In 10 Years, Will 'Remote Work' Simply Be 'Work'? (msn.com) 74
Bloomberg reports:
A decade from now, offices shall be used for one thing and one thing only: quality time with colleagues. This seemingly bold prediction comes from Prithwiraj Choudhury, a Harvard Business School professor and expert on remote work. âoeWe will probably in 10 years stop calling this âremote workâ(TM). Weâ(TM)ll just call it work,â he said....
His research showed that a hybrid workforce is more productive, more loyal and less likely to leave. With companies from Twitter Inc. to PwC now giving employees the option to work virtually forever, Choudhury said businesses that donâ(TM)t adapt risk higher attrition... "For employers, itâ(TM)s a win as well because you are not constrained to hiring from the local labor market â" where you have an office... This is a once-in-a-generation moment when people are not going to be forced to live where they donâ(TM)t want to. Some people will find a permanent place to live; some will move around. The digital nomad revolution is going on...."
"We should not care about how many days or hours anyone works. Every job and task should have objective metrics, which are output based, and if an employee can perform those metrics in two days, so be it. I am a firm believer that we should stop counting time. We should give people the flexibility to work when they want to, whichever hours they want to, whichever days they want to, and care only about their work."
His research showed that a hybrid workforce is more productive, more loyal and less likely to leave. With companies from Twitter Inc. to PwC now giving employees the option to work virtually forever, Choudhury said businesses that donâ(TM)t adapt risk higher attrition... "For employers, itâ(TM)s a win as well because you are not constrained to hiring from the local labor market â" where you have an office... This is a once-in-a-generation moment when people are not going to be forced to live where they donâ(TM)t want to. Some people will find a permanent place to live; some will move around. The digital nomad revolution is going on...."
"We should not care about how many days or hours anyone works. Every job and task should have objective metrics, which are output based, and if an employee can perform those metrics in two days, so be it. I am a firm believer that we should stop counting time. We should give people the flexibility to work when they want to, whichever hours they want to, whichever days they want to, and care only about their work."
Music to my ears... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Music to my ears... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a new trend called "evidence based management". Apparently some people found out that the usual "management" approaches do not work, cause problems, increase risks and overall are very, very expensive. Maybe in a decade or two we will have managers that actually deserve that title. Well, that will probably be after I retire, but still.
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https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=9681
That procedure can turn even the most horrendous damagement into something useful and enjoyable.
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It depends on the sort of work that you do, some will always demand being on-site/in-the-workplace. For those who can work at home there are huge benefits, not just to the employee (think: saving one commute time & cost); the environment also gains: less commute means less pollution. There will still need to be face to face time in an office or somewhere: this is good for team bonding & idea exchange - in a way that does not happen remotely over a video link. I think that many will settle down to ho
If People Could Just Be Nice (Score:4, Insightful)
Offices suck. No one could pay me enough to ever want to deal with those politics ever again in my life.
There were always overbearing managers who managed time instead of projects. They always had problems. If it wasn't your work, it was your shoes.
I get that some folks need to see each other to get stuff done, but for most tech folks, we work best when we are comfortable.
If I'm comfortable, I likely won't be looking for a new job.
--
My work is a love for me; I'd do it for free, but don't tell my bosses. - Chick Hearn
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If I'm comfortable, I likely won't be looking for a new job.
And that is just the thing. There is a huge demand for tech workers now and it seems to be getting larger. In my area (IT security) it is even larger. By now, even people with average or below average skills can simply turn down offers they do not like. I do not see that trend reversing anytime soon, especially as the web-application trend has completely failed on its promise to make everything simpler and instead made everything much more complicated, fragile and insecure. At the same time, businesses desp
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You're apparently not single and poor. It's been a good place to meet people who are distinct my my Facebook or Slashdot bubble. and who don't know my name from my technology work.
Re:If People Could Just Be Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
People who like working in offices should be able to do it. Those who don't like, should not have to (conditions may apply). PERIOD.
For example I've been working from home since 2020. And after performance reviews showed that I do better from home, it wasn't difficult to turn this into a permanent arrangement, without any pay cuts.
The same could be true for GP, after all they spoke for themselves and not for everyone else as well.
If you flourish under office culture, that's cool. Go work in an office where you can socialize with people that feel the same way. GP didn't speak for you.
But if you think everyone has to be like you, then understand that your apparent extrovert neediness for social interaction does not entitle you to harass other people that do not feel that way.
Slashdot poll time (Score:1)
Not everyone likes office culture, regardless of where they come from. People who like working in offices should be able to do it. Those who don't like, should not have to (conditions may apply). PERIOD.
Now that's one for a Slashdot poll. I like to work: @Home, In the office. I don't like work at all.
