Ask HN: What still sucks about remote work? Hey HN. Working from home a fews days per month can be pretty great. Less distractions, more time to think deeply about stuff, more natural to take breaks and, let's not forget, better coffee. But what about working remotely still sucks? Be it from home, from a beach on Bali, or from a WeWork in Amsterdam. (Im trying to get my company to be more remote-friendly and would like a nuanced view before I make my case.) |
I'm not saying I need my coworkers to be my best friends or anything, but I think that you are more likely to have a well functioning work relationship with people that you're comfortable around. In my experience, those relationships are usually built through informal conversations.
If any of you have this figured out, I'd love to hear tips. Most of the other aspects of remote work are fantastic.
overcommunicate. Share like you do IRL. Kvetch. Cheer. Share interesting finds. Say good morning. Ask team-mates how they're doing.
I find I build pretty good rapport with my team mates because I _don't_ limit communications to required transactions.
You build relationships by communicating about life and sharing feelings. So, communicate about life and share feelings.
Personally I think much of the benefits of remote work comes from the ability to close out the noise of the office, which includes thing like someone tapping me on the shoulder or grabbing my attention when Im deep in some mental exercise.
So what I wonder is how you couple the great things about (actively chosen) isolation with the need for social interaction and banter over time?
Perhaps it's a non-issue and remote work will never reach the level of distraction you face in an office. Still would be interested to hear your thoughts.
We typically hop into a video conference while we play to make it more personal. It's better than foosball in that more than 4 people can play (we generally play with 8-12) and it's got a much shorter path to proficiency.
Rookies always suck at foosball for their first few months, so getting them involved with something less intimidating has been helpful.
Simple annoyances such as opening the laptop when using with an external monitor (1 out of 10 times making macos unresponsive for half a minute), to changing your bluetooth noise cancelling headphones for music to airpods, reconfiguring airpods tethered to your iPhone to macos. Making sure the wrong input/output audio is selected in macos...
People working from coworking space or a regular office, usually want to switch to a phone booth/meeting room, that takes them 2-3 minutes to walk to the next phone booth and get set-up.
Once you're up&running too often audio/video is unreliable, or simply airpods running out of battery.
I'm experimenting now with a tablet (with its own headset) dedicated to voice&video calls. While the audio/video setup now works seamlessly, there's still some usability issues that need workarounds.
Edit: Note that Im not affiliated with Tandem in any way, just curious.
2. Some family members/friend thinks your work is easy and not that important. So you should run their errands or take extra responsibilities.
3. As someone already mentioned, it is difficult to build team rapport. This affects badly in situations like sudden change in deadlines.
4. If you don't have active social life outside job, it becomes very difficult to build new one.
My advice for people new to remote work: reserve an hour each morning for exercise, start reading fiction, try out the keto diet, avoid alcohol as much as possible, try to limit your caffeine intake, open your windows to prevent co2 buildup, keep eye drops within reach for long hauls, try to get all of your chores done in the morning.
Plus it compliments nicely with your morning cardio and provides a decent energy boost throughout the day without the need of caffeine.
It is hard to make connections with coworkers, and it is so important to build a social life outside of work if you do not have one.
I find I work less hours in front of the computer, accomplish more, and have to spend more time "screwing off" to fill in that void of losing office banter, work lunches with coworkers, etc.
I cannot imagine how the informal interactions with co-workers would happen remotely, but I work in an unimaginative bureaucracy where my co-workers are about twice my age.
One idea that has been floated is meeting together for training with my teammates, but I have yet to meet anyone in six years -- even my boss.
The downside to having lots of video chat is that I'm really constrained to working from somewhere with good internet, and somewhere without a lot of ambient noise -- which somewhat ruins the "work from anywhere" appeal. It's definitely a trade-off I can live with, though.
Aside from those things, I'm honestly struggling to really come up with something that sucks about remote work. My experience with being fully remote has been fantastic and has brought so much more joy to my career.
When you're a remote manager competing for staff time to get these things done with on-site managers it gets even trickier, as people want to please the people they have to face every day, even if they see them just in passing. You need to take extra steps (more reminders) to keep secondary projects moving.
Im uncertain myself so further reflections on this would be interesting to hear.
Not just image and audio quality, but Google Hangouts on my phone (so I can carry it around the house and get tea etc during a meeting) slurps up oodles of battery and the phone (OnePlus 5T) gets really really hot too.
No such problem with eg. Netflix and Youtube, guess those video codecs have some HW acceleration while Google Hangouts doesn't?
Further: I only work some 500km from the office, so I travel there (mostly by train) roughly once a month for a few days. Good mix of remote and on-site for me.
Anyway, I also work remotely but visit an office a few times a month, that is really helpful both from the technical side of things and socially.
Also, having worked in companies using one or the other exclusively, video conferencing is much much better than audio only. Seeing your colleagues' faces makes you feel so much more connected and less like strangers.
1) Stable, fast internet for endless video-chats
2) Visa/bank account issues.
3) Company politics.
These 3 things can make working remote a challenge. Video chats are needed to simulate "in person conversations" which company executives believe improves efficiency and morale. Companies are also worried about "how do we legally pay our employees if they claim to be in the USA but are really on a tourist visa somewhere". And third, companies will often has gossip and politics and power struggles where those who are in office have more face time and promotion potential than those who are remote.
All of these things can be easily fixed but it requires the employee and the employer to not be incompetent.
This is magnified x100 in group settings, especially group settings where more than half the participants are physically present and only a minority remote.
The problem is many non-engineering related roles follow similar organization around sprints and backlogs/task lists. Because of that I think there's a natural suspicion around productivity for people you don't get a chance to see everyday.
In other words work organization still sucks for non-engineering related remote work (sales excluded actually).
And then internal relationship building i think is also a challenge which impacts collaboration 100% - that still sucks.
A major predictor of workplace happiness is if people feel like they have at least 1 other friend or confidant at work.
It's incredibly hard to build meaningful relationships over a conferencing system and makes the job feel more robotic.
Also I think I'd get incredibly lonely and depressed if I did remote work.
She gets it from an intelligent perspective that I need to work, but emotionally its a struggle.
When I worked on the office, she kept complaining that I came home too late (8 hours + ~1 hour commute). Now she complains when I work too late, but I work late because of the interruptions.
I've considered renting an office in my city, which would mean a ~5 minute commute by bicycle. This should help solve most of the issues we have, since I can be physically away, but not that far away. When I talk to her, things get better for a little while, but it's not really a permanent solution. I could probably make it work with 2-3 days in the office and work at home the other days.
Some days I would just do obligations like meetings and urgent stuff at the normal hours and leave the deep work to do when she and the baby were asleep.
This was definitely the hardest thing to balance...