Comment by hkai
5 years ago
I am currently soft-quarantined by my employer in Hong Kong because I recently visited Mainland China, and will be working from home for 14 days, along with many others.
It's not going that well: from my subjective point of view, people seem to treat it as an extra vacation. They are often not online and will only complete a few small tasks per day, because there is no threat from the boss who sees that you are browsing facebook instead of working.
Even government employees are at home. Many people didn't get their tax bill so they don't need to pay tax for now. Sweet!
That experiment makes me think that perhaps work from home is optimal mostly for a small pool of highly motivated and talented individuals, such as the average person on HN who actually does feel more productive working from home. Outside of HN, work ethic could be different.
Well, of course you can't just switch to remote work overnight without any preparation, and expect everything to work well immediately! But, for example: how do you know those workers are treating it as a small vacation? You're not there to see them either! Managers can do the same, they don't need to know what the worker is doing instead of working; they can see the work is not getting done.
I would guess a lot are also not set up at home to work efficiently. I.e. proper desk in a quiet room etc. And if the kids are home from school as well, I assume it is very hard to concentrate on working from home.
Also if there is the threat of an incoming pandemic, then my priorities would be elsewhere than work. I.e. securing family, provisions, medicines, etc. And checking news sources about the epidemic every 5 minutes is not good for efficiency...
Especially in HK where people just don't have the space. Many people live with their families in tiny apartments for much longer in life.
I think one obstacle is that in practice, it is difficult to tell someone "your performance is bad today and you are not getting work done".
It's not difficult, though. It just takes practice. You use the same channels that you are using for remote work: chat, email, voice, video. I understand the desire to not put something like that in writing, but that's what voice and video are for.
I agree, but. People skills. Allegedly managers have them.
Plus until corps can fire and replace the slackers, they are not in danger. (Because it's unlikely to hire someone while the quarantine is in effect.)
But simply tying pay to daily performance usually works.
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For most modern work it's difficult to see if the work is being done, whether people are at home or in the office. For the stuff you can watch it's mostly impossible to do at home.
There is one major requirement for remote work, it’s called deadlines. Give people a paycheck, some requirements, and deadlines and I promise you the work will find a way to get done. They can browse Facebook all they want.
What about work that does not have deadlines, but requires constant attention? Like monitoring security cameras, or the status of a medical patient or a nuclear power plant..
These types of work have the added risk of unauthorized people, such as the employee’s kids or friends, snooping in on sensitive information.
That might be helped by the employer providing a dedicated computer for remote work, with screen-recording and facial recognition that locks the system if you’re not (the only person) in view.
Perhaps having always-on video and voice surveillance on that computer, and announcing that fact, would force employees to create a dedicated distraction-free work environment in their homes.
You do the same thing that you do in the real world. Have you ever noticed how sometimes security guards will walk around with a little key fob and touch it to a point on the wall? That's because in order to ensure they're doing their required patrols they physically have to log they've been to a point.
If you're requiring someone pay attention to a monitor you can do the same thing - for example put a square on the image and require the employee to click it. Obviously though, this requires someone to actually critically think about protocols for ensuring work is done to a standard.
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So externalising office costs onto the workers - lovely
You might want to think about how this effects the housing market if this take off long term.
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There are ways you can 'force' attention. Things like semi-regular unannounced drills, audits, etc. I agree it's harder, and for things like the status of a medical patient or nuclear power plant the potential damage of someone going to the pub in the afternoon and missing something is far worse than missing a couple items in a sprint, but it is still possible to assess.
Those are the jobs that should be automated, and I imagine will be soon.
What stops people just watching cat videos on Facebook in those situations?
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It doesn't work that way, because most work is at least somewhat collaborative and that means the remote worker is not solely in control of the pace. As a remote worker I can't meet with someone in the office who doesn't respond to my pings. I can't commit my code if reviewers only respond once per day. If people have an across-the-desk conversation without me that invalidates what I just spent a day implementing, I'm screwed - either by losing that work or by having to spend time (and become The Bad Guy) by persuading them back to the right path. The only way around these issues is to multitask more, which we should all know by now creates its own productivity problems. If you think deadlines alone work, you can't have tried it for any but the most trivially separable kinds of work.
