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.
As a mostly remote worker, that's fair. Just yesterday, I happened to be in the office and bumped into someone and had a quick conversation about something that would otherwise have involved setting up meetings, etc.
> Sometimes you don't want to formally disperse some information but are happy to let people overhear what you think.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point because remote work is not for everyone, and who am I to tell you what to prefer? But I wanted to note that I've been working fully remote for more than ten years, and I'd say 95% of my contact with team members is informal, and along the lines of just sharing thoughts and ideas exactly as you describe. The only difference is that we share them on slack and via emails rather than having that tap on the shoulder as you describe it. Which is "better" is a matter of personal preference.
effective for long term employees who would benefit from physical close-proximity (the water-cooler style propagation of ideas for example)
You can still have those when you work remotely. There just needs to be a mechanism set up to actively share things - where I work at the moment we have a weekly "web engineers" huddle to share ideas, tools, and articles we've found. We have Slack and stuff as well obviously, and we talk to each other, but there needs to be something slightly more formal when you're remote.
FWIW I've also worked in companies that had no "water-cooler chat" despite being physically present. You have to consciously want to talk to people, and some companies are full of people who just don't.
> Have you ever tried working on a difficult bug or vague and ill-defined new problem space with a combination of local and remote coworkers?
Yes. It works if you agree that "local" doesn't exist anymore. If one person is remote, everybody is "remote". As long as that's the agreed medium, many issues go away - it actually gets better sometimes, because that private water-cooler conversation which would be interesting to other parties is sometimes available for copy-paste.
How is one supposed to collaboratively socially distance at the office? I understand Mr. Schmidt's point, but if we all have to be 6 feet away, meetings basically become unfeasible in small meeting spaces, at which point, remote makes equal sense.
That's a very real pain when only one or two people are remote. I spent the last five years in that environment and definitely missed out on a lot of relevant discussions.
I'm now leading a team which is about 50% remote, with the remaining people working from home a few days a week, and it makes a huge difference. Discussions naturally occur on Slack, often spinning out into a few people jumping into a Hangouts call. For people in the office we've got the meeting room set up for video conferencing which makes it practical to have mixed local/remote meetings without the half hour of trying to get things set up.
Overall I'm a big fan, and hopeful that we can make people working remote even smoother as time goes on.
No reason remote work can’t be spontaneous, even easier IMO because you don’t have to herd cats into the same space. A ping on chat and within 1 min multiple people can be in the discussion without even having to move.
Anecdotally having spent several years at my current job in person and now several years fully remote (whole company, full remote) I find it much much easier to do quick huddles and swarm on tasks/ideas. Before you had to convince everybody you wanted to talk to to leave their desks and hopefully find a free conference room and you had to premeditate this by days for scheduling (and free conference rooms). Now we can meet almost right away, no physical context switching.
As with most things it really depends, also having some people be remote and some in person is always going to disadvantage the remote workers and set them up for failure in management’s eyes so no surprise there.
And I'll add my own anecdote: the top performers on the 100+ software engineer org I work in are either fully remote or mostly remote. Losing our fully remote people would be catastrophic to the team. Collaboration with them is extremely easy, even from different time zones.
On the days I go to my office, all I observe is people wearing headphones to be able to focus. Team lunches are nice, but we never talk about work. As I've already developed personal connections with my coworkers, I could go months without seeing them in person (as a matter of fact, that's what happens with my coworkers who live across the country).
The famous "whiteboarding sessions where ideas are born" can be easily done remotely, or in one off events in the office if people who believe in office work insist. I found shared docs and basic digital whiteboards allowing me to draw rectangles, arrows and labels as efficient than physical chalk/marker boards. Why? Because the hard work is on the ideas and conversations, not the drawing.
Also anecdotally, in 10+ years of office work, I've never observed a single "watercooler conversation" leading to a particularly interesting idea. I generally hear sports, weather chat and complaints about the food by the watercooler. Oh, have you seen that? I'll counter that with the dozens of non-watercooler conversations that led to interesting ideas.
That's not a remote problem, that's a project management and communications problem. Physical proximity is no replacement for clearly communicated requirements/bug reports/product roadmaps as well as tribal knowledge (which should not be tribal but documented somewhere searchable and robustly accessible), but it makes a nice hack when everyone is required to be in the office.
I've been working remotely for 8 years now for a couple of companies. Currently work in an environment where I'm one of the few devs working remotely, where the rest share an office.
