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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.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
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.
Sorry. That's shit, too.
People who are well-motivated and self-driven can work without someone continuously breathing over their shoulder.
People who are slackers can slack off just as well in the middle of a crowded office. Dilbert's fellow-employee Wally is alive and well and I've had the questionable honor of working in offices with many of his clones over the years.
People who have to be forcibly driven to work are going to resent it and the results are going to show in the quality of their work. Although, what am I saying - qualify took back seat to cheap and fast years ago.
Personally, my home office is organized and equipped a lot better than most employer-supplied workspaces I've been given. I can have a comfortable chair because it doesn't have to conform to HR's ranking of who gets what kind of chair based on whether one is a manager or not (even to the point of whether it should be floral or plaid). I don't spend my time looking for items to set fire to because the office thermostat isn't set to arctic levels in the misguided idea that the colder it is the more "productive" i am. I don't arrive at work in a bad mood because of the commute or connive to quit early in order to avoid the rush and I can even adapt my working schedule to be more friendly to natural body rhythms by taking a break in the middle of the afternoon and returning to work in the evening since I don't have a long commute in and out of work.
I don't even talk to headhunters who expect me to work exclusively on-premises anymore.
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.".
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.
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.