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Are Remote Workers More Productive Because Asynchronous Communication Just Works Better? (doist.com) 174

An anonymous reader quotes the CEO of Doist: Study after study after study into remote work has made one thing clear: Remote workers are more productive than their office-bound counterparts. What's not entirely clear is why. Yes, people gain back time (and sanity) by avoiding rush hour commutes. They avoid the distractions of the office. They regain a sense of control over their workdays. They have more time to dedicate to family, friends, and hobbies. But apart from the commute, all of those benefits aren't necessarily the result of location independence, but rather the byproduct of asynchronous communication -- giving employees control over when they communicate with their teammates.

Many company leaders are asking themselves if they should embrace remote work. Very few are asking themselves if they should embrace a more asynchronous workstyle. While I think remote work is the future, I believe that asynchronous communication (or async, for short) is an even more important factor in team productivity, whether your team is remote or not. Not only does async produce the best work results, but it also lets people do more meaningful work and live freer, more fulfilled lives.

Asynchronous communication helps workers avoid "collaborative overload" and the distractions of near-constant communication, the article argues. "We know that we are challenging the status quo and that calm, asynchronous communication isn't the current norm.

"It's going to take a paradigm shift to change things."
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Are Remote Workers More Productive Because Asynchronous Communication Just Works Better?

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  • How about "All of the above"?

  • Partly (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fred911 ( 83970 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @02:45AM (#59354184) Journal

    But mostly it's due to the fact that the only measurement of value is the producers productivity and quality The metrics speak for themselves, without the ability for politics and personal bias getting in the way of mission Fellow producers can't hate how you dress, how you speak, or how you look.

    Managers can only assess productivity metrics and assist in education.

    It's perfect for quality producers.
     

    • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @05:13AM (#59354300) Homepage

      If you're part of a team things rapidly start to fall apart when working remotely if the development is tightly coupled especially if there are timezone issues on top because the sort of immediate communication and problem solving you get with swivelling around in your chair and talking to someone who knows about an issue just doesn't happen so well. And no, slack and skype are NOT an adequate substitute for face to face interaction.

      • Have we forgotten that you can call a group of people if you want?
      • by BrainJunkie ( 6219718 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @07:01AM (#59354434)
        Off and on I work for a company that does enhancement / disaster relief projects for a popular ERP system. We do a little but of on site work, mostly our BAs or an architect or two. Other than that everything is done remote, and our devs are spaced all across the US. Generally we seems to do high quality work relative to our competition as we get more repeat business than any other outfit I've worked for.

        I think the lack of face to face is a problem for some people but not really all. People who've spent a lot of their lives doing just that seems to have a tough time transitioning. In any case I've done it both ways over my career and don't think there is an inherent difference. I think this is being noticed with the whole move away from "open offices", in that the removal of physical walls doesn't remove the metaphorical ones.
        • by ranton ( 36917 )

          Off and on I work for a company that does enhancement / disaster relief projects for a popular ERP system. We do a little but of on site work, mostly our BAs or an architect or two. Other than that everything is done remote, and our devs are spaced all across the US. Generally we seems to do high quality work relative to our competition as we get more repeat business than any other outfit I've worked for.

          There is just too much anecdotal evidence and research based on surveys instead of actual metrics. In your situation maybe you have a great VP of Marketing or Sales who keeps business coming in. Maybe your architects have creating very useful repeatable templates which are applied to each product keeping costs down. There are plenty of factors other than remote work which could lead to your success other than not working on-site.

          As far as I can tell there are significant pros and cons for both remote and on

        • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Off and on I work for a company that does enhancement / disaster relief projects for a popular ERP system. We do a little but of on site work, mostly our BAs or an architect or two. Other than that everything is done remote, and our devs are spaced all across the US. Generally we seems to do high quality work relative to our competition as we get more repeat business than any other outfit I've worked for.

          I think the lack of face to face is a problem for some people but not really all. People who've spent a

      • I don't think that's the kind of "remote" the article is talking about. Timezone issues are the same whether the team is "remote" or not. Global companies have people "on-site" all around the world.
      • It depends how time latency dependent the situation is.
      • by jbengt ( 874751 )
        My current bosses don't want me to work from home one day a week, because they say I need to interact with co-workers and review what they're doing (even though I have no authority over them). Yet our company is almost always working as a small part of a bigger team, and we seem to interact fine with our clients and their other subs while not in the same office, or even the same city.
        I agree with your point about "swivelling around in your chair and talking to someone who knows about an issue", but th
      • .... especially if there are timezone issues ....

