Hybrid is a compromise that makes no sense to either party. The company still has to maintain an expensive office while being limited to the talent pool within commutable distance. The employee still has to waste countless (albeit fewer) hours travelling while being limited to job opportunities within ~20 miles of their residence.
Hybrid is always worse than either fully remote or fully in office. You end up with people coming into the office and sitting on Zoom or posting on Slack, and people at home missing out on conversations that don’t happen there. So you have to do twice as much work to keep everybody on the same page.
For perspective, I was 100% WFH for about 10 years. A couple of years ago I got a new job (huge compensation boost, and massive perks boost).
Lucky for me, which was one of the reasons I looked into it, my work is a 15 minute bike from where I live, they offer free breakfast and lunch every day, and a gym. So there are plenty of personal incentives for me to go into the office.
But what I find so surprising is that virtually everyone in my office thinks that hybrid is the best for productivity. Literally every person I’ve talked to about this agrees (quietly, of course, they don’t want to lose it) that the spontaneous meetings, the overhearing what other people are talking about (and jumping in with your own knowledge), the ability to quickly turn around and chat with another person, makes collaboration, and by extension productivity, way higher.
My biggest thing is that, as a senior software dev, the junior devs come to me for help quite frequently. When we’re in the office, I would say the average is about 3 times a day. When one or both of us is WFH, it probably doesn’t even average to one. There is something about sending a message or an email or requesting a zoom meeting that seems to be enough of a hurdle to ask what is a simple question. So they end up spinning their wheels a lot longer.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I get that WFH is a huge benefit to the employee. Which is why I did it for so long, with two young kids it was a god send to be home all the time if they needed to come because they were sick or if I needed to run out to the doctors with them. And, of course, commuting just absolutely blows (I think that’s the biggest drawback of any non-FWFH schedule). So I do support it.
However, I think we need to be realistic about its benefits. Companies want people back in the office because, generally speaking, people are more productive.
You realize that you’re experiencing massive selection bias right?
A) it’s not very socially acceptable to talk about how much you’d rather be at home with your cat than here talking with this colleague.
B) everyone you work with chose a hybrid job.
i.e. “People who choose to work a hybrid job think hybrid is better”
Or in your case, “people who get to go into a big tech office with free meals and gyms and laundry think it’s better to go into the office”.
Try working a hybrid job where you commute 45min each way, and still have to cook yourself three meals a day and then come back and tell us whether you think hybrid is really more productive. I spent a year at a MAANG firm as a contractor and got to go to their head campus near SF and thought ‘damn, if this was what working was like, I could more easily see myself going into the office’, then I returned to my home city and went to their office their and saw the stale muffins that were breakfast and remembered the whole rest of my career and what companies are like and returned to the real world.
Yes, I understand the hurdle in asking people questions, but quite frankly that is addressable through numerous ways from zoom office hours, to better team rituals and culture, to slack bots, occasional meetups, or just plain old fashioned pair programming… all methods that cost far less and cause far less disruption to people’s lives then forcing in them into an office 3 days a week.
And you know what else is more productive for a company? Having everyone working 60 hour weeks in the office all the time. Who. the. fuck. cares. We live in a world with literal billionaires. Working more doesn’t make the world a better place it enriches assholes who never learned how to share or be happy with what they have.
Honestly the productivity argument isn’t hitting and probably never will. It’s just not easy to measure, especially in software where it makes sense to be remote in most cases.
Rather pro-wfh should argue about employee well being. Its horrible PR to go against employee well-being.
The last paragraph is the most important, imo. When I last worked an office job, in the before (Covid) times, the rare occasions when I would work from home due to being sick were my least productive days from the company’s perspective. But they were essential for me to mentally recharge or recover from illness (in a civilized society of course we’d have free healthcare and unlimited zero-work sick days).
If I had a similar job with WFH days I would almost certainly be less productive than I would be if I was 100% in the office, but I’d also be less stressed, happier, and healthier. Less likely to need full sick days. Less likely to job hop after a year. Less likely to sneak alcohol in my coffee mug to deal with coworkers and clients. And the world would keep on spinning, no one would die, there would be no measurable impact on the world other than the stock price/CEOs bonus maybe being down a few cents.
I get that being more productive is how we can sell healthier work habits to the capitalists, but let’s not drink the koolade. There’s an immeasurable number of things more important in life than one’s productivity at work.
it’s not very socially acceptable to talk about how much you’d rather be at home with your cat than here talking with this colleague.
Make no mistake about it, most have said they would rather be WFH. It’s just that most of them also accept that office work is more productive.
everyone you work with chose a hybrid job.
Or, more accurately, didn’t leave a FWFH job when it went back hybrid. But, sure, this definitely biases the sample. Which is why I provided a link that studied this, and just gave my personal experience that seemingly further confirms the studied.
But also, keep in mind that while this sample is far from perfect, it’s many times better than people posting on lemmy claiming that they work better from home.
Try working a hybrid job where you commute 45min each way, and still have to cook yourself three meals a day and then come back and tell us whether you think hybrid is really more productive.
You’re missing my point. I get that it’s better for the individual to be full WFH. I don’t deny this. But we’re talking about productivity here in the office.
