[HN Gopher] The effects of remote work on collaboration among in...
___________________________________________________________________
The effects of remote work on collaboration among information
workers
Author : agomez314
Score : 138 points
Date : 2021-09-11 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| civilized wrote:
| Next paper from these guys will say: "the shift from an open
| office plan to private offices caused work to become more siloed.
| Previous research shows this may impede the flow of information
| through the network"
|
| People need to stop fetishizing "breaking down silos" and
| "serendipitous hallway encounters" and all that nonsense and
| think about the big picture.
|
| You're more likely to have something worth saying, and a work
| product worth talking about, if you aren't wasting time on your
| commute and shooting the shit in the office.
| huetius wrote:
| I can sympathize with this, given that truly high-functioning,
| collaborative work environments are anything but ubiquitous,
| but I think that these kinds of environments are still the
| ideal, however rare and difficult to achieve they are. I've
| only worked for two orgs that really got it right, and they
| were far and away the best work experiences I've had. I can't
| imagine those orgs being able to thrive in a completely remote
| environment (I know factually that one has big attrition
| problems since COVID hit).
|
| The problem is that it takes a lot of effort and attention from
| all levels of the company to really get it right. You also need
| a commitment to subsidiarity and shared vision, which most
| companies actively disincentivize, despite rhetoric to the
| contrary.
|
| EDIT: wording, typos, formatting.
| civilized wrote:
| I get that some people love their offices and think they are
| amazing work environments, but when I probe, it always seems
| to boil down to emotional attachment. A lifestyle choice.
| Offices usually don't actually improve productivity, IMO.
| huetius wrote:
| That's probably true in many, or even most cases. Even so,
| what do you think about the example of the formerly
| successful company that now can't retain engineers? Even if
| the benefits were entirely intangible, this still
| ultimately has had an effect on productivity, right?
| Intangible benefits are... benefits!
|
| I think the benefits were quite tangible in this case; I
| can elaborate as much as I can while maintaining my
| anonymity if you think it's relevant.
|
| EDIT: more formatting. Can't type today.
| onion2k wrote:
| _You 're more likely to have something worth saying, and a work
| product worth talking about, if you aren't wasting time on your
| commute and shooting the shit in the office._
|
| The problem is that no one actually knows if that's true, or
| whether it's universal or individual. I used to commute by
| train, and I got a good hour of time to myself to think. I did
| great work thinking through problems in that time. Now I work
| remotely I try to carve out an hour to just think about stuff,
| but it's less effective because I'm easily distracted by house
| things like washing up or playng with a cat. Similarly, I got
| value from hearing conversations around the office, and now I
| don't have that. Slack can be the same thing if people join in,
| but so far it's rarely as effective.
|
| All of that is tempered by the fact that I do much better work
| at home. Fewer distractions, more time, and longer quiet
| periods, all sum up very productive times.
|
| Ideally we need some from column A and some from column B. I
| absolutely don't think remote is perfect, but it's certainly
| better. With work on how to collaborate in remote environments
| I can see it being even better still.
| sixdimensional wrote:
| I'd go one step further. I have done research on "silos" and
| actually believe they form naturally, even virtually, and we
| should be looking how to take advantage of the natural
| tendencies and make them more effective rather than eradicate
| them because it sounds like a good thing to do.
|
| I'm not saying a return to pure tribalism here, but I am saying
| maybe realistic acknowledgement of tendencies and how to make
| those more effective/efficient and less problematic might be a
| good idea.
|
| In other words, turn a negative into a positive. Work with the
| tendencies with incremental improvement.
|
| There's another way of thinking about silos - call them
| organizational boundaries - and observe a complete shift in
| thought on the topic.
|
| Some might call this heretical thinking.
| clcaev wrote:
| Boundaries, especially explicit ones with clear contracts,
| are healthy and enable innovation (via refactoring,
| automation, efficient onboarding, quality control). In the
| organizational recesses, hiding within unaccountable
| reporting, away from healthy boundaries, is where sociopaths
| grow most influential.
| hogFeast wrote:
| If your business model includes: "we put people in an office in
| the hopes that their random interactions will create
| value"...then that sounds like the problem is something else.
|
| Random encounters that create value sound good. It sounds less
| good when you flip this logic, and ask whether the reliance on
| randomness is a function of weak information-sharing within
| formal structures. It is easier to break down silos if you put
| this online, then there is genuine sharing. That is what the
| internet is for.
