...but how do we get to remote working without crushing isolation? Can tech solve that problem?
Can tech solve the problem of getting a coffee with a couple of coworkers and feeling connected to them in a way that helps the technical argument two months from now?
Can tech solve the "Do I have my coworker's undivided attention or are they multitasking and ignoring me" problem?
Can tech solve the "I'm in the room with my boss and he can't ignore that I'm a human being" problem?
We are social creatures. A slack conversation isn't the same, and I don't think a VR conversation will be the same, especially with further distances. Do we say that everyone must live within 1,000 miles?
Finding the equivalent of a face-to-face conversation is, in my opinion, one of the main communication problems (for the record, I don't think putting on a VR headset is the solution).
Working from home and working in an office have very different environments. So finding a solution that feels like the technology doesn't feel like it's present would go a long way to creating an improvement in remote work.
Another key issue, is being able to completely disconnect so that - by design - you can be separated from the constant barrage of communication without feeling worried about FOMO.
More generally, presence is the missing piece. VR is one possible solution to that, if you can solve the motion-sickness issues. Holographics (if real-time holos ever reach commercial viability...there's some interesting research on it now) is another possible solution. Perhaps there are other possibilities that people haven't found yet. Wrap around screens, like the Google Liquid Galaxy display? Projectors?
But someone needs to invent a way for office workers to feel like they can have an impromptu conversation, casually, with a coworker thousands of miles away before remote work really takes off.
I think remote working really is a part of solution to this.
Perhaps augmented/virtual reality could be a good solution for some sort of application to have remote meetings with colleagues with headset in a virtual room/scenery and collaborate like that.
It could be used for daily standups and other meetings and it would remove the social isolation problem of remote working and make it much more feasible. Is any AR/VR company working on anything like that?
That's a social problem we'll have to address as remote working becomes ubiquitous. It helps if the remote environment is more immersive, with the team aware of each others' presence and activity even when they're not directly communicating. Keeps your head in the space, so to speak.
Today, the internet can't compete with face to face communication. Even with Skype etc. I think this is the reason rather than keeping tabs on the work you are doing. This may change in the future of course if we can get VR to a real level of fidelity.
> If you have to have people in the office to make sure they're working, you already have a fundamental hiring problem.
It is possible to be remote and have your screen recorded to make sure you are typing for 8 hours, vs. being local and just being trusted to get on with it.
Well, as a person who moved to a new state and worked remotely for three years, I can attest that email, texts, and voice chat are no substitute for in-person visits. Just getting out among people or the environment can help. If you stay indoors and just work all the time, you'll get even more depressed and go a bit nutty. I know this from personal experience.
I can't comment on video chat, could never get that working at the other site because their machines were locked down to the point of uselessness without special permission from ITS requiring 5 pints of blood and a signature from god. I'd be interested to see whether actual VR could fill a void.
There is value in face-to-face conversation, and while software solutions like Google Hangouts help bridge the gap to some extent, they don't eliminate it entirely. There may be some advantages to yield with VR, but even at its current state, it can't replicate the real world. It's likely we'll start to see direct neural interfaces before we actually have means to replicate the face-to-face aspect that remote work sorely misses out on.
People will probably eventually learn to integrate things like video chat, multiplayer 2d environments or AR/VR etc. into a work collaboration system.
It's weird that so many assume that it's either physically in the office yucking it up or just completely disconnected and not using any internet communication tool at all.
Why not suggest something like a Discord server with a voice channel? Or try the new Meta Quest Pro for like a fifteen minute meeting every day. Or any of the various projects related to making remote work more social.
Or set up a weekly real life meeting at a coffee shop. Or playing some game online like Rainbow Six Siege. Or anything.
With regards to remote work technology , we've done pretty poorly:
1. Normal video chat is awful. We can't create eye to eye contact. We can't see body language. It's not very useful to build trust or bonding that way , and this is critical. There might be solutions but they're only availble to very expensive telepresence suits.
2. We haven't managed to create an informal environment via video chat , say like lunch or the water cooler.
3. Working from home requires a lot of self-discipline which is hard . Social face-to-face pressure works better as a motivator for people in general(see battle units) , and it rarely translate well into electrons.
4. Working from home is isolating, and it might be due to limits of the technology.
Remote work requires eye contact, which doesn’t exist yet. It will happen rapidly once we have VR with eye tracking.
The other thing missing from remote work tools is collocated workspaces (can’t fit that on your monitor). Existing VR tech solves that problem though.
