Some people fail to recognise the actual problem here. I, among many, live within <5 minutes from my work. Distance is never, and was never the deciding factor in my decision to work from home full time. I'm incredibly lucky my employer sees the benefits of it.
The deciding factors were
- that I didn't have to leave the room for a personal call so that I didn't disturb anyone.
- that I didn't need to have six seperate conversations in the morning before being able to sit down and begin my work.
- that I didn't need to sacrifice portions of my lunchtime to grab a coffee with others and look like a team player.
- that from home I could now show affection to my partner that I would otherwise likely be ostracised for in an office environment.
Do I seem antisocial to you? Probably. But that's how I'm wired and want to live. I have (easily) another 1 1/2 productive hours in my work day now, and that's without children or a long commute. I'm the happiest I've ever been.
When I'm feeling exceedingly social and want to connect with others, I will work that specific day from the office.
Fully agree. I have about a 15min walk away from my work place. Recently, my company has annoucned its re-entry plan and have decided on a hybrid work environment in order to "foster collaboration and increase productivity." My department was classified as a 'mostly-essential' department which means that we'd be required to be in the office 3 -4 days a week.
I immediately emailed management requesting a near 100% transition to WFH, at least for me, and made the argument that my KPIs have more than doubled in 2020 vs. 2019. Working from home has allowed me the flexibility to not get burned out between meetings and as a result I booked more than 2x client meetings. In terms of collaboration, the main person on my team I collaborate with was relocated to San Franscisco, so I need to collaborate with him digitally anyway.
Also, despite closing more deals this year, I only received a 3.5% pay increase, and a $1K bonus increase over 2019. My 2019 numbers were abysmal compared to my 2020 numbers, and in 2019 I received a 4.4% salary increase. So more productivity doesn't get me bigger pay raises I guess.
Currently waiting to see what stupid bullshit they try to spin in order not to accommodate my request. My boss already told me that he'd support me WFH if it means I'll be able to keep up my current numbers. I'm thinking of telling management that I'm willing to overlook the slap-in-the-face pay increase if they'd accommodate permanent WFH for me / only need to go into the office as necessary.
Different stokes for different folks. To me, WFH purely means I avoid my crushing 2.5hr-each-way commute. If my employer built an office next to my house, I'd happily go to the office every day. Or even better, if my employer built an office in a cheaper cost-of-living area like the Nevada desert, I could move to a trailer there and happily go to the office every day. I'm not enamored with my home office. I don't really care as much about working from some room in my home as I care about not having to white-knuckle it down 3 interstate highways just to get to an office where I spend all my time having video conference meetings with remote teams anyway.
A often less-mentioned problem of remote work for many in my circle is that working out of your cramped San Francisco bedroom isn't always productive. Many need a dedicated, well-lit, and preferably sunlit office space at home to be truly productive and companies have not normalized giving out rent subsidies to people, even though the amount of rent subsidy necessary to have a dedicated office space at home would be much less than the equivalent square footage of commercial office space.
I'm only a 20 minute drive from my local office, so it wasn't a big deal for me either.
And my boss isn't even in the same country, so I didn't have that kind of boss that makes sure you're sat at your desk and questions every moment away - I could come and go as I pleased, and as long as I got my work done and didn't take the piss, nobody would have a problem with me arriving late, leaving early, taking a few hours off for appointments etc.
But when I started working almost full-time from home some years back (5-10, I forget exactly), it was a great move for me.
My biggest issue with working in the office was they way we were made to work in the office - everything open plan, everyone fully exposed to the noise and bussle of everyone else. And there's always that one guy (OK, usually at least 3) who talk REALLY loudly all.the.time. And there's always that one guy who spends his whole day taking calls on a bluetooth headset, wandering around the office all.day.long, constantly in and out of your peripheral vision, or standing right behind you while he continues talking.
So having a nice, quiet home office makes working so much better. Plus, I get to have breakfast with my family, and lunch with my wife/kid/kids depending on the day.
I have to add though, that I have a decent sized house, with a dedicated home office, with a big desk, 2 monitors etc - I realise that not everyone has the space for that. I also realise that the social aspect was/is a huge deal for some people.
I actually think the ultimate solution would be for companies to be fully remote, but with the option of working from co-working spaces whenever you want - I'm really curious to see if we have a co-working space boom coming up; they are non-existent around me.
Exactly, we should all have the freedom to choose how we work.
Never really understood people managers who don’t get this. You hired the best, right? Listen to them! They are experts about what makes them happy and productive.
