[HN Gopher] The effects of remote work on collaboration among in...
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The effects of remote work on collaboration among information
workers
Author : saadatq
Score : 71 points
Date : 2021-09-13 14:23 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| gdubs wrote:
| Only skimmed, but do they address the fact that last year was
| more "working at home during a pandemic" than "remote work"? How
| much of the communications issues were due to the fact that
| people were juggling homeschooling, housekeeping, caregiving,
| while trying to stay productive?
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Also it's worth considering that remote vs in-office work may
| be different skills and it takes time to build up skills.
|
| For me, I'd rather work on building the skill with a higher sum
| value ver time (integration of value rate), even if their is a
| learning/adaption curve.
|
| Taking someone who has worked in an office for 10 years and
| expecting them to be more productive in the first 6 months of
| work from home is failing to treat it as a skill that develops
| over time.
| lostcolony wrote:
| It's worse than that; the skills and learnings -run directly
| counter to each other- in some cases.
|
| For instance, in the office, what is the single best way to
| collaborate on something? Why, you get people together and
| chat, likely informally, in a free ranging discussion.
|
| Remote, what's the single best way to collaborate? Why, you
| write up a document with your initial thoughts and send it
| out for everyone else to weigh in on; you have a fully
| asynchronous, documented communication.
|
| There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches,
| but, tellingly, the people who are best with one of them are
| likely not the people who are best with the other. And trying
| to impose one in the other's context will lead to poorer
| results; written docs in the office when a conversation will
| do feel heavyhanded and process heavy, but zoom meetings,
| especially if the hours don't all line up, in a remote
| workplace feel unnecessary, and reduces participation.
|
| A LOT of companies have treated the pandemic as "figure out
| how to carry in person practices to remote", rather than a
| new beast worthy of learning new ways of working.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| Not only that, but this article is being held up by
| Microsoft as the end all, be all of answers. No one answer
| fits all jobs. For quite a few coders, working at home
| while communicating over _Teams_ (Microsoft) is a better
| fit, but for the execs and producers, of course they do
| better face to face in a dynamic group setting. Artists
| probably do as well.
|
| Talking to your team and seeing what works best and looking
| at productivity metrics is probably a really good place to
| start =[
| furyofantares wrote:
| On the flip side, something that I haven't seen discussed
| really, the experience I had was that over time, I found there
| were ways in which working from home got harder rather than
| easier. At the start of the pandemic, I already had a ton of
| work to do, and when I finished it I already had a good idea of
| the next work to do, and so on. That became less and less true
| over time
|
| And then, unrelated to that, I eventually switched teams, and
| had a _much_ more difficult time finding my place on the new
| team
| civilized wrote:
| They use the people who were already working at home before the
| pandemic as a control group. They experienced the same pandemic
| changes as everyone else, except they were already working from
| home. So theoretically, taking the difference between the newly
| WFH group and the already WFH group "cancels out" pandemic-
| related effects and isolates the impact of moving to WFH.
|
| In simplistic terms, Group A experienced "pandemic + effect
| from changing to WFH" while Group B experienced only
| "pandemic". Therefore, B-A = "effect from changing to WFH"
| alone.
|
| It's a nice idea but I'm not sure it's entirely convincing. It
| seems like you'd have to assume a couple things: (1) the
| pandemic affected both groups in the same way, so that taking
| the difference between the two groups cancels out the pandemic
| effect; (2) new WFHers are interchangeable with veteran WFHers.
|
| As a veteran WFHer, Assumption 2 seems especially suspect to
| me. People who self-selected into WFH and have been doing it
| for a while are going to be a very different group than the
| general population forced into it by a pandemic.
|
| That said, I am a fan of econometrists and the crazy stunts
| they do with data to obtain so-called "natural experiments". So
| I'm open to changing my mind here. These kinds of papers are
| rarely convincing but never boring. Perhaps they managed to
| prove the somewhat uninteresting proposition that people thrust
| into WFH by a pandemic aren't very good at it.
| Natsu wrote:
| Yeah, not all businesses were well-prepared for a sudden WFH
| transition like this. At my employer, we were already doing
| limited WFH (one day a week) and productivity & satisfaction
| increased broadly for full WFH, but I know that doesn't
| generalize and some particular people had individual issues
| (e.g. it's hard to work on stuff that requires focus while
| small children want your attention).
