Leaked Zoom all-hands: CEO says employees must return to offices because they can’t be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom::Zoom CEO Eric Yuan discussed the benefits of in-person work in a leaked meeting.
If you’re in a tech job, working from home should be the default. If you’re in a service job, working on-site is a requirement. This can have a negative impact on a company overall because you may have both in your workforce, and the ability to work from home breeds resentment and impacts morale.
Amidst COVID, our office workers were told to return to work. The reasoning was a perceived inequity held by the field workers toward those that sit at a desk all day. Nevermind that having everyone return up’s everyone’s chance for getting infected. Truth be told, those forced to come in would rather risk that than be left out.
They should turn off the AC too, if anybody has to sweat, everybody should have to sweat.
I hope people demanded an eye-watering raise, citing the inequity in remuneration between the workers and C-suite.
Oh - you don’t care about equity after all? Why do we need to come back again?
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2010 is the year we started going full “remote work” and we sold our office building in 2012. Since then we have somehow managed to thrive and innovate like crazy. I am pretty sure these guys know that what they are saying is bullshit, at least as it relates to tech. Creatives, maybe, but in tech it is far easier to screenshare and discuss than it is to lean over some dude’s shoulder to look at their screen…in dark mode…with nano fonts.
Because they work at a job that requires them to.
I’ve been working remotely for over 10 years. Even without Zoom, it’s never been a problem. I’ve met people and developed many relationships with just Slack. Heck I’m sure I’d manage that even with just email.
When I finally met everyone in person at the company retreat, everyone was super happy to know me in person. I was about exactly as they imagined.
Company culture is how you develop it. At every company I’ve worked with, I introduced social channels and established a continuous background chatter that’s for people to share memes or whatever they want, to help establish a personnality that goes beyond “I just deployed X which puts project Y live on production”. I have DMs with all sorts of people from all departments, just idle occasional chatter. It makes connections with other departments when you need their help. It works. I always somehow become the guy to reach out to for anything that doesn’t necessarily fit a Jira ticket, or sometimes just need help making sure they file the right kind of ticket.
If it doesn’t work, then either you have hermits that wouldn’t be much more active in an office anyway, or the company is holding it back by discouraging or forbidding any sort of unprofessional or otherwise non-work related activity and the only way to socialize is in the break room in the office.
IMO idle chats on Slack are way less disruptive than in-person, it doesn’t take you off your work stretch, you can send replies during Zoom meetings, you can even have textual side threads during a video meeting to go over details without holding the meeting for everyone. Sometimes I have hours long conversations going about projects on Slack, with everyone essentially just chiming in whenever they have new ideas or feedback. It gives people time to think and refine the specs without any “now or never” pressure.
Remote work works, if it doesn’t work, it’s a company culture problem not an office problem.
Honestly this so much. I’m not a forward enough person to be the one to create that background chatter in my workplace, but I will participate in it.
My last workplace had it and my current one doesn’t, and the difference is night and day. Leaving my last company hit hard because among the developers we had such a great culture in spite of upper management’s toxicity. I would leave my current role in a heartbeat because there’s just no real culture. That’s not something management should be aiming for, because higher churn is bad for the business.
Yeah, it really matters. It’s the difference between a computer you turn on to do strictly business and a computer you turn on and look forward to engaging with other people and see what cool stuff people are working on. Look at people’s delicious breakfasts and coffees in #breakfast, look at people’s cats and dogs in #pets.
When done right, tools like Slack can also give you so much more visibility too and chime in. I’m a DevOps/platform engineer, but unless we talk secrets or implementation details we chat in a public channel so backend devs can see what we’re doing. I can passively read the support team’s channel and give them hints like oh this customer’s CNAME points to the wrong site. I can see what the backend team runs into deploying their stuff and propose tooling changes to make their life better. It lets me be extremely proactive, without turning into a “you must keep up with everything everyone is doing”. Half of them I have muted but still idle browse every now and then. I’ve had other teams pop on our public channel and ask details about how it works, so they can better understand how their code will run. I’ve had other devs chime in and say hey, our app works better in that kind of environment. It’s a constant informal feedback loop on top of the usual formal Jira tickets. Saves everyone time, makes everyone happier.
