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Remote Work Works, a New Google Study Finds (fastcompany.com)
Working remotely can be really tough. To get some insight into how to do it better, Google conducted a two-year study involving data from 5,600 employees across the U.S., Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. From a report: Approximately 30% of the company's meetings involve staff in more than two time zones, and 39% involve more than two cities. Veronica Gilrane, manager of Google's People Innovation Lab, oversaw the study and has written a guide for how to make the most of distributed teams. Last week, she released a report of her findings. On the outset of the study, the team hypothesized that distributed teams might not be as productive as their centrally located counterparts. "We were a little nervous about that," says Gilrane. She was surprised to find that distributed teams performed just as well. Unfortunately, she also found that there is a lot more frustration involved in working remotely. Workers in other offices can sometimes feel burdened to sync up their schedules with the main office. They can also feel disconnected from the team. Gilrane says there are three key tricks to optimizing a remote workforce.
The first is being flexible about time zones. For her own teams meetings, which has people on the West Coast and East Coast, she makes sure meetings are at different times every week and are equally convenient for workers in each time zone. If workers extend into more varied time zones, like Greenwich mean time or China standard time, she says to make sure that a manager should alternate meeting times so that one time zone isn't inconvenienced more than another. Next, she suggests making time for team members across the globe to get to know one another. She thinks managers should be really thoughtful about when they use technology for meetings and when its more appropriate to fly out team members to meet in person. Though distributed teams cannot meet in person often, she thinks managers should encourage workers to get to know one another. Her team meets once a week for 30 minutes with no express agenda over video chat.
The first is being flexible about time zones. For her own teams meetings, which has people on the West Coast and East Coast, she makes sure meetings are at different times every week and are equally convenient for workers in each time zone. If workers extend into more varied time zones, like Greenwich mean time or China standard time, she says to make sure that a manager should alternate meeting times so that one time zone isn't inconvenienced more than another. Next, she suggests making time for team members across the globe to get to know one another. She thinks managers should be really thoughtful about when they use technology for meetings and when its more appropriate to fly out team members to meet in person. Though distributed teams cannot meet in person often, she thinks managers should encourage workers to get to know one another. Her team meets once a week for 30 minutes with no express agenda over video chat.
It's amusing that they seem to be so concerned about making sure the meeting schedules work for people in different time zones.
Because, in my experience, meetings are absolutely useless. I've never been to a meeting that accomplished anything that couldn't be accomplished with a brief e-mail, or at WORST a brief phone call.
Meetings are nothing more than a way for middle-management-types to justify their existence.
Remote Work should be a different concern then your Outsourcing. The biggest issue I see with working with different countries isn't the Time Zone, as you just base the Time Zone on the companies home location, and you just need to expect the employees to be working around home base time. So if the Company Home base is in New York, then if you are Chinese worker you still need to be available during Eastern Standard Time. But the biggest problem I have seen with Wide Remote Work across countries is differences in Cultures. If you have a Programmer working in India, they are working with Indian Culture, which will often clash with American Culture. However if you take the same person and move them to America, they are much more compatible, because they are operating within the US culture.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Are all of the centrally located teams in an open office, I wonder if the remote teams function just as well because they aren't being constantly interrupted?
The methodology seems to be surveys and focus groups. As if employees will report that distributed / remote work is less effective or productive.
The only way to do this properly is to measure the waste in their processes. The farcical thing is that the report actually identifies a whole bunch of different types of waste that are caused by alleviating some of the challenges of remote work: travelling to get face time, fiddling with technology, delays in communication due to needing to schedule meetings, etc.
I've known for 20 years that distributed work environments such for the business and are great for the employees. I've worked in both collocated and distributed environments and I've actually measured (objectively) the effects of both. Business people; don't be fooled! Distributed teams usually cost more than they are worth!
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
These may actually be useful. If the meetings act as a sort of corporate town hall and provide a paid work time to socialize it can help employees take time out to interact or bring up questions/problems/ideas that aren't pressing enough to be discussed during normal work hours, but may be in a more casual setting.