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Do you get more work done @Home, or in the office? For some, switching venue and workspace to a distinct, business-oriented workspace does help their productivity. Keeping the children or other family away from your work can also be a relief for those with troublesome children or without schools that occupy the children for 10 hours a day.
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Offices suck. No one could pay me enough to ever want to deal with those politics ever again in my life.
This is about work location, not dispensing with people. If there are people involved then there will still be politics.
I get that some folks need to see each other to get stuff done, but for most tech folks, we work best when we are comfortable.
If you're playing whac-a-mole with issues off Jira, sure. I've definitely found the last couple of years that my productivity is up for the easy stuff, but for th
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There were always overbearing managers who managed time instead of projects.
It's the manager's job to see things get done on time. Product has to be ready to be shipped when the trucks arrive to pick it up. Software has to be ready when the client was told it would be ready. Databases have to be ready to receive data when scheduled. Machines/servers have to be imaged and ready for first use on time.
Obviously you must be a programmer because logic and common sense don't enter into your thought process.
Re: If People Could Just Be Nice (Score:2)
Unless (Score:3)
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In 20 years, AI-driven cameras could be topo-mapping your chosen perfect haircut with robotic precision, and a chemist will be a smart vending machine connected to relevant test equipment to validate AI-assisted output learned from millions of historical records.
I mean, it was a good effort.
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If companies picked more sensible places to locate their workplaces, then you'd save a lot of time and money.
My grandfather was a chemist, and when evaluating the various job options he had - he would always choose a role where he could live nearby the workplace so he didn't have to spend a lot of time or money travelling to/from.
Some of his work was also theoretical and paper based, so he didn't need to be in the lab all the time - that work could be done remotely.
There is also no need to work 9-5, working
Good Luck With That. (Score:5, Insightful)
Go ahead. Ask yourself, IT experts. Just how long have we had the capability to essentially plant the office worker virtually behind their office keyboard with Remote Desktop and VPN technologies?
Yeah. Two fucking decades.
So, why are we still having this silly conversation? Simple answer. Control. Well that, and the trillion dollar commercial real estate market run by Greed N. Corruption.
Didn't happen 20 years ago. Good luck 10 years from now. You better learn to push a lot harder than $15-hour minimum wage.
Oh, and this bullshit "quality time" (a.k.a. Friday-night keggers) to justify a few million being pissed away on (almost) pointless office space? NextGen will be far more comfortable in VR than you will, voomer. Stop ruining the planet with your pointless commutes. That electric grid still burns oil.
Re:Good Luck With That. (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't really like change, most of the time.
While quite a few employees would have jumped at an opportunity to work from home 10 years ago, the employers had to consider risks. What if this does not work out? Sure, I'll save some money by not having to rent an office, but will the managers be able to manage remote employees just as well? Will the employees work just as well remotely? Some of them probably won't and I'll either have to tell them to go to the office or replace them. What we have now works, why change it?
It may not be the perfect reason, but it's still a good one. However, because of the pandemic, a lot of companies had a choice - work from home or not work at all. Obviously, trying to work from home is a better choice out of those two and now the companies had to go through all the hassle - setting up VPNs, figuring out how to manage people remotely, replacing the employees who slacked off too much when working from home. Now that it's already done, the appeal of not having to pay rent for an office is much greater, also, the employees who have been working from home for the past 2 years and liking it have a good argument - "why should I return to the office if you were satisfied with my results over the last 2 years when I was working from home?".
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I think you hit the nail on the head. There was little or no personal upside for management pushing work from home, and a lot of risk. So it's not surprising not many people did it until it was forced on them.
Re:Good Luck With That. (Score:5, Insightful)
20 years ago, we didn't have easy access to videoconferencing. 20 years ago, most people were still on dialup.
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20 years ago, we didn't have easy access to videoconferencing. 20 years ago, most people were still on dialup.
People were doing video calls with CU-SeeMe in the 90s, which was fairly common software. Broadband started rolling out in my area in 1998, and even 3Mb/s was fine for RDP/Citrix. VPN clients came into prevalence during the turn of the century as well. A corporate firewall with VPN client support could be had for less than $2K by 2002.
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This is rather obvious (Score:5, Informative)
Offices are exceptionally expensive. There is no reason to have them except for some really good uses. Just going there for regular work is decidedly not a good use. The only reason we do not have that situation is because managers on all level are conservative and adverse to change. The pandemic showed that the alternatives work and finally there will be some changes. The typical insecurities of the lower management tiers that they will lose control if people work online will not manage to survive in the face of how much money can be saved by online-work. And it does work. People that do not really work at home can do the same at the office and they do. For others, productivity actually improves a bit.