| [deleted]
| imbnwa wrote:
| > Random encounters that create value sound good. It sounds
| less good when you flip this logic, and ask whether the
| reliance on randomness is a function of weak information-
| sharing within formal structures. It is easier to break down
| silos if you put this online, then there is genuine sharing.
| That is what the internet is for.
|
| Probably why I've never seen a Confluence that wasn't a
| disaster, magnified by turnover. This kind of stuff isn't
| interesting to business because it forces them to be
| accountable rather than deflecting accountability on the
| people in the trenches. Those people are expected to do all
| the heavy lifting for the org while business focuses on 'the
| bigger picture'
| rybosworld wrote:
| Confluence does the bare minimum to support organization,
| imo. It is too easy for documents to become orphaned.
| civilized wrote:
| Confluence is the dictionary definition of "tragedy of the
| commons"
| maxclark wrote:
| "Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to
| acquire and share new information across the network."
|
| Remote is hard and not every company is going to adapt to this
| long term.
|
| I'm happy that remote is now an accepted structure but I worry
| that full time remote employees will miss out simply because they
| aren't present.
| domepro wrote:
| maybe that's the price they're willing to pay for whatever
| benefits they get from remote work, and maybe they're missing
| out on what they consider bad things more than good, everyone
| is different.
| mc32 wrote:
| An issue is remote people may be at a disadvantage because
| they are remote and therefore may suffer consequences of not
| being in the office (visibility, chit chat, camaraderie,
| etc.) but they (we, or some portion) may feel they are
| unfairly suffering from unequal opportunity. On the other
| hand, they/we specifically have made the choice to be remote
| despite the inherent disadvantages (and also advantages
| though in another dimension).
| domepro wrote:
| Agreed, as I said, some people will not consider things
| like visibility, chit chat, camaraderie valuable. I don't
| really want to be friends with people I work with, or
| generally spend time with my coworkers when I'm in the
| office since I already spend 8+ hours daily looking at
| them. Even when remote, people I work with are not my
| friends, those are a separate bunch of people, I'm there to
| do my job, solve problems and I don't need camaraderie,
| chit chat or visibility for that. On the other hand,
| relying too much on office chit chat tends to make
| knowledge more word-of-mouth than written down if there are
| no documentation practices in place, while its practically
| a necessity to write things down when you're working
| remotely and that's a huge gain in my book. I think it's
| really really hard to to decisively say that one model is
| better than the other, but it does smell like distrust and
| micromanagement from the higher-ups to me when office work
| is considered mandatory.
| silisili wrote:
| I've been remote a loooong time and that's always been the
| case. I miss out on so many 'oh, because Timmy in the SOC told
| me so' type things, spontaneous whiteboards, and much
| information. It certainly makes things a bit more complicated.
| Further, I found it harder to get promotions in general.
|
| All in all, I still prefer it despite its drawbacks. But it's
| certainly not for everyone, especially people who get or had
| little social interaction outside of work, and those who are
| chasing ladder climbing.
| axpy906 wrote:
| How does it make it harder to get promoted?
| tzamora wrote:
| Networking? Interactions person to person can achieve you
| promotions if you know how to move.
| silisili wrote:
| From my experience, often being the only remote on the
| team...frankly, because you're generally forgotten about
| quite often. You aren't as chummy with your direct, you
| don't do lunch together, small gifts/favors, etc.
|
| I don't mean that as a suckup or anything, just things
| people generally do with one another. If you have two equal
| performers, and one came to your wedding, gave you a jump,
| etc....and the other you often forget exists, the choice is
| quite natural. And I don't find any fault in that or hold
| any bitterness, it's human nature.
|
| Also, you see your direct's boss in the cafeteria, or
| hallway, get to chatting, etc. I'd never just ping him or
| her on Slack to chat, for example.
|
| Then again, I'm only speaking from experience at where I've
| been. I'm sure others are more strict about meritocracy,
| perhaps.
| sfg wrote:
| It works best, when the entire company is remote.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| This is why I like fully-remote workplaces. That said, I've
| only seen remote work well in fully remote workplaces. Once
| there are some remote some not, things break down a bit.
| sharken wrote:
| Fully-remote workplaces are very rare, so it's a lot more
| likely that remote workers will lose out.
