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Why Working Remotely Needs To Make a Comeback
silentbrad writes sends this excerpt from a blog post about the history of working from home:
"Remote working has existed for centuries. And now is the perfect time for its comeback. ... Prior to the Industrial Revolution, goods were manufactured by contracting individual craftsmen who worked out of their homes. The merchant would drum up sales, and would coordinate the production with at-home sub-contractors. ... This all changed with the Industrial Revolution: production was centralized in factories and cities. For merchant capitalists, this made sense: it was cheaper and more efficient to produce goods in one place, with machinery. ... We've been in the Information Age for at least 25 years. We've made huge leaps in technology. Many of us would describe ourselves as Knowledge Workers: we don't work in factories, we work at desks in front of glowing screens. We don't make goods with physical materials, but rather things made out of bits. The great thing about bits + the internet is that the materials and means needed for production aren't dependent on location. But here's the funny thing: the way work is organized hasn't changed. Despite all these advances, most of us still work in central offices. Employees leave their computer-equipped homes and drive long distances to work at computer-equipped offices. ... CEOs, like Yahoo's Marissa Mayer and Apple's Steve Jobs, think that a central office fosters more innovation and productivity. I think they're wrong. We're still early in the research, but recent studies seem to dispute their claim. ... Managers have developed centuries worth of habits based on the central workplace. The hallmarks of office work (meetings, cubicle workstations, colocation) need to be seen for what they are: traditions we've kept alive since the Industrial Revolution. We need to question these institutions: are they really more innovative and efficient?"
I certainly feel I'm much more effective in the quiet of my own home vs. the open-plan chaotic environment called "the office".
I would agree with you if not for the growing trend of collaborative spaces in the IT industry. Sitting isolated in a cubicle and only talking to other people in meetings or the water cooler is no better than working from home and Skyping or talking on the phone. But a collaborative space and pair programming do foster innovation and rapid, high-quality software development. The social aspect yields interesting ideas that the individual would not think of on his (or her) own. Pairing (or at least having extra eyes around) tends to yield higher quality both from being able to have someone check for mistakes and the social pressure of not cutting corners when someone else is looking.
I love it, I can't imagine going back. I like my hammock office, and every time I am forced to work at a desk or table, and can physically feel my mind cramping up. If that is innovation and productivity, count me out!
Don't get me started about my years facing grey half-walls feeling like someone was watching what I was doing behind my back. Gave me the creeps, and again, just made me feel uncomfortable working.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
If you can do your work from home, it's probable that someone else can do the work from the other side of the planet. For less. So be careful what you wish for.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Only the most anachronistic, self-absorbed, border-line sociopathic managers are against working remotely. Marissa Mayer, hint hint. It is a win, win for companies. Companies save money on expensive office space and employes have more job satisfaction resulting in less turnover further saving money for the company. Those managers concerned with "face time" are micromanaging, control freaks.
I think it depends on your office culture. I do phone tech support and can work remotely. Several of my coworkers don't ever drive into the office, several other coworkers work in other parts of the state and when we finish our transitional/expansion period (next 2 months or so), the goal is to have 10-15 people working remotely every day. I actually just had an email needing information to make sure our new VOIP setup will be compatible with everyone's home setups.
... then we can fill our staff with intelligent employees from India!
I recall over the summer reading a piece in the Wall Street Journal (http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2012/07/13/working-from-home-beware-a-career-hit/?mod=e2tw)
Pointing to the fact that telecommuters aka people that work remotely are less likely to get promoted regardless of their productivity and work ethic.
Quite alarming
Work from home jobs are available all over the place. What planet are you on?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What is this, a Japanese RPG? Can you possibly squeeze any more ellipses into that summary?
I've worked for 3 massive software companies that hire 10s of thousands directly or contractually, and they all have allowed remote workers for about 15 years. It doesn't matter if Apple and Yahoo don't, many companies that hire more in roles that allow you to work remotely(application development, support, implementation, training, marketing, etc) do allow the practices.
Apple wants to look cool with its giant campus and onsite amenities because it's fostering an image of oneness. It's also a company that people use as a stepping stool, like Google, Yahoo, SpaceX,etc. Your average company doesn't care and wants their employees to be happy enough to stay there for a while, and working from home is a huge benefit that fosters long term loyalty.