        After working for companies with offices all around the world, I can assure you that timezone latency issues are not tightly coupled to folks working from home. In fact, the worst cases I've experienced were all in cases where literally everyone involved was 'coming in to the office' nearest where they lived.

      • ... however, in return for working remotely I will happy work times based on my clients workday ...

        all I miss from the old days is collaborations using a whiteboard.

        • Do you just prefer the volatile odor of whiteboard markers? I gave that up years ago. In fact, whiteboards here in my office currently have irrelevant scribbles from 2 years ago; nobody has bothered to wipe them down. Skype does just fine, even literally in the same office.

        • I have a white board in my home office for my own brainstorming and doodling. Recently I did a video interview for a new position and it turns out the camera on my laptop is good enough that I was able to do a whiteboard-coding interview from home - writing code on my own whiteboard and they could read it. These days the list of things that can't be done just as well from home via chat and video clients is pretty short.
    • I came here to say something a lot like this.. Are they measuring real live statistics or merely "heads down at the job" statistics?
    • My main reaction is that I'd like to see exactly how "productivity" is being measured. My most productive jobs were somewhat constrained, task focused, and involved teams and working together. I generally found large meetings a waste of time, but face-to-face discussions with two or three people at a time achieved high bandwidth. Synchronization is needed for the best communication, though email can get close if I know the correspondent well enough.

      Meanwhile, the metric that is most correlated with employee

  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Monday October 28, 2019 @02:46AM (#59354188)

    If I know what I need to do, sure I'm better off with peace and quiet. However, regular face to face meetings speed up certain types of work on comparison with asynchronous communication.
    A Scrum is better done in person that remotely. Although it does work.

  • Asynchronous communication is just one factor, there are many which combine together. The individual ratios however are down to the nature of the work and the individuals involved.

  • by Tuidjy ( 321055 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @02:50AM (#59354196)

    I spent 25 years working for the same company as an IT director for a manufacturer with 2000+ employees, 3 plants, and 50+ point of sale locations. I was also the company's only general purpose programmer.

    When I wanted to needed to finish a project, or put into production an upgrade that we needed to satisfy a customer's requirements, I would tell my best guy "Hold the fort", stick a snarling wolf picture on my door, and shut it. Every one hour, I would take a break, and read my emails while doing wrist exercises. Read, not answer. At the end, I would answer the ones that needed it. Of course, when I needed to actually pick someone's brain about the project, I was free to bother them - RHIP.

    The owner was OK with it, his kids made fun of my approach, but I found that I was a lot more productive that way. The times I had to drop everything and address something else were probably less than a dozen in a quarter of a century.

    Now I am a freelance programmer (the company got sold by the founder's children) I use the same approach, while I'm working, I'm working, and I check emails only on breaks.

    No browsing, no games, no news. I jump in the pool if code does not flow, things starts to look iffy, and I decide that I need some rethinking of the problem.

    Basically I not only make sure my communications are asynchronous, I try to compartmentalize design, interface, etc.

    • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      I admire your self-control.

      Good for you!

    • No browsing, no games, no news. I jump in the pool if code does not flow, things starts to look iffy, and I decide that I need some rethinking of the problem.

      Self-discipline works like this when you operate as a freelancer and are in effect your own CEO, accountant and marketing manager.

    • I presume "wrist exercise" is yet another euphemism for having a wank.
      • by ahodgson ( 74077 )

        Or, you know, he has some sort of RSI and needs to do what he can to keep it under control.

        • Does that help with RSI, or does it add more wrist stress?

          • by ahodgson ( 74077 )

            That probably depends on the RSI. I do some several times a day designed to maintain and improve range-of-motion and it definitely seems to help, as recommended by a physio therapist.

            It's really hard to find good advice about RSI, though. Lots of people have varied advice, and some people even believe RSI's are purely psychosomatic, which I'm not sure I believe or disbelieve yet as I haven't found an actual cure. I did switch to a left-handed mouse at one point and developed pain in that hand within a few m

  • by sanf780 ( 4055211 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @02:56AM (#59354200)
    I understand the too much collaboration can be detrimental. I mean, too many weekly or daily meetings that do not grasp your interest for the whole duration. You attend those meetings but are thinking about something else. Not being at your desk does not help. However, I appreciate when I step a roadblock and can walk to somebody that can help me in that instant. I really dislike asking stuff over e-mail and have to wait for hours. I really hate when I need to insist sending e-mails or IM.
    • Those are the times when you use chat modes of communication. Slack never made it to any of my workplaces, but if you can use it asynchronously by default but chat on request, that would be the ideal.