|
| E.g. there is a task that requires the help of person A or B,
| where person B is working remote.
|
| I'd argue that person A will be chosen 9 times out of 10
| simply due to convenience.
|
| To counter that, workers are required to spend 2 or 3 days in
| the office.
|
| Slowly but surely some will go to the office one additional
| day, causing the remote workers to be left out of some tasks,
| while on-site workers form stronger bonds.
|
| So i don't see a very bright for WFH, but it's all very new
| so time will tell.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I always have heard it said "if you have one remote employee on
| your team, everyone is a remote employee", because if you don't
| interact as if you are all remote, then the remote employee is
| going to miss so much.
| walshemj wrote:
| And I think the number of new employees not making it past
| probation will increase.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| My experience is I can more easily join earlier or later meetings
| with remote teams in other timezones when I wouldn't been able
| before due to the commute. I can also meet with people
| spontaneously when before you'd struggle to find a room (or you'd
| annoy your neighbors). This far outweighs the number of work
| related 'coffee machine' or 'hallway conversations' I ever had.
| [deleted]
| aj_nikhil wrote:
| Normal work from office as past will resume in next few months.
| WFH is not sustainable or enjoyable experience for most people.
| icedchai wrote:
| I thought that back in June, when Covid cases were heading down
| to a reasonable level. Today, not so much.
|
| You are right though, WFH is not sustainable for many. Many
| folks are burnt out.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I don't know on what basis you make these sweeping
| generalizations. If nothing else, commutes made people
| miserable in terms of time, money, stress, and difficulty
| scheduling outside life.
|
| Time will tell whether you are right or not.
| [deleted]
| yoyar wrote:
| Where is the study on the detrimental impacts of commuting?
| phillipcarter wrote:
| The key thing is here:
|
| > over the first six months of 2020
|
| Those first six months were pretty rough. The large majority of
| people had little to no experience working remotely, so many
| folks didn't have a good home office environment, and there was a
| general sense of being unsure if this would just be temporary or
| if employees should settle in for the long haul. Many orgs didn't
| have good practices set up for remote work yet, and people were
| still struggling a lot with the tools (say what you want about MS
| Teams, but they improved their product by leaps and bounds over
| the pandemic, much of which after the first 6 months).
|
| I'd be interested in a follow-up that analyzes the same time
| period but for 2021.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > The key thing is here:
|
| > > over the first six months of 2020
|
| This also implies that most of the employees already knew each
| other and worked together before being forced into remote work.
|
| One of the biggest problems with switching to remote work is
| that people carry over the in-person relationships they were
| already comfortable with.
|
| It's the new hires who suffer most, in my experience. When
| everyone else has months or years of in-person relationship
| building and a comfortable network of people within the
| company, it can be hard to break in.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| So true. I've personally experienced this with starting a new
| job in January 2020 and subsequently working on 3 teams.
|
| Team 1: 3 engineers of various tenure already on the team.
| Built good relationship with 2 before pandemic put us in WFH
| about 6 weeks in. I still talk to both of these engineers on
| a regular basis, even though we no longer work together.
|
| Team 2: Changed about 8 months in due to a reorg. Working
| with a different set of people who had all worked in this
| area together pre-reorg. Very hard to "break in" and ramp up.
| Things were not going well. Manager, another engineer, and my
| manager all moved teams.
|
| Team 3: 6 months later. Brand new team with engineers all
| coming from different parts of the company plus an external
| new hire. Working well together but we've all been remote
| working together the entire time.
|
| Team 2 was _rough_, and its situation is what most new
| joiners will face.
| ghaff wrote:
| What I've found is that I will work with people I didn't
| previously know if there's some forcing function but the
| people I randomly reach out to for working on things re
| mostly people I knew previously. Reaching g out to strangers
| for help/collaboration with something mostly isn't very
| effective in my experience.
| goodells wrote:
| I would agree with this. Ancedotally, at least for the first 6
| months until the fall of 2020, my team and its management were
| completely accepting of sub-par WFH setups and attitudes. We
| couldn't really blame the guy whose two young daughters
| screamed all day and tromped up and down the stairs next to his
| desk.
|
| Now it's different - remote hires are expected to have a decent
| working environment (either at home or elsewhere at their own
| expense).
| kahmeal wrote:
| Elsewhere at their own expense? Yea that's gonna be a no from
| me.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| "We used to pay for entire buildings to house our
| employees, but covid made us realize we can pass that cost
| on to them!"
| kiklion wrote:
| It kind of depends on the details.
|
| My company has offices that you can go to, but if you
| want to work remotely then it's up to you to manage your
| environment.
|
| The company already has offices. Why would they pay for
| more just because you don't want to go to the offices.
|
| There is a one time budget for hardware, such as a second
| monitor at home, we'll have to see how that plays out
| with upgrades in a few years.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Because you are saving pennies but losing dollars of
| productivity?