Productivity is not based on location of the workplace
as much as it is based on the person doing the work.
Only ignorant paranoid idiots want workers "where they can
be watched". I won't work for such fools.
As a manager, I can tell you that I need to spend some hi-bandwidth time with my people on a regular basis. I need that interpersonal time to interact with them, make sure they have what they need and the barriers to their work are pushed out of the way. There's no substitute for eating lunch with someone to really understand where they are.
Can I imagine a corner case where work can easily be done from home and the person doesn't need that time?
Sure, but this isn't how the team works as a whole and I need the team working, as a whole.
Even God says we should get together with him once a week face to face
The more you scare people.....the more they will pay.
Working from home requires a certain work ethic.
Not all of us possess this.
I've also heard from friends who do work from home that they struggle to distinguish between work/home and personal/business. It seems that the physical acts of leaving for work and coming home from work are required for some people to be able to keep the two (mindsets?) separated.
I think the problem with centralizing knowledge work, especially something like software development which has a creative element, is not so much the remote versus centralized issue, as the kind of environment centralized workers find themselves in. There are definite advantages to bringing a team together to work face to face, even if the benefits are difficult to quantify. Where it goes wrong is a cube-farm office, which has all the disadvantages but few advantages, for example being an environment which is both isolating and impersonal and at the same time full of distractions from the nearby presence of your co-workers. What's needed is a better balance of interaction and isolation.
One big flaw in your argument is that the linked studies seem to focus on individual productivity. What about team productivity? I can definitely see myself producing more code if I worked in a more isolated environment, or whatever other metric you'd like to use, but I think my team's overall effectiveness would suffer. Note that we don't work alone in cubicles or closed offices, but at desks in an open environment as is common these days. It's hard for me to imagine a remote work environment -- even with chat and Google video hangouts constantly running -- that could match the free flow of ideas and information that we get from working right next to one another. The distractions to individual productivity are more than compensated for by being more plugged in to what other people are doing, which lets everyone make better decisions that save time in the long run.
I'm not sure why so many people are reacting as though there's a universally superior approach here. All teams and organizations are different. Having employees present at the office seems to work for Google, and presumably Mayer has good reason to think it will work at Yahoo as well. I'm sure there are also lots of big organizations where the opposite is true.
I worked for a year remotely from a new country, and by that time I was about stir-crazy from isolation, even as my day ended promptly at 3pm and I had so much time to have a good home balance. If you have flexibility, you should go into the office at least once a week to get that invaluable face-to-face interaction, and during crunch time switch to 80% in-office. Impromptu five-minute stand-ups with a project group are often essential.
If you spend most of your working days at home, you WILL be forgotten. There is definitely value in having a physical presence at your workplace, even if you spend the majority of your time at your desk. You'll still be seen in the hallways, you'll be physically there at meetings, if you need to talk to someone about an issue it's easy enough to do it in person with the subtle benefits of having your physical presence there as opposed to being on the phone/communicator.
People remember faces better if they seem them regularly. Work at home (at least regularly) and you run the risk of being forgotten for various benefits such as being picked for a promotion, or to go on a field trip (if you aren't sick of travel yet), and heck, people will like you more if you're actually there (people being the social creatures that they are), which has its own benefits.
The only exception would be if everyone else at your workplace works from home, and there's only a handful of people who need to physicall go somewhere to work. I know the writers on Ars Technica fit that description quite well. Otherwise you might be better off dealing with the drudgery of dragging yourself into work for its career benefits.
Raenex is a dickhead
You know those guys who start the day on youtube/facebook/ and only start to work when you nag them to death. If you don't they might do some "proof that I worked" BS at the end of the day? These are the guys who have to obey one rule and they cannot: be available between 9-5. Then you call, message, mail, call all numbers, all messengers, and the guy is no-where.
I have seen a complete telecommuting department of 30+ people ordered permanently to the office because a couple of these assholes.
That said: I work at 2 places at the same time. Since I don't have to prepare, make food (special diet, no take-out and soda machine for me), drive, socialise and all that, I can comfortably put 10 hours a day of coding/planning (infrastructure design, consulting with coders) on the table. I have an elliptical trainer and a garden. If my head is about to explode and I "only" have to read some specs or make a call, I walk/sit outside in the garden in natural light (tropics rule).
