Theory: people at companies who are allowed to work remotely feel they are trusted and treated like adults. Meanwhile people who work for companies forcing RTO feel like they being treated like children and lied to, and therefore less likely to be invested.
To maintain high trust you need to correct for untrustworthy people, either by setting norms that build trust, teaching people to be more trusting, or getting rid of non-performing people who destroy trust.
A fundamental problem in tech is that most upper managers cannot know which engineers are good and which are not, since it’s very difficult to understand what they are doing.
Unless a lead or front line engineering manager is making good evaluations of the team members, it’s ultimately a lack box of people when viewed from above.
> ... released Tuesday by Scoop, a hybrid work management startup that also compiles the data set Flex Index, includes an analysis of remote work policies and revenue growth at 554 public companies done in partnership with the Boston Consulting Group. It found that the average public company that gives employees choice over whether to come into an office also outperformed on revenue growth over the past three years by 16 percentage points, compared to companies with more restrictive policies.
Hypothesis: Companies that are functional as fully remote tend to have to have really solid communication capabilities which means people can be partially independent when needed.
Companies who need to be in person suffer from the desperate need to constantly tap people on the shoulder and have in-person convos since no information is written down.
I'm experiencing these things so I feel like funcitonal remote work is a side-effect of good processes, and good processes lead to good company growth.
Yep, also focuses on making sure folks are great at communication.
It's one of the cornerstones of great remote teams, and going RTO is just a bandaid to allow bad communicators to monopolize other folks time with endless face to face time.
When some of the key decision makers are poor communicators and/or underperformers it’s not in their personal best interest to allow remote work. Perhaps that’s why some companies push RTO despite the workers hating it.
I believe that the results here are true, but it's also worth noting that the company which performed this analysis is a "hybrid work management startup" and they have an incentive to report that hybrid work is superior.