  • by Vlad_the_Inhaler ( 32958 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @03:13AM (#59354218)

    I stopped working a few months back when the project was finally replaced.
    My experience was that being at work (a 20-25 min commute) was more effective than working from home and that it was the relaxed interaction with other people which made it so. I could see when they were "in" and available for consultation.
    One big advantage of working at home was that I could avoid the "team meetings" where most of the content was of zero interest to my and frequently of zero interest to anyone at all. Then the team leader started adding the missing people via a telco. At least he could not see that I was ignoring most of the proceedings and getting on with the work. His predecessor had accepted that the doings of 2/3 of the "team" were irrelevant to the other 1/3 and let us stay away.
    A lot of the time, people "working from home" were unreachable or were off in the woods walking the dog - the background noises made it obvious.

    • by Confused ( 34234 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @03:26AM (#59354234) Homepage

      A lot of the time, people "working from home" were unreachable or were off in the woods walking the dog - the background noises made it obvious.

      This is a big no-go. Never let them know you don't pay attention. Around here, you get a seriously bad reputation wit management if you're caught at this even once. It means, you can't be trusted to work without constant managerial supervision.

      • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

        I agree. Some people have the discipline for it - like my wife. Now that she's the country manager she can't be at home as much anymore, but I remember her working from here - reading emails at 6am and continuing to work often past 8pm. Grabbing a quick bite and eating lunch in front of her laptop, etc. She's the type of employee who benefits greatly from a home environment. Occasionally I have to shut our dogs up when she's in a conference call...

        My daughter on the other hand has no discipline. Work from

        • So your wife didn't have much time for you when she was home and now isn't home much anymore? Somebody is slow on the uptake.
      • A lot of the time, people "working from home" were unreachable or were off in the woods walking the dog - the background noises made it obvious.

        This is a big no-go. Never let them know you don't pay attention. Around here, you get a seriously bad reputation wit management if you're caught at this even once. It means, you can't be trusted to work without constant managerial supervision.

        Well in fairness it is blatantly obvious they DO need constant managerial supervision if they are off in the woods or doing other stuff when they are supposed to be working. Where I work pretty much everyone can be trusted to work alone and unsupervised, however we are often contracted into government departments and other companies where I would say less than 1 in 10 could be trusted that way.

    • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      Being "available for consultation" or "reachable" is part of the problem...
      If someone is trying to concentrate on their work, often the last thing they need is someone disturbing them for consultation. It disrupts your thought processes, breaks your concentration and can set you back quite considerably depending on the type of work that's being done.
      Also, why shouldn't someone take a break to walk the dog or whatever else?

      In my experience of office working, you waste time travelling there, you work your 9-5

    • A lot of the time, people "working from home" were unreachable or were off in the woods walking the dog - the background noises made it obvious.
      That does not mean they are not working. IT professionals usually don't shut of their mind when they are walking the dog.
      Also it is quite possible he works 3h - break 2h - work 3h - break 2h - work 3h
      I often do my last 2h from about 22:00 to 24:00 because I sports from 18:00 till about 21:00

    • "A lot of the time, people "working from home" were unreachable or were off in the woods walking the dog - the background noises made it obvious.

      If you are a software developer and the only time you work is when you are in front of the computer you suck at it. If you only work between 9 and 5 PM you also suck at it. If the person answered your call and was discussing work they were working. You have no idea if they were thinking about a problem or how cute their dog is prior to your call. You also have no i

  • Not really (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Confused ( 34234 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @03:18AM (#59354226) Homepage

    We have here two aspects:

    One is people not having to commute, not working in a distracting environment etc is beneficial. But that's isn't tied to remote work. This can be solved just as easily in other ways. I've been working at a place 10 minutes by foot from my home, now I'm working with a commute of 15 minutes by motorbike. Now add a sane office planning (yes, that sound very far-fetched) and I have all the same benefits, no remote work.

