I am currently soft-quarantined by my employer in Hong Kong because I recently visited Mainland China, and will be working from home for 14 days, along with many others.
It's not going that well: from my subjective point of view, people seem to treat it as an extra vacation. They are often not online and will only complete a few small tasks per day, because there is no threat from the boss who sees that you are browsing facebook instead of working.
Even government employees are at home. Many people didn't get their tax bill so they don't need to pay tax for now. Sweet!
That experiment makes me think that perhaps work from home is optimal mostly for a small pool of highly motivated and talented individuals, such as the average person on HN who actually does feel more productive working from home. Outside of HN, work ethic could be different.
Well, of course you can't just switch to remote work overnight without any preparation, and expect everything to work well immediately! But, for example: how do you know those workers are treating it as a small vacation? You're not there to see them either! Managers can do the same, they don't need to know what the worker is doing instead of working; they can see the work is not getting done.
I would guess a lot are also not set up at home to work efficiently. I.e. proper desk in a quiet room etc. And if the kids are home from school as well, I assume it is very hard to concentrate on working from home.
Also if there is the threat of an incoming pandemic, then my priorities would be elsewhere than work. I.e. securing family, provisions, medicines, etc. And checking news sources about the epidemic every 5 minutes is not good for efficiency...
It's not difficult, though. It just takes practice. You use the same channels that you are using for remote work: chat, email, voice, video. I understand the desire to not put something like that in writing, but that's what voice and video are for.
Working remotely both incentives and sort of mandates better visibility into one's working/thinking processes.
Writing, explaining, documenting, committing, pushing, testing one's work is important. It helps others know what you are up to, and helps you to be able to better show your work.
By reporting progress, daily targets should not be a certain tangible goal necessarily, rather than that some progress has been done and reported. This isn't perfect of course but I think it's possible to evaluate whether or not the tasks/progress someone has made reflects a days work.
Daily targets are a waste of time in my opinion. Weekly targets make much more sense. But as a team meeting, not for a performance evaluation.
That said, people constantly measuring performance should be replaced by productive people. It is always a management failure if your people are slacking off. Otherwise I would just do something that makes me look good on daily reports. That can have massive negative implications for general business interest. That creates the typical blinders that make large corps unproductive.
Daily targets make sense in production, but not for evaluating employees, but because you need it for other business processes to allow supply and demand fit the productivity.
The current trend for more employee surveillance is mostly a scam and doesn't even help productivity. On the contrary it tends to create unnecessary overhead, like daily meetings. It is one of the most non-creative employment of information technology.
That said, daily meetings can be extremely important for remote teams. But those are mostly about other topics anyway.
Daily targets can be okay as long reports like "I tried these and none of them worked for the problem I'm trying to solve." or "There is new XCode update which broke my build and I'm still trying to figure out why." are accepted as progress.
At the lowest level the team lead (you can call it manager or whatever) has to be accountable and needs a budget and the ability to freely hire and fire people to be able to meet objectives.
Giving first-line managers the freedom to hire and fire would be a stupid way to manage an organization. Most of those managers lack the experience, competence, and perspective to make that type of decision effectively. Which is why competent organizations support them with a surrounding structure of corporate policies, senior management, and human resources to (hopefully) prevent first-line managers from making too many mistakes.
If you don't have competent enough first-line managers to decide who they can effectively work with, your whole org will become a micromanagement hell. Which breaks down if you try to do it remotely.
Of course the implementation of hire/fire does not mean that the first line manager does the interview alone, without any help, supervision, oversight and support from middle management and HR. But if you have no say in who you manage, who you work with, it'll be very hard to get work done.
And in my experience this usually already happens informally anyway.
You appear to be unfamiliar with best practices in software project management. User stories (or change requests or whatever you call them) are either done or not done. Progress on tasks is meaningless: from a customer value standpoint either the functionality is ready to deliver or it isn't. If you ask for progress reports then developers will report a lot of "progress" but it's totally meaningless.
Naturally, you should break down tasks until you get max one day chunks. But estimation errors are common, so if you end up spending 2+ days on a "half-day task", then you should be able to explain why. GitHub/GitLab/JIRA/Phabricator/Gerrit/GoogleDocs/whatever comments, emails, commit messages, CI runs, are all manifestations of progress.
Task completion is a manifestation of time and effort, not progress. While breaking down user stories into daily tasks can be a useful crutch for newer teams that lack proper agile process discipline, highly productive agile teams find that administrative overhead to be a waste of time. In general incompetent managers tend to fall into the trap of looking at meaningless metrics just because they're easy to calculate rather than focusing on what really matters: sustained customer value delivery.
I don't really know what else to tell you, because you seem to insist on some magic definition of progress.
I work with people I trust. Their competence, ability, and integrity. If I see them spending time on tasks, exerting effort on whatever problem at hand they are solving, I'm very much certain that's progress measurable in direct customer satisfaction/value.