What you've described are symptoms of an office who doesn't know how how to scale distributed work loads with remote workers. Across-the-desk conversations for instance don't scale to large workforce numbers.
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Deadlines are the incompetent manager's virtual whip.
Exactly, and I'd argue the metrics you need to check that someone working remotely has been efficient is a much better business metric than ass-on-chair time.
I'm running a fully remote engineering team. There are plenty of difficulties and downsides unique to being remote, but one of the major benefit is that performance evaluation becomes much simpler, as you're not biased by seeing people sitting or not sitting at their desk.
Fully remote is very different than partial remote, which is the situation here and one that companies still need to learn how to deal with.
I think it's a misconception that remote work has to be async.
You can breath down people's neck just as well over a video link, and there are multiple apps to help scale that.
Whether that's desirable or not is another topic, but why not solve one problem at a time?
Are you saying manager oversight is what's keeping your co-workers from slacking off all day? Is this a place that produces quality of any kind?
I mean most people when they first start working remotely have trouble adjusting. After all, up until then their home is a place for rest, not for work!
It's probably that people are not accustomed to this flow
I work remotely but I still go to an office almost every day.
For many jobs that's how it works. A lot of work is not about quality, tasks just have to be completed according to schedule.
in which case it should be easy to measure performance
Could you give an example of a task where you cannot make a difference in quality? I have trouble coming up with any.
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Remote work is a skill, it takes time to acquire, just like office work and barely less. (Have you forgotten how hard it was to stay put for 8+ hours in the same place? I still remember.)
My personal estimations -- it takes 18 month to work out an established routine, so any RW "decreed" on the worker before that time, is indeed effectively vacations.
The worst scheme is working from home 1-2 days a week, and coming to office for the rest. Beside the established routine it also requires adapting the sleep schedule (which is twice as hard if the RW days are floating, not fixed).
Why does working from home 1-2 days a week require changing your sleep schedule?
Because when one works from home, there is no need to allot time for commute. People with short commute times (==> no need to adjust sleeping schedule), are much keener to go work from the office.
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As another HKer, I just think that working practices at many companies in our city are not set up for remote work yet. There is a lot of reliance on micromanagement, paternalism and face-to-face communications. Working from home is too different from this.
I've also seen this in HK. The team I worked in, used to work mainly with people in Singapore, my local colleagues just didn't know what to do with their manager not being in the office with them. Half of the time they would just sit around and do nothing, until our manager explicitly told them what to do, and even then they struggled.
Sounds like the military.
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They are often not online and will only complete a few small tasks per day, because there is no threat from the boss who sees that you are browsing facebook instead of working.
And I'm sure they're worried about their friends, family and relatives that might be sick (and they can't get to). That worry will cause a productivity drop BECAUSE WE'RE ALL HUMAN.
If I were an employer, I think I'd probably give folks a bit of slack for the next several weeks.
I think this is highly dependent on culture. If you have a strongly hierarchy based culture where the boss is breathing down your neck all the time, then people are not going to deal well with being given freedom.
I have seen this time and again as a Norwegian, when living abroad. I come from a culture where power hierarchies are quite flat and there is a very high trust level between people. Bosses don't breath down your neck.
I remember an Indian manager who had worked long in Norway remarked on the difficulty of going back to India. People there are used to be bossed around and micromanaged all the time. The result is that it is difficult for them to manage themselves when the boss is gone. He remarked on the frustration of having to be present all the time for work to get done. I had gotten accustomed to not needing that in Norway.
But you don't have to go as far as India to see it. I got family and friends who observed the same in the UK. As soon as the boss left everybody started chatting and chilling.
I could see similar things when I studied in the US. American teenagers were often quite bad at managing themselves away from home. When I stayed over at people's places I realized why. Their parents where far stricter and far more micromanaging than I was used to. Even on campus there was far more rules and control than what would be normal in Northern Europe.