    And then we have the remote work aspect. I'm working with a team far abroad and it's a lot harder remotely. We're all a lot more productive I'm on site with them. To top this, the guys at the remote facility still have the commute and the distracting office.

    To sum it up:

    Remote work sucks and generally is a drain on productivity due to losses in communication.
    Having a short commute and a sane work environment is really great and improves productivity.

    • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      You have these problems because your remote employees have all the disadvantages of being remote, but none of the advantages...

      They are in a different timezone to you, and yet their hours are constrained by the requirement to attend a specific location at a specific time, so the extent to which their hours overlap with yours is reduced. As they are working fixed hours in a fixed location, once closing time is reached they will go offline. Similarly, while they are wasting time travelling they are unavailabl

      • by Confused ( 34234 )

        They are in a different timezone to you, and yet their hours are constrained by the requirement to attend a specific location at a specific time, so the extent to which their hours overlap with yours is reduced. As they are working fixed hours in a fixed location, once closing time is reached they will go offline.

        What you really need is flexibility, assuming your timezone is ahead of theirs they can get up the same time they do now but work from home instead of starting a commute, consequently they can also finish earlier and have more of the afternoon free for their own activities.

        I see here a clash of culture between the USA and Europe (where I am located). If you want to work odd flexible hours that's fine. However, having to work odd hours can be a severe strain on your personal life.

        Here where I live, an employer can't really ask for it without enhanced payment. When the agreed upon hours (usually 38 to 42 per week, depending on the country) are done, the only correct thing for the employee is to log off. He has done his part and let the company deal with the remaining problems.

        • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          It's possible to still work the agreed upon number of hours, while being flexible about when exactly those hours are. If i worked extra hours one week i would be sure to work less hours the following week to balance things out.

          Even offsetting your day an hour or two up or down can be done easily, since you would otherwise likely be spending that time commuting, or preparing to commute. Instead of getting up at 6am to get ready for a 1.5hr commute to an office, i can get up at 6am to work a couple of hours b

    • by CODiNE ( 27417 )

      One is people not having to commute, not working in a distracting environment etc is beneficial. But that's isn't tied to remote work. This can be solved just as easily in other ways. I've been working at a place 10 minutes by foot from my home, now I'm working with a commute of 15 minutes by motorbike.

      My mortgage would be more than double if I moved that close to where I work. On good days I'm about 35 min by car or 1 hour on bad days. Getting home can be an hour and a half.

      Being unable to live close to w

      • One is people not having to commute, not working in a distracting environment etc is beneficial. But that's isn't tied to remote work. This can be solved just as easily in other ways. I've been working at a place 10 minutes by foot from my home, now I'm working with a commute of 15 minutes by motorbike.

        My mortgage would be more than double if I moved that close to where I work. On good days I'm about 35 min by car or 1 hour on bad days. Getting home can be an hour and a half.

        Well, thank God your time is worth absolutely nothing, not to mention wear and tear on your car and gasoline. If those things had any value, you might find that paying more for the house is worth it.

        • by ahodgson ( 74077 )

          A half million bucks worth of gas lasts a long time.

        • Funny how you assume that the OP could even get that double size mortgage? Or that there is a suitable house available within that commute? Remote work is an excellent solution for a lot of tech industry people. Not everyone, every time, but a lot. There are adjustments and concessions, but today's technology means that at least in the software engineering space we can do pretty much everything from home. I spent my last 8 years at IBM working with a distributed team from home. I only left when IBM de
  • Confounders (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Bongo ( 13261 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @03:32AM (#59354238)

    Too many variables. But one simple point, we are individuals and we are social, and both function best in different ways. If things look so much better with everyone working at home, then there is something seriously broken with how companies are doing the social interactions. It could be open plan offices, or too many meetings, or too many made up deadlines for rubbish which is of no consequence, and so on.

    • It could be open plan offices, or too many meetings, or too many made up deadlines for rubbish which is of no consequence, and so on.

      It could be too many meetings or too many arbitrary deadlines, but we all know it's the fucking open plan offices.

  • Betteridge's Law of Headlines aside, IBM has a lot to answer for its illegal age discrimination firing practices disguised as work colocation policy.
    • I should have left IBM years before I did, but their co-location initiative was the final straw. I remember the executives trying to explain the new policy to make it sound like anything other than what it was, but no one was fooled. They even reduced their severance package from 1 week per year of service to max 4 weeks for everyone so that when they force-retired all those long time employees it would be cheaper. Bastards.
  • by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <.moc.eeznerif.todhsals. .ta. .treb.> on Monday October 28, 2019 @03:57AM (#59354248) Homepage

    A lot of companies prefer teleconferences to asynchronous communication via email, but i just can't understand why...