| Bilal_io wrote:
| > They experienced the same pandemic changes as everyone else
|
| It takes a while to adjust to the changes.
| null_shift wrote:
| "(1) the pandemic affected both groups in the same way, so
| that taking the difference between the two groups cancels out
| the pandemic effect"
|
| i think this is a significantly flawed assumption. in my
| experience, the people that had been working from home
| previously are much better equipped to deal with the pandemic
| (e.g. likely have a home office set up vs. working from
| makeshift workspace like a kitchen table).
| mabbo wrote:
| This URL links to an anchor at the bottom of the page. Recommend
| modifying the URL, except the original URL has already been
| discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28494920
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| I'm willing to be the "office" will be a competitive advantage in
| the future.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to
| acquire and share new information across the network.
|
| This is because deliberate knowledge sharing is so ad-hoc and
| inconsistent. How often do new hires have to turn to someone to
| figure out how to get the project to build locally as the
| instructions suck? Quite often.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| So... just call the colleague who knows on the phone? How is
| this any different than walking over to their desk and asking?
|
| It's very weird how adverse people are to spontaneous phone
| calls. Especially the younger generation. Everything has to be
| scheduled and confirmed back and forth.
|
| I understand that an unexpected phone call can disturb someone,
| but so can an unexpected tap on the shoulder.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| What I've seen some people do is create a Clubhouse like
| audio chat room. If they are in it, it means you can feel
| free to interrupt.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Voice calls combine the worst of real-time interactions (no
| chance to review what you're about to say for possible
| misinterpretation) with the worst of long-distance
| interactions (can't read body language). I literally can't
| for the life of me think of a worse way to interact with a
| human being than over the phone.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are very few people I will call out of the blue these
| days but there are certainly things that are _much_ more
| easily resolved with a 15 minute phone call than going back
| and forth on chat or email over the course of an hour.
| VectorLock wrote:
| Lots of people seem to have found a lot of utility in
| asynchronous communication and mitigating time vampires.
| guenthert wrote:
| When you walk over, you at least have the opportunity to
| observe whether the person you're about to bug is deep in the
| flow, cleaning up his desk or chatting with co-workers.
|
| I'd rather use e-mail or some chat system when remote and
| working on something else until I get an answer, unless of
| course, something is on fire.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Said this somewhere else recently, but I've never seen a
| Confluence that wasn't a disaster, magnified by the modern rate
| of turnover.
|
| Ostensibly Google/Amazon put a lot of thought and work into
| formalizing institutional practice and knowledge, and it likely
| helps that most competent engineers are gunning for a long-term
| role at those kinds of firms, but I've yet to see anything
| resembling such where I've worked.
| hinkley wrote:
| There are too many degrees of separation in Amazon and I
| suspect Google's situation as well.
|
| Onboarding docs need to be iterative. They need 'user
| studies' with some of the new employees. If I go through the
| onboarding docs with a new employee, and they get stuck,
| either I'm the one who knows how to fix it or I know the
| person who does, so we can get it fixed. Once that becomes
| opaque the docs are more of a sick joke than anything.
| VectorLock wrote:
| I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to unsuck
| Confluence but haven't come on anything really great. It
| doesn't help the WYSIWYG in-browser editor isn't great, and
| its document model/API doesn't exactly lend itself to getting
| documents in/out of it from other systems like Markdown, etc.
| imbnwa wrote:
| IIRC Confluence defines its own dialect of Markdown as
| well, but I don't think the issue is the tech so much as
| enforcing some minimum discipline in encoding knowledge
| formally in a central, organized repository. That takes
| building a culture which in turn takes investment from
| management to acquire as far as I can tell.
|
| Until then, I'd rather have things decentralized in their
| appropriate Github/Gitlab repository with issues and a
| wiki. At least this way you have all functional blocks of
| knowledge absolutely in one place since you can get code
| history, closed issues, and the wiki history in one place.
| I'd even go a step further and have design/UI as a
| directory in the repo.
| hinkley wrote:
| There's some way to quote a markdown document stored in
| Bitbucket in a Confluence page. That's proved to be less
| of a pain than dealing with Confluence.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Did not know that, my current shop is all-in on Atlassian
| so I'll have to check that out
| hinkley wrote:
| Looks like it's not out of the box, might be why you
| hadn't heard of it. Having trouble finding the name of
| the plugin.
