Remote Work Works, a New Google Study Finds (fastcompany.com) 61
Working remotely can be really tough. To get some insight into how to do it better, Google conducted a two-year study involving data from 5,600 employees across the U.S., Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. From a report: Approximately 30% of the company's meetings involve staff in more than two time zones, and 39% involve more than two cities. Veronica Gilrane, manager of Google's People Innovation Lab, oversaw the study and has written a guide for how to make the most of distributed teams. Last week, she released a report of her findings. On the outset of the study, the team hypothesized that distributed teams might not be as productive as their centrally located counterparts. "We were a little nervous about that," says Gilrane. She was surprised to find that distributed teams performed just as well. Unfortunately, she also found that there is a lot more frustration involved in working remotely. Workers in other offices can sometimes feel burdened to sync up their schedules with the main office. They can also feel disconnected from the team. Gilrane says there are three key tricks to optimizing a remote workforce.
The first is being flexible about time zones. For her own teams meetings, which has people on the West Coast and East Coast, she makes sure meetings are at different times every week and are equally convenient for workers in each time zone. If workers extend into more varied time zones, like Greenwich mean time or China standard time, she says to make sure that a manager should alternate meeting times so that one time zone isn't inconvenienced more than another. Next, she suggests making time for team members across the globe to get to know one another. She thinks managers should be really thoughtful about when they use technology for meetings and when its more appropriate to fly out team members to meet in person. Though distributed teams cannot meet in person often, she thinks managers should encourage workers to get to know one another. Her team meets once a week for 30 minutes with no express agenda over video chat.
The first is being flexible about time zones. For her own teams meetings, which has people on the West Coast and East Coast, she makes sure meetings are at different times every week and are equally convenient for workers in each time zone. If workers extend into more varied time zones, like Greenwich mean time or China standard time, she says to make sure that a manager should alternate meeting times so that one time zone isn't inconvenienced more than another. Next, she suggests making time for team members across the globe to get to know one another. She thinks managers should be really thoughtful about when they use technology for meetings and when its more appropriate to fly out team members to meet in person. Though distributed teams cannot meet in person often, she thinks managers should encourage workers to get to know one another. Her team meets once a week for 30 minutes with no express agenda over video chat.
Missing meetings is a *benefit* (Score:5, Insightful)
It's amusing that they seem to be so concerned about making sure the meeting schedules work for people in different time zones.
Because, in my experience, meetings are absolutely useless. I've never been to a meeting that accomplished anything that couldn't be accomplished with a brief e-mail, or at WORST a brief phone call.
Meetings are nothing more than a way for middle-management-types to justify their existence.
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> It's amusing that they seem to be so concerned about making sure the meeting schedules work for people in different time zones.
That's far better then what our Fortune 50 company does! They *constantly* schedule meetings at 9 am EST which means the West Coast is always getting screwed for 6 am PST meetings. Just ONCE I'd like to have a meeting at 4:30 pm PST so those buggers on the East Coast know what's it like to have a meeting at 7:30 pm EST for 2 hours.
> Because, in my experience, meetings are
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Send out a reoccurring meeting invite to all your west coast co-workers which starts at 9am EST and ends at noon EST. Call it work-prep or something like that, but make sure everyone is a required attendee and that it will show them as already busy with a meeting on their calendar.
Easier to skip some meetings remote (Score:2)
Because, in my experience, meetings are absolutely useless
At some places I've worked at, we always did an in-person physical standup every day.
Far more simpler is to broadcast things done yesterday and planned to do today on Slack - if a team has a lot of remote people everyone is paying attention to the Slack (or similar group chat) and no-ones time is taken up on things they don't need to know directly.
I do disagree that all meetings are worthless, I have been to a lot of small in-person meetings that wer
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Meeting are useful to the extent you are (1) meeting with the people who are going to solve the problem and (2) brainstorming about how you will solve the problem. All other meetings are needless.
I have had useful meeting with more than 4 people, but never when there were more than 4 people who spoke. A meeting with 1-2 people explaining their design and 2-3 senior engineers tearing it apart is not made useless by an audience.
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Meetings seem worthless to people that no one wants to talk to.
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Communication Is Important (Score:3)
I've never been to a meeting that accomplished anything that couldn't be accomplished with a brief e-mail, or at WORST a brief phone call. Meetings are nothing more than a way for middle-management-types to justify their existence.
