#WFH #remote work #work from home #company culture #virtual meetings #remote teams
In recent months, there has been a significant shift towards remote work and working from home (WFH) for many companies. While some employees have embraced this change and enjoy the flexibility it offers, there are also many companies who dislike the idea of WFH. But why is WFH so disliked by companies? Let’s dive into some of the reasons behind this sentiment.
## Lack of Company Culture
One of the main reasons why some companies are hesitant to embrace WFH is the fear of losing their company culture. Many organizations believe that working from an office helps build a sense of community and camaraderie among employees. They worry that by allowing everyone to work remotely, they will lose the social interactions and team bonding that occur in a physical workplace.
### Example:
“I have to move across the country to work in an office so I can participate in “our company culture” while half our team works from other locations, not to mention entire new teams are being stood up in India. We’re all remote from each other anyways, why are you forcing me drive to an office where every meeting is a video call anyways?”
## Communication Challenges
Another concern for companies when it comes to WFH is the potential for communication breakdowns. When employees are working remotely, it can be harder to have impromptu conversations, quick check-ins, or spontaneous brainstorming sessions that often happen in an office setting. This can lead to delays in decision-making, misunderstandings, and a lack of clarity on projects.
## Productivity and Accountability
Some companies worry that remote work may lead to a decrease in productivity and accountability among employees. Without the structure and supervision of an office environment, employees may struggle to stay focused and motivated. There is also a concern that some employees may take advantage of the flexibility of remote work and not put in the same level of effort as they would in the office.
### Example:
– Lack of face-to-face supervision
– Distractions at home
– Difficulty in tracking work hours
## Technology and Security Concerns
Implementing WFH policies also raises concerns around technology and security. Companies worry about whether their employees have the necessary equipment and technology to effectively work from home. There is also a fear of increased cybersecurity risks when employees are accessing company data and systems from outside the office network.
## Employee Engagement and Well-being
Lastly, some companies dislike WFH due to concerns around employee engagement and well-being. Working remotely can lead to feelings of isolation and disconnection from the team. Employees may miss out on social interactions, networking opportunities, and the support system that an office environment provides. Additionally, there are concerns about the impact of remote work on mental health and work-life balance.
### Example:
– Loneliness and isolation
– Difficulty in separating work from personal life
– Burnout from overworking
In conclusion, while there are valid reasons why some companies may dislike WFH, it’s important to recognize that remote work can also bring many benefits such as increased flexibility, cost savings, and improved work-life balance. By addressing the challenges and concerns associated with WFH through effective communication, technology solutions, and a focus on employee well-being, companies can successfully navigate the transition to a more remote-friendly work environment. At the end of the day, it’s about finding the right balance that works for both the organization and its employees. #remote work #work from home #company culture #productivity #employee engagement
A lot of middle managers would have nothing to do without being able to call meetings and interact in person with people.
They can’t monitor you
They have leases on real estate
They don’t want you to apply for other jobs
One reason is because often these companies own expensive real estate that’s no longer being used and has dropped significantly in value.
If your company claims to advocate for fighting climate change and insist people drive to work everyday call them out on their bullshit. Name and shame anonymously.
Multiple possibilities:
1. Older generations are still leading some companies and are sticking to their old ways. They literally _don’t_ understand younger generations. They all say, “Back in my day…”
2. Some companies had invested in physical office spaces by signing 10-, 15- or even 20-year contracts pre-COVID, or even outright buying properties pre-COVID. Then they don’t want to admit their investment backfired, so they pretend that WFH is going against “company culture.”
3. Some jobs actually _need_ to be in-person, and I say this as a permanent remote employee. For example, if your company has physical tech in the office (namely servers) and you are partly responsible for maintaining it, then you really do need to be there.
Micromanagers can’t check up behind you and see and ask what you are doing every hour.
I work remote and absolutely love it but I could see why companies might not.
I’m friendly with my coworkers, but not in the same way as I was in the past, when I was in the office. This then makes it very easy for me to move on without a problem. It wasn’t impossible back when I was in the office but it’s even easier now
As a senior engineer have no problems I’m pretty much self-guided. I know exactly what I need to do and I only pop up when I have questions for people however, for junior engineers much more difficult. They can’t really pop in and ask questions. I could definitely see some of them, missing out on the mentorship part of the workplace
Something not talked about are the tax breaks large companies receive from these cities for bringing head count to stimulate the economy in said city.
