First, companies were hesitant about remote work. Then the pandemic hit and majority of knowledge workers were sent home to work. It wasn’t without its problems but generally I’d say worked good. After the pandemic started to ease out, it looked for a while that remote work came to stay. But now companies are forcing people back to the office and saying how working together in an office is so much better.
I think it’s a pipe dream.
In these discussions, the comparison is often the perfect collaborative office vs the worst remote experience.
More often than not, I’ve sat in offices where everyone stared at their own screen all day and then we went home. I’ve even sat in offices where we didn’t have enough seats for everyone despite the requirement to be at the office so I sat at client’s kitchen a lot of my days there.
I’ve also worked in remote, fully distributed global teams with a ton of great communication and company culture. I got to know people from all around the globe, not just those who happen to live in the same neighbourhood than I do.
Often these days companies are distributed to multiple offices so even if you work 5 days a week at the office, it’s likely you end up in remote meetings. And remote meeting from office is infinitely worse than one from home. It’s even worse if some people in meeting are in same room and others are remote.
But let’s say we work in an office. In 2024 it’s quite rare for a software developer to have their own office so we may have 10+ people in the same room. If I want to collaborate with a colleague by discussion or doing long pair-programming sessions, I’m likely to disturb a dozen others and their flow. And if we have fixed seats sitting next to each other, pairing with someone means we need to have an extra person squeezed in, further disturbing people sitting next to us.
In a recent news article from Finland, a company ordered everyone to office for 3 days a week. Management brought up how someone had asked if they could work remotely while sailing from Denmark to Finland. My question is this: if the work gets done well, what’s the problem? Why are we so hyper focused on optics and being present and not at all worried about the quality of the work?
Sure, there are tasks that are best done or just need to be done in-person. And I agree that those should then be done like that. But it shouldn’t be a question of “Tuesday through Thursday at the office” mandates but rather “What’s the best place to perform this particular task?“. If you have a team where you need occasional collaboration, then schedule those with the team up front as you would do anyway.
Bad remote work leads to bad results: lack of sense of being part of a team, lack of innovation, lack of great ideas. But so does bad office work. It’s not a silver bullet to force everyone to commute to the office to sit in remote calls.
Great remote work leads to great results: good sense of belonging, increased productivity and increased quality of life (you can choose where you live, what kind of environment you work in, accommodate for personal needs better). And so does great office environment.
It’s not about remote vs office that should be the question. It should be: how do we create a great environment for our people to work in.