    I've encountered many instances where you try explaining something via email, they claim not to understand and then ask for a conf call... In the call, you simply read the contents of the email you already sent and now they magically understand.

    The article makes a good point, you can either have an immediate low quality response, or you can take your time to come up with a high quality response. Putting you on a teleconf forces you to make an immediate low quality response.

    • Re:Teleconfs (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Confused ( 34234 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @04:08AM (#59354256) Homepage

      A lot of companies prefer teleconferences to asynchronous communication via email, but i just can't understand why...

      In my experience, there's a big gap between what you meant when you wrote an email and what is understood when the same email is read. This goes from simple cases that people just don't read the main past the first two lines up to you and the reader work with a different set of assumption about the problem.

      Emails are very often also just to cover your arse or to make sure you have a club later to hit the reader over the head when she messes
      up.

      With telco's it's a lot easier to ascertain that you're talking about the same things and that you have a compatible understanding of the problem. Also it's a lot easier to raise concerns.

      The last point is specially important when dealing with off-shore teams based in India or China, where they're often very reluctant to put anything in writing that could either show they have no clue or embarrass the writer. In a one-on-one telco call, it's a lot easier to address these things.

      • "they're often very reluctant to put anything in writing that could either show they have no clue or embarrass the writer"

        All the more reason to force them to put it in writing. If they refuse, then you summarize it and insist on confirmation or correction. Precisely in difficult situation like you describe, having a "paper trail" is essential.

        The danger of telcos (or face-to-face meetings, for that matter) is that people will remember them differently. Hence, even if I have a meeting, I always follow it up

      • In my experience, there's a big gap between what you meant when you wrote an email and what is understood when the same email is read.

        That's a literacy issue more than anything. If you can't succinctly convey technical information, you need more practice and/or more training.

        I try to do everything in writing, and I try to write clearly enough that if someone doesn't understand it they'll look like an absolute moron to 95% of the population. Most people don't skip reading or claim to have misunderstood it more than once, because they realize how horribly unprofessional they look.

        My phone calls often go, "I covered that in the second paragr

      • In my experience, there's a big gap between what you meant when you wrote an email and what is understood when the same email is read. This goes from simple cases that people just don't read the main past the first two lines up to you and the reader work with a different set of assumption about the problem.

        The e-mail communication problem is a combination of poor feedback, out-of-order information, and generic distortion.

        In real-time communication, you can be interrupted. Speaking, body language, the like, all play a part. Face-to-face, you use the side channel to alter your conversation continuously to fit the listener. As an example: many of the complex social choice and economics theory stuff I explain in pages and pages of text come across in about 90 seconds when face-to-face, both because of gestu

    • by pz ( 113803 )

      If you generalize a teleconference to include just plain old phone conversations, I find that these work far, far better than asynchronous email. If I have questions about something, they all get resolved in 2 minutes and I can proceed with the project, rather than having to fragment my time to wait for an email that doesn't quite resolve the issue, forcing me to write a followup question, continue fragmenting my time, rinse and repeat. Email has serious shortcomings as a communication medium, not the lea

    • In the call, you simply read the contents of the email you already sent and now they magically understand
      Reading comprehension ...
      Your voice stressing certain parts ...
      Your face expression ...

    • by jbengt ( 874751 )

      Putting you on a teleconf forces you to make an immediate low quality response.

      No, not really. You always have the option of not making an immediate response. I've found that insistence on an immediate response is often a pressure tactic to get you to agree to something you shouldn't, so I've learned to resist it, politely.
      Also, as others have responded, e-mails are often misunderstood and face-to-face meetings or telephone calls are needed to get everyone to understand the issues. And I say this as so

    • A lot of companies prefer teleconferences to asynchronous communication via email, but i just can't understand why...

      I've encountered many instances where you try explaining something via email, they claim not to understand and then ask for a conf call... In the call, you simply read the contents of the email you already sent and now they magically understand. ...

      A lot of people just don't read very well...
      (Particularly, if English is not their first language.)