I work in software and electronics design, and this comment matches my experience over the last two decades. If each treats emails/voicemails like the important communications that they are, then I've seen little point to meeting as a group, face-to-face.
Perhaps it depends on the kind of work...
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Re: Missing meetings is a *benefit* (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFY.
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I've found that people are not shy whatsoever about assigning you to an 8AM meeting, since they think that is a "normal" work hour, but they absolutely refuse to assign someone to a 5PM meeting time even if the other person is agreeable and it's better overall for the workers. In some instances I've seen a meeting at 6am Pacific time even though there was only one person that was in a different time zone. When a day is completely full of meetings, I've had someone give me a meeting for 7am because he said
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Any ISP can provide that 1000/1000 service.....
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Meetings can be done right, but it needs work. Just inviting people and hoping for the best is going to waste a lot of time.
1) Meetings without a WRITTEN(!!!) agenda are useless.
Write an agenda so people know what's going to be discussed and (this is the important bit here) STICK WITH IT! No tangents. No "but can we also". This is what we're talking here and now, if you want to talk about something else, invite for a meeting yourself.
2) Make sure everything is important to everyone at the table
Security does
Time Zones (Score:3)
Remote Work should be a different concern then your Outsourcing. The biggest issue I see with working with different countries isn't the Time Zone, as you just base the Time Zone on the companies home location, and you just need to expect the employees to be working around home base time. So if the Company Home base is in New York, then if you are Chinese worker you still need to be available during Eastern Standard Time. But the biggest problem I have seen with Wide Remote Work across countries is differences in Cultures. If you have a Programmer working in India, they are working with Indian Culture, which will often clash with American Culture. However if you take the same person and move them to America, they are much more compatible, because they are operating within the US culture.
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You tried to export a toxic work culture to a place where people don't have to put up with it. They didn't put up with it.
From their perspective, they tried to tell you there was no need to hit yourself repeatedly in the head with a hammer. For unfathomable reasons you bought a new hammer and hit yourself in the head with it repeatedly.
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Fair enough.
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The people are under no moral obligation to allow a corporation to exist at all. Act in the public interest or go POOF.
Open Office (Score:2)
Are all of the centrally located teams in an open office, I wonder if the remote teams function just as well because they aren't being constantly interrupted?
Farcical Report (Score:2, Interesting)
The methodology seems to be surveys and focus groups. As if employees will report that distributed / remote work is less effective or productive.
The only way to do this properly is to measure the waste in their processes. The farcical thing is that the report actually identifies a whole bunch of different types of waste that are caused by alleviating some of the challenges of remote work: travelling to get face time, fiddling with technology, delays in communication due to needing to schedule meetings, et
Distributed can work, does save time (Score:5, Interesting)
I've worked in both collocated and distributed environments and I've actually measured (objectively) the effects of both. Business people; don't be fooled! Distributed teams usually cost more than they are worth!
Maybe at one point that was true, but I highly doubt that is the case now as group communication has become really efficient.
Also I question how objective your measurements really were. If they were not with the same PEOPLE over that entire time, they mean nothing - some people and teams work well as a remote group, some do not.
What is an absolutely objective fact is how much time is saved every day by the remote worker in terms of not commuting. That is time that can either be used for work (often true) or sometimes for personal errands, which would have eventually been taken out of work time anyway. Distributed workers have more time and energy to give a company, point blank.
Anyone who says otherwise has not experienced a lifetime of calls or out of work errands to try and deal with stuff on company time, that has to be dealt with during the day.
Re:Distributed can work, does save time (Score:4, Interesting)
I've done both longitudinal studies and statistical studies in corporate environments starting in 2004 up until the present. Indeed, technology has improved and made some things about remote work arrangements better. And you are right, that there is an objective fact that costs are saved when using distributed/remote teams. But that cost savings is more than overwhelmed by the increased costs of delayed communication, decrease in communication fidelity, and lost opportunities for communication. So when you measure productivity properly (time value of business results / time value per unit of investment), you will find that the clear winner in most cases is collocation. I also want to be clear: there are other business drivers besides just short term profit so, for example, customer satisfaction might best be served with distributed team members that are close to customers. I'm definitely not saying that all teams are better collocated... just that this particular study appears to be deeply flawed.