Yes, I understand the hurdle in asking people questions, but quite frankly that is addressable through numerous ways from zoom office hours, to better team rituals and culture, to slack bots, occasional meetups, or just plain old fashioned pair programming
Can you point me to some study that confirms that this would replace it? If so, I would happily change my tune. But I think most people work kind of asynchronously, and this is forcing them to sync these moments (when, IME, they happen kind of spontaneously, and I don’t see how it would replace the times when I’m talking to one person, a third overhears it and says “I have something useful to add.”), which isn’t natural.
Who. the. fuck. cares.
Again, I support FWFH because I think the flexibility is important for the individual. That doesn’t require me to be under the delusion that it’s equally productive. It’s not, and I think going forward that’s going to be more and more obvious.
You can rent smaller offices with fewer fixed desks and some open ones free for anyone to use for whenever people needs to pop in. Hybrid offers benefits too.
Then you run into the issue that you need a reservation model and you end up unable to provide enough desks to guarantee that teams are able to meet at the office when necessary if they don’t make their reservation early enough.
Hell, where I work we have quotas and people can’t meet them because they can’t manage to get a seat at the office they used to work in full time before 2020 and they certainly won’t waste an hour in traffic to go to the next office closest to them.
Offices always have had limited meeting rooms and same reservation concept applies. Not a new challenge.
We have hybrid and it actually really works. We hire countrywide and if you don’t live near an office you are fully remote. But if you do live near an office you can go in anytime. I don’t like going to the office, but if I need to print or ship, or need to meet a client or coworker it’s nice to have the option. Also anytime I have an issue, I can pop in the office to check out new hardware, or work if my home is unsuitable due to whatever ( power outage, noisy maintenance, over 90 degrees since we don’t have AC, sick kid). However, I think hybrid only works if there is no minimum requirement on time in office. If it is at the teams discretion the home office becomes an amenity. We also downsized from something like 200 cubes to around sixty, so that helps too.
As someone who has WFH for the last 10 years, I do wish I could go into the office occasionally to have face to face meetings for large projects. Those are actually very useful for faster communication and effective for full understanding between groups in a way that video calls just can’t do. We are, after all, social animals and there is something about breathing the same air that can’t be beat.
I’ve worked from home for the past 10 years as well, and the face to face meetings don’t do anything for me, personally. With a job done entirely on a computer, I can’t think of anything that works better in person.
I would call that “remote first” to avoid ambiguity. My current employer is like that too, with offices or co-working spaces in select major cities around the world.
The key differentiating factor is that you can go into the office if you feel like it. It’s only “hybrid” in the sense that you decide, on a purely personal whim, whether you want to or not.
Personally, I live fairly close to a big office, but have only go in for big yearly meetings. And with a remote first culture no one bats an eye at that.
Hybrid does make sense. There are people who work better in an office ( like myself ) and there are people who are better working from home ( like my coworker ). The company i work for believes hybrid is the way to go so that you can supply an office for people like me, but also hire people who work remotely. However, nobody is saying you need to have an office that can house 100% of you employees. 60% is good enough as not everyone will be in the office at the same time. Money saved!
That said, some meetings are better to have in person so once in a while a required in person meeting is needed.
I believe in the words of my company : everyone, everywhere. And that includes an office or, which has happened, from working from spain, germany or thailand which are all remote locations in no way connected with the company. These were people who legit lived abroad or were looking after a vacation home of a friend
Congratulations you just cut your available employee pool down to…local access again. Hybrid is pointless and a waste of space and resources for less.
No meetings require in person. Get a white board and a camera if you can’t do in person meetings. It’s 2024, not 1975.
No i didnt. You seem to have missed the spot where i said we hired and had people work remotely from completely different countries. I may have not mentioned the in person meetings are preferred in person, but can be done remotely was well by those that want to work remotely and not be in the office. However, some meetings have gravitas to them and are preferred in person. And im not talking about once a week or w/e. It all depends on the team workflow, type of job etc etc.
Ive worked on projects that were 100% remote that ended well, but was working on a project recently that was going so bad that a (preferred) in person meeting was requested because a full day of body language reading while discussions were ongoing, was required. If a person lived far away ( which wasnt the case here ) then that wouldve been totally fine ! They couldve attended the meeting remotely ! I planned the meeting as a teams meeting incase somebody wanted to work from home, and had planned a small meeting room for those that didnt.
I didnt shoot myself in the foot, im saying a hybrid workfloor is all about being flexible to anyone’s needs and every situation because nobody is the same and not everyone wants to be at the office 100%.
This is what i also believe. To quote the company’s slogan again : “everyone, everywhere”
You mention 60% minimum, the second there’s a minimum then you can’t hire employees living far from an office or if you do you create two classes of employees.
Why should I RTO 60% of the time if they are ready to let others with the same job RTO 0% if the time? Just because I got unlucky and they happen to have an office less than X km away from where I live? How come I’m not allowed to move somewhere further away and get the same exemption then?
We call that discrimination and I’m not even getting into how it impacts women and POC more than white guys to have to RTO.
Re-read that post. They didn’t say 60% of the time they said office capacity should be 60% of the workforce at minimum.
You can make more coherent arguments arguing the actual words the other guy said.