Personally, I have only come into the office or visited customers for meetings for the last 14 years. Never was a problem. This will now only get even easier with more meetings online because people have started to adjust to that. And since customers pay for travel-time, I expect more and more will want to cut that down as well.
Now, labs, workshops, stores, hair-saloons, etc. are a different thing. But I expect that even there more flexibility will become the norm.
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Dunno.
Someone else here pointed out the modern corporate structure essentially operates as a jobs program for degree holders, sacrificing efficiency and maximizing profit for some inflated sense of worth. Now would be a peculiar time to come the the realization that maybe that was actually a waste of time and money. I mean have you seen the Google campus? And you could get essentially the same work done from telecommuting from North Dakota? What will you tell the shareholders?
To be fair, there is something
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Now would be a peculiar time to come the the realization that maybe that was actually a waste of time and money. I mean have you seen the Google campus? And you could get essentially the same work done from telecommuting from North Dakota? What will you tell the shareholders?
Comments like that always crack me up, kind of like the “managers are insecure” or “all MBAs are bad” comments that are typically found on these threads.
Shareholders do not care about past investments, or even past mistakes. They, as a rule, care about future earnings. If the story is clear, e.g. “we have realized that we actually can continue this work-from-home experiment that began with the pandemic, and by the way, we can sell 1/3 of our campus, or use it as our next data c
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Ah yes, hair saloons, where you can get your done and drink a beer while listening to some piano music.
Nothing new here (Score:5, Interesting)
I've worked from home for years and don't see it as anything unusual anymore.
The company I work for downsized, was bought by our biggest customer, and downsized some more. Eventually I was the last one standing. We tried a shared office space (which had its moments) but eventually my boss (in Texas; I'm in British Columbia) and I decided it wasn't worth what we were paying for it and I've worked from home ever since.
The nature of my work (software engineering) makes it possible. Fast internet makes it work. Good software (the company uses Teams, among other things) makes it worthwhile. An added bonus is I can live anywhere I like, as long as I have good internet. When I got tired of living in suburban Vancouver I made good use of this.
...laura
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the company uses Teams, among other things
You have my sympathy.
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I worked for an electrical construction firm at the beginning of covid. In that realm, what was needed was software that non-nerd types could easily understand and navigate -- and quickly. It being fairly well integrated with their existing workflows (Office, Outlook) made this process as
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Its not so much the conferencing and calls and scheduling, that works just fine in teams. Its their text based communication, which I dont known about for others but for all of our teams of hundreds+ engineers, accounts for the vast majority of their communication. In that instance slack makes more sense with how it is organized. I believe teams *can* work well, the problem is people dont take the time to set up their groups/chats properly, and so everyone ends up annoyed as shit because they are getting co
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What are the insurmountable problems with Teams?
None of the problems are insurmountable, but that doesn't make it not crap. It's way crashier than zoom, for example, and, how I encounter it most, video meetings with someone outside the host organisation are a crapshoot compared to Zoom which just works. Never had one of those go wrong.
I haven't been in an office in 15 years. (Score:2)
Meetings (Score:4, Insightful)
This would only be possible if we abandoned the meeting-driven work paradigm. How else could we work "any time and any days" if meetings remained the default way of communication and cooperation? If meetings remained in place and were mandatory, they would work as a synchronisation element between the schedules of individual employees and therefore would undermine the entire work-any-time concept.
Although it could work if we simply carved out the cancer that are all the middle management roles who organise and thrive on the bloody meetings in the first place. Power to the people!
P. S.
This could also mean that software development methodologies which require regular (including daily) ceremonies (such as Agile) would need to be phased out, too. I can't wait to see that day!
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I've never said that I'm certain it will have happened. Have you missed all the "woulds" and "coulds"?
OK. (Score:2)
Fine, just don't complain when you call for product support at 2 PM on a Thursday and there's no one there to help you.
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That's far less of an issue than you obviously thing.
We worked in a very small team, but had no issues providing support from 0600-2200, because between the lot of us, we all had our preferred working times.
And the reason we *could* provide that support window was exactly because we were able/allowed to set our own work times.
Can't tyupe. (Score:2)
Thing? Think! I need more coffee....
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It will if the job can be remote (Score:2)
There are a lot of jobs that can't be remote, I've been applying for both software and hardware jobs in the last two months. Most of the hardware jobs require you to be there, obviously you can't build hardware remotely. There are some hardware jobs that are hybrid jobs where they only require you to be in the office a few days a week. Most jobs will allow for some kind of hybrid work. Many of the software jobs are remote, and a lot of them are fully remote. I wish the job search sites would differentiate b
Careful about productivity (Score:4, Interesting)
These companies have systems in place to measure not just time, but the effectiveness at performing many roles, from QA, to customer service, and even many development roles by measuring the amount of bugs opened against specific code and the time it takes to resolve problems.