  • People need human socialization.
    Not too much, of course. But definitely not too little. Any lonely basement geek will know that.
    And you can't tell me that that won't influence productivity. Even of only via getting sick more often due to whatever one abuses as a substitute. (Caffeine, sugar, nicotine, cigarettes, cocaine, people.)

    Also, indirect comminication stifles the ability to feel empathy, thereby causing antisocial behavior.

    Which can clearly be seen by anyone ... of you assholes. ;)

    • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Monday October 28, 2019 @06:14AM (#59354362)
      Yeah but for a lot of people just a spouse is enough socialization. My wife and I are happy together. We don't like going out (she more than I). We don't like other people. My daughter drops by once every couple weeks. I see my dad for dinner once every 3 months or so. And that's about all I can take :)
    • by Kenneth ( 43287 )

      Why does your job have to be your social interaction? Jobs are for earning money. Why not socialize with people you like rather than people you're stuck with

  • When I work from home, I feel like I have to prove that I have actually worked, so I do stuff. At the office, just coming there is proof of work, so I can do basically nothing all day..
  • I prefer working in the office because everything is setup for me to be productive. At home I'd be on a laptop sitting at the kitchen table, having to pull DB data, code and artifacts updates through the wire instead of the local network.
    Also, colleagues are nearby if there are issues, of course this goes both ways.
    But nowadays, things like Slack, MSFT Teams, etc... really don't allow for "asynchronous" communication anyway, even at home. You can "ignore" incoming messages and calls, but you can do the sa
    • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      In the office you can ignore their messages until you're ready to respond, so they come over to you and interrupt you in person or get someone else to do so...

      Many companies i've worked with had extremely unproductive office environments... Noisy, uncomfortable, bad seating, bad desks, bad climate control, constant distractions. In many cases servers will be hosted remotely in a datacenter so you're pulling stuff over the wire anyway, but doing so on the office connection shared between many users rather th

  • It's the inteeruptions. One study showed it took a programmer up to 20 minutes to get back into the deep thought.

    There's no way to do this right with tight schedules so you can't wait for an answer for the next step in what you are doing.

  • I've worked in-office as well as remotely for years, and managed engineering teams both remote and in-office. I also found remote workers on average more productive, and over the years my thinking is that the reason is quiet simple - folks in the office can feel busy without being productive, while the remote workers are not really tracking their "time in the office", so while office people feel they earned their paycheck because they showed up to work and spend 8 hours at the office, the remote worker feel

  • Makes sense, you don't have to do as much context switching and lose track of exactly where you were and what you were thinking about when attacking your objective. Similarly, it's better to help others when you don't have something going on in the back of your mind.

  • by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @06:47AM (#59354416)
    When I was a young buck and starting out in the office, I would look around and couldn't believe how many people just walked around and had personal conversations all day. I mean if you're in a shitty office and feel isolated, what do you do? Seek out companionship from others that feel the same. Enough said.
  • Work Space (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tsqr ( 808554 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @07:06AM (#59354440)

    Having worked as a systems engineer in large and small aerospace companies for the past 43 years, my personal opinion is that companies would see a huge increase in productivity by abandoning cubicle farms and open work spaces (ugh!) and going back to private offices with doors. What I enjoy about working from home is the peace and quiet, plus the freedom from distractions.

    • Having worked as a systems engineer in large and small aerospace companies for the past 43 years, my personal opinion is that companies would see a huge increase in productivity by abandoning cubicle farms and open work spaces (ugh!) and going back to private offices with doors. What I enjoy about working from home is the peace and quiet, plus the freedom from distractions.

      Hear, Hear!!!

      Bring back office walls and doors!!!

      "Open Concept" (sort of) works in houses. Not offices. Especially for people in "brain required" tasks, like software and hardware Engineering.

      At work, I can (and often do) "create" a "cone of silence" with my Earbuds and streaming music. But I get tired of that after a few hours. And it doesn't stop people from "stopping by my cube".

      But it works much better for me at home, at my desk, with the TV on quietly in the background as "sonic wallpaper". That, and b

  • by Escogido ( 884359 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @07:12AM (#59354446)

    this is one of those cases where there is a clear phenomenon but not much actual knowledge about it that can be reliably applied in a business environment.