I think the fear stems from the idea that people will try to be happy and not productive. To any managers out there: you have nothing to fear, just fire those people.
As long as I still have a quiet, private office and don't spend an hour+ per day in traffic and am not expected to give up evenings for "not mandatory but really you should show up to play politics" office happy hours, I don't care where I work.
Currently working from home gives me all of that and I haven't been happier with a job ever.
In 2019, my team would occasionally need to work long hours or would deliver something awesome. I would reward them with HH and dinner/late meal. It gave me a chance to say "thanks" and for us to bond over the challenge we overcame.
I can't do that anymore! I've don't virtual HH, but it isn't the same! I would REALLY like a virtual solution to "bond with your team" and "say thanks in a meaningful way" - cost be damned.
As a side note, politics suck. I really like WFH. Working long hours is bad - bonding is good.
Yup. Ever after 5pm work thing I've been "rewarded" with is still work. Even if it's more fun than working at my desk its still work. I'm not able to do with that time what I want. It's only a reward if it is replacing work. And really it's only a reward if the amount of time that it is replacing is taken out of the sprint planning.
At the end of the day if you take a weeknight from me I'm going to be annoyed at best and upset at worst. If you take a work day from me, or part of one, but still expect me to get a full days or work done we will both be in a bad position.
I get the intention here. I used to be a people manager and I planned lots of things for after work. But I stopped when I realized how difficult it actually made things for many people and people with kids.
> and for us to bond over the challenge we overcame.
That occurred already. It happened through the process of overcoming the challenge.
I get the intent, but your people probably just want to rest and get some of their time back. If you must celebrate, do it during hours. I typically did offsite lunch time activities pre-COVID. Now it's more gift driven and individual. I made up award systems like the high school "most likely to ...". If someone renovated their masterbath, give them something that is specific to that as a thanks. Find out if they prefer public or 1:1 gratitude
> I would reward them with HH and dinner/late meal.
Maybe your team would appreciate a $200 gift card instead of HH + dinner/late meal, especially when some people don't drink or prefer healthy meals instead of steakhouses.
It sounds like your intentions are good and that you are a great manager, but to be honest, and just to share my personal perspective: the last thing I want after working long hours is to spend even more of my personal time on work, even if its a HH or a expensive meal. I just want to get home/off work and do my own stuff, even if its just eating pizza in my couch. Its probably not like this for everyone, but it is for me. Don't sweat it that you haven't been able to arrange HH, some of your team might be like me.
Good. You'll have to think harder to find ways not to overwork your team in the first place.
This attitude towards workers rubs me the wrong way, but your side note saved you in my eyes:
> Working long hours is bad
Yes! Overworking people and then saying "thanks" by exploiting the fact ("using the chance", as you put it) that you locked them into the office isn't exactly fair. If this is what people mean by happy hour, that's absurd. If they chose to stay for social stuff after a normal day of work, that's of course another thing.
I am the type of person who appreciates this sort of thing, but it seems like we're in the minority.
Growing up, I always loved getting to see people from school / school clubs (e.g. FSAE team, photography, etc) out of the normal context. It really opens up relationships and helps you figure out how to work better as a team.
If someone's not there because they don't want anything to do with work after hours, it's hard to treat them fairly -- the people who do show up are going to start viewing them as an outsider, and they might get passed up on promotion for someone that the higher-ups got to know better after office hours. So, objectively, having a happy hour probably tends to punish the people that don't show up, turning it into a mandatory function. I'd never really thought about it that way.
It sounds like you're the manager in this case, and that your intentions are genuine. But are you entirely sure that your team feels the same?
I've done similar, but in local restaurants during working hours. It's unfair to implicitly demand your team to donate free time, regardless how much you believe they should enjoy and appreciate it.
That aside, virtual options have come pretty close for us. Give everyone a budget to arrange their own food and either organize activities/games that your team will enjoy or just hang out.
One manager I had would reward us with a nice lunch out. It meant we didn't have to give up personal time for the reward, and it also limited drinking since we all had to go back to work and it was midday (usually there wasn't any drinking).
We all enjoyed it because it meant getting time off work and having a nice meal without giving up family time.
You could replicate that by ordering a nice lunch to be delivered to everyone's house and enjoying the meal together remotely.
Personal experience which is at the very opposite point of the spectrum from yours.
I have had the pleasurable working in a team where bonding is simply working toward a common goal. This was an extremely cohesive team. Our main motivation of working long hour was to push the company to a more beneficial position so that we are also benefited from it.