Instead of working on Google Docs in your office, you’ll work IN Google Docs in VR, and your coworkers will be there nearby, and you’ll be able to talk face to face without leaving your workspace.
Without going full VR I still think a dedicated piece of hardware might be the way to go to normalize across everyone's setups and preferences. Maybe a big ass tablet (or around the size of the Surface Studio) with networked persistent whiteboarding / kanban boarding / alert-messaging software could be an MVP. Those are the main things that I wish were improved after ~4 years working with distributed teams. Informational meetings per se I haven't really had problems with, google hangouts/meet or GoToMeeting have worked out well enough. I'm not sure how we'll ever solve the "conversations that only happen because your desk is next to mine" problem without VR though.
While I agree with you, I think it's a mistake to reject all social aspects of working. It doesn't have to be about making friends, and certain type of work definitely benefits from direct social contact. Even with programming being mostly a solitary activity, discussing a piece of code, brainstorming design, pair programming, etc., are all much easier and interactive in person. The online tooling is just not there yet. We've settled on text chat, crappy video conferencing and code review tooling, but they're a lossy alternative to in-person communication. Maybe one day when our brains are wired up this will improve, and we have VR in the meantime.
Outside of tech work, consider how many professions depend on communication where this lossiness is unacceptable. So I definitely get that there's a wide spectrum of preferences towards telecommuting.
Good virtual reality could make remote working a lot easier. Face time is important. I don't know if VR meetings could fully replace face-to-face, but I feel they'd go a lot further.
Not the OP, but I've been thinking about this a lot recently.
The problem is that telecommuting is currently very limited by technology. You can currently only transport your voice and a single video view, while collaborating over a single view from a monitor. You end up missing on very many of the modalities available in the real world.
But my vision of what work and study could be like with good VR is The Magic School Bus. Assume that every time you an your colleagues wanted to do work on any domain, you would be transported into a hi-fi all-senses-included representation of that domain, which provides a perfect sense of presence. That technology is still quite far away, but once we're there, it would be significantly better than just being in a room with them. And the world would be forever changed.
There's nothing magical about proximity. It's all just a question of sufficiently high-bandwidth, low-friction communication.
There's no getting around our monkey brains' desire to see other people's faces and bond with them. But that's just a technical problem: high quality video that starts instantly, or that is always on, provides the same stimulus. The fact that most remote workers don't have that kind of setup just shows why we're not quite there yet.
So the problems with remote work that people discuss endless are not problems with remote work per se. They're problems with our nascent, not-quite-good-enough-yet tools for remote work. But the tools are getting better really fast.
The thing is though with audio or video chat you can visit with your colleagues and office banter all that you (both) want even though you are remote.
Or you can do text chat in Slack about work or whatever interests you. Or interact in a 3D or VR office space. Or play video games if you want. Or meet up at a real life coffee shop.
You just have to get the other people to do it deliberately rather than everyone being automatically forced to do it by constant required physical proximity.
Like muaddirac, I, too, think there's a lack of tools for solving the problem. I've been a remote worker for ten years or so. A couple of years ago, a colleague and I decided to just run a continuous all-day video conferencing session with dedicated screens and speakers. It was really great for hashing out random ideas as we thought of them, getting in some "water cooler" talk, joking about who's doorbell is ringing, and even having some beers together after a long day at work. It wasn't perfect (Google Hangouts kept wanting to kick us out every two hours, for instance), but gave me optimism that good tools could go a long way towards solving the problem. (One of these days, maybe I'll get around to putting together my own WebRTC telepresence solution.)
In any case, let me be the first to welcome you to Denver! There's no other place that I'd rather work non-remote. ;)
Having been fully remote for 4 years now, I've had plenty of water cooler type conversations with other remote employees- humans are social creatures, and with an experienced fully remote work force we end up socializing remotely, including coming up with cool Gonzo ideas.
I'm not arguing it's a 1-1 trade off, but it also doesn't go anywhere near zero.
Can tech solve the problem of getting a coffee with a couple of coworkers and feeling connected to them in a way that helps the technical argument two months from now?
Can tech solve the "Do I have my coworker's undivided attention or are they multitasking and ignoring me" problem?
Can tech solve the "I'm in the room with my boss and he can't ignore that I'm a human being" problem?
We are social creatures. A slack conversation isn't the same, and I don't think a VR conversation will be the same, especially with further distances. Do we say that everyone must live within 1,000 miles?
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