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| The cost of outfitting an employee with state-of-the-art
| equipment for their home office is at most a few months
| of commuter benefits. It's a comically small price to pay
| for employee happiness and productivity.
|
| Employers that don't or aren't willing to pony up are
| going to be losers in the long run. Cheap is cheap.
| ghaff wrote:
| The equipment is trivial and most tech professionals have
| it at this point or don't really care. But you're not
| going to get paid from your urban studio to an apartment
| with an office though some companies did pay for
| coworking spaces when there was no office for employees
| to commute to pre-pandemic.
| fragmede wrote:
| Because they don't have to pay for those offices anymore.
| If the company is allowing for remote work, they can also
| downsize those offices (subject to lease conditions),
| saving piles of money. (Commerical space is expensive!)
| If _some_ of those savings aren 't passed onto their
| employees, those employees will choose to move to a
| different company that has a more general WFH allowance,
| probably get a raise in the process, and work with a
| company that's just generally less obtuse to work at/for.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| It's always at "your own expense." Me and my partner who
| also works full time wound up moving to a two-bedroom unit
| down the hall. Why would the company pay for this?
| meowface wrote:
| >say what you want about MS Teams, but they improved their
| product by leaps and bounds over the pandemic, much of which
| after the first 6 months
|
| Did they? I've been using it at my company for years, since
| long before the pandemic, and I don't think I've seen any
| improvements since the first day I started using it until now.
| Every issue I have with it has gone unchanged. The only change
| I can think of is when they added support for custom video
| backgrounds and blur, which is helpful but doesn't really
| affect the experience of the app itself.
|
| I find it funny how at work I use this giant behemoth's chat
| app I hate and then when I'm done with work I use this silly
| app (that used to be) for people who play video games, Discord,
| which has had a far superior UI/UX to Teams for years and keeps
| getting better and better. For every issue I have with Teams,
| the same issue has never been present with Discord. Every time
| I use Teams I just wish I was using Discord.
|
| And I'm not a Discord shill or something. It's just such a
| weird contrast. It feels like Discord has been enterprise-ready
| for years and Teams has never stopped being a toy rip-off.
| Trying to share anything technical or code-related has always
| been super seamless for Discord and is still basically a
| nightmare every time I try to do it with Teams.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| This is my experience exactly. Teams is also somewhat easy to
| get lost in once you get a lot of rooms open. Our IT
| department has decided to use Teams as a ticketing system. My
| manager decoded to use Teams as a PTO calendar by assigning
| tasks to yourself. All we really needed was a good chat app
| for private conversations and small teams... I don't know why
| companies have such a hard time solving these kinds of
| issues.
| kongin wrote:
| They should do a follow up study on how many people will die
| from Covid by working in the office. I rather wonder how
| preventable deaths impact innovation in teams.
|
| From Israel we can see that that death rate per million with
| 90%+ of adults double vaccinated is ~4 per day. In the US that
| works out to ~1300 deaths a day. This is the new normal until
| everyone susceptible dies.
|
| The office doesn't sound so good when it's sold as the place
| which ensures you can't live past 70 for your line managers
| convenience.
| technofiend wrote:
| Anecdotally I've seen reports of people getting Covid more
| than once. So even the assumption that if Delta runs rampant
| through the unvaccinated population at least we'll gain
| _full_ herd immunity that way is perhaps not true. Plus you
| always have people too young to be vaccinated or
| immunocompromised that will be a reservoir. I 'm not an
| epidemiologist and claim no expertise but it certainly
| appears we may always have the threat of this virus in the
| background. Bleh.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I was set up for working from Home. Home schooling 2 preteens
| is what has killed my productivity.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Not to mention kids being at home.