The reward is the good result of the work itself and going home/out knowing that it will benefit us in the future.
The experience was almost like playing a co-op game rather than doing typical office work.
Happy hours and additional recreational activity were a way to regulate stress rather than a main reward.
Of course this is pretty unique, and is a rare thing to happen, especially in big companies where profit and work rather detached.
If you really wanted to give them a treat, you could do the "team bonding" stuff during normal work hours, rather than asking them to give up yet more of their personal time when they've already been overworked.
Maybe something like "We're playing hooky today, folks. We're all going to lunch and...we're not coming back to the office afterward."
The kind of happy hour you are describing is great and one of the things I miss about the office. Chilling with your tight knit team after a long day or a big release is great. I assume the GP is talking about the other sort of happy hour where it is a bigger crowd. I can’t stand those.
It can be great to sometimes (!) put in a little more time to reach a goal, deliver something the team wanted to deliver for a long time or improve upon some annoyances in status quo.
Working extra hours is not to be expected and should be valued. A team probably works better when extra effort is valued. I think it is great, that you are trying to thank your employees / coworkers.
These things are highly individual. Usually, after crunches and pressures, I tended to be angry at disorganization that caused it and also wanted to go home due to pile of stuff that accumulated there.
I get that there were people who appreciated these, but not everyone does. It is one more added duty after you have already done a lot.
Parties with my coworkers are often far enough from the office that we all have to drive anyway. That doesn't work for these impromptu things, but it does work for things you know a priori.
When you say reward people for working hard on something, you don't mean the same night, do you? That sounds like possibly fun for extroverts and no fun at all for everyone else.
What my team does, is every 1 or 2 months we would all go to work at the office for 1 day (not mandatory of course, but people usually like to come), at the end of which we would all go to a really nice restaurant, and order anything we'd like, paid by our boss. 90% of us are WFH, and I find this works really well and helps with bonding.
This has been my life for years except without the “renting a place” part. I work in cafes. I work in parks. I work sitting on a bench taking shelter from the rain on my way to somewhere else. I work anywhere I have space to take my Wacom tablet out of my bag and plug it into my laptop, and the desire to spend more time working today.
I also work at home in my studio but getting away from the distractions of home is, as this article notes, important.
I thought “remote work” already meant this? I’ve been doing it for years, it’s one of the perks of being a freelance artist. Sometimes I’ve toyed with the idea of getting together with some friends and splitting the rent on a shared studio space but really I know I’d only show up a few days a month.
I wouldn't mind working in a different place than at home, but I've grown accustomed to having a 27" screen, and having to switch to using just the 13" screen of my work laptop would drive me bonkers. Perhaps one day when rollable monitors are a common thing and I can carry a 27" scroll screen in a poster tube...
yeah all you people who Absolutely Require a giant screen, or multiple ones, are stuck at desks. Me, I like plugging my laptop into the 24" screen on my desk, but I also like sitting out in a park with birds and cicada singing, so I've got my tools set up for both ways.
Like anything, it's a spectrum. To some people, "travel" means "I drove to the next state over for the afternoon," and to some it means "I am going to this island down by Antarctica that requires getting a special government permit".
I have considered this but it seems too inconvenient. A cafe doesn’t seem like a great place to work unless it’s consistently quiet and mostly empty so you aren’t taking a table an actual customer could have. The library seems like the next best place after home but it doesn’t seem to provide a whole lot of value over just working from home since I have a pretty good setup there.
Currently my current and ideal situation is working from home 3-4 days a week and then coming in at the end of the week. Those in office days might be less productive but they do provide enough social interaction for the week.
I worked remotely in 2011 while in Vancouver on a Working Holiday visa. While watching the sunset at English Bay, I met a Starbucks barista who had 5 free drinks per shift and was willing to give some to me. Sure enough, I now had a café-office!
Finding a nice desk with good WiFi, power socket, and a view was always challenging. Outside isn't ideal because of lacking WiFi/power socket. Free WiFi in backpacker hostels is sometimes limited to a few hundred MB. The Apple Store has a fast connection, but blocks everything that's not port 80 (which means no connecting to our SQL database on Amazon RDS). University WiFi worked well, thanks to a friend's eduroam.
Libraries are wonderful, but need to have longer opening hours in Western countries. The KHOP prayer room in Kaohsiung was excellent.
I wish there were a place I could go after work that isn't the office or my room. As it is, I get a lot done while sitting on a bus, but WiFi, power, and a view would make that much more pleasant.
> Sometimes I’ve toyed with the idea of getting together with some friends and splitting the rent on a shared studio space but really I know I’d only show up a few days a month.