When my dad worked at a major tech company some of their best productivity was lunches/dinners outside of normal work hours, or less formal 'meetings' held by managers without an agenda. Those periods gave team members time to relax and remember or discuss issues that weren't pressing in whatever short term crunch they were on, but sometimes helped with the longer term project goals or bringing up common issues everyone had but were normally considered too minor of an inconvenience to bring up in the normal flow of work.
This is a form of workflow optimization that is often overlooked in the modern workplace, but can help immensely in the longer term prospects of the company. Having said that, it needs to be treated with a degree of care so it doesn't just become a screw off period like a lunch break. You may not be actively working, but that doesn't meant the focus can meander too far work.
Because, in my experience, meetings are absolutely useless
At some places I've worked at, we always did an in-person physical standup every day.
Far more simpler is to broadcast things done yesterday and planned to do today on Slack - if a team has a lot of remote people everyone is paying attention to the Slack (or similar group chat) and no-ones time is taken up on things they don't need to know directly.
I do disagree that all meetings are worthless, I have been to a lot of small in-person meetings that were very useful for everyone to come together on a common approach to a problem we were all trying to solve or how someone would use a system. While that can be done over chat to some degree even chat is a lot slower than voice/video to get through ideas quickly. But only with a small number of people, any meeting with more than say 3-4 people seems like it can quickly get non-productive or take a lot longer to arrive at some shared goal.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Don't like it? Move to New York you California Slacker!
THAT is how it really works out.
I've worked in both collocated and distributed environments and I've actually measured (objectively) the effects of both. Business people; don't be fooled! Distributed teams usually cost more than they are worth!
Maybe at one point that was true, but I highly doubt that is the case now as group communication has become really efficient.
Also I question how objective your measurements really were. If they were not with the same PEOPLE over that entire time, they mean nothing - some people and teams work well as a remote group, some do not.
What is an absolutely objective fact is how much time is saved every day by the remote worker in terms of not commuting. That is time that can either be used for work (often true) or sometimes for personal errands, which would have eventually been taken out of work time anyway. Distributed workers have more time and energy to give a company, point blank.
Anyone who says otherwise has not experienced a lifetime of calls or out of work errands to try and deal with stuff on company time, that has to be dealt with during the day.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeeeeeah. Not that I don't trust Google to perform sociology studies, but I've seen how they respond to requested feedback.
This "2 year study" is actually just a survey to 5000 employees and a 100 member focus group. When your boss asks you how well you're working, does anyone actually say they're not working? Who would slit their own throat like that?
It would be good if remote work really took off. There'd be a mass exodus from all the high cost of living cities. We'd be able to bank more of our paycheck. Work would be done cheaper. (hmmm... and my house, a major investment of mine, would tank in value just as I try to compete with the Chinese and Indian masses... I take it back, no, remote work sucks!)
I've never been to a meeting that accomplished anything that couldn't be accomplished with a brief e-mail, or at WORST a brief phone call. Meetings are nothing more than a way for middle-management-types to justify their existence.
I work in software and electronics design, and this comment matches my experience over the last two decades. If each treats emails/voicemails like the important communications that they are, then I've seen little point to meeting as a group, face-to-face.
Perhaps it depends on the kind of work...
Company offering remote-work oriented services (Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Mail, Google Calendar, ...) says remote work is great!
More at 11.
I do a lot of remote work and, for me, it is very productive. The idea of getting dressed up, getting in my car, driving through traffic and sitting in a grey cubicle all day is a complete waste of time. Management tend to be the biggest opponents of remote work. Not all managers but the old school type that want to know what time you arrived at work and how long you took for lunch.
The unspoken truth is that people like this don't trust you. If they can't come out of their office and see you in the little grey cubicle you can't possibly be working. You must be goofing off. The only way they can ensure that you are actually working is to exert a measure of control by requiring you to be in your seat for a given number of hours every day so they can stop by whenever they like and watch you work. This visit will be disguised as some sort of colloquial chit chat or team bonding exercise. The true intent, of course, is to try to catch you off guard (i.e. goofing off) thus providing self validation to support their worker theory.