|
| I got so little work done that first few months until daycare
| opened back up. You can't do much work with a one year old and
| a four year old demanding your attention. Focus work was
| impossible, and speaking in meetings had to be timed for the
| few moments of quiet.
| [deleted]
| ren_engineer wrote:
| I think the hardest thing remote work has to replicate is just
| random small talk between smart people that can lead to great
| ideas. This speech from Richard Hamming about Bell Labs sticks
| in my mind, especially the segment about open vs closed office
| doors. I'd say remote work is objectively better for pure
| productivity in terms of getting things done, but you run the
| risk of limiting innovation I think
|
| https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
|
| >Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the
| following facts about people who work with the door open or the
| door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office
| closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are
| more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't
| know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the
| hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who
| works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but
| he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and
| what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and
| effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is
| symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there
| is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the
| doors open and those who ultimately do important things,
| although people who work with doors closed often work harder.
| Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not
| much, but enough that they miss fame.
| midasuni wrote:
| > But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what
| problems are worth working on
|
| It seems normal mow to move job every 3 years so that's not a
| concern
| ghaff wrote:
| That's a very Silicon Valley tech influenced meme.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Not really. I see that pattern across the entire software
| landscape, from big companies down to startups. It's true
| that there are occasionally people who stay put for 17
| years at Microsoft, but those seem to be the exception
| rather than the norm.
| Swizec wrote:
| This too is a type of open door. You see more breadth and
| talk to more people by regularly changing employers. It
| enables you to move towards problems worth working on.
| Salgat wrote:
| >random small talk between smart people that can lead to
| great ideas.
|
| Outside of maybe a very innovative R&D department I don't
| really see these "brilliant ideas that only smalltalk could
| achieve" in your typical run of the mill company.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| doesn't have to be ground breaking research, could just be
| ideas for product iteration or for an employees own side
| project. Benefits individuals more than the company really
| chokeartist wrote:
| That is because most companies are fucking horrible to work
| for.
| rickspencer3 wrote:
| First half of 20/20 _was_ really hard on a lot of people: the
| pandemic, civil unrest, political instability. It was a
| difficult time for sure. Then there is the whole shock of kids
| at home from school, spouses at home, potentially lost jobs,
| etc.. That said, I suppose it is intuitive to think that a
| bunch of people leaving campus life and suddenly working from
| home would have an adjustment period anyway.
|
| I'm also a little skeptical of the their leap from their
| dependent variables to "other research suggests less
| innovation." It's probably a fallacy on my part, but I am also
| skeptical that a company with what must be billions of dollars
| invested in high tech campuses is going to find that remote
| work is just as good as a campus environment.
|
| I have been working fully remote, in remote friendly or fully
| remote companies for 12 years or so now. It is definitely a
| different environment and different way of collaborating than
| working on a campus. I would be interested to see similar
| research on such companies. I suspect that the results would be
| replicated, but would be interesting to know for sure.
|
| Related anecdote: I was visiting Microsoft campus in Redmond
| pretty regularly around 2018/2019. Most of the meetings I
| attended included many people calling in to their video
| conferencing system from around campus and sometimes from home.
| I thought at the time that it seemed like they were on their
| way to a remote work situation anyway.
| nojito wrote:
| The unfortunate aspect of data and studies like this is that the
| HN/tech community prefers working in silos.
| [deleted]
| akomtu wrote:
| Silos are ideal for knowledge workers: their often autistic
| personalities and the nature of the work fit really well a
| quiet corner office.
|
| Managers don't really exist without the chitchat: if managers
| are fish, then chatty open office is their fish pond.
|
| The guys above them, VP+, who I'd call "gamblers", don't really
| need the open offices. They build networks anywhere they want.
| The in-office connections are too fake and weak anyway.