I am the same. I actually do rent a "hot desk" at a co-working space and I use it barely once a month.
I have probably used it more for a private bathroom in the city centre than for the desk.
The original goal was just to get me out of the house and an excuse to get into the city for a wander. But I almost always choose to actually work in the gardens or at a cafe en-route. I keep renting it because it is pretty cheap and is entirely tax deductable for me, and on occasion it has proven invaluable (rain, cold, noisy at home, need to work for more than a few hours in a row and need the commitment device etc).
Now that you can sit in inside spaces without a mask, I feel libraries and cafes are a real alternative for me! And this is me typing from a desk at a public library 10 minutes from my apartment. Can't express the amount of relief and joy I feel right now
ooh, thanks for reminding me about libraries, I got a lot of work done upstairs in the main branch of Seattle's library, I gotta get around to checking out the options in my new city.
very much this, I'm a very restless person and I _need_ to move every 2-3 hours. Cafe hopping is very very important to my general flow. I also need noise and general life happening around me. Offices are too artificial an environment and my apartment is too silent.
Blues Bars for me. It may be strange, but I get a table in the corner, tell the bar tender to keep the coke and lime coming and my programming just flows with the music.
I've been working remote for 13 years now and I really wish I had rented an office outside of my house much earlier than I did. At 23 your threshold for pain and discomfort is I think much higher in many ways, but I definitely burnt myself out by having my workspace also be my living space (small apartment in NYC).
Once I started sharing a loft space with some friends to co-work out of things got a lot more enjoyable. My space was a 20 minute walk from my apartment, I could keep a more robust setup there, had space for an electronics/soldering station, kept a library of CS and math books there, etc. And if I needed to just do some work on my laptop and stay at home, that was always an option too.
Highly recommend having a situation like that if it's at all possible. I gave up my space in Brooklyn mid-way through the pandemic and definitely am going to go find a new one soon. (If anyone has got a hacker space in north brooklyn let me know!).
Counterpoint: I have a small room that is now my home office, and I really enjoy that it is essentially "zero commute", and think that even just a small 10 minutes walk would make that worse.
Because a 10 minutes commute is not actually a 10 minutes commute, for me at least. In the morning, I have to shower even if I still feel clean (my hair otherwise would need hours to look like I didn't just wake up), I have to dress for outside, I have to take my breakfast with this constant mental reminder that "you should get out to work soon".
With my little office room, I just declare "over!" at some point in the evening and am happily at home instantly.
But everyone's different, and I had generally observed that the lack of physical separation that some lament seems to affect me less. On the weekends, I still use my "office room" as a recreational room, and I sometimes also work from my living room couch and am happy to just declare "over!" by closing the laptop, without the impression that this has somehow "spoilt" my living room.
Key there is a dedicated space for an office. This may be renting an office space outside your living space, or if you live anywhere that is not a large city chances are you can afford a larger place that would include a dedicated space for an office for much less than renting an office would be.
Around here a 1 Bed room apartment + small office rental would be FAR FAR FAR more costly than simply renting a 2 bedroom apartment.
1 year ago, before home prices skyrocketed, it would have been very economical to buy a 2 or 3 bedroom home in order to have a dedicated office space.
Granted that only applies if you do not live in one of the top 50 Metro's, and if your job is not really fully remote why would you want to stay in a high cost of living location?
Friends and family are my largest reason for wanting to live in a location. A lot of my friends live in very high cost of living areas. So I will aim to be comfortable living in those same places. It definitely is a lot more expensive than state I grew up in, Oklahoma, but it’s cost I accept.
I still like full remote for flexibility it gives especially with a trip for a couple weeks/months but long term location I’d probably end up in the Bay Area independent of my work just from friends.
I actually have this arrangement with my employer. They're paying $500/mo. to rent a small one room office for me a few blocks away from my home because I am easily more than twice as productive when not at home. It's a no-brainer comparing the cost to value.
I think we will soon see a dip in productivity.whenever assessing trends, you should never base conclusions on outlier events and we are basing too much of the wfh success on this past year. A year when you couldn't go out and do things, when people feared for their jobs amid a global crisis and felt a call of duty to keep on working.
A lot of managers seem to have an unshakeable convention that as soon as workers are no longer cattle-penned into an office that they'll turn into lazy slobs. As if the only thing stopping them from vegging out on the couch, eating ice cream and watching Jerry Springer during the work day is the watchful and benevolent gaze of their adult supervisors from across the open office floor plan.