If the head count doesn’t meet a certain threshold, said company is no longer entitled to said tax break. We’re talking big bucks here, especially in cities like SF, NY, and Seattle.
Lots of companies *do* want people to work remotely, so they can hire more cheaply and have a larger pool of candidates, and more easily let people go with minimal drama. The positions can get more competitive since they get more applications from people across the country instead of just people willing to relocate or already in the area.
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I know it will be insanely unpopular on this sub and probably heavily downvoted, but there are plenty of advantages to working together onsite. You get easier mentorship and collaboration, stronger team bonding, being able to know for sure that someone is available to ask a question or out for the day, etc. There are certain natural collaborations that happen from being in the same room and having a coffee break together, or looking over at what your neighbor is doing, and those kinds of interactions don’t really happen organically over most remote work setups. Some people like Steve Jobs have tried to take that to an extreme, doing things like designing the building in specific ways to maximize little chance encounters for unexpected collaborations. Working remote is like doing the opposite- you don’t interact unless you’ve specifically scheduled or called someone. There might be tons of people you never interact with at all because they’re in a slightly different team or department, but if you worked in the office you might meet on the regular, chat about different things, learn from each other, make friends, etc.
Obviously there are different advantages to working remotely as well, like no commute, a broader talent pool, more flexibility etc. But that makes it a legitimate tradeoff with real upsides and downsides for both policies.
I work remotely right now, and I’m very glad to be home since I have a baby and it’s easy to take a break and help my family out. But I also know I’m also personally less productive and definitely less in tune with my coworkers. I’m glad I worked previously in my career on site, where I had more direct mentorship and built up some skills and strong connections, and I could see myself doing it again sometime in the future.
RTO doesn’t make sense when part of the team is distributed. However, the hard truth that this sub hates to admit is that being in person as part of a collaborative team leads to casual conversations about work and discuss ideas that can yield dividends. These tend to happen a lot less in remote cultures, as there are less opportunities for this to happen organically when everyone is working in their silos.
Of course there are trade offs, but this sub loves to act like there’s no benefit to working in the office other than objectively negative reasons like micromanaging.
If you set aside the “they hate us” kind of responses, there is 1 big one. Ramp up of new hires is not good with wfh. Or, the management perception of the ramp up of new hires is not good at least.
I’m sure there are some teams that have mastered integrating new hires with remote, but a lot of us kind of sucked at it. It’s extremely noticeable how much worse the covid hires are compared to how my peer group was at the same level of experience. For my job, part of it is increased hiring and the inevitable lowering of standards, but my managers definitely believe that wfh is playing a role. Our new(er) hires have also commented on how much more they feel like they’re learning from us being in the office together.
> We’re all remote from each other anyways
The end state is that we won’t be remote from each other. People will be moved around to be colocated within the same cities eventually. My team has frozen hiring but we’ve already preparing to change from us/canada hiring to seattle only.
A lot of people touched on the established reasons (control, real estate, taxes etc). However, the sad truth is that most statistics seem to indicate that overall performance decreases. Almost every large tech company collected formal / informal metrics during the pandemic on the performance of their SWEs during WFH.
In general
* Experienced and tenured employees tended to self report higher efficiency
* Junior employees self reported a lower efficiency and a lower rate of learning.
* Junior employees took statistically longer to get promoted
* General high level metrics went down (# of code reviews, # of lines modified etc. useless at individual level, but very informative at the overall company level).
* All employees reported less feeling of comradery with other employees.
This is a combination of data I obtained by being both nosy in my current company (where data is mostly not made public even internally) and talking with friends at Google (where a lot of this data was internally public).
All of these metrics track with my personal experience when WFH started. I never bought a house in the country like a lot of my friends because of it, since the initial data pretty much meant that you had to have a mostly senior workforce with below industry attrition to be coming out ahead with WFH. Since most big tech companies rely on a steady stream of juniors to get trained up to replace senior attrition, it wasn’t sustainable without a complete rethink of fundamental corporate HR practices.
I work from home as an SRE a very well known company.
I’ll admit this:
I’m so much less productive working from home. I work maybe 10 hours a week. I make $190k TC. Same with my team. Yes, I do dishes, laundry, clean the house and do errands while ‘working’. Even my manager works from his fishing boat time to time. I also have zero bond with anyone on my team. They’re just faces on a screen. I have zero camaraderie with them vs my in person jobs in the past.