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"But that cost savings is more than overwhelmed by the increased costs of delayed communication, decrease in communication fidelity, and lost opportunities for communication"
As I'm sitting 3000+ miles away from my companys central office, I have to disagree.
I travel back to the central office a few times a year and my productivity (quantitatively) actually goes down while back in the office. It's too easy for my boss to walk into my office and derail me with a "quick" question or estimating a project, etc.
W
5 AM! (Score:3)
Don't like it? Move to New York you California Slacker!
THAT is how it really works out.
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Why don't we hold the meeting at 5AM New York time, and I can remote in from home at 2AM before I go to bed?
Sociological surveys (Score:3)
Yeeeeeah. Not that I don't trust Google to perform sociology studies, but I've seen how they respond to requested feedback.
This "2 year study" is actually just a survey to 5000 employees and a 100 member focus group. When your boss asks you how well you're working, does anyone actually say they're not working? Who would slit their own throat like that?
It would be good if remote work really took off. There'd be a mass exodus from all the high cost of living cities. We'd be able to bank more of our paycheck. Work would be done cheaper. (hmmm... and my house, a major investment of mine, would tank in value just as I try to compete with the Chinese and Indian masses... I take it back, no, remote work sucks!)
Company with remote-work oriented services... (Score:1)
Company offering remote-work oriented services (Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Mail, Google Calendar, ...) says remote work is great!
More at 11.
My take on remote work (Score:5, Insightful)
I do a lot of remote work and, for me, it is very productive. The idea of getting dressed up, getting in my car, driving through traffic and sitting in a grey cubicle all day is a complete waste of time. Management tend to be the biggest opponents of remote work. Not all managers but the old school type that want to know what time you arrived at work and how long you took for lunch.
The unspoken truth is that people like this don't trust you. If they can't come out of their office and see you in the little grey cubicle you can't possibly be working. You must be goofing off. The only way they can ensure that you are actually working is to exert a measure of control by requiring you to be in your seat for a given number of hours every day so they can stop by whenever they like and watch you work. This visit will be disguised as some sort of colloquial chit chat or team bonding exercise. The true intent, of course, is to try to catch you off guard (i.e. goofing off) thus providing self validation to support their worker theory.
Sadly I actually worked for an idiot like this for a period of time. He didn't hire me but I soon found myself as part of his group. I eventually grew weary of trying to drag him out of his 1950s mentality and into someone that was actually cool. Someone that I could respect and actually work hard for. He would have meetings for the sake of meetings. His calendar was consistently double or even triple booked, allowing him to blow off meetings that required decisions or * gasp * leadership. The whole thing was an attempt to make him appear more important than he really was. Self preservation and empire building. In short, he was the most worthless piece of shit I ever worked with.
Nonetheless, it was a valuable experience. It taught me to ask a prospective employer about their remote work policy very early in the discussions. If their response is "we don't allow it" or "we'll see" then I don't want to work for them. If you don't trust me then don't hire me. It will save both of us a lot of time.
Yet (Score:2)
Yet Google is HARD CORE anti remote worker
Coming up on three years (Score:4, Informative)
I started working from home in the summer of 2016 after several rounds of downsizing left me the last person standing. We tried a shared office environment for a while but decided it was costing us more than it was worth. Working remotely required some adjustment. It took some getting used to. It can be lonely. It can be depressing. It can also be liberating, but only for somebody who can plan and organize their work themselves, because nobody's going to do it for you. I'm fairly strict on work time vs me time. Again, I have to do it, nobody's going to do it for me.
The main people I work with are two time zones east of me. My boss and I have a regular weekly call. The time is reasonable for both of us (1100 Pacific, 1300 Central). The worst was a past life when the bulk of the engineering staff rarely showed up before 1100 Pacific time. This drove our European colleagues nuts. I took many phone calls along the lines of "is there anybody in Engineering?" The flipside was "Laura, wanna come over to Paris and show us how the new software works?"
...laura
Larger sample (Score:5, Insightful)
Merit works over distances too (Score:2)
They know how to study.
They can learn new tasks without constant in person supervision and support.
They can work with the new information they have been given to study.
The project is worked on diligently by an educated worker.
The results are as good as if the well educated worker was made to travel to and from an office building.
Find great staff and they can work well in the office, in any other office, a new office created fr