Believe it or not, most professionals are actually still productive outside the panopticon. If anything, substantially more productive because of being in a pleasant environment of their choosing. The only reason I can think why so many refuse to accept this evidence is because a lot of middle managers add little value beyond daycare supervisor. Not all, but a lot.
> as soon as workers are no longer cattle-penned into an office that they'll turn into lazy slobs
That's full on projecting. It's what they'd do.
I'm trying to figure out what options I'm going to be interested in to work part time once I have enough money to retire, because I'm always going to be making something. It's why I got into this industry in the first place, instead of getting a job trying to trick other people into doing work.
I was remote working before the pandemic, and once it hit and people had to be home, I started hearing this argument. I looked at people leaders and asked them how they dealt with people who weren’t delivering in the office, and why that would no longer work. People who slack off were doing it before at the Starbucks or through walks, Internet browsing, etc, but when they’re home you can’t look over their shoulder while they do it. What you can do is continue to look for them delivering or not, and if they are, who cares where they do it?
WFH people were more productive before the pandemic. There were just fewer of us. If anything, as everyone else learns how to be remote and to do it well, and the stress of the pandemic subsides, performance should increase to match those of us that have been doing it for years.
I can absolutely say that at the firm I work, we're moving to a hybrid model following COVID's WFH model. Surveys from across the business show that some people want to WFH all the time, some want to work from the office sometimes and others (like me) want to work in the office all the time.
We're having this conversation and discussion around what is best when it comes to WFH, but there's no perfect fit, it depends entirely on the type of job you have, your home situation and also your social needs.
Possible, but there's the counter-balancing fact that people have been amped up and stressed out the whole last year, they didn't have the hardware they needed or the processes in place to help them succeed, they were dealing with their kids being unexpectedly dumped in their laps, etc.
This time last year companies were scrambling because they were absolutely unprepared for the amount of VPN bandwidth and other resources that would be necessary to handle abruptly shifting their work-force remote.
If anything, I would expect things to go more smoothly, for the companies that don't hastily revert to the asses-in-seats paradigm.
Yeah, imagine if people could do the stuff that they were not allowed to this past year, and so many things had not been postponed. Productivity would be through many roofs
In the early 2000s, when I was sharing a really dumpy student apartment, and had no office, I often spent the day working around town, mostly from parks and cafes.
Cafes can be distracting, but they had power for charging old laptop batteries, for the cost of a coffee, and sometimes had free WiFi.
Probably most productive were park benches, and sitting under particular trees.
I carried a bag with a laptop, a high-power WiFi card, a camera, and (nod to Douglas Adams) a towel.
This was the first laptop for working all over town, and I learned tricks for conserving battery power, including keeping disk spun down, and using the LCD passively (non-backlit) at times. https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/
The towel had multiple purposes, including: (1) wrapping the laptop in towel inside shoulder bag, for impact padding, which once saved laptop; (2) for sitting upon grass when it's wet or geese/ducks go there; (3) extra cover for laptop when caught in rain.
Today would be even better, with better laptop batteries, and with fast Internet from my phone.
Now that I have my own place, I usually prefer WFH over WFNH, for immersive work. But there's something to be said for "fresh" city air and sunlight, and speed-walking all over town for hours a day was good exercise.
Except the screen technology, which seems worse. The higher end the laptop the worse it seems to work in the sun light. My last good sunlight laptop was a super cheap atom based 11" Acer. I accomplished more on that than any Alienware, XPS, etc - because it worked in any light, and the batteries lasted longer than me.
New macs are fine. I have an air which is 20% less bright as a pro, and its fine in sunlight. A pro would be even better. I typically work outside on my patio with the laptop sitting in direct sun often. OSX also cranks up the gamma when it detects bright light to help resolve blacks a little better. Battery life is probably suffering though, its better to find shade. The screen is plenty visible at half brightness in shade.
An M1 macbook would be perfect for this sitting-under-a-tree lifestyle, the cherry on top would be built-in 5G, but that is a minor gap compared to battery/display brightness.
Are the batteries actually worthy in these? When I got my macbook (intel) Apple claimed 10 hours. Reviews claimed 10 hours. I get 5 hours with the mail app open and an ssh connection to our server. Even took it to the apple store and they said the battery is fine. If a zoom meeting is over an hour I need a charger.
Yup. I ran an office out of a wework for a while and it was a mess. But the folks who used their office as a secondary part time space to do focused work seemed to really enjoy it. They were also the only people who were there during our entire lease.