However, I am also lucky enough that my job doesn’t care what I do so long as I well, do my job and meet KPIs.
I’m kinda screwed because I’ve basically lost all work ethic if something does happen though. I can never go back to a real job. Luckily my company has never had lay offs in its 120+ year history and we are never going back to the office as there is no office for us. You might be more productive from home, but I sure am not.
I can 100% see why employers who have higher op tempo wouldn’t want remote employees. If I was a CEO of a company, I’d make only my absolute top performing employees remote who have proven themselves and are valuable assets, like at Meta.
Its hard to build team cohesion and trust on a new team while fully remote.
Its great if you’ve had a team that you’ve been working together with and trust completely for years. Everyone just goes to work and it works like a well oiled machine.
It sucks if you’re new and or inexperienced.
I can only speak to early stage companies, as I know many founders and am one myself (although, I am pro-remote).
Some common reasons:
* It’s their baby. They didn’t want to go in when it was for other companies but now it’s theirs they want tight control and to form it exactly how they want. It’s less fun for them if it’s remote.
* They don’t know how to hire for remote. It requires a different strategy and you need to look for different signals.
* It’s seen as an unnecessary risk. You have a million and one risks to worry about. Your goal in moving the company forward is really mitigating and reducing as many risks as possible. If they don’t feel strongly, they will choose the seemingly less risky option.
* Investors insist on it. Quite a few VCs won’t invest in remote-first companies for various reasons (some unknown).
* Remote is an easy scapegoat. If you have failed to deliver, you can make it seem to investors things will improve if you return to office. Just say that the remote experiment failed. It’s not because the founder had an unviable business model.
In my experience it’s not at all disliked.
Truthfully, it is more difficult to create a “team” culture virtually. Not impossible, but it adds a degree of difficulty.
And yeah, it’s slightly easier for someone to skate by doing nothing at home for longer. I have a better pulse on what my in-office people are working on vs my international offices. But there are ways to help work around that.
I work in a large IT organization (several thousand people), and the most effective people are those who have built a network of people across the organization.
While most of us love WFH and we have a degree of flexibility to do that about half the week, there’s a broad recognition that during the pandemic we all met fewer new people, and lost touch with colleagues we’d normally see in the break room, and thereby missed out on some of the “oh yeah, I heard you are working on xyz, have y’all considered…” conversation that happens spontaneously.
If your IT job is “take this requirement, code it”, that is probably less important than if you’re interacting with a customer base daily and designing enterprise-level systems.
We do have international offices, and so some of our teams do most of their work virtually. However – I have personally experienced that teams that meet face to face, even just once, have an incredible jump in camaraderie and productivity compared with teammates who have never met each other. Personally, that’s how I’d run a department; fully remote with several mandatory f2f meetings a year based on what makes sense for that team/department.
My take: Literally it’s because some people with power just don’t want to change. And people with that mindset are usually shitty places to work for (I’m referring to people at the top, not ICs who genuinely coworking).
Like, literally that simple, just having a shitty mindset as a person.
Look, there’s some remote-first companies, some that have been so even before COVID. Some have embraced this post-COVID now that they realized that it’s very much possible to get your work done in your feety pajamas. I’ve found these are anecdoteally correlated to better places to work as a dev (again not always but just my experience working and interviewing and hearing from my network).
But then there’s some people at the top of companies who literally just don’t want to change. Maybe they just want the prestige of people being in the office, or just having more “sense” of “control” over their workers. Or maybe they have a bunch of real-estate and want to justify their shitty decision to renew it. Whatever it is, it’s a fixed mindset. And it’s not gonna change until they change (which they won’t) or they get forced to by enough pressure.
People don’t like to hear this but every team I’ve been a part of that was virtual was less productive.
Lower management seem to love WFH because they can work from home and retain top talent.
Our investors and board keep pushing for it to go away.
The general feeling is that productivity is lower when working from home, and very often it is true.
Not true for everyone of course, and some jobs it’s easier to measure productivity than others, but generally the assumption is that productivity will be lower in WFH positions than in-office positions, and there is probably some truth to that.
In my last job we used “working from home” as a synonym for “day off work” as a sort of in-joke.
People can argue about it all they like, but the general feeling is that you’re going to work more in the office, than if you’re at home.
There’s a huge tendency to slack off.
These are all the reasons:
* Boomer execs who hate change. “Old way is the best way” type mentality.
