Its partly tradition, power displays, and disbelief. People who’ve been managers for decades somehow believe that being in the office is the only true way to do work because that’s how it’s always been done. Then you have some managers who will always get off on the fact that they can hold people’s ability to feed themselves hostage to make them do what they want. Lastly, some managers just don’t believe you can be productive at home. After all, all the not work things are there.
I know this site is heavily weighted towards IT professionals and other pure-office-work type professions, but sometimes in office work really is better than work from home. Online meetings are largely useless, even when it’s a proper meeting, not just a should-have-been-an-email meeting.
In my current job, remote work isn’t an option, and I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted trying to get engineers and software devs to understand things that would have taken two seconds to understand if they would go physically look at the thing. But of course, they can’t do that because they are working remotely. Instead we get to waste half a day playing picture/video tag
Wasting a lot of time on “explaining things” is an excellent indicator of overstaffing.
Which is completely orthogonal to the question of remote work or not.
I think this is all really subjective and depends on how your team does work. Getting people to work with you or understand things is a communication problem, and in my own experience, being in the office didn’t eliminate those issues.
I agree there are times to be in the office, but it damn sure doesn’t need to be every day all the time. IMO people need to adapt, be smart and figure out what works for their teams and themselves, not hold themselves to tradition for its own sake.
Managers should be empowered to make these decisions to do the research and figure out the best strategy for their situation, and I think many would like that responsibility.
This will depend on your work. All my work is on the computer. Showing someone something is as easy as sharing my screen (and this might even be better, as I can draw on it).
And I don’t agree online meetings are useless. All of my team work from home most of the time, and we work out how to make that work.
Having half the group in the office and half joining remotely I think is the worst of both worlds.
Its partly tradition, power displays, and disbelief. People who’ve been managers for decades somehow believe that being in the office is the only true way to do work because that’s how it’s always been done. Then you have some managers who will always get off on the fact that they can hold people’s ability to feed themselves hostage to make them do what they want. Lastly, some managers just don’t believe you can be productive at home. After all, all the not work things are there.
I know this site is heavily weighted towards IT professionals and other pure-office-work type professions, but sometimes in office work really is better than work from home. Online meetings are largely useless, even when it’s a proper meeting, not just a should-have-been-an-email meeting.
In my current job, remote work isn’t an option, and I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted trying to get engineers and software devs to understand things that would have taken two seconds to understand if they would go physically look at the thing. But of course, they can’t do that because they are working remotely. Instead we get to waste half a day playing picture/video tag
Wasting a lot of time on “explaining things” is an excellent indicator of overstaffing.
Which is completely orthogonal to the question of remote work or not.
Explaining things often is a sign of over staffing? That’s a new idea for me. Why?
I think this is all really subjective and depends on how your team does work. Getting people to work with you or understand things is a communication problem, and in my own experience, being in the office didn’t eliminate those issues.
I agree there are times to be in the office, but it damn sure doesn’t need to be every day all the time. IMO people need to adapt, be smart and figure out what works for their teams and themselves, not hold themselves to tradition for its own sake.
Managers should be empowered to make these decisions to do the research and figure out the best strategy for their situation, and I think many would like that responsibility.
Oh! Oh! This is where people say “skill issue”, isn’t it?
If you can’t run a productive meeting over zoom you probably can’t do one in person, either.
This will depend on your work. All my work is on the computer. Showing someone something is as easy as sharing my screen (and this might even be better, as I can draw on it).
And I don’t agree online meetings are useless. All of my team work from home most of the time, and we work out how to make that work.
Having half the group in the office and half joining remotely I think is the worst of both worlds.
Remotely joining an in person meeting is horrible. Joining a remote meeting from your desk is fine.
Yeah except for the people around you trying to work as you jibber jabber 😆
Skill issue :-)
I think most people acknowledge that some things do gain efficiency in physical proximity. Most dont. We aren’t talking about you.
Though sending a solidworks file shoukd be easier than it presently ie.
Those things, and needing to prop up the commercial realestate market.