The thing is, having worked remotely for a year... the people working remote are the ones that become at a disadvantage. Because people in office may forget to include them in calls or conversations.
or...they may "forget" to include them in calls or conversations
As much as I think WFH will be a huge win for workers, and the whole country (to some extent, ex SF/SV), I am skeptical it would work unless orgs are completely remote. In hybrid setups, I could see WFH workers end up getting edged out -- it has never worked any other way from what i've seen in the past.
Some problems happen when you have more than one office. It is almost always us VS them. Management needs to deal with this problem. Now I'll grant that it is a little better if it is a remote office as one person being remembered can remind you of the rest of the office. However it requires effort from management.
Which is why I have approval to travel to other countries several times a year if I want to. If teleportation existed I'd probably work in a different office every day of the week, as a tech lead it would help the team.
I've seen, so many times in my career, a system being built with blood, sweat, and tears over the course of 6 to 12 painstaking months -- and then the system being "given away" to someone over the course of a couple of beers at a happy hour. (that is, management re-org / re-assignment)
When I was co-founder/CTO I never acted this way, because frankly it didnt make sense. But it happens so often in real life, I wonder if this is more about human nature.
this has happened to me. In leadership positions it should be either everyone is remote or no-one is remote. In a hybrid setup too many conversations and decisions get made face-to-face and leave out the remote people until way too late in the process. I would get on calls that went like "yesterday, after work we were at dinner and all decided to do X and so made some calls, just fyi".
There's nothing worse than joining a meeting and hearing about "the plan" for the first time. "The plan" having been decided on over a lunch meeting between person-in-charge and the-guy who thought "the plan" is the best thing ever. Doesn't matter how bad "the plan" is - it's 10 times harder to walk back something like that.
Yeah, I already WFH in a team where half were in-office, and despite having great rapport and them clearly trying to include us fully, I still felt a clear improvement when everyone went WFH.
