This is a massive accidental experiment on the effectiveness of fully remote teams. Most of these companies are fairly reticent to have even a few workers remote, let alone entire teams/orgs.
It'll be interesting to see if teams push for something closer to full remote wherever it worked well (or if some employees will want it, having not realized what it was like).
Plausibly teams that it works well for will have greater ammunition to push for it, since they have the past experience with it.
I have no desire to have a long term remote job. I want to work in the office. However, I've opted to be remote for a couple weeks after someone in the office tested positive for COVID-19. My productivity is noticeably lower (for me at least). I would imagine such a radically different work environment would take time for anyone to adapt to.
I prefer to sit with my team[0]. Better, more spontaneous communication, and better team spirit. It's fun to have lunch together. But considering the circumstances, I can totally understand working remote. I'm doing it today for different reasons, but I'm seriously considering doing it next week because of Corona.
[0] Which is a problem at my current office where all desks are officially flex, which means anyone can sit anywhere.
Same here. I stayed at home and worked remotely for one day last week. I've done about 30% of my regular workload. Granted, I was seek and I am in a management position, overseeing 20+ employees, but still.
I am wondering what your home set up is. A few years ago I built a full mirror setup of my work environment at home (the hardware) and that decrease in friction really helped with the mental ability to get started and in the 'flow'.
I feel the same way. I need a change of environment in order to be fully productive. Whether it's a cafe next door or an office, doesn't matter as long as it's not my home.
Personally I noticed it help me if I did my usual routine but instead of going to work I'd go work at home. What I mean by this is that i'd wake up at my normal time, wear actual work clothes and fully prepare myself like I'd usually do going to the office. Gets my head in the right space.
I tried that but quite frankly, it's enormously dangerous: libraries are not meant to be a workplace and as such, for example, there (usually) is an explicit exclusion of responsibility in case of stolen goods.
Basically, if you work from the library and your work laptop gets stolen, it's only your fault, cannot blame on anyone else.
And that's right, in my opinion.
At least coworking spaces usually provide some kind of storage (lockers for example).
Maybe I'm paranoid but I never leave my laptop behind in the car or in a coffee shop to go to the bathroom. Given how much access you might have to different systems.... Could be very painful. Maybe that's psycho. But would do the same at the library.
My library is a no-go in my opinion. They have meeting rooms, sure, but each 6-8-person room is occupied by one college student studying alone. So its share a table with strangers or nothing.
If this works well I will eat my hat. This represents: companies with no remote-work culture (thus systems that are not fully documented, etc.), forcing employees into this suddenly (so they will not have a proper space at home set up for this... some of them will be in the same room as a crying baby), while their spouse may also be working from home due to the virus, while everyone is also thinking about getting a deadly virus every time they leave the house. I really don't expect much "work" to get done at all.
> while everyone is also thinking about getting a deadly virus every time they leave the house
Am I the only person who isn't worried about the coronavirus? I'm not exaggerating when I say it hasn't effected my life at all, except for the effort it took me to write this comment. I live in San Francisco, if it matters.
It's always difficult to determine and conceptualize personal risk, but in this case, maybe even harder: people are caught between the extremes of "I'm healthy, and it's very unlikely to harm me", vs. "this may kill millions of people around the globe unless we get lucky, and/or are very serious about the measures we take to contain it". (Both of these statements are true [for most people] yet seem irreconcilable.)
So you staying at home and not getting the virus probably doesn't make much of a difference to you, aside from not feeling crappy for a couple of weeks. But if we all do it, then on a population scale it will make a difference, as it's one of the actions that can contribute towards preventing potentially millions of people dying.
You might not feel that you would ever be responsible for transmitting the virus to a vulnerable person who then dies, and that might be true... but again on a population scale, someone is responsible, and that infection could potentially have been prevented by this (and other) measures.
I'm not hugely _personally_ worried about dying of it; people my age in otherwise good health in developed countries usually don't. I am definitely worried about its impact on others, though, and also its impact on society. Especially as it spreads in the west; for better or for worse, China was far better set up for this than most of the world. Some western countries are still basically denying that it's a problem, which has the potential to make things _much_ worse.
For older people, in particular, death rates for over 70s are truly worrying.
I'm not exaggerating when I say it hasn't effected my life at all, except for the effort it took me to write this comment. I live in San Francisco, if it matters.
San Francisco just reported its first cases today, but there's definitely been panic shopping. The city closed down Lowell today as a precautionary measure (but that leaves nearly 200 campuses open).
Even if you don't suffer any health or financial effects (unlikely) you'll still be effected if:
- More schools close, even more if parents have to take time off from work en masse
- Public transit becomes a big vector and BART or Muni try to shut down or reduce service
- People continue to panic shop. NPR had a photo from a Marin Target with shelves bare of disinfectant wipes. Rainbow in the city was almost completely out of canned tomatoes on Monday.
- On a federal level, if our idiot president succeeds in closing the Mexican border you'll definitely feel some pain
I also thought as a relatively young person there's not much to be too worried about.
However it turned out permanent and serious lung damage can occur even if the individual recovers from the disease. That certainly changed my perspective a bit. It would serve everyone well to err on the cautious side.
You might be fine, if you are young, you probably won't even notice it, however your older parents or grandparents might pass away two weeks after you meet them while being infectious...