For most modern work it's difficult to see if the work is being done, whether people are at home or in the office. For the stuff you can watch it's mostly impossible to do at home.
There is one major requirement for remote work, it’s called deadlines. Give people a paycheck, some requirements, and deadlines and I promise you the work will find a way to get done. They can browse Facebook all they want.
What about work that does not have deadlines, but requires constant attention? Like monitoring security cameras, or the status of a medical patient or a nuclear power plant..
These types of work have the added risk of unauthorized people, such as the employee’s kids or friends, snooping in on sensitive information.
That might be helped by the employer providing a dedicated computer for remote work, with screen-recording and facial recognition that locks the system if you’re not (the only person) in view.
Perhaps having always-on video and voice surveillance on that computer, and announcing that fact, would force employees to create a dedicated distraction-free work environment in their homes.
You do the same thing that you do in the real world. Have you ever noticed how sometimes security guards will walk around with a little key fob and touch it to a point on the wall? That's because in order to ensure they're doing their required patrols they physically have to log they've been to a point.
If you're requiring someone pay attention to a monitor you can do the same thing - for example put a square on the image and require the employee to click it. Obviously though, this requires someone to actually critically think about protocols for ensuring work is done to a standard.
If touching points is all that's required, then that's all that will get done. The neural nets of all employees will eventually become trained to touch the points and not do the actual work you desire.
In the case of a security guard the 'real' job is to catalogue all things 'out of place' and then react if necessary.
Every home of the future would/should have an office, with the kitchen evolving into a general in-house factory with 3D printers etc. :)
This would have the added benefit of reclaiming the space currently taken up by many office towers, reducing traffic and the associated stress from daily commutes, improving overall health, increasing leisure time, which in turn improves the economy, and so on.
If remote work became a norm, I'd expect housing market in large cities to sink dramatically. Why would one move e.g. to New York if their hometown provided same same job opportunities?
Laptops can go anywhere, and my living room is empty until ~4pm when my kids get home. I've been remote for going on 5 years now and routinely take my work laptop to the kitchen or living room (though I'll concede I need a quiet room for some calls/tasks that involve PII).
There are ways you can 'force' attention. Things like semi-regular unannounced drills, audits, etc. I agree it's harder, and for things like the status of a medical patient or nuclear power plant the potential damage of someone going to the pub in the afternoon and missing something is far worse than missing a couple items in a sprint, but it is still possible to assess.
I understood that. I think OP was saying that forcing a path and specific, physical actions, meant the security guard will perform as expected. Which is... kind of not the case?
It doesn't work that way, because most work is at least somewhat collaborative and that means the remote worker is not solely in control of the pace. As a remote worker I can't meet with someone in the office who doesn't respond to my pings. I can't commit my code if reviewers only respond once per day. If people have an across-the-desk conversation without me that invalidates what I just spent a day implementing, I'm screwed - either by losing that work or by having to spend time (and become The Bad Guy) by persuading them back to the right path. The only way around these issues is to multitask more, which we should all know by now creates its own productivity problems. If you think deadlines alone work, you can't have tried it for any but the most trivially separable kinds of work.
What you've described are symptoms of an office who doesn't know how how to scale distributed work loads with remote workers. Across-the-desk conversations for instance don't scale to large workforce numbers.
Yes, they are symptoms, but the point is that "just give people deadlines" does nothing to address either the symptoms or the underlying problem. It's facile advice that doesn't lead to actual improvement.
Exactly, and I'd argue the metrics you need to check that someone working remotely has been efficient is a much better business metric than ass-on-chair time.
I'm running a fully remote engineering team. There are plenty of difficulties and downsides unique to being remote, but one of the major benefit is that performance evaluation becomes much simpler, as you're not biased by seeing people sitting or not sitting at their desk.
I mean most people when they first start working remotely have trouble adjusting. After all, up until then their home is a place for rest, not for work!
It's probably that people are not accustomed to this flow
Any task that is a rote, skill-less application of a list of procedures. Success in that case is a binary "did you do the thing", not "how well you did the thing".
...such as? All jobs I can think of -- even the most low-status or menial -- requires a certain skill and can be done with varying levels of quality.
All jobs I can think of involve some sort of outcome that is desired by the one purchasing the work. Furthermore, that outcome can be of insufficient quality and therefore rejected by the purchaser, or at least not fulfilling the needs they were expecting to have fulfilled.
Remote work is a skill, it takes time to acquire, just like office work and barely less. (Have you forgotten how hard it was to stay put for 8+ hours in the same place? I still remember.)
My personal estimations -- it takes 18 month to work out an established routine, so any RW "decreed" on the worker before that time, is indeed effectively vacations.
The worst scheme is working from home 1-2 days a week, and coming to office for the rest. Beside the established routine it also requires adapting the sleep schedule (which is twice as hard if the RW days are floating, not fixed).