I'm trying to figure out if you've actually worked remotely or not. It does take a much more concerted effort on everyone's part to be more inclusive of remote workers, especially if only a handful of devs are remote and the rest share an office.
Meetings aren't usually a problem. We primarily rely on Skype for Business and all meetings are generally held online. We've even managed to move scheduled meetings (which I loathe) into Microsoft Teams channels. The written words manage to keep everyone on the same page, much better than just hearing it.
Microsoft Teams and Slack facilitates the sharing of cubicle conversations and informal ideas but it takes effort to get everyone onboard with using these as their primary ways of sharing convos.
I mean, I don't get interrupted very often. I can be as out of site/out of mind as I want and need. And I'm way more productive working from home, than I am where I can be interrupted constantly. I don't know about you, but it usually takes me about two hours to recover from an interruption to get back to where I was. Not always, but usually.
All of the above is pertinent to being a mixed bag of remote and office sharers. I would imagine that an all remote team, would have an even easier time with communications and inclusivity.
I’ve been 100% remote for two years with a trip to the office every 5 months or so and this is roughly the same strategy I use to stay connected during those visits.
“What are you working on? What’s next? What do we need most?" 1-on-1, less than 30 minutes, we're a pretty loosely structured org so it’s all self-initiated. Works well, I’m more comfortable with my colleagues and they’re more comfortable with me, we know roughly what each other are working on, and bandwidth is so much higher in person than on video or text chat.
I’ve never ever ever have had all my team in one place. I’ve worked in two different countries and six different cities. Not one team has had everyone in the same area. Water cooler conversations always ended up isolating and creating in-out group dynamics. We always had to fight to force communication through async global channels as much as we can to make sure people don’t feel left out or lack important context. It is a challenge.
Pandemic changes in work has thrust into the open the challenges with remote. But you ignore it at your own peril or curl up to the familiar return-to-work ass-on-the-seat model and be left behind.
Btw, if you need good ideas, you schedule and organise a brainstorming session or create an idea board org wide. You encourage challenging assumptions and involve your team in decision making. All of this need to happen irrespective of whether your team is local or scattered. Might as well use modern technology when you can and support remote and local discussions.
"Spontaneous collaboration can happen just as effectively with a remote staff, but you have to default all your channels of communication to digital ones."
So, if you handicap your local staff to use only a fraction of their communications capability then your remote ones are just as good?
Seriously - I've spent a large amount of time dealing with offshort staff and onshore staff, and staff both in the different buildings, the same building but different rooms, and staff in the same room - and having people sitting right next to each other makes a massive difference to the communication bandwidth.
The ability to turn your screen towards a co-worker, say "What do you think of that?" and get a reply three seconds later is _fantastic_ - and simply impossible with remote communications. (Where you can ping them on IM, wait for them to notice the message, start a screen-share, wait for them to accept, and then wave your cursor over the bit of screen you want them to pay attention to. It's effective, but it's nowhere near as fluid as pointing and handwaving.)
> personally am much more distracted at home because "I'm home". When I'm at work, I'm in work mode.
Not sure if you've tried this or if it's practical for you, but I've found that having a completely dedicated space, with dedicated tools, can create a working context that helps boost productivity. I won't name them due to privacy concerns but my company has been very good about dealing with remote workers and provides a basic set of office amenities to any worker who is selected to go remote (convertible standup desk, remote access point with office telephone, all-in-one printer w/ ink refills, etc.)
> Over the years, I can't even count the number of times that I heard a conversation taking place and was able to step in and say "that's wrong" and stop several people from a multiple day detour.
I'm not sure what your experience is but a trend I've noticed is that this tends to occur when only a subset of team members are remote - in fully-remote teams the use of collaboration tools (mailing lists, Jabber, IRC, etc) can often replicate these kinds of ad-hoc conversations with the added bonus of automatically capturing the information discussed.
I generally think environments where ad-hoc conversations are necessary to maintain overall effectiveness as being tool deficient.
FWIW I was pretty sure full-remote (even Covid remote) would lead to less spontaneous interactions but since we’ve gone full remote (no office ever) I’ve found spontaneous interactions/ideas to have gone up. I imagine, as with anything, you get out what you put in and my company went hard on full remote. Also oddly my meetings have gone down (and I’m a lead dev) I think because of increased use of Slack and async work, means small meetings aren’t necessary.
That only works if we're all online at the same time. And yes, so does office discussion, but we're more likely to all be in the office at the same time than we are to all be online simultaneously when remote.
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