this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Not sure why you're getting down voted to hell. I don't understand why people refuse to believe there is anything beneficial to human collaboration about being in person. It was a lot easier to help out teammates for a 10 or 15 minutes chat near a communal white board or on pen and paper as opposed to scheduling a virtual video call, and creating a diagram in power point or lucid chart in advance for something I could sketch by hand in 60 seconds in real time. Also those discussions did lead to SMEs overhearing and dropping in to provide additional help were great. Unfortunately this hybrid choose your own home or office location is just the worst of both worlds for those that come in.
A lot of people don't like to drive 2 or 3 hours in a day for that 15 minutes around the whiteboard when you can instead do an hour inefficiently in an online meeting and still get ahead in terms of times spent on work.
It adds up when you have a lot of meetings where you need to do that. Also 2 to 3 hour commute is insane. And I'm not suggesting office work needs to be 5 days a week. Also the type of work really makes a difference as well. I'm also not sure wfh is more efficient. In the in office days meeting room availability dictated the number of meetings you could have a day. Virtual has created meeting hell for me at times.
That never stopped people having meetings. Before virtual you had good ol' teleconference and you were on the phone the entire day. You also had clients wanting a meeting or the company office in a different city/state/country/continent that wanted to discuss things so you travelled multiple hours for a one hour meeting in some cases. Fun times.
Time management and the ability to say no remain important, in office or work from home.
A 2 to 3 hour commute (1 1/2 hours both ways) is unfortunately given the traffic situation and general suburban sprawl structure of the US not insane at all here. It is considered a long commute, but not super far out of the ordinary.
Of course there is something beneficial to being with other humans.
Is it beneficial even on the days when you’re just getting your head down?
Flexibllity is the key. Let the teams decide how they work best. Mandates, one way or the other, are silly.
I think that's where it breaks down and the people in the office get the worst of both worlds. It's actually less constructive to be in an office where you are taking calls all day with multiple remote employees that could be in the office. I don't go into the office at all anymore, but I would be happy and happier to be back in the office 3 days a week if I knew the teams I worked with were also in the office. Pre pandemic I had a very flexible in office policy where the norm was to be in the office 3 or 4 days a week. But folks that had long commutes were able to leave the office early and work from their commuter trains to wrap up the day. Folks on the team would roll in anytime between 830 and 11am. I think the unfortunate thing about RTO policy is that coming down from HR in a 1 size fits all approach makes it less flexible and terrible with badge swipe counting and what not. And in order to be fair, some type of written policy must be in place, but teams, managers, etc. should have flexibility to make it work for their teams.
I agree completely that being in the office while 50% of the team is not is borderline useless. When I’m arguing for teams finding their own approach, I definitely also argue that teams should agree on days when they’re all in the office together (our team’s office day is Thursday - we organise 1:1s, brainstorming sessions and social gatherings on Thursday when we know we will be together in person).