It continuously reinforces the importance of my role, why my team do the things we do, who it’s for. It’s not soulless work anymore, because you know and see the impact of your work on other people. Even sales is less annoying because you can see them chat about how it’s the 50th customer that asks if we can do X, instead of just hearing that sales sold feature X that we don’t hace and now it’s due next week, because you have context on why.
I’ll get downvoted to hell for this, but the CEO is at least partially right. It is really hard to get to know people and build trust remotely.
I started my first post-college job in August of 2020. Most people were remote, but I was not due to the nature of my work. It is extremely hard to get to know people exclusively over email, phone calls, and video calls. It’s frustrating not being able to get to know people even at the surface level. Knowing a little bit about your coworkers allows you to build rapport with them. Video and voice calls can be unreliable, and people can be very difficult to understand without in person cues and the ability to read lips. I say all of this as a very introverted person with social anxiety.
Not downvoted, appreciate you sharing your perspective.
I’ve been successful building trust in remote work settings but it’s a very much about building a narrative that’s much more explicit and communicated in an active way.
But ignoring that bullshit I just typed, I think “building trust” in a professional environment is largely a trap. Not because you can’t trust anyone but that, if you’re building a good team, trust should be implicit. I was hired to do a job, you were hired to do a job, let’s trust that each other to do it.
I think it’s also worth bearing in mind that high trust teams can still build trust, I’m simply advocating for not starting from zero.
Unfortunately so many of the tools and workflows are built explicitly for low trust teams.
I wish people would move away from the will be downvoted for this statement before saying something. It’s just meaningless votes, and message is stronger without it than giving the impression of caring about karma or a willingness to stand by it regardless of reaction by not even acknowledging it.
Maybe if companies actually tried offering affordable employment housing so people aren’t having to do long commute times or losing a chunk of their salary living closer people would not be against working in the office.
There’s too much personal monetary and time inconveniences of working in the office over remote on an individual level that it’s hard to care about wanting to get to know someone being enough of a draw to work in the office.
That may be true for some people individually, but I believe if no one at a company is able to build any connection (even on a professional level of base rapport ), that’s much more an indicator of the company’s failures to build a proper company culture that supports that.
People have been making close friends over the Internet with zero in-person interactions for decades now. And that’s even without video chat being the primary way of doing it. I work 100% remote at a company with ~2500 employees. I’m pretty introverted, but I’ve managed to make a few friends mostly over slack that I would ask if they wanted to grab a drink or something if I were traveling through their area. There’s no pressure or expectation of that from the company, there’s no “we’re family” nonsense, they’ve just created a company culture where that can happen.
I disagree completely. I love the word terroir. It’s a good metaphor. A good wine comes from a grapes in a specific place, with specific soil conditions, with specific weather conditions that can’t be predicted or replicated. Even if you could replicate the controllable variables again, the variables are too great to replicate. Sometimes terroir happens at work, and it requires all these things to come together in a place and time. I was lucky to have that in my career. But with remote work I don’t think that will ever happen again and remote work will prohibit that. I love working from home 2 days a week. But I wish we could figure out a 3 days a week in office that makes sense.
I agree. In the old days I was coming in only 3 days a week. But for those 3 days everyone was there. And the weekly end of day knowledge share and training where buckets of beer were passed around that turned into happy hour were natural and organic team building. Also, being able to white board off the cuff when needed to train folks on random topics during on boarding when you discovered a knowledge gap or had to field an off the cuff question with a 20 minute mini lecture…
Video conferencing killed all of that or at best made it way more painfull than it should be.
Also remote work killed the office. Even if I was going in 3 days a week I’m still video conferencing 75% of the time and no conference room is available.
Upvoted because you’ve definitely touched on a very real problem that needs to be addressed.
But you’re completely wrong about the cause. The problem is companies with a bad culture. @Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me said it brilliantly in a comment further up the thread, and I did my best (less elegant) job of explaining it above that. The company needs to take steps to encourage a good relationships between people, for example with casual and non-work-related chats in the chat app of choice, or by having people frequently working on problems in pairs instead of solo, especially when first starting out.
