I feel like these rules are direct results of frustrations experienced in real life and trying to put them down in a shared manner.
I know, because I've experienced about 70% of these frustrations. I usually ignored them, and thought "whatever, I'm sure things are fine," and then I realized my views of remote work are impacted negatively by these slight annoyances.
Maybe if people had that slightly better headset, or a connection that doesn't piss you off due to choppiness, hey, maybe it would make things work better. I think it might help. These aren't bad suggestions taken at face value.
Codifying them as rules is a bit harsh-sounding I agree, but it seems like they're just Things That Work, and in the sense of Paying People Real Money For Doing Things, they might as well be Things That Work, and not things that are just annoying and less functional, even if, as you say, in the unmeasurable ways they are beneficial (which I still think is true).
It sounds like they're not trusting people. I don't like that part, and I don't think it's effective to reduce autonomy like this. Maybe they need to work on the wording, or the philosophy, I don't know.
They aren't a bad set of suggestions (although apart from the headset bit, the rest are fairly obvious and I try to implement them anyway while working remotely. Yeah, I need a decent up bandwidth for Google Hangout. Where do I sign up for the newsletter?)
What I don't like is making them into a "remote work policy" rather than "here are some things which might make your remote work more smooth for your team". That basically means (as you said) that there is a lack of trust amongst your team members. And lines like the suggestion to "Over-communicate and over-deliver." are just plain Microsoft-management-style bullshit which prevents anyone who is actually working remotely from enjoying their day.
> Maybe they need to work on the wording, or the philosophy, I don't know.
Probably both, the post would be pretty good as a set of suggestions without the hubris, and if they actually gave technological suggestions that you might not know off the bat. A set of scripts that makes remote VPN login seamless and smooth? Perfect. A set of things that sounds like Captain Obvious combined with some pseudo-motivational nonsense from an IBM manager training session? Probably not so much.
clearly you've never had a coworker that pitched a fit when it was pointed out that watching his kids (and trying to hold meetings over their screaming and racing around) is many things, but work it ain't
> Maybe if people had that slightly better headset, or a connection that doesn't piss you off due to choppiness
As a remote worker: I wish my main office wouldn't use shitty conference speaker phones and actually had an internet connection half as fast as I do. :-)
(Seriously, just today I sat through a WebEx conference call with six people in the room and six people online--all our devs are remote--and ghhhhh mumble mumble mumble ghhhh was the order of the day.)
I know, because I've experienced about 70% of these frustrations. I usually ignored them, and thought "whatever, I'm sure things are fine," and then I realized my views of remote work are impacted negatively by these slight annoyances.
Maybe if people had that slightly better headset, or a connection that doesn't piss you off due to choppiness, hey, maybe it would make things work better. I think it might help. These aren't bad suggestions taken at face value.
Codifying them as rules is a bit harsh-sounding I agree, but it seems like they're just Things That Work, and in the sense of Paying People Real Money For Doing Things, they might as well be Things That Work, and not things that are just annoying and less functional, even if, as you say, in the unmeasurable ways they are beneficial (which I still think is true).
It sounds like they're not trusting people. I don't like that part, and I don't think it's effective to reduce autonomy like this. Maybe they need to work on the wording, or the philosophy, I don't know.