Please, I’m just genuinely curious.
But I’ll like to help anyone wanting to answer by categorizing the reasons into like 4: You can choose any, or come up with your own reasons.
- You believe remote work is just a trend, and will die soon
- You think it’s just a bubble waiting to burst
- You think remote work will never be successful
- You believe remote work is still in its infancy/ (it’s early) and you don’t want to jump on the train just yet
- You’re just uncertain about the whole remote work thing
I’m thinking of using your reasons to work on a bigger content (ebook) for my long piece here.
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.
They would hop in a meeting literally in bed, head on the pillow, eyes closed.
We had someone like that in college who didn’t know their camera was on lmao and then he fell asleep. But do you mean they ment to put their camera on in bed or didn’t do it intentionally?
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.
I actually think remote working will make workers less competitive. If companies are force to adapt to full remote working then there’s no reason from them to pick expensive first world staff when there are just as talented people working in India or China.
I was offered 50k more for a non-remote position. An almost 50% bump. I turned it down. No way I’m giving up a comfortable work life balance for profit.
That depends on the person. I’m sure there can be people who would accept it.
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.
Literally everyone knows this.
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 don’t get it. What stops the employee to take long sh*tter breaks, coffee machine talks, long lunch breaks.
Same things are happening in the office.
I work as a contractor and perms are off sick every other Friday or Monday 😀 does it mean they should give up on employees?
But I get the point. Not everyone can work remotely.
We went from fully office to fully remote 4 years ago and people who slack off did it even in the office. You will always have 20% of people who do 80% of work. Remote or not.
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
“Mayo discovered that workers were highly responsive to additional attention from their managers and the feeling that their managers actually cared about and were interested in their work”
This has nothing to do with remote work and 100% to do with good management. The study even said they changed up the physical environment (in 2023, means change to remote work) and productivity even increased when they felt their managers cared.
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.
Sorry, you;re wrong. The millennial career stagnation can only continue if immigration is cranked up by a massive volume to compensate for the almost non-existent Gen Z/Alpha
A lot of our work is in manufacturing, and in general that’s just not conducive to work from home.
What do you make?
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.
Just a note about leaving work at the office. The concept of “bringing work home with you” existed long before remote work was a trend. Just because you work in an office doesnt mean the work stops for everyone.
You’re doing two experiments at once.
To abstractify one level out, other than company culture and your specific wishes, what is to stop the remote employees from having to work exactly the hours that in-house employees do, and not having to answer before/after-hour calls, thereby potentially decreasing their “significant lack of focus” via psuedo-circadian/worklife rhythm normalizations?
Because I think that this is what OP is getting at, and I’m pretty sure your main response to such a thing is the general perceived lack of motivation of workers; which may or may not be wholly incorrect, I don’t know, you’re the managing party.
Still a potential psychological blind spot to look for though; take for instance:
If we imagine a hypothetical linear regression model that outlies before+after work hours on whatever litmus test you use to mentally fortify your endeavours against remote workers, what might the results be?
Again: you can’t test for two things at once.
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.
Have you found difficulty in complying with tax laws when hiring outside the US?
Nope. My CPA/accounting team takes care of it all.
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.