* Micro-managers and power-hungry ppl who want more control over their employees.
* Managers/employees who _enjoy_ office politics. They can’t easily play that game if they’re is no office.
* Idiot Execs. who refuse to terminate the lease of their office building, and want to justify the expense by mandating employees return from home. Or
* Some big companies normally wouldn’t care if you WFH or in office, but what they’ve discovered is when it’s time to do layoffs, they can do a RTO and some of their employees will quit willingly, which allows them to do less “resignation packages”.
At one of my jobs the CEO forced everybody back into office but that bloke was never even there. It really just seems like a power move. Like then want to tell you that they own you and that you’ll do whatever they tell you to do. The people in office always make such a big deal when the other person who’s working from home doesn’t immediately reply or answer a surprise video call.
I work fully remotely. WFH is more popular now than before. That said, there’s a few reasons companies are reluctant to make everything fully remote.
* It’s nice when talent is local. Nothing like everyone in one room hashing things out. Several startups I interviewed with seem to want people to be local even if working remotely because when in a pinch they just want to get a wework space and hash things out.
* It’s very very hard to onboard new employees, especially new grads, remotely. You need a very very strong remote culture to be able to do that without too many problems.
* I worked at a global remote type company previously. We were all local with a few specialists working fully remotely to start with. During the pandemic, they made it fully remote and hired people all around the world. It was HELL and I hated it. I was blocked a lot because people weren’t in the same timezone as I was and weren’t online the same hours I was. I ended up having to work at all hours just to coordinate with people and it messed my mental health and family life to such an extent that I had to quit.
* I’ve worked at companies previously where shit wouldn’t get done until you actually showed up at their goddamn desk and said “hey do this for me”. Having that option is quite valuable.
* It’s really hard to have a company culture while fully remote. You can get coding done if you’re organized enough. Other kinds of jobs are quite dependent on interpersonal connections, and it’s hard to nurture those unless there’s an office culture. It becomes quite hard to progress beyond a point without an in-person culture.
* I’m increasingly seeing companies want jobs to be hybrid. They recognize the jobs to be doable fully remotely, but they want to be able to have in-person events and some kind of office culture happening so they can have new grads connect and be groomed, and be able to scale up in-person stuff when there is a necessity instead of that being off the table.
* It’s really hard to bond with people without being present in person. I like my colleagues a lot, but I honestly have no clue what their lives are like and it feels too rude to even ask. Slack channels go out to the whole goddamn company and it becomes super hard to be yourself. Most messages are either super curated or the informal channels become dominated by the noisiest few people. I miss having lunch with colleagues and earlier in my career, I made great lifelong friends at work despite being quite an introvert. I don’t see too many opportunities for that now and that makes work life a lot less rich. I like the option to have to be in office now and then and get to know your colleagues well enough.
* I don’t know why amazon expects you to badge in everyday even if you’re in a different location from the rest of your team etc, that seems to be some big-company ass-covering, but also amazon seems to constantly do a lot of crap that inconveniences employees for no reason.
Feel like people always leave this tidbit out. While there really is a lot of people that thrive and are productive in a WFH setting, there are absolutely people that DO NOT.
I’ve had so many co-workers that slacked off so hard in WFH setting and they would constantly push their ticket back and couldn’t really explain in detail why they are falling behind and are unresponsive in chats.
These bad apples honestly ruin the whole WFH culture.
Honestly, people tend to disappear for long periods of time if WFH. There is a justification for mistrust from the management to the workers below.
“Because fuck you, we want to make sure we’re getting our moneys worth out of you.”
Feeble managers who push their authority and control, and need their sycophant underlings lack that with wfh.
A lot of the older crowd unironically would HATE to be home all day with their kids and spouse.
Managers job can also be a lot different when remote.
Some people arent disciplined enough to wfh.
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As others have said WFH is a double edged sword. If your team can be fully remote exactly what prevents outsourcing? The whole ‘oh because you live in the USA you deserve 3-10x as much for doing the same job’ stuff is really not really based on logic.
Boomer mentality. 2/3 of the team is usually in other cities or in India. Doesn’t make sense for non client facing roles
Not all of them do. Mine doesn’t.
They spend less money on leasing office space, keeping office snacks/coffee/supplies. There is not as much likelihood of lawsuit which can occur from working in office…less people suing over slipping in the bathroom, over being sexually harassed, etc.