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The Real Reasons Companies Won't Hire Telecommuters (oreilly.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Esther Schindler points us to a new article at OReilly.com: Those of us who telecommute cannot quite fathom the reasons companies give for refusing to let people work from home. But even if you don't agree with their decision, they do have reasons -- and not all of them are, "Because we like to be idiots." In "5 reasons why the company you want to work for won't hire telecommuters", hiring managers share their sincere reasons to insist you work in the office -- and a few tips for how you might convince them otherwise.
The arguments against telecommuting range from "creativity happens in the hallway" to "the extra logistics aren't worth it," and the article suggests the best counterarguments include pointing out a past history of successfully telecommuting and allowing your employer to gradually transition you into a remote position. And if all else fails, just become a "rock star," because according to one tech placement company, "For the right talent and when a role has been open for a very long time, they tend to give in."
The arguments against telecommuting range from "creativity happens in the hallway" to "the extra logistics aren't worth it," and the article suggests the best counterarguments include pointing out a past history of successfully telecommuting and allowing your employer to gradually transition you into a remote position. And if all else fails, just become a "rock star," because according to one tech placement company, "For the right talent and when a role has been open for a very long time, they tend to give in."
How in the world can Real Work(tm) get done without the constant barrage of face-to-face interruptions? Think of the children!
Brought to you by Management. Management - for when you need to divide your day into never-ending 30-minute chunks of time. Focus? What the hell is that?
I was getting ready to throw some serious shade at this, but there are actually a few good points in this article. In particular the comments regarding mentoring junior members and knowing when they are struggling.
Managers like to sneak up on their employees, and look over their shoulders. They like to be an ever-present looming threat keeping the prole's heads down and working hard. It's a constant trickle of pleasure in their bloodstreams. Productivity and mental health numbers don't matter to them.
As someone who's spent the last two years working on nothing but remote projects, I completely understand it. Doesn't always have anything to do with the worker, either. It's been my experience that it's something that doesn't experiment well.
What I mean by that, is that you can't easily mix the office model and the work from home model easily. You're usually doing all one, or all the other.
If you don't, and you haphazardly experiment with it, without knowing how to do this, your office people will screw everything up, or hire the wrong people.
Sometimes, they'll intentionally mismanage projects, because the notion of remote workers is seen as a threat. I've seen it. They also have this nasty habit of wanting all of the productivity gains of remote workers, while insisting they work with constraints that don't make sense for remote contractors or employees.
It's not for everyone, at least not yet. The whole idea is a pretty radical change from the established order. Better tools need to be built. Better protocols need to be in place more consistently. Better practices need to be thought up and deployed, because the state of it now is objectively bad at the corporate level.
And if companies know their weaknesses here, I say good. Good. It means fewer shit remote jobs.
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Don't some of these same reasons apply to hiring developers in India or wherever? Yet that gets done all the time.
apart from people who don't have a business that is developed enough to make it worth shelling out for office on-costs?
Telecommuting is a perk for trusted in-house rockstars who aren't quite board material. The value those rockstars deliver is nearly always organisation specific. It isn't tranferable. Don't believe the hype. Unless you is a global rockstar or sumfink.
The real reason? Simple: people are lazy as shit. If you give them a chance to slack off, they will. And that's far more likely at home than at work where a pointy-haired boss can tell you something else that needs doing.
All the rest is just hand-wavy bullshit. And it's right. I personally think "working from home" is *never* as efficient as a dedicated, isolated workspace. If you do it, it should be a level of trust you EARN from a company, certainly not start with. Plus, I think if you work from home you should get paid less, because working from home is so desirable and convenient.
And I personally have the full choice of working from home, or at my office; I've worked for the firm for 23 years, they couldn't care less. But generally, I work from the office.
-Styopa
...they don't know how to manage remote employees. I find this difficult myself, but primarily because I ad hoc manage a few people who are remote - I think if you manage the entire team in a remote fashion, it can be a win.
With a management process built to support this type of team - remote teams actually coordinate and communicate better than physically co-located teams.
We currently have a single remote team (many other teams in-house) at our company - and they're fantastic. That's primarily down to the fact that the guy running the team (also remote) has a great and transparent system for communication that works well.
Now, there are many reasons why it wouldn't work for a given company - but I can definitely state that it can work, and work REALLY well - given the right circumstances.
