really worked for me. But there were significant downsides, some of which I didn't realize until I had the opportunity to work with similarly-qualified networks of co-located people. I'd be very nervous about joining a group which was trying to set ambitious goals and also having most members working from home.
Most jobs cannot telecommute (Score:3)
Once workers could communicate with their colleagues through instant messages and video chat, he reasoned, there would be little coherent purpose to trudge long distances to work side by side in centrally located office spaces.
It is a relatively rare job that can effectively and economically conduct all it's communication through IM and video chat. For example I am a manager at a manufacturing company. Our employees do not sit in front of computers writing code all day. If I worked from home I would effectively have near zero communication with my staff because they are busy making products. While I could do some engineering from home, a large chunk of my job would be impossible to do off site. Good luck telecommuting to a hospital or a restaurant or a retail store or fitness center.
There are some cases where telecommuting works great. There are many more where it simply doesn't work at all or doesn't work well. Even jobs that are compatible with telecommuting (like writing code) often find considerable added value in being co-located in the same building. A lot of people lose significant productivity when they aren't in an office and there is a surprising amount of administrative burden to managing a remote team.
You insensitive clod! (Score:2, Insightful)
HVAC maintenance IS tech!!!
Re: (Score:2)
I also don't telecommute anymore. I did it for ten years, and ended up utterly hating it. I still work with remote people when I go to the office, but really I just need to get out of the house. I am so much more focused and productive when I have a deadline looming everyday :). I'm also so much more productive just being around people: you can pick up so much more being in earshot of people, or just having people around who might randomly be able to save you a whole bunch of time Googling for things.
Re:Diaspora to the countryside (Score:5, Insightful)
We only need two things before most white collar people leave the crowded and expensive cities and move to the countryside
You'll need a third thing: People will have to want to move to the countryside. A lot of people don't.
The reason people are moving to cities right now isn't that they're being forced as much as, that's where the stuff is. There are places to go and things to do. Some people actually like being part of civilization, rather than retreating to a cabin in the middle of nowhere.