Now that is the good part. At one place my colleagues just don't get it. Communication is freakin' impossible with them. Even though the policy: code when you want/can, be available in business hours (US eastern 8-4). Guys don't answer mails, forget if you Skype/call instead, not on Skype sometimes for hours without notice (and messing up everything the night before in the GIT repos). It is just a mess...
So I think it is possible, it is good, but you simply have to screen the people and remove their rights if they fail to deliver/communicate.
If you are in software development an need to participate in planning/design (not just e.g. work on tickets on a ready product), then probably it makes sense to go to the office once a week to do some joint brainstorming. Maybe more. Depending. When people talk tech in the elevator, at the cafeteria, smoking area, gym, or etc ... good things happen. Ideas are born. When you just have a Skype call without using any presentation tool (whiteboard), then you feel the difference: it is not as effective.
The ADD ridden ones at least are (somewhat) forced to pay attention at meetings and at best can play with their phones, but if it is Skype, who knows what is on the other 4 screens. Worst experience : my colleague has his whole family screaming at the same time while we are having meetings. I am not talking a noise once in a while, or family arriving/leaving, but full time lunch serving and baby screaming all the way.
Most hated office things: 1. Half the room is cold, half the room is hot. Always, everywhere. 2. Morning chatter of yesterday's game, movie, news .. etc - fine, just do it outside if you see someone trying to work. 3. Asshole on speakerphone or asshole on personal call, calling 10th place to get new tires.... 4. food smell.. New rule: next time I have to smell your packaged paprika bacon-pork skin chips I can throw up into your hair..... If you touch my screen with the finger, I get to chop it off with a blunt cheese-knife.
This is an issue that's very important to me, personally.
I've relocated my immediate family far from all of our extended family for a job. It's a great job (Google), but the relocation has imposed some real hardships on us, and I'd very, very much like to be able to move back "home" but keep the job, working remotely. I came to Google from IBM, a company which has gone largely distributed, and I spent the ten years prior to joining Google working from home.
So I have both motivation to convince Google that I can work remotely with great effectiveness and experience to show that I have, in fact, done it. Further, Google has outstanding tools for facilitated distributed work... not only do we use Google Docs and Google+ Hangouts extensively, they're also integrated with each other and with Gmail, and Google Chat, and Google Voice. Plus, of course, all of our source control tools are well-suited to remote work, our code review and systems management interfaces are all either command-line or web-based (either works great remotely). It really is a world-class remote collaboration suite.
However, I've had to grudgingly admit that Google is right in its assertion that distributed work is less efficient, that remote teams move slower and accomplish less than co-located teams. I'm in the Boulder office, but much of my work has reached across site boundaries to include teams in Mountain View, San Francisco, Boston, New York and Zurich. And, as a result, I've ended up spending a lot of time in those cities (I'm in Zurich now) because it is so much more effective to communicate with people in person.
How do I reconcile the conflict? Was I just ineffective at IBM? I mean, there I was e-mailing Office docs and talking on conference calls. That had to have been even worse than at Google, right? No. Remote work can work, and very well, but it requires a massive cultural shift. The technology is there, and has been for a while, but what's lacking is the motivation to be willing to suffer the large cost of essentially re-training your entire company on how to communicate.
IBM made this shift because it was drowning in red ink and Gerstner decided a first step to fixing that problem was to eliminate most of IBM's real estate, and the resulting lack of office space led the company scrambling for solutions. IBM had decades-long task forces focused only on finding and addressing obstacles to remote work. There's no doubt that IBM's productivity did take a big hit during the transition, and it lasted for a long time. But IBM was at the same time fighting its way out from under massive internal bureaucracy, and the improvements from eliminating the bureaucracy papered over the problems caused by retraining. Another source of improvement was the fact that IBM built, at the same time, a whole new -- and very large -- services business, which was inherently distributed.
A key to IBM's success, though, was that almost everyone was pushed out of the office. The people who couldn't be productive working remotely ended up being slid out of the company, many in the course of a few layoffs. If you want to make remote work effective, everyone needs to be comfortable dealing with remote collaborators all the time, and by sending nearly everyone home, IBM achieved that.
