Entrepreneur

I am an employer in a strategy consulting business. I do not think it is possible to build team culture and operating effectiveness in a fully remote environment. In particular brining on and training junior staff is far more difficult.

Hybrid works. Remote doesn’t.

My feeling is that a lot of people who hate the social aspects of work, love WFH and don’t see what gets lost in the process. They broadly set their own KPIs, work to meet them, don’t notice when they diverge from corporate KPIs then whine about how cruel and incompetent egotistical bosses are.

In some fields WFH may work. For the most part, in my view, it does not. And the most rabid advocates of it are often the ones who least understand why.

Not an employer but definitely can say that remote work will be here to stay. Even doubling an employee's salary may not sway him enough to abandon working from a convenient, remote location.

There’s certainly many jobs where remote work isn’t possible (at least part of the time). E.g. Those who need to be in a lab/shop. Even a seemingly non-technical job, like a salesperson, may need to be in person for meetings with clients, etc.

Communication breaks down extremely fast! People go from talking and collaborating to never talking or asking questions. During Covid, it was a shit show. Some people are great at it and some people are horrible at it and there is no way to know until they’re doing it and by then it’s too late.

We're a construction company. We'll only have remote work when there's robots replacing construction workers. Even I need to be on site most of the week just to monitor QA/QC (though it has been a bit off loaded due to cctv monitoring on the field).

I'm in the service business, and for the majority of opinions in the company, remote work is not possible (need to physically meet clients, etc). For those positions that can be done remotely , almost all of them are performed remotely, and the majority of them people are working from abroad/different countries).

But remote work definitely requires a lot more self-organization and self- reliance from employees, and not all employees have these skills. Organizing and controlling people is a lot easier when they are all in the same room and that room is an actual place of work and not a bedroom or kitchen next to a beach somewhere 1000 miles away.

Can even say from my personal experience - it's easier to get more work done when you're in a work environment surrounded by people who work on the same/similar tasks.

I'm not in your target group as we are fully remote. But I gotta say I've had to fire more than a couple of employees because they took the piss when it came to what was acceptable and what wasn't. I fully know that life gets in the way and am very flexible with your family life, appointments etc, but too many people just to do the bare minimum (eg 20hrs tops instead of 40) and hope to stay under the radar.

It's because of idiots like this that ruin it for everyone else

I feel like this was already settled in the 1920's, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-introductiontobusiness/chapter/the-hawthorne-studies/

WFH might give people the ultimate optimization of comfort/environment etc but what's more important in satisfaction and producrivity is who you're working with and alongside

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

Gen Zs are getting fucked on career development

They'll be in the 30s with career progression equivalent of typical mid 20s.

You can quote me on this.

A lot of our work is in manufacturing, and in general that's just not conducive to work from home.

I own a business that has a heavy online presence but also a brick and morter. I do allow all of our online sales reps as well as our HR/PR/dispatch to work fully remote if they want. They also have access to a private office at our brick and morter.

On a positive note for me, as the employer, the remote workers typically work more oddball hours, aka, answering emails or phone calls after hours or weekends.

On a positive note for the employees, they are flexible to run errands, doctors appointments, and other activities during normal business hours and that's totally fine. They are still averaging around that 40hr/week mark, but more sporadic hours. They are much happier with this arrangement.

On a negative note for me, as the employer, the remote workers are significantly less focused on the job at hand, and drop the ball much more often than when they worked in the office.

On a negative note for the employees, they are now expected to answer calls/texts/emails "after-hours" because their flexible hours are not defined, and therefore they are expected to take care of limited "after business hours" support for the trade off. The side effect to this is the work-life balance is much more vague and thus it's very difficult for them to find the "line in the sand" between at work and not at work. Sound confusing? I'll explain:

When your going into an office say.. 8am-4pm you can lay all your work life troubles there at the table at 4pm and let it go and enjoy your home life. When you work from home, your bringing the work stress to the house and your not able to separate the two so easily. This is a trade off for the work from home atmosphere.

Remote work is a pandemic trend now power is back to employers. The isolation and mental side on tech is brutal. Humans need human activity so hybrid is how it’ll move forward

I've been remote as a solopreneur for over a decade. I have been building my company for the last 3 years and am hiring exclusively remote. I see no reason to pay for an office, and would rather source world-wide talent. We have team members in US/CAN/UK and in India, Phillippens, and Indonesia. Some company models require in-person working. Mine does not.

Onboarding green (Non software) engineers in my industry requires hands on mentoring from experienced supervisors, or they will quickly get lost and overwhelmed, particularly when it comes to the month or so out of the year they need to work in the lab.

If you're not good enough to work remotely, you're not good enough.

It’s the overall drop in productivity and engagement. My job is office based, my employees are field based. Their support teams are 100% WFH.

Engagement dropped. We constantly have to hit them up to have them do things they should be doing. Moving work, assigning, calling etc.

This is a team that when office based pre Covid had to have a supervisor walk up and down the cubicles to make sure they weren’t watching movies on their phones.

What do you think they are doing now?

When WFH started they had a hard time understanding their cameras. They would hop in a meeting literally in bed, head on the pillow, eyes closed. One turned her camera on, had to present in a meeting and did so from her Car because she left to get Dunkin Donuts. Apparently that couldn’t wait 20mins. It really became how do I fit work into my life.

If it’s a self driven role, like sales, seems good to go. The more your work the more you make.