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| "I just read a study in Nature saying remote work is more trouble
| than it's worth, back to the office everybody!" /s
| dang wrote:
| " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| aaomidi wrote:
| Here's an anecdote. I left because Microsoft was being weird
| about long term remote plans and I wanted to actually be able to
| plan ahead.
|
| They lost me because they couldn't give me a straight answer if I
| can continue working there if I went fully remote or not.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| "If there's one thing in business that's certain, it's
| uncertainty."
|
| -- Stephen Covey
|
| "It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of
| uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of
| human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined,
| permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various
| periods in the history of man."
|
| -- Richard P. Feynman
|
| "There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing."
|
| -- Robert Burns
| ok_coo wrote:
| And yet, companies in interviews will ask you where you see
| yourself in 5 years.
| kongin wrote:
| Some basic stats about vaccinations using Israel:
|
| + Their double dose vaccination rate for adults is ~90%.
|
| + Their death rate per million is ~4 people/day.
|
| + Their ICU rate is ~25 per million.
|
| + They are doing third and fourth booster shots.
|
| + For the US those numbers would be ~1300 deaths per day and
| ~8000 ICU beds occupied.
|
| This is what going fully open with current vaccines and
| indefinite booster shots looks like until everyone susceptible
| dies.
|
| Anyone arguing for stopping work from home is arguing for 500,000
| dead Americans a year as a good trade off for 'innovation'.
|
| I find this somewhere between unconscionable to genocidal.
| dang wrote:
| We've already asked you once to stop posting in the flamewar
| style to HN. If you do it again, we will ban you.
|
| It's not what this site is for, and--what's worse--it destroys
| what it is for, so this is somewhat of an existential issue for
| this forum.
|
| If you'd please review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to
| the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| All we will find in this thread is a bunch of remote workers
| trying as hard as they can to dismiss any finding that remote
| work might have downsides.
|
| Those damn managers only caring about butts in seats!
| mmaunder wrote:
| " Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the
| collaboration network of workers to become more static and
| siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts. Furthermore,
| there was a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase
| in asynchronous communication. Together, these effects may make
| it harder for employees to acquire and share new information
| across the network."
|
| So less interruptions and more asynchronous work. That's awesome!
| But it's framed as a negative outcome.
|
| Do we really think that a company fully geared up for in-office
| work for over 100,000 employees in the USA alone would produce an
| impartial report on the effects of remote work?
| walshemj wrote:
| You didn't see "static and siloed" that's just asking for a
| disruptor to come in and eat your lunch
| ryanSrich wrote:
| A disrupter that's likely also working remotely.
|
| A businesses absolute shit remote working process != remote
| working is bad.
| walshemj wrote:
| Co located teams always wins sorry if you don't want to
| hear this but its true.
|
| December 94 did first agile web project in BT took a month
| two developers flew up to Edinburgh collocated team.
|
| The traditional remote (Cardiff) quoted 2 years.
|
| Before that 3 of us developed SIROS the system that
| controlled the UK core ip network in 12 weeks again using
| agile and getting the customer in the room regularly
| [deleted]
| sam0x17 wrote:
| They don't link this data with something tangible like "profits"
| nor do they really try to quantify productivity in any way, so it
| is left up to the reader to decide whether the effects they
| observe actually hurt or help productivity.
|
| Case in point, what they consider useful spontaneous interactions
| between disparate corners of the social graph could in reality be
| annoying distractions that decrease productivity.
| AndreiCalazans wrote:
| Unintentional by accident remote work shouldn't be considered the
| baseline for such comparison. This research does at best find
| results at Microsoft, thus it could be titled "effects of remote
| work at Microsoft" to not induce the sense of generalist
| research.
|
| For the negative results: remote work creates silos and reduces
| cross-network collaboration. These might easily be mitigated with
| strategies and tooling.
|
| Nevertheless, I admire Microsoft for conducting such research -
| congratulations to whoever had the initiative.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Can you tool-in a water cooler? A walk to the cafeteria? A
| weird smell several people notice?
|
| [ninja edit]: someone downvoted you, it wasn't me.
| tobr wrote:
| Not literally, but you can dedicate time for everyone to
| occasionally talk to a mix of people they don't talk to every
| day.
| geofft wrote:
| Absolutely! I started a scheduled call for a weekly "monorepo
| morning tea" for people interested in the mechanics of our
| monorepo and how we build/version/distribute software in-
| house. No agenda, no commitment, the meeting link is posted
| weekly via a Slack reminder to a public channel. It gets a
| couple of folks from our build farm team, a couple of people
| who are experts in specific languages/runtimes (Python, Node,
| etc.), a couple of SREs, a couple of random developers across
| the company who find this stuff interesting, etc. The topics
| tend to be pretty wide-ranging but it's a good way to find
| people doing interesting and relevant work that you might not
| ordinarily think of talking to and hear what's on their
| minds.