|
| ETA: Closest I seem to be able to get is this jira
| ticket:
| https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-27798
| phaemon wrote:
| Would like to know this too.
| VectorLock wrote:
| Confluence has a lot of ways to 'embed' other documents
| but they look like junk and aren't searchable.
| nineplay wrote:
| I like confluence as a _temporary_ discussion space. Put up
| some mockups, put up some sequence diagrams, suggest external
| components and get feedback. It doesn't entirely eliminate
| design meetings, but it can serve as a overview so people
| have already thought about the design before a zoom meeting
| on it. A virtual whiteboard maybe.
|
| The other think I like it for is lists of 'learning' links
| Our team has a nice page with suggested books or lectures or
| tutorials that they think others will find useful.
|
| Everything else is stale within a week or so. If I need to
| document something it goes into a Readme which can also go
| stale but is still a bit more in your face.
|
| I've also seen what someone points out below - the engineers
| who think Confluence documentation counts as task completion.
|
| > "Did you figure out how to do X?"
|
| > "Yes, here is a confluence page."
|
| > "Did you install it? Did you run it? Did you validate the
| results?"
|
| > "... here is a confluence page"
| vikingerik wrote:
| Confluence is documentation theater. For most Confluence
| usage I've ever seen, the author's real purpose is mostly to
| signal that documentation has been written, and the
| experience of whoever might be using it later is a distant
| second.
|
| Confluence docs tend to be written as the result of timed
| events, for each project or sprint or meeting or whatever,
| rather than organized by topic. And most are write-only and
| never looked at again.
|
| What a Confluence (or any documentation) repository really
| needs is continuous refactoring, to be organized by
| functionality rather than time implemented. Just like code,
| if you never do that, what you get is documentation debt and
| a big ball of documud.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Presumably just once, as the new hire updates the instructions
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Yup. It's a living document and the new hire can update it in
| a way that makes sense to them and in turn to future new
| hires. All manager should encourage this from day 1. Be the
| change you seek.
| wcunning wrote:
| Dupe, previous discussion available at:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28494920
| Houston808 wrote:
| Seems to me this study doesn't warrant a lot of attention. Its
| basic methodology is flawed, and the author's identify this
| towards the end. Couple things I noticed: 1) They only look at
| one company. 2) There is no control group. 3) There is no
| comparison to companies that were full remote prior. 4) IM is
| listed as asynchronous communication. In my experience it can be
| async or sync with my split being ~50% of the time. It is an easy
| replacement for Phone/Video when only a small amount of back and
| forth are needed. 5) Microsoft has not just remote employees but
| also cross collaboration across remote campuses prior to
| pandemic. This could have also been a good control.
|
| Surprised Nature picked this up with such big holes.
| joelbondurant wrote:
| Organizations that treat tax cattle state property objects like a
| biohazard are the future, so I'm retired.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Since the industrial revolution, all knowledge work has required
| remote collaboration. If your company has multiple physical
| offices, or if you have a supplier or a customer that's not
| colocated within walking distance, you've been collaborating
| remotely, whether by mail, telegram, telephone or computer. Maybe
| that's slightly "inefficient" - or maybe it's a good thing with
| full-remote working that we get to refine it so well?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The positive effect a 2-week in-person visit to a remote office
| had on the collaboration over the next year or so astonished
| me.
|
| Turns out humans are social animals, people with social bonds
| work together more effectively, and you don't build those via
| Zoom and Slack. And I'm not talking about "partying together
| every night, living at the office", just "being around each
| other and talking outside of the rigid confines of scheduled
| meetings".
|
| No, scheduled socials aren't the same.
| reidjs wrote:
| What you are describing sounds like scheduled socials to me,
| just in the office instead of over zoom. But I would not be
| surprised if mostly wfh with a few in-person days turns out
| to be the optimal setup for most offices.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| You can't schedule a social for 8h/day though. The trick is
| the informal interactions, e.g. over lunch, or between
| tasks, or when you overhear something interesting.
|
| Compare e.g. a language course that you go to once per week
| or day for an hour vs. in-country immersion. similar thing.
| m4rtink wrote:
| I don't think its comparable - most factories still had huge
| main complexes in one place or at least a city where one could
| visit everything during a single day if needed.
|
| Sure, there was internal communication with smaller factories
| and with customers, but with much migher latency and
| information content than whats possible now.
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(page generated 2021-09-13 23:01 UTC)