Because when one works from home, there is no need to allot time for commute. People with short commute times (==> no need to adjust sleeping schedule), are much keener to go work from the office.
As another HKer, I just think that working practices at many companies in our city are not set up for remote work yet. There is a lot of reliance on micromanagement, paternalism and face-to-face communications. Working from home is too different from this.
I've also seen this in HK. The team I worked in, used to work mainly with people in Singapore, my local colleagues just didn't know what to do with their manager not being in the office with them. Half of the time they would just sit around and do nothing, until our manager explicitly told them what to do, and even then they struggled.
I found it immensely frustrating, eventually my local colleagues got let go because it just wasn't working out (even though it's a HK office, we mostly worked with people overseas).
There were plenty of other reasons why it didn't work out as well.
They are often not online and will only complete a few small tasks per day, because there is no threat from the boss who sees that you are browsing facebook instead of working.
And I'm sure they're worried about their friends, family and relatives that might be sick (and they can't get to). That worry will cause a productivity drop BECAUSE WE'RE ALL HUMAN.
If I were an employer, I think I'd probably give folks a bit of slack for the next several weeks.
I think this is highly dependent on culture. If you have a strongly hierarchy based culture where the boss is breathing down your neck all the time, then people are not going to deal well with being given freedom.
I have seen this time and again as a Norwegian, when living abroad. I come from a culture where power hierarchies are quite flat and there is a very high trust level between people. Bosses don't breath down your neck.
I remember an Indian manager who had worked long in Norway remarked on the difficulty of going back to India. People there are used to be bossed around and micromanaged all the time. The result is that it is difficult for them to manage themselves when the boss is gone. He remarked on the frustration of having to be present all the time for work to get done. I had gotten accustomed to not needing that in Norway.
But you don't have to go as far as India to see it. I got family and friends who observed the same in the UK. As soon as the boss left everybody started chatting and chilling.
I could see similar things when I studied in the US. American teenagers were often quite bad at managing themselves away from home. When I stayed over at people's places I realized why. Their parents where far stricter and far more micromanaging than I was used to. Even on campus there was far more rules and control than what would be normal in Northern Europe.
Stuff like that gives short term benefits of people behaving. The long term problem is that people get little to no training in managing themselves and setting their own boundaries. Autonomy and self control is not something you are born with. You have to train on it and learn it.
I find Scandinavian parents are far more tolerant towards kids screwing up and wasting their time. Part of that I think is they know kids must learn to handle situations themselves.
My wife is Asian-American and I know from all the stories she tells me that in Asia where it is even more control oriented and more ambitious it becomes even harder. Parents and teachers make all the "optimal" choices for you all the time, to push for success. She has family members who never chose even what clothes they wore all through childhood. Parents made all the choices.
I had a friend from Singapore. She remarked on how difficult it was coming to the US as a teenager. Suddenly teachers wanted to know her opinion on a variety of issues and subjects. But nobody had ever asked her opinion on anything before.
So I can imagine that remote working in Asia is going to be a lot harder than for many western countries. Even within the West there will be big differences in how well it can work.
But just so it is clear. I don't think the ability to work remote is inherent in people. I think with training Asian societies and workers can develop a culture for more independent working and working from home.
People who slack instantly when the boss leaves, are only working because they're being driven before the whip. It's not lack of self management. It's being dragged unwillingly into a tedious hell. Refusing "autonomy" in the circumstances, is a form of soft sabotage protest.
I think for most people makes job is something you have to do, you do it to make a living. Work is not fancy outside tech world: the pay is less, task is more repetitive than challenging, work is not dynamic.
Also working in HK, everyone is encouraged to work from home. I’ve been going into the office since my company issued laptop just isn’t equipped for software engineering. Our company VPN was also down the entire day, so not sure how anyone could’ve done any work.
On the upside, my commute to work has been quiet, and there’s no distractions in the office.
> from my subjective point of view, people seem to treat it as an extra vacation.
Every middle level managers job is depending on this belief. Once they accept people can work from home,their job becomes extinct its understandable but not true.
The fact that most people have never before had exposure to work from home (due to not being given the option until now) has to be taken into account. I doubt people would continue to treat it as an excuse to slack in the long-term.
no idea about HK law but in USA law not getting your tax bill has no bearing on your obligation to pay. Even getting bad info from the IRs does not give you an excuse to not pay it correctly and on time.
It's not going that well: from my subjective point of view, people seem to treat it as an extra vacation. They are often not online and will only complete a few small tasks per day, because there is no threat from the boss who sees that you are browsing facebook instead of working.
Even government employees are at home. Many people didn't get their tax bill so they don't need to pay tax for now. Sweet!
That experiment makes me think that perhaps work from home is optimal mostly for a small pool of highly motivated and talented individuals, such as the average person on HN who actually does feel more productive working from home. Outside of HN, work ethic could be different.