If it’s a “9-5” for sure the goal is to work as little as possible to keep your job.

On the flip side I’m not sure how you can accurately gauge and grade performance.

Work from home is the worst thing that has happened to business in our country. Most... not all, but most people cannot manage time wisely. I see people all the time that say, "oh I can hope school my kids now because my job just went remote" Yeah No way

Am an employer with a remote team.

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its a mixed bag.
Started with the pandemic, then people moved away.

pros:

- no office expense.

- flexibility

- no commute

- saves a pile of time getting things done

- can hire people from anywhere

cons:

- creativity is harder

- people who slack are harder to recognize

- mental health toll of being solo

- getting together is hard

- requires certain kinds of personality to work Well.

i do like our remote setup, but am aware it limits us in some ways.

It’s mind numbingly simple. Imagine you’re a ceo.

If you have an office with enough room for all your employees, there’s no benefit to allowing remote work and only cost. The cost is more pronounced in certain roles but it’s essentially self evident: it’s easier to skate off when you’re out of sight and out of mind, and you know you’re getting what you pay for when your employees are in the office, vs when they are not you don’t know. Oh, you’re more efficient at home and don’t waste time commuting? As the boss I don’t really care, because I only care about the metrics that drive my business to grow. It would be irresponsible to operate differently and likely cost people their jobs.

Well, five is unnecessary -- the result of one-through-four. Four is definitely my thing -- and I have worked remotely with a team.

The tools aren't there for management. Just the hype. Not one little feature addresses anything in the news since The Great Resignation took hold -- let alone solves the notorious 'problem' all startups claim they understand so well.

Management is difficult in person. Nobody wants to admit any of the challenges at arm's length. And you know what, typical to wantrepreneurship not one damn body gives a shit.

Everybody has a solution. They just can't understand any problem. And all say "artificial intelligence" like that subject hasn't had the worst track record of pragmatic results for fifty years.

It doesn’t work for everyone. It works for more senior experienced people that knows how to get things done and responsible for themselves.

For juniors it has a 50 percent success rate because they lack the discipline to make it work.

Some employees cant even properly set up their remote office let alone manage their time.

Thats the reason why we offer hybrid approach only for employees who has proven that they can manage and put in the efforts.

I run an events company so most of my staff are physically required either onsite or in our warehouse. It’s really only the admin and management staff who could work remotely.

I think it would be terrible for my company’s culture to require the people, who physically do the work, to come in while the managers all sit at home.

Leadership should be from the front.

Remote work works for some people and is definitely here to stay, but for me it's just quite depressing being on my own all day. I find having colleagues around to chat to is what makes work worthwhile when the real work gets boring or repetitive.

I am just 100% more productive when I don’t need to be standing in traffic for 2 hours or be forced to be sitting in a 4 walls room with AC that is killing my health.

Previously running a team remotely I found that the existing team did well, but training anyone new was difficult. The lack of interaction and discussions at lunch or the pub afterwards used to solve issues, that obviously stopped happening.
Some people slack off, some more than others, but the biggest issue with that is people that you couldn't get hold of on a Monday morning or Friday afternoon if there was a problem.

To give a reason, I think it's less productive but keeps people happier. A lot of the best employees want to be remote, and if you insist on the office you'll never get access to these employees.

Fully remote is a horrible idea, like really, really bad. Sure, everyone thinks that fully remote is great because it is great for them. However, it really isn’t. Why? Simply because less work is done. I remember reading a study regarding remote work done back in about 2015. The finding was that when remote work was allowed, not fully remote, just some remote, there was less work that was done. In software development, there was source code checkins. Checkins fell off significantly on Fridays. Management decided that people were required to be back in the office more, more checkins happened, and more software updates were completed on time. Life feels much more transactional in a mobile environment. There is much less interaction. There is much less interaction. There is much less brain storming.

Quite simply, I’m not a fan of full remote at all.

As a formerly remote network engineer, managers that don't understand what you do are a huge hurdle to allowing remote work for some companies. How can they be sure you're doing your job if they can't see you!?

Fully remote but had an company that worked in an office for about 6 years. So this is from an employer / business owner:

A couple of reasons why on-site might be better:

• better team bonding / closer relationship
• faster execution of ideas (especially for startups)
• less distractions
• better to guide new team members
• there are some jobs that are not project based, so productivity is lower for remote.
• poorer communication

Yes, it’s down to management and better communication,

But I need to put in way more effort to get more from the team versus (the whole job of a leader and manager)

Especially if the team is inexperienced and never worked remotely before.

It works for a company with an established systems. But less for a startup trying to figure things out and scale.

Working from home goes against how the entire system was created. 40 hour work weeks in an office somewhere far away from home. We are supposed to be slaves to the system. If we have more time to ourselves and less work then eventually the population might figure out shit we aren’t supposed to figure out. We might find other ways to survive and make money that doesn’t rely on corporations resulting in less buy in overall. Or we all actually realize we are smart and figure out how to become wealthy. In reality the system can’t work if there’s too many wealthy people. It’s designed to have a certain amount of people at the top and bottom. Is being home more is a direct threat to the control they have over us.

Remote work is another thing in the societal unbundling of standards. In our company people appear to be packing more complexity into their lives and removing any time gains from commuting.

I'm just so curious to know. To people who commented here saying that their company is remote-first, what kind of roles do you hire for?