I had better relationships with my coworkers fully remotely at my last job than I do at my current job despite being in the office frequently. And that’s all down to how the company manages its culture.
I disagree. Good culture is sometimes an accident. And folks in charge like to take credit for that accident working out
Sure, that’s absolutely the case.
But that wasn’t my point. My point was that the experience with WFH comes down entirely to the culture, and if you’re feeling isolated when WFH it’s not a fault of WFH, it’s a problem with your company’s work culture.
I’ve been doing a combination of working from home and working from the office since the start of COVID. I generally only go into work when there is something broken that needs me to physically repair it. I can honestly say that the times I’m working from home, my productivity is exceptionally higher than it would be otherwise. No distractions from coworkers, a more comfortable environment, better computers and desk ergonomics, no commute.
Employers need to realize that good employees work better from home, and the ones that don’t are not worth keeping on the payroll.
Clown 🤡
The number of jobs I’ve missed out on and lost exclusively because I’m not normative enough to tell milquetoast jokes around a water cooler with a bunch of people I know two facts about but treat like my best friend numbers in the 100s.
Fuck all these people trying to force the old ways forever just so they can exercise their social capital upon the rest of us.
He’s not wrong, remote meetings do suck for getting to know your coworkers, but that’s not a great reason for rtw
sounds rapey
The fact of the matter is when your company revolves around you being able to communicate and work from anywhere, it is a bad look for you tell people you can’t communicate effectively over the product you make. Anyone who knows business should know this and should know to keep their mouth shut and their policies focused on trying to destroy business.
Makes me feel like someone is paying to or making them do this. If it’s best for ‘THE’ WFH company to WFO, then every company can say it’s best their employees WFO.
Yes, the executives who are looking at empty offices with decades-long leases is what’s “paying” them to do this.
Greedy dumbasses around the world are subject to sunk cost fallacy, apparently far worse than normal people.
Why tf do out of touch executives and managers always think that we want to make friends at work? I don’t really care to know any of my coworkers, I just want to do my job in a professional manner, get paid well for it, and then either go home or close the laptop and leave my home office.
Also the only creativity that the office gives me is how to creatively get around the Internet restrictions they place on us, or how to creatively appear to be working when there’s nothing to do.
If I wanted to make friends I’d go to a bar or something else that adults do together in groups, like bowling leagues.
I know it’s very popular online to brag about being an asocial shut-in, but believe it or not some people like their jobs and like the social aspect of the office. The problem is the bigwigs applying the same rule for everyone either due to being out-of-touch with normal humans or just through greed, but don’t assume your experience is universal!
I bet their real goal is to shed employees without having to do layoffs. They know some of these people will refuse to come back (or moved far away) and therefore can be fired with little press or blowback.
Depends on the type of work. Workshops and strategy sessions are definitely better in person than online for me.
Even if that is the case I don’t find myself caring enough to want to work in the office when going to work has such a huge impact on time and money wasted commuting, and plays such a huge role on where people can live. Its hard to care when it’s such a drain on personal time and expenses.
I prefer working remote as well and not suggesting going back full time. I just think there are some things that are better in person. Fortunately my work provides a good balance where I am remote 50 - 80% of the time but can fly in to different locations for a F2F when necessary.
I think when I look at when it comes to remote is that as an employee what an employer sees as better in person is not better for me. But, I can see why an employer would see in person as better. As an employee I need to be paid even more to make it worth it, since it is overall a con in my time.
Okay so what are you getting from either of those that you can’t get from attending the same on Teams/Zoom etc.?
Workshops also just feel like school and the presenters always talk too fast, quiet, or accented for my hearing and ADHD to make it worth me going to one, some dedicated study time always was the better route for me.
Meanwhile strategy sesh’s are just conversations with an end goal, nothing difficult about that at all.
One thing people who are against work from home have to realize is that not everybody functions the same, some people do better remotely, others need the office.
I just wish we could be treated like adults and work in the way we feel most comfortable and efficiently without being mistreated over it and without being astroturfed against it by entities like the Wall St. journal and Bloomberg, sorry rich people but I just don’t give a fuck about your corporate property values.