The problem is, when we try to codify an entire organization into a set of discrete KPIs, then all of the sudden you are just measuring the world as it exists today and optimizing against it.
By all means, everyone will get super good at their job. But no one will have any ideas for new products, or understand why their existing operation does not fit what customers want.
Re:Careful about productivity (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever you come up with a set of specific KPIs, you end up with 2 problems...
First is that the specific KPIs are prioritised at the expense of anything that's not being directly measured.
Second is that there are usually ways to game the system and inflate your scores in specific KPIs - possibly at the direct detriment of other things which arent measured.
Re: Careful about productivity (Score:2)
Yeah and no amount of genius management strategies can stop even the most simpleton worker from that gaming I have seen.
Much better to have them on your side and gaming the customer / investor / govt I guess.
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Depends on the employees i suppose.
If you treat them well in the first place, they are less likely to want to game the system.
If you treat them like shit, they will attempt to compensate for the shit treatment using whatever loopholes are left at their disposal.
Re: Careful about productivity (Score:2)
Super Insightful. And true obviously. That's why at best its routine/production/sales jobs that can be KPI'd or sorta de-skilled actually.
But if you can break down the job into small discrete steps with objective evaluation criteria for each step, it basically means it would be automated sooner or later.
Offcourse there's no better practical way to manage without this shit at present as a lot of people do tend to do the least possible amount just enough not to get fired.
Unless they love their jobs.
B
Dont count your chickens (Score:2)
Be afraid if it is. (Score:3)
Reality is that it will happen, and it will have a huge impact on individuals as well as society as a whole. Not in a good way. In-person capabilities skills will be essential for competitive salaries.
Re: Remote work means offshored work... (Score:1)
Two words : security clearance.
I have a sweet gig providing cyber security architecture to .gov. :)
You only need a low level clearance, but you MUST be a citizen onshore.
I work 100% remote and there's no way I can be replaced by Prajeet from Mumbai.
Can't do SECRET/TS from home obviously, but there's plenty of lower level stuff to do
Typical MBA speak (Score:2)
because you are not constrained to hiring from the local labor market â" where you have an office.
Clearly this so-called expert has no clue what it means to support people not local to your business office. Shipping equipment to someone out of state is not cheap. That's an added expense to the company. Trying to manage their machine on the network is another expense because generally people in remote areas don't follow directions about how to receive updates and patches for their machines.
This doesn
some pigs are more equal (Score:3)
"I am a firm believer that we should stop counting time. We should give people the flexibility to work when they want to, whichever hours they want to, whichever days they want to, and care only about their work."
Why do I guess the writer is nevertheless angry when Starbucks isn't open when expected? Or when only one security lounge is working with big lines at the airport?
Not all huge corporations does this... (Score:3)
I love working from home, it has given me less workhours, and made me more efficient as a worker as I'm not constantly bothered by disruptions.
But the corporate which I work for (and it's one of the biggest around, 200K employed worldwide), I work in IT support, but my corporate was fairly quick at recalling everyone to the office once gov. sanctions were lifted, not to everyones satisfaction I can tell you.
Our company have zero plans to let people keep working from home, but they are open to negotiations of a typical 60/40 Office/home life, but require people to come in to the office at least 2-3 days a week because they want to have interactions with their manager based culture. Our managers kinda like to micromanage sadly.
Trending down, not up (Score:4, Interesting)
According to Gallup, remote work is trending downward, not up, as the pandemic winds down.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/3... [gallup.com]
Will remote work be more common than before the pandemic? Yes, certainly! A lot of companies have figured out that it can be done effectively. But will it be the new normal? That's not at all clear.
All animals are equal. Some are more equal than ot (Score:1)
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It's not about counting time, nor is it about counting productivity. A company that treats its people like robots will treat them like robots whether they are paid by the hour or paid by the job. I've worked for both kinds of companies, some were good to their people, some were not, but it had nothing to do with the metric used to pay its people.
Mwah (Score:2)
Office (Score:2)
Coming in to the office should get you combat pay.
I've been working remotely for over a decade (Score:2)
I think the last office I saw was Office Space. I still find it funny after all this time.
quality time with colleagues.?!?!? (Score:2)
Output based doesn't work (Score:2)
I've spent thirty years charging for output-based by-the-project costs. But the more life I have, and the larger the projects get, the more unfair that becomes.
You can't predict how long a brand new innovative project might take to complete.
You can't standardize how long it takes to gut a fish -- given different workers of different heights, strengths, abilities.
So unless you're planning to screw-over every dedicated worker, and discriminate against every less-than-body-builder person, it's only fair that