Sadly I actually worked for an idiot like this for a period of time. He didn't hire me but I soon found myself as part of his group. I eventually grew weary of trying to drag him out of his 1950s mentality and into someone that was actually cool. Someone that I could respect and actually work hard for. He would have meetings for the sake of meetings. His calendar was consistently double or even triple booked, allowing him to blow off meetings that required decisions or * gasp * leadership. The whole thing was an attempt to make him appear more important than he really was. Self preservation and empire building. In short, he was the most worthless piece of shit I ever worked with.
Nonetheless, it was a valuable experience. It taught me to ask a prospective employer about their remote work policy very early in the discussions. If their response is "we don't allow it" or "we'll see" then I don't want to work for them. If you don't trust me then don't hire me. It will save both of us a lot of time.
Yet Google is HARD CORE anti remote worker
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
I started working from home in the summer of 2016 after several rounds of downsizing left me the last person standing. We tried a shared office environment for a while but decided it was costing us more than it was worth. Working remotely required some adjustment. It took some getting used to. It can be lonely. It can be depressing. It can also be liberating, but only for somebody who can plan and organize their work themselves, because nobody's going to do it for you. I'm fairly strict on work time vs me time. Again, I have to do it, nobody's going to do it for me.
The main people I work with are two time zones east of me. My boss and I have a regular weekly call. The time is reasonable for both of us (1100 Pacific, 1300 Central). The worst was a past life when the bulk of the engineering staff rarely showed up before 1100 Pacific time. This drove our European colleagues nuts. I took many phone calls along the lines of "is there anybody in Engineering?" The flipside was "Laura, wanna come over to Paris and show us how the new software works?"
...laura
Open source communities have been working efficiently for years while being scattered around the globe. Most do not even do meetings.
I have seen this before and I won't be surprised to see that in the next few years, Google will do what IBM had already done -- stop hiring expensive Americans/Europeans and move development centers to cheaper locations like India and China.
And to do that, Google will tell their US staff to stop remote working and have to come into office everyday, so more people will quit on their own. Yes, you heard it right, they will claim working remotely from the opposite end of the Earth works, but working remotely 20 miles from office won't. That's management for you.
Google is just growing up to be like all other huge faceless and amoral corps.
When staff are hired on merit and have skills they can work on new projects.
They know how to study.
They can learn new tasks without constant in person supervision and support.
They can work with the new information they have been given to study.
The project is worked on diligently by an educated worker.
The results are as good as if the well educated worker was made to travel to and from an office building.
Find great staff and they can work well in the office, in any other office, a new office created from a spare room.
Its in the IQ and quality of person selected to work. Not the location they work from. Great workers don't need a lot of constant supervision.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This exact same story AND comments are from last year. Seriously WTF?!
I worked at a large company where some people could "work" from home. I would call them up during work hours, and they would often not answer the phone. It seemed like they were in their own world. Getting useful work out of them was rare.
The last job I had at that company was on a team where half the employees were in the USA and the other half were in China. This worked OK as long as we were on our own separate projects. But then some mid-level manager got the "bright idea" to combine the work of the team so that work would happen "around the clock". The time zones were a killer. I would send my counterpart in China a request to do something via email. I would come in the following day only to find that he had not done what I had requested. Then I had to send another email, and wait another day to see if it finally got done. That took 4 days instead of before where I could just walk down the hall!!!
Furthermore, one time I got in trouble for criticizing my colleague in China because he once again did not do what I had asked. (I was supposedly supervising his work.) I sent an email to his team leader in China. Then a ton of bricks came down on me because I dared to criticize him! The cultural differences were also very difficult to deal with.
Remote work seems to have a lot of benefits. But in practice, the problems it creates are not worth it.
"We eat lunch or breakfast over chat,so we get to know each other".
Jesus freaking christ, breaks are for being disconnected from the company not the inverse, makes me hate Google and I would NEVER work for such a blood-sucking company. I feel pitty for these new generations that live their life inside this fucking company. Yikes!