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Companies pay people for being at their desk 8 yours a day (and yes, HP payed me for doing nothing for over a week). If companies actually payed people based on the results they produced rather than being warm bodies at a desk, then they wouldn't have any problem with where they were when they produced those results. The "need to be in the same room" is bullshit, because I've been forced to work with coworkers on the other coast and even overseas while sitting at my desk -- I even have a direct manager in another state. Granted, the real reason they don't like you working at home is they can't directly monitor the hours you work.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
One advantage of planning for remote work is that it makes it easier to get people on-line and working in an emergency. If production goes down unexpectedly on a weekend, if the company's already set up for remote work they can make phone calls and get engineers on-line and working on the problem in a matter of 5-15 minutes. If the company isn't, engineers are going to have to get dressed and get in to the office before they can even start looking at the problem and that can take a half-hour to an hour (or more depending on how far away the engineer lives). It also makes it easier for employees to turn what would've been a day taken off to deal with appointments into a half-day or less of time away from the keyboard, which helps get more work done. I've always felt that those benefits more than outweigh the costs of setting the company up for remote work, and that having people working remotely on a regular basis makes sure all that infrastructure's working properly and gives confidence that it'll be there and working when things go pear-shaped and you really need to get people on the problem quickly. To me that justifies telling the HR people and the managers "The company needs this. If you don't know how to run things this way, go start learning.".
Communication works better in person
By far, the most prevalent attitude is that rapport and camaraderie are generated best from in-person relationships.
Unfortunately, this is true. it's why companies spend millions of dollars a year on travel expenses when it would be much cheaper to use phone/video conferencing.
Creativity happens in the hallway
Questionable. Especially when the only examples they can come up with is Yahoo and Best Buy. Seriously? Yahoo and Best Buy? WTF?
Just write the damned code there is no requirement for it to actually work seems to cross all cultures.
Yes, productivity is higher if you don't keep being interrupted, but if you are off site, emails texts and even voice calls can always be used to destroy productivity if there is any risk of it actually happening.
But its hard to operate CNC machines from home, and group hugs are also a problem for telecommuters.
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Working at home every day is not efficient if you're into software development for example.
In one whiteboard session with some coworkers you get more done than by e-mail for two weeks.
But there are tasks that require absolute concentration if you want to get the best results, like designing and implementing a complex algorithm, or fixing a complex bug.
My days in the office are mostly filled with meetings, Skype calls with the offshore team, writing e-mails, etc. I work at home one day per week, and that's the day that I usually get most programming work done. It allows me to focus for a couple of hours without being disturbed.
The only real alternative to working at home is working really late. Arrive at 11:00 and leave at 20:00. Most coworkers are probably gone around 18:00, which leaves you with two hours to get some real shit done.
Managers don't know enough about the ins and outs of the job, so they substitute butts warming seats instead of proper performance metrics.
Other reasons, such as mentoring, are fullof sh*t. There's no reason a group of coders, documentation writers, even accountants, can't rotate meeting at each other's homes in small groups of 2 to 6 people, especially if they all live in the same area. This also takes care of the "communications work better in person", because sometimes having a frank discussion to find out what is bothering a co-worker isn't ever going to happen under the watchful eyes of everyone else.
As for the "creativity happens in the hallway", first, consider the source. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer banned telecommuting, and Yahoo fell into the shitter - over and over and over. There is no reason for ANYONE to be stupid enough to write an article on October 4th, 2016 (the date of the article) with advice from Marissa Mayer, unless it's "How to ruin a business, screw over employees and shareholders, and collect a golden parachute". Seriouisly. WTF was Esther Schindler thinking? Or EditorDavid, for that matter?
"Managing remote workers is harder" - sure, if you don't understand what they're doing, don't trust them, don't have a way to measure performance, and want to justify your job as a manager by being seen managing those chair-warming butts. Don't use the manager's incompetence as an excuse. It indicates that whoever hired the manager should also be fired.
"It's more complicated." Aw, gee whiz. If you're going to use that excuse, put a gun in your mouth and eat a bullet. LIFE is complicated. Other companies can do it, managing nurses visiting patients in their homes, truck drivers on deliveries, any company that dispatches workers to the job. Anyone making the excuse that it is complicated should be ashamed of themselves,
As for "we've always done it this way", we could have used the same excuse to keep the old outhouse around. Both are equally full of shit.
Crap article by someone who is stuck in the past.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Think of the office sports pool!
FTFY.
A lot of the push to get people into the office is made by those for whom the office is their social life as well. The repeated interruptions aren't always about work.
Have gnu, will travel.