Google, on the other hand, is already a highly productive, efficient company, one which doesn't really have massive layers of bureaucracy to clear out. As a result, any widespread transition to remote work would cause the company's performance to take a large hit, and not briefly. 5+ years, I estimate. I think Google could make the transition faster than IBM did, partly due to better tools, mostly due to better people -- not everyone, mind you, there were lots of highly capable IBMers, but there's hardly anyone at Google who is not highly capable. But it would take years and Google's apparent dominance notwithstanding, Google can't afford that.
IBM's market position was built primarily on long-term, solid c
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
This article is obviously a reaction to Yahoo's actions, stopping the ability to work remotely.
But it's ignoring the real reason why Yahoo did so. Over time, Yahoo has grown vast and has accumulated a number of freeloaders who possibly were not even working, but were still being paid.
By pulling everyone in to work for a year or so, Yahoo can evaluate who they really have working. In technical terms, you can think of it like a garbage collector spinning up and cleaning out useless nodes...
In about a year after Yahoo has everything settled up, they'll probably re-introduce remote working.
More details on Yahoo here (my apologies for linking to a BusinessInsider article, a website that usually has little to do with business).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't necessarily agree that everyone should work at home. I think some people need a professional environment to thrive.
Therefore telecommuting centers would be a great compromise. Places to telecommute that provide some common infrastructure for people to share. Cameras to remote observe workers. Scanners to mass convert paper to digital. Places that are within a mile of where they live; someplace you could bicycle to.
As a tech, you are quite welcome with the results you get from your Indian techs.
Redde arachis hypogaea, posside simiae.
A sig is placed here
To display how futile
English Haiku is
The reason people want to get away from what we have now is because it's not what we had 30 years ago. When I first won a promotion to a technical job in our HQ in 1985 we actually had offices. I retired a couple of years ago (get off my lawn kid). By that time only mid-level and higher managers had offices. Us peons were crammed into cube farms. And, oh yeah, there were reviews under way trying to figure out how to cram more cubes into the same space. Obligatory Dilbert http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-09-15/ Give people real offices, and they might not mind.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I built a house with a large home office in it so that I could run my Internet based company from home. The city threw a huge fit, and said it needed to be built to commercial standards. Submitted new plans and they said that you can't live in a commercial structure! The American Dream is all jacked up.
My colleagues and I are spread across at least half a dozen states and a couple countries and our manager is not within a thousand miles of three quarters of us. And his manager is 3,000 miles away from *him*. And we've managed in high stress, mission-critical, crazy-hour, professional situations for almost two decades, doing this. It gets easier and more productive, every year, too. Thanks to things like video conferencing, voice conferencing, web-ex style services, telephones, instant messaging, email, etc.
I find that the shitty attitude a lot of people have is simply because they don't personally think they could manage (or wouldn't be allowed) to work form home, so they think nobody else should, either. Unless you're assembling cars, building a house, or working at a cash register, there aren't really any knowledge-worker jobs that can't be done just as well or better, remotely, with proper use of the tools (think of the flexibility and extra time with no commute that people inevitably end up re-investing in spending far more than their 40hrs/week working).
Between chores begging to be done, cats wanting to be fed, kids coming home hours before the typical workday finishes, and a myriad of other distractions I find home is a terrible place to get things done. I take work home only when the distractions at work are worse than they are at home and that is rare, usually end of reporting period or something similar.
On the flip side being co-located with scores of other people we rely on to get jobs done is a real blessing in efficiency. People have a tendency to react slower to phone calls and ignore emails. Compare that to actually talking to a person face to face, or potentially running into them several times a day. This could be due to the collaborative nature of my work (engineer in industrial environment) where I rely and am relied upon for things to get done, but in any case not being at work makes these interactions much harder.
I do IT work and we are all in cubes in a large room, including my boss (he's a tech, not a PHB). It really works better because when someone wanders in needing help, they can more quickly get routed to the person who can actually help them, when there's questions about something we can get them answered quick, and we can chat about ideas.
I find I really like it. It isn't perfect, of course, but overall I'd take it over us all being in individual offices, which we could have, if we wanted (most of us do have an assigned office to use if we need, we just don't).
"CEOs, like Yahoo's Marissa Mayer and Apple's Steve Jobs, think that a central office fosters more innovation and productivity. I think they're wrong." ...but how is your own multi-million company doing with your remote workers?
Less sarcastically, are there any LARGE companies out there which are mostly comprised of remote workers and have both innovation and productivity? (I know some small ones do exist)