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WSJ: There's An 'Inexorable' Trend Towards Working Remotely (foxbusiness.com)
The Wall Street Journal reports that the trend towards remote working "is inexorable" in America's labor force, with 43% of workers now doing at least some of their work from home (up from 39% in 2012), and 20% now working entirely from home (up from 15%). An anonymous reader writes:
Besides lowering an employer's rent, telecommuting also makes employees happier, which helps with both recruiting and retention according to the Journal. Automattic, maker of WordPress, is able to have an almost entirely remote workforce of 558 employees spread across more than 50 countries. But it depends on getting the right set of tools. Automattic uses Slack for conversations, Zoom for videoconferences, "and its own internal system of threaded conversations for documenting everyone's work and for major decisions." One of the company's "happiness engineers" even says online communicaton has created "radical transparency," since it's possible to read and search through internal communcations. Just remember that not every job can work remotely, according to Dell's chief human resources officer. "Engineering, leadership, R&D, sales and customer support -- those are roles that don't lend themselves very well to remote work."
It'd be interesting to hear the experiences of Slashdot's readers. Anyone want to share their own experiences with working remotely -- or of working with remote co-workers?
It'd be interesting to hear the experiences of Slashdot's readers. Anyone want to share their own experiences with working remotely -- or of working with remote co-workers?
I know some people think that going into the office helps productivity or something through face-to-face communication, but I haven't had that experience at all as a developer. You're sitting there in the huge amounts of traffic congestion, thinking what the heck is the point in all these people moving from A to B when they could be working from home? Then you go into the office just to be distracted all the time (to different degrees, depending on how badly designed the office is - the open-plan office is the worst).
From now on I'm really trying to demand a majority of time home working from any new job up front, if I can get it.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I've telecommuted for the past 14 years or so doing sysadmin, dev, and app support. It works for me because I have built an excellent report with my leadership team (they trust I will get my work done). My team communicates with Skype business mostly in group chats. However, we're all open for quick VoIP and screen sharing calls if needed to better address the subject. It is important to "over communicate" when you are the sole remote team member. Out of sight and mind will render good work fruitless (we all know shit work gains attention). I also ensure to include personal or friendly phone conversations with my team on topics unrelated to work so that we are more personally invested.
Having a couple young children, I built a detached office in my back yard with a standing rule - do not bother me unless someone is near death or beyond. Otherwise, call.
It does get lonely at times, but being able to eliminate Southern California commuting so that I can be a part of my children's lives is well worth the solitude.
Smaller companies designed for a large percentage of their critical employees being offsite can work great. This also has the advantage of being very contractor friendly...however, expectations have to be set and in person meetings should be used when possible to build better teamwork. This system works better for older employees.
On the other hand, I've seen that the bigger the business, the more difficult it is to sustain a telecommuting culture. At the very least, you end up with a system where those who are onsite tend to slowly be promoted and replace those who are offsite. Employees that are junior and needing mentoring also benefit more from being onsite. And, unless management really pushes a telecommuting culture, or has a firm policy that every works x% onsite/y% offsite - being offsite is just too risky for long term career growth of senior staff.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the trend towards remote working "is inexorable" in America's labor force, with 43% of workers now doing at least some of their work from home...
In select industries among white collar workers perhaps but as a general proposition? I don't buy it. It's trivial to name entire industries where it isn't even possible to do much in the way of useful work from home even if you wanted to. Restaurant work, many types of nursing, manufacturing assembly work, maintenance, machining, retail sales, most farming, mining, foundry workers, drivers, etc. The list goes on and on and almost certainly accounts for well over half the work force. Unless they are talking about trivial stuff like answering emails etc from home the 43% statistic doesn't pass the smell test. I guarantee you that 43% of Walmart workers are not working from home.
Remote working is a hugely useful thing and fits a lot of IT work nicely but it doesn't generalize to every job. Speaking for my job, aside from answering the occasional email I couldn't possibly do my job at home. (I'm the GM of a small manufacturing company) We have two people in our company that can usefully work away from the office some of the time - our sales and purchasing managers - and even they have to be in the office a good chuck of time. We might be able to expand that to select IT and accounting functions as we get larger and maybe certain bits of engineering but that won't cover anywhere near even half of 43% of our work force. Everyone else is pretty much as useless as tits on a bull away from the office, myself included. That's pretty typical of manufacturing companies.
Using time and resources to make employees who could just as well work from home come sit in an office is the very opposite of productive.
Working from home, for those who can, is often more efficient. I handle most meetings via skype anyway, so whether I'm sitting home or at the office as I'm taking part in those makes no difference.
Shorter work weeks and more paid holiday with a higher GDP than the US currently has? How's that a bad thing, exactly?
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
I'm a senior software engineer. I work from home because I'd otherwise have a 20 hour commute! The small company I work with has trouble finding qualified people where they are - and few will relocate to go there - so remote working was a necessity...and we embrace that.
When I worked in an open office - (which I hated) we still chatted over Skype and email. I still chat over Skype and email. Technical communications don't suffer too much - but a really good replacement for a whiteboard (with audio and text chat) would really be wonderful. Random connections in the break room are missing - but because all tech discussions go via engineering Skype sessions, we are all able to see all conversations and everything is archived - which is actually vastly better than face-to-face. My productivity is definitely way up.
On the plus side, I can have lunch with my wife every day - and that 15 second commute gives me back an entire hour out of every day. It's as if my life were 10% longer.
My wife wanted to spend a week visiting her family - and I didn't particularly want to take vacation time off work to do it - so plan A was for her to go alone...but then it struck us..."Work from home" is really "Work from anywhere" - so we tossed my computer and a couple of monitors into the back of the car drove - during the day, I could still work - during the evenings and over the weekend, I could put in an appearance. Win/win! This is suddenly a very liberating thing!
We did a bit of rearranging at home - so I have an office, with a door I can shut and a desk that can be as cluttered or as clean as I like. We installed a coffee machine and a soda fridge and a snack/office-supply closet...so there are less temptations to take random breaks or for people at home to interrupt me. When I'm "at work" people know not to interrupt me.
I wasn't sure how I would like this - but I'd say that it's turning out OK.
www.sjbaker.org
Using time and resources to make employees who could just as well work from home come sit in an office is the very opposite of productive.
Exactly... The typical business districts in major cities are expensive, both to locate your office there and to live within reasonable commuting distance... Plus the time spent commuting is utterly wasted and provides no benefit to anyone.
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The biggest benefit that I found in working at home was how it effectively shortened my work day.
I saved between 1 and 2 hours per day by not commuting and having the option of stopping for just a few minutes to have lunch was also a big time saver.
My days went from 10-11 to 8-8.5 hours.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Plus the time spent commuting is utterly wasted and provides no benefit to anyone.
Ericsson in Sweden used to have commuter trains with laptop friendly tables, network connectivity and printers, allowing workers to do paid work while commuting.
Personally, I see the value in both offsite work and onsite work. The value of being able to talk to people without scheduling a meeting is non-zero. The ability to show someone something, and judge by their facial expressions whether they understand it or not is even higher. A remote desktop session is quite inferior to two people being in the same room.
And, yes, some people will slack when working unsupervised, whether it's from home or behind an office door. But I don't think the solution to that is increased supervision, but changing out the employees.
After spending an hour in traffic doing nothing useful besides listening to the radio and polluting the environment, I'm currently sitting at my desk in my "collaborative" open office at 8:45 AM on a Monday morning listening to two coworkers shout a conversation at each other, fumbling for my headphones so I can drown them out with loud enough music that I can focus on what I'm actually paid to do. But thankfully, I'm not being lazy or unproductive.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.