Working From Home: What if You Never Saw Your Colleagues in Person Again? (bbc.com)

Bryan Lufkin, writing for BBC: Throughout my career I've worked with people that I've never met in person. In theory, I could spend an entire day without meeting another human face-to-face. But could this kind of self-imposed isolation become standard working practice in the future?

Studies show that in the US, the number of telecommuters rose 115% between 2005 and 2017. And in early 2015, around 500,000 people used Slack, the real-time chat room programme, daily. By last September, that number soared to over 6 million. In 2017 a Gallup poll revealed that 43% of 15,000 Americans say they spend at least some of their time working remotely, a 4% rise from 2012. And a 2015 YouGov study found that 30% of UK office workers say they feel more productive when they work outside their workplace. How would we feel if we never had to work with another person face-to-face again? Would we care? Have things gone so far that we might not even notice?

Comments

Yes please!

[jawtheshark]

I hope so!

Re:Yes please!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope so!

Indeed. The majority of people are self-centered, self-absorbed, and self-important. As such people are not interested in introspection, personal growth and change, they tend to also be petty and small-minded. Maybe it has always been this way. Generally, the workplace is the only place where I cannot easily avoid such people by choosing not to associate with them. There are no benefits to this -- it is only a source of stress. Also when the slightest power/authority is involved it makes all of this worse. Rather than responsible leaders, many workplaces are filled with petty tyrants whose only concern is playing politics and looking good.

By eliminating unnecessary social contact in the workplace we would gain much more control over our own social lives. It would make social contact a much more voluntary phenomenon, both in terms of quantity and quality. It would increase the tendency of "water seeks its own level".

Those who want lots of contact would find plenty of like-minded company, in fact they would find they are the majority. The only thing they would find lacking is the ability to impose their ways and their personality traits (i.e extraversion) on others. This is a Good Thing.

I can't imagine anyone having a problem with this, except maybe nosy busybodies and those with a thinly-veiled desire to control others. I guess the usual excuses would be used, ranging from "you should be forced to do X because I have decided it's for your own good", to those who are merely threatened by the fact that not everyone else is just like themselves.

Re:Yes please!

[ShanghaiBill]

I hope so!

Be careful what you wish for. Work that can be done from Montana can also be done from Mumbai.

Re:Yes please!

[apoc.famine]

I'm much more torn than you seem to be. I would definitely miss some because they are fun, interesting people, and others for more aesthetic reasons. A solid 50% or so I could definitely do without.

But I've worked from home for short periods, and I can honestly say that I do get somewhat stir-crazy. I need some intellectual human interaction on a pretty regular basis. I'd love to work from home one day a week. I honestly don't know that I'd like more than that.

Re:Yes please!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope so!

Be careful what you wish for. Work that can be done from Montana can also be done from Mumbai.

I telecommute from Montana to my outsourcing job in Mumbai to do work in London where they offshored work from Helena. It really stinks that when they call me from London, I have to have a fake Indian accent. And if I get a direct call from Montana, I have to fake an English accent. But my accent is really from the Northeast so I put 'R's where they don't belong.

Re:Yes please!

[Bigbutt]

I do work from one day a week as scheduled and have to throw an extra day or two in over the winter due to road conditions. Personally I find there's some comeraderie that's missing when you don't work directly with people. The day to day interactions that make the team a team vs 10 people who work together. When I worked at IBM, I worked on a contract for a year that was 100% work from home. And it was pretty bad, team wise. Conversations were very business oriented with no personal connection with the rest of the team. I'm pretty introverted but still enjoy being able to freely trade pokes at the team. And nothing like coming in and hearing, "oh, you weren't here when we discussed [some tech subject]" and then having to be spun up on what's going on.

From a business perspective, yes, if you can work from home, you can work from Mumbai or Saigon. And there are benefits in that germs aren't passed around either. Plus the "wasted time" of work related socializing.

Team Building exercises. Going out with the guys at lunch or after work. Eventually, like at IBM, you're just a cog in the machine, easily replaced by someone in Mumbai.

[John]

open plan office???

[ArTourter]

Well I think one of the causes for this is the insistence from upper management that open plan offices are a good idea and impose it on every one but themselves.

the result is that people need to find a quiet place from time to time to not be disturb so that they can concentrate on a specific task. And when putting headphones on, not answering email immediately and so on don't work any more because people just come by your desk and stand there until you give up and talk to them, the only solution is to simply not be there!

Depends on the job

[alvinrod]

I think it really depends on the job. There are clearly some where being left the hell alone and not bothered allows a person get much more accomplished, never mind all the time saved from the commute to work.

However, I can't imagine having something like a writers' room that works anywhere near as effectively if everyone is video conferencing in from home. Also anything that requires a lot of specialized and expensive equipment doesn't seem workable in that manner either.

However, if you could have 20% of the current work force working from home it would likely make traffic far more bearable for the other 80%.

Re:WFH was so much more productive

[xevioso]

The jury is still out. Working at home allows you to complete tasks on your own time and in your own environment where you are presumably less distracted.

But you also lose the ability to have face-to-face collaboration, which is very important in certain industries. Scheduling a skype meeting is different than chatting with someone in the hall about what might be needed or expected for an upcoming project. There's a reason a lot of deals and agreements get made in person, and people have had the ability to meet via "video-conference" for decades now; yet face-to-face contact is stil preferred in certain situations.

I think it's often best to have it both ways...to come in for meetings sometimes, but to work at home for projects that require intensive work.

It would be like old times with Debian

[Bruce Perens]

When I was Debian project leader - is that around 20 years ago now? Time flies - I had around 200 regular collaborators who were the package maintainers at that time. They were distributed worldwide and we never met. We made a great distribution that worked and got on the Space Shuttle for two flights. I ran into Ian Kluft at a ham radio function, and eventually was invited to Europe to speak and met some other developers. But I have still never met many of those 200.

Re:WFH was so much more productive

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the people I know that work from home are more productive but they eventually get shit on because of office politics. The employees that are physically at the office every day have social opportunities and form relationships that, unfortunately, make a huge difference when it comes to career advancement.

Re:WFH was so much more productive

[malachid69]

I don't think the jury is still out. I have worked from home off and on for decades. In my current job, I was going into the office every 6 weeks until recently (haven't been in the office in probably 6 months). Since that also involves flying there and back, one week in the office is about as productive as one day at home. I'm not being facetious about that - I'm just considering burn down and tickets that actually get closed out.

While I do understand the desire to have face-2-face whiteboarding sessions, that's rarely what we are doing.

We use conferencing (Hangouts and unfortunately also WebEx at the moment) daily for an international team. While it may take a minute or two to start a chat online, when onsite it usually takes much longer to find each other AND an available room. Half the time, we crowd around one monitor anyway.

However, the less distracted assumption is also not really all that true. Even ignoring things going on at your own house (deliveries, pets wanting fed, etc), you still get constant distractions from meeting invites and slack conversations. The only real difference is you are less likely to be pulled into a meeting or an off-site lunch.

You'll probably find that how you manage your project has a bigger impact than a lot of that. How many administrative meetings are you having? How many scrums and retrospectives and grooming sessions and artificial deadlines etc?

All that being said, I do tend to turn down onsite jobs anymore because I don't want to waste 2 hours a day of unpaid time commuting.

Never seen = easy to lay off

[Danathar]

When you never see somebody, then the personalization goes down. I'm all for teleworking, but not 100% telework. If your boss never sees you, its probably a LOT easer to lay you off.