    What seems to be more or less obvious is that there are certain people with certain kind of jobs and duties that excel at working remotely. I don't think a lot of people would disagree with this general statement. Now when you try to get into details however:

    - how do you determine if a particular person is of the "performs better when working remotely" kind or of the "too many distractions - can't focus" kind?
    - how do you tell which positions are more suitable for remote work, and which are better off being done in the office environment?
    - how do you change your processes to make them more remote work friendly?
    - which changes in the company culture are desirable to facilitate that (e.g. the asynchronous communication mentioned)?
    - how do you know if your productivity problems can be more easily solved by ditching open office layout?

    There're plenty of anecdotes how remote work works out - or does NOT work out for some people somewhere, but it's not really helpful at this stage until there is practical knowledge with regards to the questions like those above. Especially given that in some industries, like in software engineering, we've already learned a lot how to extract maximum value from remote work, but just how would that be applicable elsewhere, who knows.

    So short story is, if remote work works out for you in your particular situation, kudos to you, but if you aren't doing it, feel free to check it out but don't expect it to magically fit like a glove just yet.

  • indeed, working from home used to be calm and silent and you could really focus on your work.
    already this is no longer 100% true.
    all kind of tools to have you connected to your remote colleagues (which also might be working from home) and you get an unlimited assault on your desktop of chat popups and calls, including video calls and what have you.
    sure you can opt to not start these tools (or set dnd), but guess what, you don't have a choice as you need to be always reachable.

  • by angel'o'sphere ( 80593 ) <angelo.schneider ... e ['oom' in gap]> on Monday October 28, 2019 @07:39AM (#59354486) Journal

    One reason:
    When you work on site, you get paid for the hours you spent there.
    When you work remotely, you get paid for the results you deliver.

    Then again:
    You don't have to get up early.
    Drive/commute tired to work.
    Wake slowly during the first two working hours with to much coffee reading emails.

    Finally:
    Not having coworkers around to ask forces you to be more clear and precise with the communication tools:
    - issue tracker
    - wiki, or other documentations if you use them
    - email

    It is super annoying if I get emails with "quick shot questions", on site you would go to the person and ask "What do you want? I don't get it!"
    However if I had to sent three emails to get clarifications on the first one, I would run mad.

    Basically to have an efficient remote team you need a fitting git branching model and a proper management of your issues/sprints/milestones.

  • Leaving the commute behind is a massive help, but lets ignore that as the article already pointed it out.

    The office environment I generally work in, is a stinky, clustered, distracting, mess, and every time we try to address the problems, the changes never stick, so working at home leaves me in control of the environment, and once that's effectively set, my productivity will naturally improve.

    The biggest issue at the office right now is the graphic designer, who refuses to shower and refuses to wear anti
  • by clawsoon ( 748629 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @07:46AM (#59354496)
    Joel Spolsky had some thoughts on being interrupted back in 2001 that are worth a read. Human Task Switches Considered Harmful [joelonsoftware.com].

    The trick here is that when you manage programmers, specifically, task switches take a really, really, really long time. That’s because programming is the kind of task where you have to keep a lot of things in your head at once. The more things you remember at once, the more productive you are at programming. A programmer coding at full throttle is keeping zillions of things in their head at once: everything from names of variables, data structures, important APIs, the names of utility functions that they wrote and call a lot, even the name of the subdirectory where they store their source code.

    • There's a method of solidification where you work over the thought you're following, write down some salient points about how you worked it out (yes, rework over your current train of thought to reason out why it's your current train of thought), and then switch away. Read back your journal and you'll drop right back in like nothing happened.

      It'll take you a few tries. The first time, you'll see something but you'll probably fuck it all up and it will work barely. Convergence to efficiency is fast; afte

  • Maybe on average the more productive folks are the ones more likely to be allowed to work remotely?
  • It should be accepted practice in business that all emails are sent and received at 6am with all sent during the day delayed for delivery until the next morning.
    • Don't fire up your email client until 6 AM and then close it when you are done if you want to be that kind of a moron, dipshit. Everyone else on the planet wants to use email properly.
  • My god, a question in an article title, where the answer is "yes"!

    Yes, and yes again. The last software shop I worked in, we all had a chat application open, and we communicated 90% asynchronously, even for people sitting next to each other. Of course, there is that other 10%. Sometimes you need to work out something complicated that's going to take genuine discussion. Then we would leave the development area (so as not to disturb everyone else), and talk. However, almost all really essential communications

  • One of the things that almost 100% got is that their children go to school. Working remote give them the flexibility to spend 30mins each day to go pickup their kids from school and not have to enroll into after school programs or hire services like ZUM to pick up. Giving employees this advantage encourages them to think appreciative of their working conditions and promote their commitment to their work when their children are already at class.