"Precautionary decisions do not scale. Collective safety may require excessive individual risk avoidance, even if it conflicts with an individual's own interests and benefits. It may require an individual to worry about risks that are comparatively insignificant."
As with any potential threat, people take it to the extremes. Same with climate change. On one side you have the "I don't really think it's a thing, it isn't influencing me at all" folks, on the other side you have hardcore preppers and "Humanity as we know it will end in few years I can't wait to repopulate the Earth".
Huh? I’m pretty confused by this attitude. This seems pretty callous.
Obviously, media hype train is in full swing, but this is fairly infectious and fairly dangerous for those over 80 and those with other risk factors. That’s narrow, but it is not nothing.
Personal risk is pretty low for me (at my age/health status), but I’m still not super interested in getting knocked on my ass for a week. Particularly since coronavirus immunity is not believed to last for a particularly long period if time. I definitely don’t want it twice!
It’s nothing, because people can’t do anything other than wash their hands and not touch their faces. The media hype is a problem because it causes supply chain issues. People over 80 are always at risk of the flu and other crap, and again, the only thing to do is properly wash your hands and not touch your face.
I would be a lot of money that you touch your face dozens - if not hundreds of times - a day, just like everyone else. It's a normal human reaction to multiple stimuli. There's a video spreading on reddit right now of the talking heads regurgitating the same advice you're giving now, they usually last about a few seconds after telling others not to, before touch their face.
This seems non-sequitor? The main infection route is airborne droplets. Sure, washing your hands reduces risk, but it does not solve the problem. Showering is a good idea, but not relevant.
Or the people bringing it to your country in the first place. Traveling from an infected country is reckless and disrespectful for the lack of better words.
I am not either. I see a disconnect between the numbers published by the WHO and the alarmist reaction of the mainstream media. Earlier this week there was a speech from the director of the WHO on the front page of hn suggesting the virus was less contagious than the flu, I don’t see any mention in any major newspapers. It feels like one of these “facts that don’t fit the narrative will be simply omitted”.
I am concerned however about the overreaction to the virus. Like I am not concerned about catching it, but I am having second thoughts about a holiday trip in south Asia I wanted to make next month as I don’t want to find myself jailed for weeks in a military barrack for some unnecessary quarantine. And my biggest concern is the economic impact.
Hopefully this thing will go away in 2/3 months as the northern hemisphere gets warmer.
I mean, "less contagious than the flu" is a bit like saying "less poisonous than cyanide"; the flu is very contagious. If you have something that's less contagious than the flu but much more lethal than the flu, that's pretty scary.
I'm almost sure it won't work. Everything you mentioned is true but there's one even more important thing. There are plenty of people who literally don't care or dislike their jobs and would take every opportunity to work as little as possible. While this might work for Google & co. where employees are relatively happy and passionate about their work, it would fail spectacularly in other environments.
Also I don't think management can be fully blamed for dismissing remote work as it would represent a considerable cost-cutting opportunity. It's likely not worth it as the overall productivity would drop too much.
Which of these companies have you actually worked for? Microsoft, intel and Google, (3 I've worked for) can go 100% remote in the software side anytime.
I had a similar insider story being recounted to me recently about one of the previous worldwide outbreaks (I think it was SARS).
The French administration at large was extremely reluctant to allow remote work, even very occasionally, if at all, purely by policy. Then the outbreak happened and people started calling in sick.
But when you're calling in sick, chances are you've already been contagious, and so the body count started to go way up, until people started asking to work remotely instead because it was obvious their work could be carried remotely and they just did not want to become sick, because it just made sense.
Which was denied. Because policy.
So people started calling in fake sick (sometimes with direct management being complicit) and worked from home anyway. And then upper management realised that... it worked! People that were marked as sick (but were not, this was a thinly veiled secret) were actually working, and quite efficiently to boot.
And ever since that outbreak the policy changed, and remote work is now a thing. Maybe not like big-R remote, but at least it went from an outright systemic impossibility to being possible.
Those teams will ultimately walk away from this with proof that WFH “doesn’t work.” Distributed teams can work, it just takes a different set of organizational structures that keep people engaged and visible, structures that aren’t in place due the sudden nature of the virus.
Although I'm not sure that's necessarily an unfair reaction - compatibility with remote work isn't the only relevant factor when building organizational structures.
It may not go as well as would if it weren't so sudden though. I'd say that affects the results when comparing for a company that optimizes for remote.
Microsoft is remote-friendly, and has the infrastructure for it. Team culture varies, but that also changed a lot overall - it used to be that you had to specifically ask people to create meetings with videoconferencing enabled, but now it seems to be the norm.
We have a few remote employees in the company I work for (I'm one of them), there are still some things we could do better, but it works well. When there were strikes and it got difficult for people to go to the office, many worked remotely. It worked well since we already had the tools and processes in place, and some colleagues who were skeptical about being able to work remotely discovered they liked it.
In companies with no remote workers and with no tooling/processes in place, it could backfire.
It'll be interesting to see if teams push for something closer to full remote wherever it worked well (or if some employees will want it, having not realized what it was like).
Plausibly teams that it works well for will have greater ammunition to push for it, since they have the past experience with it.