Our team has office days once or twice per month and fuck all gets done on those days. Time is spent on social chitchat, longer coffee breaks and lunch with more small talk, discussing random ideas and almost anything else than actual work. And those are really nice to have, when we’re mostly scattered across few cities and limited to text chat or calls they tend to be strictly about the task at hand. The office days give a sort of a break on normal schedule and while very little gets actually done the discussions often include planning future stuff, going trough previous changes, current situation and workload more broadly and so on. After those days, even if nothing got done, we’re all a bit more on board on almost everything and it’s nice to actually meet the people we interact with every day.
But for actual work, for the stuff we do, the office doesn’t offer anything we couldn’t do remotely. I have more comfortable setup at home than at my cubicle at office, I can listen to whatever I want at how loud I want without disturbing others, no hassle with commute (even if mine is pretty much as short as it can be) and so on.
Well, I think some fully remote is fine. However, I do think hybrid is the best model. Just my opinion.
One of the “dangers” of fully remote is that they become fully global. The amount a company will pay becomes disconnected from the cost-of-living. That creates inequity. Not just that employees in richer areas may be underpaid but also that remote employees for rich companies may be paid far more than their countrymen in their home market.
I don’t really like the idea of running decades of income lottery while the global order works this all out.
Even within a single country it can be fairly extreme.
Our team has office days once or twice per month and fuck all gets done on those days. Time is spent on social chitchat, longer coffee breaks and lunch with more small talk, discussing random ideas and almost anything else than actual work. And those are really nice to have, when we’re mostly scattered across few cities and limited to text chat or calls they tend to be strictly about the task at hand. The office days give a sort of a break on normal schedule and while very little gets actually done the discussions often include planning future stuff, going trough previous changes, current situation and workload more broadly and so on. After those days, even if nothing got done, we’re all a bit more on board on almost everything and it’s nice to actually meet the people we interact with every day.
But for actual work, for the stuff we do, the office doesn’t offer anything we couldn’t do remotely. I have more comfortable setup at home than at my cubicle at office, I can listen to whatever I want at how loud I want without disturbing others, no hassle with commute (even if mine is pretty much as short as it can be) and so on.
So what you are saying is that a lot gets done on those days.
Anyway, I agree that hybrid is the best model.
Depends on how far the office is. Remote work allows companies to hire people from across the country, but that means that they can’t RTO everyone.
Well, I think some fully remote is fine. However, I do think hybrid is the best model. Just my opinion.
One of the “dangers” of fully remote is that they become fully global. The amount a company will pay becomes disconnected from the cost-of-living. That creates inequity. Not just that employees in richer areas may be underpaid but also that remote employees for rich companies may be paid far more than their countrymen in their home market.
I don’t really like the idea of running decades of income lottery while the global order works this all out.
Even within a single country it can be fairly extreme.