    Although I'm not sure if async communication is a major facto
    • by gwolf ( 26339 )

      That's a great life quality decision, of course. I work at a office (university setting). But I live ~3Km from work, and my kids' school is ~1Km from home. So, even with the worst traffic, I manage to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with them, and even enjoy some play time.
      And I have my quiet, secluded office, even during their vacations :-]
      (of course, I have to build a shrine to mom)

  • One of the things that make asynchronous communication as effective as it is is because it forces the author to think about what they're asking. In office communication allows anyone with a half formed thought to spend minutes just getting to the damn point, and you're kinda stuck there doing nothing else until they achieve coherency ( if they ever do ).

    Email, however, forces these folks to think about what they're trying to convey. I'm not saying it's a magical cure all, obviously; these same folks can,

  • by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @11:20AM (#59354698)

    I'm not autistic, ASD or socially awkward, but one thing I really don't like is the forced interaction with office-mates. This is even worse when you're sitting 2 feet away in an open-plan office from your colleagues. My job requires me to think carefully about complex problems, talk to people when I need to, and test/experiment. I can see collaboration working better with junior JavaScript people writing web front ends, but there are some jobs that aren't conducive to being bombarded with questions and distractions all day long. Async communication forces people to think about what they're proposing, rather than just shouting verbal diarrhea across the cafeteria table at their colleagues.

    I'd love remote work, but it's almost 100% software development (I'm in systems engineering) and very few companies are willing to commit to supporting remote work. They want this fantasy where the marketing person goes over to the coder and they collaborate hand in hand over the next sprint for this awesome new feature. It's only applicable for a few use cases, and definitely not any of the ones I deal with. For me, remote work would enhance my concentration, shave an hour of travel off of my day, and allow me to pick up my kids from school instead of having to pay for care.

    The other problem is that remote workers are the targets of MBAs bearing salary spreadsheets. Some new hotshot CIO will come in with his preferred offshore outsourcer in tow and show that the same remote job you're paying someone US salaries to do will be 10% of the cost once they move it to (insert cheap country here.)

    • Some new hotshot CIO will come in with his preferred offshore outsourcer in tow and show that the same remote job you're paying someone US salaries to do will be 10% of the cost once they move it to (insert cheap country here.)

      Point #8 [google.com].

      What you need is a union.

  • I'm going out on a limb and saying that this is from millennials, as are the 'studies', and listen, folks: you brought this on yourselves. Even among the oldest of your cohort, a great number of you still have some pretty shockingly infantile notions abut life. I'm not here to bust your balls though, so listen: you were the ones that decided to scrap private offices or cubicles for your open plan bullshit so that no one ever had to have anxiety over daring to have an individual thought even when many tried
  • by gwolf ( 26339 ) <[gwolf] [at] [gwolf.org]> on Monday October 28, 2019 @12:21PM (#59355012) Homepage

    I *like* working in my office. I cannot work from home with a good level of productivity; I have too many distractors there.
    One of the things I like of working in my (university) office is that I bump into people in the hallways, and we get many blockers out. Just going to the restroom is often a way to do something.
    But when talking with others, I often ask them to drop me a mail to remind me about whatever. We have useful face-to-face conversations, but when it comes to specifics, I strongly prefer having them in writing and tackling them according to the time availability I manage to arrange.

  • I remember the old days, before I became a manager, where i would be able to work remotely one day per week. I was so productive. I cranked out far more work without the distraction of co-workers, meetings, and other lost time.
  • by holophrastic ( 221104 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @06:52PM (#59356592)

    It's a terrible comparison between "remote" and large open office. It's not about "asynchronous communications". It's about closing your door.

    Give everyone a private office, then you can compare. That's what "remote" working-from-home is. Everyone gets an entire building as their own private office -- complete with kitchen, bathrooms, doors, windows, phone, choice of music, choice of decor, and thermostat.

    There was a time when any employee, doing anything of value, had an office with a door that closed -- you know, so they could get work done undisturbed.

    That's long since dead. That's why I left the office building, and rolled my own. My home office is of a calibre that you can't find in an office tower anymore -- no matter how much you bring in.

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