|
| Also, my company already had (before the pandemic) a
| voluntary program to match with random coworkers to get
| lunch, specifically to facilitate this sort of thing, and
| that's been turned into online coffee chats. Seems to work
| pretty well.
|
| If you value these serendipitous interactions as part of your
| company culture, then it behooves you to properly support and
| encourage them. You can't just set off a weird smell and let
| the two coworkers who feel like speaking up meet each other.
| They're probably the least shy people on the floor and know
| each other anyway.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| It's a ridiculous study.
|
| They should instead look at companies that are:
|
| 1.) set up to do remote work because they actually created a
| plan for it and executed on it. Not companies reluctantly
| forced into it by a pandemic.
|
| 2.) look at companies that have been doing it longer than 6
| months. Focusing on the first 6 months of 2020 as the baseline
| for how remote work is "going". Is beyond unscientific.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Imagine the desperation and helplessness of managers as they
| brainstorm behind closed doors on how to force back people into
| their shitty offices. Imagine it, and smile!
| timwaagh wrote:
| I suppose it beats them thinking 'hey remote is great, why
| don't we start hiring more aggressively in Ukraine instead of
| Redmond'. If everything is remote companies won't have to pay
| non-remote wages anymore.
| Terretta wrote:
| Two issues jump out at me:
|
| 1 ) It's unclear to me why Microsoft, a leading software firm
| with distributed offices, should be considered representative of
| "information workers".
|
| Contrary to this study of a digitally inter-connected firm,
| finding their preferred connection patterns and rhythms took a
| hit before adapting (see #2 below), most enterprises had no
| established digital connection patterns or rhythms and despite
| the challenges of going online, had been so bad before they saw a
| boost.
|
| Many "big enterprise" firms' collaboration and productivity shot
| way up from April through September, as necessity drove adoption
| of any collab at all.
|
| 2 ) Aside from this, "the first six months" is not how adapting
| to change works. MBA types like it call it "Storming, Norming,
| Performing", but I prefer this:
|
| - Virginia Satir Change Curve image: https://www.plays-in-
| business.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11...
|
| - Virginia Satir Change Curve discussion:
| https://dhemery.com/articles/managing_yourself_through_chang...
|
| Bottom line: I'd argue they studied a top decile performing firm
| far ahead of typical US enterprises, and found that Satir was
| right, a foreign element can induce a performance hit.
| allenu wrote:
| One thing about slack- and zoom-based remote working I've noticed
| is that there's less room to be your "informal self".
|
| Meetings require more coordination since only one person can
| speak at a time and there are fewer non-verbal cues to
| communicate which topics are resonating with you. You also can't
| continue smaller conversations with people after a meeting.
| Everything is more formalized.
|
| Likewise, conversations outside of meetings go on in Slack,
| generally. You could set up a zoom meeting with someone
| informally, but it feels too "heavy" an operation compared to a
| in-person hallway chat.
|
| In person, I feel like people are more likely to be critical of
| their work, workplace, bosses, and coworkers. Now I don't think
| people should go overboard and whine all the time, but I think
| it's valuable to get stuff off your chest once in a while, and
| doing that in person, to me, feels natural, and it's not
| "recorded" anywhere (Slack messages aren't deleted and a lot of
| our meetings are recorded for others to view later).
|
| Anyway, what I'm getting at is the channels for communication are
| more "formalized" and it has a sort of chilling effect on our
| expressiveness in conversations about our work's office culture.
| [deleted]
| macando wrote:
| _We expect that the effects we observe on workers' collaboration
| and communication patterns will impact productivity and, in the
| long-term, innovation. Yet, across many sectors, firms are making
| decisions to adopt permanent remote work policies based only on
| short-term data52. Importantly, the causal estimates that we
| report are substantially different compared with the effects
| suggested by the observational trends shown in Figs. 2 and 4.
| Thus, firms making decisions on the basis of non-causal analyses
| may set suboptimal policies. For example, some firms that choose
| a permanent remote work policy may put themselves at a
| disadvantage by making it more difficult for workers to
| collaborate and exchange information._
|
| This implies that innovation is somehow a formalized process.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Perhaps the issue is that remote workers at Microsoft are
| constrained to using Office 365 for information exchange.
| spanktheuser wrote:
| Interesting study. The data collection & classification methods
| seem strong as does the underlying data set. However I'm
| unconvinced their analysis necessarily follows from the
| established facts.