Stuff like that gives short term benefits of people behaving. The long term problem is that people get little to no training in managing themselves and setting their own boundaries. Autonomy and self control is not something you are born with. You have to train on it and learn it.
I find Scandinavian parents are far more tolerant towards kids screwing up and wasting their time. Part of that I think is they know kids must learn to handle situations themselves.
My wife is Asian-American and I know from all the stories she tells me that in Asia where it is even more control oriented and more ambitious it becomes even harder. Parents and teachers make all the "optimal" choices for you all the time, to push for success. She has family members who never chose even what clothes they wore all through childhood. Parents made all the choices.
I had a friend from Singapore. She remarked on how difficult it was coming to the US as a teenager. Suddenly teachers wanted to know her opinion on a variety of issues and subjects. But nobody had ever asked her opinion on anything before.
So I can imagine that remote working in Asia is going to be a lot harder than for many western countries. Even within the West there will be big differences in how well it can work.
But just so it is clear. I don't think the ability to work remote is inherent in people. I think with training Asian societies and workers can develop a culture for more independent working and working from home.
There's another aspect to it.
People who slack instantly when the boss leaves, are only working because they're being driven before the whip. It's not lack of self management. It's being dragged unwillingly into a tedious hell. Refusing "autonomy" in the circumstances, is a form of soft sabotage protest.
Does anybody actually want to work though? Or simply to have the cash on hand to pay for things they actually want.
Serious question ^^
I personally find it rewarding to finish tasks & make things... being employed to do so is a luxury, but i still don't want to have a job.
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If I was forced to be at home, I would probably not work much either. My productive WFH days are when I actually want to be at home.
I think for most people makes job is something you have to do, you do it to make a living. Work is not fancy outside tech world: the pay is less, task is more repetitive than challenging, work is not dynamic.
Also working in HK, everyone is encouraged to work from home. I’ve been going into the office since my company issued laptop just isn’t equipped for software engineering. Our company VPN was also down the entire day, so not sure how anyone could’ve done any work.
On the upside, my commute to work has been quiet, and there’s no distractions in the office.
> from my subjective point of view, people seem to treat it as an extra vacation.
Every middle level managers job is depending on this belief. Once they accept people can work from home,their job becomes extinct its understandable but not true.
The fact that most people have never before had exposure to work from home (due to not being given the option until now) has to be taken into account. I doubt people would continue to treat it as an excuse to slack in the long-term.
Enforce the use of https://www.rescuetime.com/ may help.
Considering they might be worried sick about friends and family (and therefore using social media) this would be awful.
The world needs less authoritarianism and more compassion right now. We're all human.
no idea about HK law but in USA law not getting your tax bill has no bearing on your obligation to pay. Even getting bad info from the IRs does not give you an excuse to not pay it correctly and on time.
For working for home you need a system in place designed for remote work. Nothing to do with work ethic.
And this system will provide the feedback that controls the worker works or not.
In fact with remote work done right you control productivity much better, because you measure the real work or output a worker does.
With remote work you are not as influenced to subjective bias like how young or beautiful someone is, the neckline or skirt(if you are a man) that could affect you without you even realizing.
You don't need to reward someone looking productive, going early to work and leaving late, staying in place but pressing a key to watch facebook when nobody is looking.
You also don't need to punish someone who is productive, using way less time for doing the work and then leaving home or whatever.
This "theater of work" is very real and as a manager it could trick you.
With remote work you can measure the work what is critical for your business to succeed and demand it.
Someone told me once: How do you know your workers are not masturbating while working from home? Playing games or watching TV? Playing with their kids?
The fact is that I don't care if they remain productive and generate the work. In fact if they do the work, enjoining life is a bonus.
There is this Puritan mentality that for doing work you have to suffer and people that believe in that demanding not just work, but watching other people suffer while doing that. Because they actually do suffer, they need everybody that works for them to suffer too. They are sadistic.
I have seen that attitude in entrepreneur or managers colleagues: "Someone who works for me is enyoing the work and I can't stand it""I have to show him what real work is"
They prefer showing their workers how hard and miserable life is that earning money!!