I've very much liked what my company/team/office is doing so far:
1. No hard rules on when to be in the office, simply that you must be close enough to make it into the office when you need to.
2. All meetings are remote first unless everyone is in the office (protects disadvantaging people who don't choose to come in)
3. A slack channel for people to coordinate when they will be in the office. This is big as it means that people can group together when they want to socialize easily, so it's 20 people in on one day vs 4 diff people in a day in a week. I've seen team coordinate this as well, often with social activities after.
4. Cross-team social events that encourage people to go into the office without having any professional consequences when you don't come in. In person hackathons, a many game long Catan tournament, etc.
I think there's much more to sort out, but generally this seems to have few complaints. Everyone gives up a little here, but it is very flexible. Some examples:
- The people who want to be in for social reasons can be
- Those who work better in an office / separation from home can come in whenever they want
- Have a new hire? Everyone can try to come in for the first week to help onboard and get to know people, then go back to mainly remote.
- The people who want full remote get most of what they want and don't get professionally disadvantaged by not being in the literal room. The only downside is having to be near an office, but they can easily do a few weeks working from completely remote location X still.
I think many full remote people who want to get out of major cities will have qualms with the last one, but I think those people are looking for fully remote companies without any hybrid model. I'm all for that existing and becoming more popular, but I think we have to realize that the hybrid model simply can't fully accommodate these people, and the answer is to split our models. One open question then is can you split that model at a team/org level, or does it have to be at the company level?
The return on investment in physical presence is conversations that aren’t mediated by Zoom. If you’re going to have a rule of using Zoom anyway, there’s no point.
I think you're significantly underestimating the value of many other aspects:
- Things that happen outside of meetings, which are what the remote-video rule is for, not everything categorically. e.g. debugging together when in, white-boarding, the quick desk visit, etc. As I said, teams can (and do) coordinate to come in on the same day
- Socially, the return being happier workers, better teamwork to fall back on when you're remote, etc.
- The people who do not have a good home office setup for many various reasons that affect both young and old.
There are countless benefits, there's no magical "this is the reason to be in the office" that you can reduce to. The "video conferencing by default" rule is the tradeoff for not disadvantaging people who want to retain their less frequent office time schedule of the pandemic.
1. No hard rules on when to be in the office, simply that you must be close enough to make it into the office when you need to.
2. All meetings are remote first unless everyone is in the office (protects disadvantaging people who don't choose to come in)
3. A slack channel for people to coordinate when they will be in the office. This is big as it means that people can group together when they want to socialize easily, so it's 20 people in on one day vs 4 diff people in a day in a week. I've seen team coordinate this as well, often with social activities after.
4. Cross-team social events that encourage people to go into the office without having any professional consequences when you don't come in. In person hackathons, a many game long Catan tournament, etc.
I think there's much more to sort out, but generally this seems to have few complaints. Everyone gives up a little here, but it is very flexible. Some examples:
- The people who want to be in for social reasons can be
- Those who work better in an office / separation from home can come in whenever they want
- Have a new hire? Everyone can try to come in for the first week to help onboard and get to know people, then go back to mainly remote.
- The people who want full remote get most of what they want and don't get professionally disadvantaged by not being in the literal room. The only downside is having to be near an office, but they can easily do a few weeks working from completely remote location X still.
I think many full remote people who want to get out of major cities will have qualms with the last one, but I think those people are looking for fully remote companies without any hybrid model. I'm all for that existing and becoming more popular, but I think we have to realize that the hybrid model simply can't fully accommodate these people, and the answer is to split our models. One open question then is can you split that model at a team/org level, or does it have to be at the company level?