|
| - Knowledge workers are treated as a homogeneous population. But
| it seems unlikely a software engineer, a VP of software
| engineering, and a business development associate obtain the same
| benefit from frequent in person meetings.
|
| - Remote teams aren't merely in-person teams + Video/VOIP stack.
| Optimal process and culture is drastically different for each
| case. It seems possible that some/most of detrimental effects
| would disappear over time as new remote teams adopt better
| processes and discard legacy methods optimized for proximity.
|
| - There is a lack of nuance. While I may be persuaded that on
| average in-person collaboration adds value I strongly suspect
| there is tremendous variability between individual meetings. I
| once worked for a very senior Ballmer-era product executive who
| jumped ship to an alluring startup. In the year before they were
| fired I easily spent over 200 hours meeting and collaborating
| with them. To say that each hour was merely empty and valueless
| would do a disservice to this individual's talent for value
| deletion. The abrupt conversion to WFH was accompanied by a
| substantial increase in communication friction. In such cases I
| would expect lower value, less focused, and more vacuous meetings
| and network connections to be the first that are jettisoned. It
| seems dangerous to assume the collaboration dynamics associated
| with success pre- WFH will remain so post-WFH. This is a novel,
| potentially pattern breaking change.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Another aspect of the study is it's primarily measuring proxies
| to reach conclusions - for example: because email is used
| rather than zoom, they assume (following various theories) that
| nuance is lost. Maybe, maybe not.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| You've identified a major weakness of the study, which the
| authors acknowledge themselves (and then ignore when reaching
| conclusions).
|
| > For each month, we classified ties as strong when they were
| in the top 50% of an employee's ties in terms of hours spent
| communicating, and as weak otherwise. Although we have not seen
| strong and weak ties defined in this exact way elsewhere in the
| research literature on social networks, the research community
| has not, to our knowledge, converged on a standard way to
| measure tie strength.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| > over the first six months of 2020
|
| What a completely worthless set of data. Not only do their
| findings mean nothing for long term remote work, it's now fuel
| for the anti-remote work movement. Shameful coming from nature.
| seanvk wrote:
| I turned down a job offer in a principal engineering role at
| Microsoft because they were not allowing long term remote work.
| akomtu wrote:
| So a tobacco company has done a research on health impact of
| tobacco. Here are the surprising findings they've made...
| The_Colonel wrote:
| This fits my experience pretty well. The available communication
| tools suck so much, people are for the most part not used to
| communicate effectively / frequently enough in remote setting.
|
| I think it's solvable with better technology (something like
| Facebook's Horizon Workrooms), but at the same it seems very far.
| missedthecue wrote:
| At the end of the day, it's just hard to build and maintain
| relationships from afar. Any kind, be it business, platonic, or
| romantic. Humans are social creatures, meant for in-person
| interaction.
| rybosworld wrote:
| This is more or less the same train of thought that people
| first had about online dating. "It won't work", "it's not the
| same", "it's weird to meet someone online" etc.
|
| I couldn't disagree more that remote relationships are more
| difficult. On the contrary, technology continues to make it
| easier to stay in touch with 500 friends, coworkers from your
| last 3 jobs etc.
| missedthecue wrote:
| People don't date online. They meet online and go date in
| person.
| animanoir wrote:
| Companies will invoke even God to make employees return to
| offices. I don't trust Microsoft neither this study.
| jstx1 wrote:
| That argument works both ways - some people who like remote
| will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to defend WFH when
| presented with evidence that it isn't ideal.
| walshemj wrote:
| Just like when OOP was the new hotness any one suggesting
| that maybe OOP wasn't suitable for 100% of projects - used to
| get shouted down on slash dot.
| rybosworld wrote:
| I think it's specifically driven by the management population.
| Individual contributors don't seem to feel too strongly about
| how their coworkers want to work (remote vs. in-office). But
| there seems to be a large effort by managers in general to get
| everyone back into the office, often without any supporting
| evidence for why that is a good option to force upon people.
|
| This study is not good evidence against remote work. If
| anything, this study is just confirming what we already know -
| that is, remote work happens differently (synchronously vs
| asynchronously).
|
| I've said it before and so have others: the push to bring
| everyone back into the office is in my opinion, representative
| of management's own insecurities.
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