Remote work is such a fascinating leadership challenge given how dogmatic both sides have become. The tone of the debate is verging on a religious argument (on both sides), but it's all centered on work-related topics which typically don't engender such extreme responses.
A lot of individuals have very strong preferences. And those who want to go back to how things were also realize that, if many companies shift to a more patchwork employees can continue to WFH if they're able to and want to, many offices won't ever go back to the way they were.
In addition, many feel (probably with some justification) that there's a real opportunity at the moment to influence policies that favor their personal preferences. And you won't influence if you don't take a strong stand.
"In addition, many feel (probably with some justification) that there's a real opportunity at the moment to influence policies that favor their personal preferences. And you won't influence if you don't take a strong stand."
This is a great point, and that's exactly what makes this an interesting leadership challenge IMO.
Yup for sure. I (generally) see two camps on the remote work debate:
- WFH / unlimited remote work is the future, forcing people to come into the office is oppressive.
- Remote work harms culture and collaboration, we all need to get back into the office ASAP as we can't be effective remotely.
Overall I've just been surprised at the intensity of the remote work discussion, and surprised that we don't see deeper analyses on cost of rent, employee retention rates, productivity across jobs, environmental effects of less commuters, etc. My point was simply that as this topic elicits strong feelings, it presents an interesting leadership challenge.
Is it really forcing? If the work contract says "we pay you $X/month (or hour) to come to the office and do this work" is this oppressive?
I work from home since mid 2007, I know the benefits and I know the price. I do go to the office from time to time without anyone forcing me to do it. Without physical presence there is a significant negative impact for employees, I think the best of the 2 worlds is 1-2 days per week (organized in any way, even 3 days every 2 weeks) when each team is in the office, while teams will be in and out on rotations, so you do save on office space and rent, have a significant portion of WFH but still have the teams meeting regularly. Even with video conference, it's not the same as passing by on the hallway, at the water cooler and having a 30 seconds chat with random people in your department.
"Oppressive" is too strong in most cases. The more candid description of that side of the fence is probably more along the lines of "I prefer to work from home and not commute."
Assuming your team isn't geographically distributed anyway--which it often is at larger companies--the day a week thing makes some sense. I've done variants of that in the past.
On the other hand, you're now telling everyone that they still have to live in commuting distance, even if it can be a bit longer because it's infrequent just so they can come into the office now and then.
On still the other tentacle, I absolutely agree that some F2F is useful. But maybe that's better done with getting together every month or two for a few days and just fly people and put people up in hotel rooms if they're not local. Where I work, most of us (not engineering, but the same applies to engineering to greater or lesser degrees) are scattered around multiple offices and fully remote people.
Most of my team is global, just a handful of people are located in the same city as I am. We have a yearly F2F, it is very expensive and disturbing to get people from around the world (literally), get visas, fly them into a place. Because the cost, everyone wants "to make the most" out of it, resulting in stupid, meaningless meetings focused on "building the organization", making the cost/benefit even worse.
I had a colleague that worked alone in a remote place (~8 hours drive from nearest office) for 15 years. He did not went nuts, that's the best I can say about his situation.
