this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Since 2020, my specific team only meets in person 3 times per year, with one or two members deciding to come into the office once every 2 weeks (because they want to).
We discovered early on that we were more productive WFH (with metrics to back it up), so we only have live meetups to organize big projects. We then take those big plans home with us and get it done remotely.
I can’t say it would work for every team, but I definitely don’t see the value in “being in the office” as someone who works entirely on the computer.
I see a lot of propaganda about how teams are more productive when they have “spontaneous interactions around the water cooler”, but in my experience that was never really a driving factor of our work.
My department works almost entirely on the computer but is made up of knowledge workers. We found that our metrics also reflected improved efficiency. However, our metrics didn't (and likely can't) measure knowledge sharing interactions and training effectiveness to compare working from home with in the office. Most of our department has noticed and believes that knowledge sharing and training interactions decrease when working from home. This is not good for long term health and efficiency of the department. In 5 to 10 years the quality of work we provide will go down (or at least not improve as much as it could) without these interactions. So a small sacrifice in efficiency now could be worth it in the long run.
It's hard to quantify exactly what is being sacrificed one way or the other. The only way to really find out is to experiment and see what happens long term.
As someone who was a new hire during WFH I still don’t know a lot of the random tribal knowledge. It’s been getting better since we’ve been back to office, but I’m absolutely behind the curve because of it.
Thanks for sharing. I think this is a really important factor that I feel most people don't understand or care about.