Summary

Work is best done in person.

Why do we work in the first place?

The impelling reason and motive of our work is to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as our very own. If someone offers their strength or skill, they do so for the purpose of receiving in return what is necessary for the satisfaction of their needs the disposal of such remuneration, just as they please.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

• Some need to work from home due to family situations
• Some like the steady flow of going into the office
• Some need to have a quiet place to work if their home life is just too hectic

Personal Personnel Relationships

Learning to live in human community

To work for a company is to learn the corporate culture, gain a sense of belonging and camaraderie, finding mentors in your chosen field, and gaining company information to assist you in performing your job in context. This requires a critical mass of employees in one location (usually the office).

It does not work to have employees commute to the office only to find themselves alone, logging into online meetings just as they would from home. It does not work to have some people on-site and others dialing in; the imbalance in being fully part of the conversation is apparent to everyone. It would be irrational to neglect one portion of the employees and favor another, and therefore the management must duly and solicitously provide for the welfare and the comfort of the working classes.

Career development is still far more about who you know rather than what you know. In person, you can hear, see, or find people who work in your area and learn from them. How did they get to the position they are in now? If those conversations happen over a virtual meeting, they’re often far more succinct and you do not learn as much about the person.

Corporate CULTure often is, but does not have to be, at odds with family culture. Culture comes from “cultivate” - to make tend and nurture something, to grow it. What is at the center of the company? What is the primary aim of company? For example, Seagate Technology exists to provide storage solutions in all market segments; Trimble and all the subsidiaries basically aim to provide industrial precision location services and anything related to the question of “Where is ‘here’?”.

At home, it may be quieter and you can concentrate on work without having your office neighbor on the phone, you can avoid “microaggressions”, irritation at open cube-farm floor plans, and other things you find discomforting. However, you become a better human being by learning to deal with those issues.

Trust is more easily built with physical presence

Virtual/online interactions are a disembodied mode of human interrelation. On a Zoom / Google Meet call, you’re merely a box among tiny boxes. You cannot look people directly in the eye, you cannot feel the handshake, nor directly observe body language. For a speaker, it is much more difficult to tell how a message is being received by a virtual audience.

Conway’s Law and “The Neighborhood Effect”

The loss of social connectivity in an organization means that, as an organization, it must now extend greater effort to traverse across company social network voids to spontaneously generate and openly share ideas, information, and general communications. A more socially fragmented organization limits growth and adaptive capacity

Conway’s Law states something to the effect of “an organization will structure itself around its communication model.” Remote work exacerbates structures that were already fractured.

Since the Work-From-Home revolution of 2020, remote Employees now have the flexibility to create boundaries around their work and invest in important relationships. Employees are more willing to step away from their respective organizations and colleagues when they feel disconnected from them. There is no “corporate support network” and less care is given to “Burnout Management.”

Corporate Personnel Relationships

Employees as seen from the employer

Personnel Types: Office Worker vs Remote Worker

To many corporate executives, an ideal worker is one who comes in early, leaves late, and wants to be in the office - whose only priority is work and work-related projects. It doesn’t work for the leadership to be in the office while technically allowing some to work from home. Those who show up will end up being favored and everyone knows it. Senior management tends to view WFH through a lens of slacking-off employees, lower productivity, and lower ROI. A WFH worker may be someone who embraces life and has passions and interests outside of work. They work because they see work as a means to fund their life.

A maxim in management is something like “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” When management can no longer directly track how employees are working they seek other methods for constructing a quantitative productivity metric. This can generate an inherent lack of trust when management does not see employees. This leads to micromanagement and employee badge scan tracking as well as threats of termination.

In addition, an employee just becomes a productivity unit - a number, after just a couple levels of management. This is understandable though, because the CEO cannot micromanage everyone. The manager does not care whether the team uses an elastic load balancer or application load balancer or whether that choice is dictated by years of tech debt. All the manager cares about is getting keeping the application up and running so the team can be allocated to the next project. However, to misuse people as though they were mere things in pursuit of gain, or to value them solely for their productive powers - that is truly shameful and inhuman.

Some corporations hired significantly during the 2020 Pandemic Layoffs just to hold talent - productivity units. When the company encounters economic stressors, it still needs to pay shareholders. The most immediate affect on the balance books is to manage operational expenses. Employees have a large impact on operational expenses, so some employees must be released from service (e.g. Alphabet, Meta, Twitter, Netflix).

On the Location of the Work

A dedicated space vs. Where you always are

Corporations provide space for their employees

From desks to conference rooms, lunchrooms, fitness centers, or even Google’s famous “on-campus dentist”, the company provides space for the employees to focus on their work and interact with those who are working similar goals. However, the open floor plans and desks in rows seem to need a review every time new management takes over a company. None of the employees like open floor plans. They do not feel comfortable, they feel exposed.

Lockheed Martin / NASA observed how engineers and scientists interacted in laboratory spaces. That is where they came up with the term “design studios” where there is a central table surrounded by personal compute stations.

At home though, it is healthy and important to have a dedicated work space. Mixing the use of that space can breed too much familiarity, for example, playing games on your work PC or something.

Commuting

In the United States, lengths and costs of commutes have increased with suburban sprawl. For example, an employee commuting 37 miles from his home would travel at least 74 miles per day. If he is in a commuter car (e.g. Saturn SL2), we might expect the efficiency to be around 36mpg. With the average price of a gallon of gasoline at $4.00, that’s an extra $165/mo just going toward driving. If we’re paying that employee for his time, say $60/hr, just his commute would be $2,400/mo.

If the employee and employer agree to allow telecommuting, what level of intrusion will the employer require or what level with the employee allow into his home life? If higher-paid workers move to lower cost-of-living places. The company can negotiate to pay them less, but the employees can contribute to the economics of their locale, live near family, etc. This upends the outlook for the urban service jobs though, who would otherwise serve all those office workers who need some place in close proximity to the office to run errands, go out for lunch, etc.