Okay so what are you getting from either of those that you can’t get from attending the same on Teams/Zoom etc.?
I don’t get the “Bill, we can’t hear you; you’re on mute” twenty times per hour. Or the guy who doesn’t realize he should be muted but isn’t, and the chat is flooded with his background noise. I don’t get to whisper snarky comments about the presenter to my coworker whom I’m sitting next to. I don’t get to spontaneously engage people hanging around the coffee stand between sessions.
There are tangible differences between remote and in-person. As much of an introvert as I am, and as much as I love working remotely, I recognize that I do better collaborative work when I’m in-person. YMMV, but mine doesn’t.
Does your company not do water cooler sessions for your team? Also you can message people during presentations online to gossip. I just did it yesterday to make fun of some idiotic desperation move our execs are getting ready to pull.
When people say “you can’t do X remotely” what they actually mean is they either put no effort into it or they can do it, but it doesn’t feel the same to them, which is a completely different statement.
I found that keeping up with people over video works better when you’re in the same time zone. When I was managing teams at +8 hours and -12.5 relative hours, communication and trust just weakened steadily over time and creative collaboration stalled. Spending a week there in person usually got things unstuck.
I know people on split engineering teams between LA and Seattle who prefer all virtual and it’s worked long term. LA to NY I think would be a heavier lift.
And, of course, this whole discussion is always dominated by software engineers; there are lots of jobs that involve actual manipulation of matter where in person collaboration is essential to communicate skills.
Oh definitely, timezones do throw a wrench in things a bit, but there are easy ways around that usually, splitting engineering teams like the way you described is a pretty good workaround.
I completely agree that jobs that just can’t be done remotely obviously shouldn’t be, but any job that can be should have the option available. I just feel like most of the work from home backlash comes from people who cannot do their jobs from home and managers/executives that just want someone to babysit, usually in order to justify their own professional existence. It just seems like a lot of “crabs in a bucket” behavior.
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Okay so what are you getting from either of those that you can’t get from attending the same on Teams/Zoom etc.?
Firstly real human interaction. There is a lot of team building that can occur just from having lunch together. Second, just physically being able to put sticky notes or drawing lines and watching someone else do so without having to have someone try to point out where exactly they put something to you in a virtual whiteboard is way more efficient.
Workshops also just feel like school and the presenters always talk too fast, quiet, or accented for my hearing and ADHD to make it worth me going to one, some dedicated study time always was the better route for me.
Firstly if you just have a presenter talking to you, then that doesn’t sound like a collaborative workshop. Workshops might have someone who guides the discussion but never just presenters otherwise that’s not really a workshop and more just a presentation that can be done online.
Meanwhile strategy sesh’s are just conversations with an end goal, nothing difficult about that at all.
I am not sure what kind of strategy sessions you are having but when you are setting things like commercial STRAP for divisions of 20K or more employees, you need more than just a conversation. You need to draw out roadmaps, have working sessions, even the human interactions through lunches and dinners plays a big part.
One thing people who are against work from home have to realize is that not everybody functions the same, some people do better remotely, others need the office.
It’s not black or white. I am a remote worker who travels regularly. Would I ever give up being remote. No. More than half my job can be done from home and I am not wasting my time travelling to the office. But that doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge when something is just better in person. Not everything is perfect remote and not everything needs to be done in the office. You can have a mix of both and choose based on the requirements of the task.
Additionally, the type of people who are in positions to set organizational strategy are usually the types of personalities that do function between in person because they are typically extroverted personalities. It’s not like I am suggesting you bring a developer to an on site session. I am talking about leaders.
Because if your social life is tied to work you’ll stick around longer during the day and potentially do more work. You’ll also opt to stay at a job that pays less or has worse benefits because it means leaving your friends.
I feel personally attacked
I don’t remember where this quote is from but i think it’s useful.
We are not friends. Our interaction is because I’m paid to be here.
Something like that. I’m all for having comradery and if you happen to be friends then that’s great. But often times, and i know I’ve fallen victim to this, we work too much and dont have social lives that exist outside of work.
