by nunez | 2025-04-18 18:35:23+00:00
I think it goes beyond bad management.

These are my disadvantages of working remotely. I say all of these things as an advocate for hybrid work arrangements and co-working spaces/satellite offices:

1) Some people work better in an office. Offices are literally designed for working anyhow.

2) Some people didn't, and/or still don't, have optimal conditions in their house to work remotely.

I've seen tons of people on camera (another thing some management likes to "encourage" by mandate) who are working out of bedrooms, closets, or other makeshift rooms in their house. This is just _asking_ for a constant barrage of distractions.

3) Some jobs aren't compatible with remote work. Examples:

- Tech sales (moreso for complex sales and expansions than new sales)

- Many people who work in the public sector (even before this administration's aggressive RTO campaign)

- Most folks doing hardware or embedded work

- Pretty much everyone that we interact with outside of our home on a daily basis, like front desk personnel, doctors, mechanics, retail and restaurant staff, etc.

This creates an unfair imbalance of "haves" and "have nots". It is also very easy for the "have nots" to typecast those who WFH as lazy, especially given some of the memes of people doing all sorts of other things during core hours.

4) Some people don't naturally communicate what they're doing over Slack. This is the one thing I'll blame on management is communication.

Weekly "15-minute" hour long standups and check-in meetings covered for people like this back when we worked in offices, but it can be easy for these checkpoints to slip in when everyone's remote.

Now, these meetings existing are, in and of themselves, signs that management can be improved. Between Slack/Teams/whatever, bug trackers, Git commit histories, Office 365/Google Workspace APIs and all of the other signs of life of people doing things, there are ways for the PHBs to check that people are doing things so that they can report the things being done to their PHBs so they can report to their PHBs all the way up to the board and investors.

It would be great if more companies invested more in their processes to make it possible to assess productivity without needing inefficient meetings. This would make it possible to be a high-performing company regardless of location.

But change is hard, and it's easier for senior leaders/execs to throw their hands up and say "this isn't working; back to the office, now", especially when those leaders are already traveling all of the time as it is.

(I know that the trope of CxOs who golf/eat steak dinners all of the time is common; my experience working with people at these levels does not completely reflect that.)

5) Work-life balance is so much easier to immolate when working remotely.

When your home is your office and your work apps are on your personal phone, it takes the mental fortitude of a thousand monks to not be "terminally online" at work.

"I'll just hop back on after I'm done with the kids/dinner/etc." is the new normal. It existed before WFH, but it feels so much worse now, as the technology needed to set this up is so much more pervasive (mostly MDM being mature for Apple devices and Android becoming much more secure at the cost of everything that made Android fun for us hackers).

This has the fun side-effect of making people who try very hard to keep work and life as separate as possible look like slackers even when they're not.

6) Establishing rapport and camaraderie is much harder to do remotely. This "just happens" when you're working next to the same people every day for months/years at a time.

This was most evident when I joined a new company after COVID to avoid an acquisition. Almost everyone was super tight with each other because they hung out all of the time. There were so many inside jokes/conversations/memories that I was basically left out of, and because traveling was impossible then, forming new ones didn't really happen.

I get that many on this board view this as a feature, not a bug, but friends at work is important to some (most?) people. It's the one thing I miss from the before times more than anything else. Well, that and traveling all of the time!

7) Last thing I'll say on this: onboarding, in my opinion, is much worse when done remotely.

I've switched companies four times since COVID. ALL of these onboarding experiences have had some combination of:

- Loads of training materials, like labs and new hire sessions, that are dry as toast over Zoom but can be extremely engaging in-person,

- Some kind of buddy system that falls apart because everyone is drowning in a sea of Zoom meetings and the last thing people want to do is have ANOTHER zoom meeting explaining things about your new job that are kind-of difficult to explain without shadowing, and

- An assumption that you are a self-starter who will learn how to do your job by self-organizing meetings with people and scouring whatever documentation/knowledge/recordings/etc you can find.

This might just be a 'me' thing, but I've found remote onboarding to be a poor substitute for onboarding at an office somewhere.