Every one of us living in a major metropolitan area deals with the stress and bullshit surrounding just getting to your workplace from home. Not only does commuting suck hours of productivity away from your employer (2 hours a day equates to 40 hours lost every month per FT employee), it also contributes to excess reliability and consumption of fuel within the economy, along with helping destroy the environment, primarily that air you're breathing every day living in the same area.
Why not speak to what matters with companies, and provide considerable federal and/or state level tax breaks for every position that a company converts to 100% telecommuting.
Beyond the environment and opening up productivity windows, this might be a model that enables companies to perhaps want to support a change that can easily be supported by technology today. Needless to say, I'm not buying the anti-communication reasons brought up in TFA. If we can rely on technology today to bond families over thousands of miles, I'm pretty sure we can build a simple professional relationship with a co-worker or boss.
TL; DR - Federal/State level tax breaks for each corporate position converted to telecommuting, because technology can support it.
That's _their_ viewpoints. I certainly don't mean to suggest that I agree with them. But it's the perception, and you don't change someone's mind simply by saying, "You're wrong."
My company is pro-telecommuting. In fact, there is not a single member of staff that doesn't spend most of the week telecommuting.
The way we ensure people are around and active though is that we track activities and work through an online kanban system tied into tickets (code commited to repositories is reported on tickets automatically, wiki documentation is tied in automatically too, office documents are also tied to tickets automatically using our storage system). Additionally, when employees are working, we sit in a push-to-talk enforced voice chat system, where we can easilly collaborate (unlike Slack, Hipchat and Skype for business, that either don't care about voice chat, or think that push-to-talk isn't necessary).
A lot of tools that are being sold that are effective as telecommuting tools are pretty terrible and instead we've found many tools focused on online collaboration for consumers and gamers tend to be much better, which is absurd. I don't see most larger companies (I have worked in and with a few) ever considering adopting the better technologies because they're not "enterprisy", even though the vast majority can be tied into an AD at least (but maybe not single sign in).
Because we are focused on telecommuting, even if we're in a office, we are logged into voice chat with headsets (which are typically gamer headsets because they're more comfortable for long hours). I just cannot see the corporate world adopting this, for people that join my company, it's a culture shock that some find difficult to adjust to at first and within the first week, they really struggle to understand how we consider it essential (and not just an occasional thing) to be on the headset when you're working or move to the AFK channel if you're not.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
As someone who works for a large multi-national, trying to hold someone accountable that works for home is a pain in the rear. If they work in a remote office, I can ask someone to walk past their office and ask them to call or email. There are a lot of people who are good remote workers. However, almost none of them seem to work as developers and system admins. The couple of dozen or so that I have worked with while they have worked from home have been absolute pain in the neck, since they are passive aggressive little twerps.
If you want to work from home. Prove you can work in the office, that your skillset is significantly better than others who could do you job and are willing to show up, and give a cost/benefit that matters to your management, not to you
In God we trust, all others require data.
All of the reasons listed in the article are pure bullshit. The real reason companies don't want employees to telecommute is because they don't trust them. If an employer doesn't trust you, you shouldn't be working for scumbags like that.
In reality the ONLY thing an employer should be concerned with are deadlines. If a project has been assigned to you and you deliver by the deadline, then there should be no issue. That's how most of my past employers have thought, fortunately. Nowadays, I'm the employer.
And quality. Any employer that isn't concerned about that really isn't working for.
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Working late is a sign of someone who doesn't have their shit together. I like someone who gets their shit done on time, but I prefer someone who does it during business hours. The people who send emails in the middle of the night are usually the ones who work on adrenalin and stress. I want the guy who does his time and then goes out and lives his life. not a "rockstar" who shows off by working all hours. Show up on time, do your work, and then get the fuck out of there.
I live 15 minutes away and rarely come in.
It works well for us simply because we hire people who respect this freedom: we have core hours in which you are expected to respond to email, slack, phone calls. Missing meetings is not an option - you will attend over GTM. People are pretty professional. No gossiping or stuff like that.
We realistically scope our work - an Agile shop, our two week sprints are rarely ever slipped, our stories are are rarely ever 5 points (Fibonacci). We usually make the goals that management and engineering agree to. While of course they ALWAYS want more, they have tasted the sweetness of perfectly predictable product release dates... and they like it.
We also fire. Quickly. Not only is it a reminder to all that slackerdom is not tolerated... just one lazy apple can bring the whole thing down. So we end up working *very* solid 8 hour days. Rarely have to work overtime. It usually ends up feeling like a low grade constant crunch time, but is not so bad.
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