Because the #1 reason why employees will stay at a job that underpays them is because they like the people they work with. And you can’t form those bonds remotely.
Definitely disagree on this one. Worked a job across the pandemic that was completely virtual and I never met my coworkers in person. A number of us left about 6 months ago due to layoffs but we all flew out to meet up with each other last week and hang out. That’s almost an entire department of folk that now work in different companies taking the time and personal expense to travel and hang out with each other so I’d say a meaningful bond was built. It absolutely can happen, managers just need to be informed on how to do it. If any org should be prepared for this it’s Zoom. This is just being super lazy on the part of Zoom and having a lack of confidence in their own product.
Been remote for years, number two is just flat out bull shit.
But it doesn’t make sense. If I would have people which I like so much in the office would, you know, go to the office. If I don’t wonna go well… then I don’t like those people enough and there can’t be bonds anyway. We will just come, say hi, do job, go home. What a great creativity boost
Yes you can, what on earth are you talking about? I’ve been remote for 5 years now and I have close relationships with most of the people I work with, especially the devs on my team. Sometimes we’ll debug an issue or discuss something and then afterwards bullshit for a while on the phone.
Are people really this inept? You can have remote relationships especially if you make time for it.
Except that you absolutely can if the company has a good remote culture.
The company I was at prior to the pandemic and all throughout the height of the pandemic had such a culture. Even before the pandemic our work chat had rooms for different teams, different products/projects, and general subjects including non-work-related ones. And the chats were active and lively. And during the pandemic it only got more so. There was a very strong bond between coworkers, including new people first onboarded as WFH.
After we got bought out by a new company and they mandated 100% from the office, I left (as did over 50% of the years of experience in the dev teams). My new company is actually still hybrid/remote, with most people working from the office occasionally but anything including 100% remote being allowed at least after initial onboarding.
But I actually think this company is really bad at remote culture. There are a handful of public chat rooms but they almost never get used, and there’s nothing off-topic at all. It creates a feeling that reaching out to someone is a bigger hurdle than it was at my last place, and greatly reduces collaboration.
At my last place, working collaboratively was the norm and it translated extremely well to remote work. Here everyone is much more siloed and I don’t think it works as well. Especially if your goal is to create interpersonal bonds.
I think that any study you find over the past 30 years will show that while online relationships can be meaningful in some cases, the average person will not form as strong a connection as they would in person.
The term for this is parasocial relationships, and you have truth to your claims
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Huh, weird. The Twitch chats I hang out with and I tend to use “parasocial” as a term in which people develop a relationship with others that people haven’t really seen or spoken to. I’ve seen them and myself use the term to talk about how chats have relationships with streamers themselves, which aligns with your definition, but I’ve also seen it used between Internet users that have minimal interaction with others aside from texting.
I’ve made friends online via Xbox that I have on other social media and that know my face/voice/background, but I try to secure more of my anonymity these days. I wouldn’t consider those relationships as parasocial, but in some ways, depending on how the relationship evolves and grows or decays over time, I’d say they dip in and out of being parasocial and tangible.
Perhaps parasocial might be better thought of as a class of relationships people share that are digital and that don’t manifest IRL in any meaningful ways (excluding face/voice/identity).
Maybe the idea I’m getting at here has a term coined for it already. I’d be willing to change my vocabulary if you suggest something!
Because they aren’t putting effort into it and neither is the company.
If you can talk to someone you can form a relationship with them. Period. This is not hard to figure out.
Remote culture requires putting effort into it. You have regular online events with the team just for fun and you ask people to stay after the scrum for an open floor once a week or so, etc. You invest in the social aspect of remote work.
Studies can say important things but they can’t contradict lived experience and their methodology can also be flawed or biased.
I’m not limiting this to work.
And of course you can have a relationship with someone remotely.
But overall, for the average person, in-person relationships are going to be stronger. Friends, family, romantic relationships, hobbies, work, you name it.
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I agree with the first part, disagree with the second part. You absolutely can form bond remotely, some of my closest friends are online-only. I’ve even met some of my online-only friends IRL once or twice. I’ve become close with online-only coworkers too, honestly closer than I was with a lot of people in the office.