Readit News
The deciding factors were - that I didn't have to leave the room for a personal call so that I didn't disturb anyone. - that I didn't need to have six seperate conversations in the morning before being able to sit down and begin my work. - that I didn't need to sacrifice portions of my lunchtime to grab a coffee with others and look like a team player. - that from home I could now show affection to my partner that I would otherwise likely be ostracised for in an office environment.
Do I seem antisocial to you? Probably. But that's how I'm wired and want to live. I have (easily) another 1 1/2 productive hours in my work day now, and that's without children or a long commute. I'm the happiest I've ever been.
When I'm feeling exceedingly social and want to connect with others, I will work that specific day from the office.
I immediately emailed management requesting a near 100% transition to WFH, at least for me, and made the argument that my KPIs have more than doubled in 2020 vs. 2019. Working from home has allowed me the flexibility to not get burned out between meetings and as a result I booked more than 2x client meetings. In terms of collaboration, the main person on my team I collaborate with was relocated to San Franscisco, so I need to collaborate with him digitally anyway.
Also, despite closing more deals this year, I only received a 3.5% pay increase, and a $1K bonus increase over 2019. My 2019 numbers were abysmal compared to my 2020 numbers, and in 2019 I received a 4.4% salary increase. So more productivity doesn't get me bigger pay raises I guess.
Currently waiting to see what stupid bullshit they try to spin in order not to accommodate my request. My boss already told me that he'd support me WFH if it means I'll be able to keep up my current numbers. I'm thinking of telling management that I'm willing to overlook the slap-in-the-face pay increase if they'd accommodate permanent WFH for me / only need to go into the office as necessary.
We’ll retroactively reduce last years raise to 1%. The difference will be held from next month’s salary.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Also, your request is rejected. Someone clearly has to keep an eye on you to make sure you don’t slack off again.
And my boss isn't even in the same country, so I didn't have that kind of boss that makes sure you're sat at your desk and questions every moment away - I could come and go as I pleased, and as long as I got my work done and didn't take the piss, nobody would have a problem with me arriving late, leaving early, taking a few hours off for appointments etc.
But when I started working almost full-time from home some years back (5-10, I forget exactly), it was a great move for me.
My biggest issue with working in the office was they way we were made to work in the office - everything open plan, everyone fully exposed to the noise and bussle of everyone else. And there's always that one guy (OK, usually at least 3) who talk REALLY loudly all.the.time. And there's always that one guy who spends his whole day taking calls on a bluetooth headset, wandering around the office all.day.long, constantly in and out of your peripheral vision, or standing right behind you while he continues talking.
So having a nice, quiet home office makes working so much better. Plus, I get to have breakfast with my family, and lunch with my wife/kid/kids depending on the day.
I have to add though, that I have a decent sized house, with a dedicated home office, with a big desk, 2 monitors etc - I realise that not everyone has the space for that. I also realise that the social aspect was/is a huge deal for some people.
I actually think the ultimate solution would be for companies to be fully remote, but with the option of working from co-working spaces whenever you want - I'm really curious to see if we have a co-working space boom coming up; they are non-existent around me.
No, you seem like a well balanced human being who knows what’s important in life.
Your comment certainly resonated with me.
Never really understood people managers who don’t get this. You hired the best, right? Listen to them! They are experts about what makes them happy and productive.
I think the fear stems from the idea that people will try to be happy and not productive. To any managers out there: you have nothing to fear, just fire those people.
Currently working from home gives me all of that and I haven't been happier with a job ever.
- taking a 20 min nap in your lunch break
- doing a set of push-ups between phone calls
- cooking your own meal at lunch
- giving a hug to your partner
- having your pet in the room with you
- not listening to your coworkers noises
- 3 x 7 minute yoga sessions
- a 20 min power walk while on the phone
- zero driving, waiting, zero miles on your car, zero car accidents guaranteed (where I live people spend 10h week commuting on average)
… during your workday.
In 2019, my team would occasionally need to work long hours or would deliver something awesome. I would reward them with HH and dinner/late meal. It gave me a chance to say "thanks" and for us to bond over the challenge we overcame.
I can't do that anymore! I've don't virtual HH, but it isn't the same! I would REALLY like a virtual solution to "bond with your team" and "say thanks in a meaningful way" - cost be damned.
As a side note, politics suck. I really like WFH. Working long hours is bad - bonding is good.
At the end of the day if you take a weeknight from me I'm going to be annoyed at best and upset at worst. If you take a work day from me, or part of one, but still expect me to get a full days or work done we will both be in a bad position.
