Office and remote work have different strengths, and combining them brings out the best solution.
Working from home means more focus time, less commute, and more flexibility in personal matters.
More focus can undoubtedly improve productivity if your only measure is to count the lines of code you deliver.
Engineering is more than programming, and it needs more than just more focus time for productivity.
Long-term investments can improve short-term results, such as our code throughput.
Active collaboration can decrease wasting time on bad decisions. It does not matter if you deliver so much from home on an utterly wrong decision. It is artificial productivity. And good collaboration needs more than just several people speaking to one another. It requires trust, ways to simplify communicating complex ideas, and uninterrupted dialogues. Most of the time, being in the same room provides all these three with the optimum settings.
People do their best when they constantly learn better ways. It even fuels our passion for our work. And we don’t just learn from books. We learn from one another too. In many cases, it is the best type of learning. And we learn best when we have a good relationship with people we learn from. Working closely in a physical environment can fuel these relations. Socializing with people in physical environments is one proven method of building rapport.
I have seen many people being unofficial mentors and mentees for each other as they build close ties. People learn better when they are vulnerable, and you show your vulnerability mostly only in front of those you trust.
Therefore, it is not productive if it takes a week for, in fact, an hour of work because you don’t know any better.
But again, working from home also helps immensely. Spending less time on commuting, meetings and having a more focused time is critical for solid work. Remote work benefits are well known, so there is no need to discuss them here.
And to me, the hybrid solution is still the best as long as it is doable. It utilizes the best of two worlds instead of following only one religiously.
There are several essential things to make this arrangement even more productive:
- Set fewer meetings on remote work days, and use the office days more for meetings.
- Give flexibility for office days. For instance, don’t force people to join meetings physically at super early hours like 7:00 AM or super late hours like 6:00 PM. Let them participate from home if those meetings are essential, perhaps due to time zone differences.
- Let people take care of some personal stuff, such as picking up their kids from school during office days, and depending on the situation, they can finish off their work at home remotely.
- When in the office, encourage people to socialize.
- Never underestimate the power of whiteboards. Discussing ideas there can speed up conversations many times!
These can also ease people into coming back to the office too.