Remote work does work. Return to office is just a power grab by companies and real estate sunken cost fallacy.
I like my coworkers well enough but there is not a single person in that office whom I would choose to be around socially.
Why tf do out of touch executives and managers always think that we want to make friends at work?
Because it’s the type of people they are, and they think everyone is just like them. I worked a corporate job for 10 years and saw a lot of people who made the company their whole identity. Their whole friend group was their co-workers.
That’s a great point, these people’s who lives revolve around their jobs, it makes perfect sense.
From what I understand, it’s all about the companies trying to inflate their value with real estate.
The other way around. They’ve invested in so much real estate they need to justify it.
Thanks for the insight, it does make more sens
I want to start off by saying that I work from home and would like to continue doing so indefinitely. I also think these CEOs are chodes and aren’t really thinking about the point I’ll attempt to make next and typically do not care about such concerns.
Now, I do wonder what effect the loss of the “2nd place” (home, work, community being the “working definition” of places) for vast swathes of the American public will have in a country where the “3rd place” is already pretty non-existent.
In other words, we’re already quite an isolated society. What will a large percentage of us also working in isolation have on the country and on mental health in the long run?
I think there’s a potential that it could be a good effect or a bad one (or a mixture like most things), and I’m not sure which outcome is more likely.
We could become even more withdrawn from each other…or we could use the time we used to spend in traffic and with coworkers to build up local, community bonds instead. I suppose only time will tell, but I think it’s an interesting discussion that I haven’t seen talked about much yet.
It’s a fair point, but I think the answer is to take action necessarily to reintroduce a proper third space, including moving to more medium density mixed use developments.
I also work from home for several extended periods of time, while during others I need to be on site one or two days a week (sometimes it’s nice, sometimes it’s a drag to be on site).
I have to say, while I can work a 100% of the time from home, the nice parts of being on site is to get to know more personally the people I meet. I don’t deny the fact that this be successfully done remotely too, but I believe as humans we need social connections. Yes, we can make friends online (which can carry over IRL and I know that personally) and yes you can meet your partner online too, but it always felt (at least to me) that if you meet others in person, you accelerate the connection.
I mean, I had a fairly bad time in high school, but I had the time of my life on college and met most of my friends then. I’m not sure I’d have made as many friends if it had all been online.
Also, as someone wrote in another post today (but I can’t remember where so I can’t link it, sorry), sometimes people (perhaps new hires fresh out of college) are not experienced enough to know when to be vocal and object to flaws in a project and in person meeting can be a boon to acquire that skill.
It’s a tricky subject, since it’s not that WFH or doing things online prevents normal life evolutions, but perhaps can make them more scarce or slow, while in person events can precipitate them.
I agree that companies forcing things is not the way to go, but somehow it feels like doing things entirely online should happen more later in life, when you’re settled and not before when you need to learn and make connections who you’ll want to meet in person too.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk
I can say for certain that wfh has had a marked impact on my real world social interactions, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. What it means is that any conversation I have with someone is sparked by genuine interest rather than obligation after having bumped into them at the water cooler.
I think it has effected me in mostly bad ways so far, but it’s difficult to 100% decouple that from the awkwardness stemming from the pandemic that coincides with it. I worked remotely before the pandemic hit, but the lack of “office” + the lack of any social venue outside of zoom calls for many months exacerbated things.
Overall, I feel mostly these days like I’m going to have to get a hobby or a meetup or something going because even though I have a pretty low need for social interactions I’m finding myself barely scraping by these days.
I’m finding myself barely scraping by these days.
What do you mean by this? Just about all of my hobbies are solo ventures, but I have heard many good things about meetups and user groups
I’m not a very social person but I find myself feeling like my social needs are barely being met nowadays.
Ah I see. You have any interests? As you mentioned, hobbies are always a good place to start, even if they’re not strictly “social”. If anything it gives you something to talk about, and maybe find some common ground with the people you meet.
Yeah, I’m into a bunch of different things. I had a friend group of sorts in this city but it frayed quite a bit during the pandemic and my wife and I are still kinda COVID weirdos (outdoor masklessness only, etc).
It’ll be alright.