I get the intention here. I used to be a people manager and I planned lots of things for after work. But I stopped when I realized how difficult it actually made things for many people and people with kids.
"Me" is the key word
> and for us to bond over the challenge we overcame.
That occurred already. It happened through the process of overcoming the challenge.
I get the intent, but your people probably just want to rest and get some of their time back. If you must celebrate, do it during hours. I typically did offsite lunch time activities pre-COVID. Now it's more gift driven and individual. I made up award systems like the high school "most likely to ...". If someone renovated their masterbath, give them something that is specific to that as a thanks. Find out if they prefer public or 1:1 gratitude
Maybe your team would appreciate a $200 gift card instead of HH + dinner/late meal, especially when some people don't drink or prefer healthy meals instead of steakhouses.
Good. You'll have to think harder to find ways not to overwork your team in the first place.
This attitude towards workers rubs me the wrong way, but your side note saved you in my eyes:
> Working long hours is bad
Yes! Overworking people and then saying "thanks" by exploiting the fact ("using the chance", as you put it) that you locked them into the office isn't exactly fair. If this is what people mean by happy hour, that's absurd. If they chose to stay for social stuff after a normal day of work, that's of course another thing.
Growing up, I always loved getting to see people from school / school clubs (e.g. FSAE team, photography, etc) out of the normal context. It really opens up relationships and helps you figure out how to work better as a team.
If someone's not there because they don't want anything to do with work after hours, it's hard to treat them fairly -- the people who do show up are going to start viewing them as an outsider, and they might get passed up on promotion for someone that the higher-ups got to know better after office hours. So, objectively, having a happy hour probably tends to punish the people that don't show up, turning it into a mandatory function. I'd never really thought about it that way.
That said, I'd still prefer to have them.
I've done similar, but in local restaurants during working hours. It's unfair to implicitly demand your team to donate free time, regardless how much you believe they should enjoy and appreciate it.
That aside, virtual options have come pretty close for us. Give everyone a budget to arrange their own food and either organize activities/games that your team will enjoy or just hang out.
We all enjoyed it because it meant getting time off work and having a nice meal without giving up family time.
You could replicate that by ordering a nice lunch to be delivered to everyone's house and enjoying the meal together remotely.
I work hard to have my own life, outside of work. I don't work hard to be rewarded with a single expensive meal with booze paid for.
I don't even drink anyways.
I have had the pleasurable working in a team where bonding is simply working toward a common goal. This was an extremely cohesive team. Our main motivation of working long hour was to push the company to a more beneficial position so that we are also benefited from it.
The reward is the good result of the work itself and going home/out knowing that it will benefit us in the future.
The experience was almost like playing a co-op game rather than doing typical office work.
Happy hours and additional recreational activity were a way to regulate stress rather than a main reward.
Of course this is pretty unique, and is a rare thing to happen, especially in big companies where profit and work rather detached.
Maybe something like "We're playing hooky today, folks. We're all going to lunch and...we're not coming back to the office afterward."
Working extra hours is not to be expected and should be valued. A team probably works better when extra effort is valued. I think it is great, that you are trying to thank your employees / coworkers.
I get that there were people who appreciated these, but not everyone does. It is one more added duty after you have already done a lot.
When you say reward people for working hard on something, you don't mean the same night, do you? That sounds like possibly fun for extroverts and no fun at all for everyone else.
EDIT: For MacOS, I found this: https://github.com/kyleneideck/BackgroundMusic
Yep. Enough of that bullshit already.
> Currently working from home gives me all of that and I haven't been happier with a job ever.
Same here!
I also work at home in my studio but getting away from the distractions of home is, as this article notes, important.
I thought “remote work” already meant this? I’ve been doing it for years, it’s one of the perks of being a freelance artist. Sometimes I’ve toyed with the idea of getting together with some friends and splitting the rent on a shared studio space but really I know I’d only show up a few days a month.
Like anything, it's a spectrum. To some people, "travel" means "I drove to the next state over for the afternoon," and to some it means "I am going to this island down by Antarctica that requires getting a special government permit".
Currently my current and ideal situation is working from home 3-4 days a week and then coming in at the end of the week. Those in office days might be less productive but they do provide enough social interaction for the week.
Finding a nice desk with good WiFi, power socket, and a view was always challenging. Outside isn't ideal because of lacking WiFi/power socket. Free WiFi in backpacker hostels is sometimes limited to a few hundred MB. The Apple Store has a fast connection, but blocks everything that's not port 80 (which means no connecting to our SQL database on Amazon RDS). University WiFi worked well, thanks to a friend's eduroam.
Libraries are wonderful, but need to have longer opening hours in Western countries. The KHOP prayer room in Kaohsiung was excellent.
I wish there were a place I could go after work that isn't the office or my room. As it is, I get a lot done while sitting on a bus, but WiFi, power, and a view would make that much more pleasant.
I am the same. I actually do rent a "hot desk" at a co-working space and I use it barely once a month.
I have probably used it more for a private bathroom in the city centre than for the desk.
The original goal was just to get me out of the house and an excuse to get into the city for a wander. But I almost always choose to actually work in the gardens or at a cafe en-route. I keep renting it because it is pretty cheap and is entirely tax deductable for me, and on occasion it has proven invaluable (rain, cold, noisy at home, need to work for more than a few hours in a row and need the commitment device etc).
I think since most people's taste of remote work happened during COVID, so home was the only acceptable remote work place.
Dead Comment
Once I started sharing a loft space with some friends to co-work out of things got a lot more enjoyable. My space was a 20 minute walk from my apartment, I could keep a more robust setup there, had space for an electronics/soldering station, kept a library of CS and math books there, etc. And if I needed to just do some work on my laptop and stay at home, that was always an option too.
Highly recommend having a situation like that if it's at all possible. I gave up my space in Brooklyn mid-way through the pandemic and definitely am going to go find a new one soon. (If anyone has got a hacker space in north brooklyn let me know!).
Because a 10 minutes commute is not actually a 10 minutes commute, for me at least. In the morning, I have to shower even if I still feel clean (my hair otherwise would need hours to look like I didn't just wake up), I have to dress for outside, I have to take my breakfast with this constant mental reminder that "you should get out to work soon".
With my little office room, I just declare "over!" at some point in the evening and am happily at home instantly.
But everyone's different, and I had generally observed that the lack of physical separation that some lament seems to affect me less. On the weekends, I still use my "office room" as a recreational room, and I sometimes also work from my living room couch and am happy to just declare "over!" by closing the laptop, without the impression that this has somehow "spoilt" my living room.
Around here a 1 Bed room apartment + small office rental would be FAR FAR FAR more costly than simply renting a 2 bedroom apartment.
1 year ago, before home prices skyrocketed, it would have been very economical to buy a 2 or 3 bedroom home in order to have a dedicated office space.
Granted that only applies if you do not live in one of the top 50 Metro's, and if your job is not really fully remote why would you want to stay in a high cost of living location?
I still like full remote for flexibility it gives especially with a trip for a couple weeks/months but long term location I’d probably end up in the Bay Area independent of my work just from friends.
Believe it or not, most professionals are actually still productive outside the panopticon. If anything, substantially more productive because of being in a pleasant environment of their choosing. The only reason I can think why so many refuse to accept this evidence is because a lot of middle managers add little value beyond daycare supervisor. Not all, but a lot.
That's full on projecting. It's what they'd do.
I'm trying to figure out what options I'm going to be interested in to work part time once I have enough money to retire, because I'm always going to be making something. It's why I got into this industry in the first place, instead of getting a job trying to trick other people into doing work.
We're having this conversation and discussion around what is best when it comes to WFH, but there's no perfect fit, it depends entirely on the type of job you have, your home situation and also your social needs.
This time last year companies were scrambling because they were absolutely unprepared for the amount of VPN bandwidth and other resources that would be necessary to handle abruptly shifting their work-force remote.
If anything, I would expect things to go more smoothly, for the companies that don't hastily revert to the asses-in-seats paradigm.
Cafes can be distracting, but they had power for charging old laptop batteries, for the cost of a coffee, and sometimes had free WiFi.
Probably most productive were park benches, and sitting under particular trees.
I carried a bag with a laptop, a high-power WiFi card, a camera, and (nod to Douglas Adams) a towel.
This was the first laptop for working all over town, and I learned tricks for conserving battery power, including keeping disk spun down, and using the LCD passively (non-backlit) at times. https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/
The towel had multiple purposes, including: (1) wrapping the laptop in towel inside shoulder bag, for impact padding, which once saved laptop; (2) for sitting upon grass when it's wet or geese/ducks go there; (3) extra cover for laptop when caught in rain.
Today would be even better, with better laptop batteries, and with fast Internet from my phone.
Now that I have my own place, I usually prefer WFH over WFNH, for immersive work. But there's something to be said for "fresh" city air and sunlight, and speed-walking all over town for hours a day was good exercise.