The WFH Folks
I’m an eng manager at a public company.<p>Short answer - relationships cannot be made via zoom. Thus, interactions are transaction based. I can provide a million examples of why this is a fact in as simple as online dating where you always want to end up meeting the person and digital correspondence is not sufficient to cross the boundary of trust between 2 humans.<p>…and trust is the one thing that gets you promoted, gets you the benefit of the doubt when you need to leave the office and inconveniently make your coworkers pickup your slack, provides a social barrier via awkward convo when your manager has to let someone go and is debating who vs the simplicity of 3 clicks to removing even a more productive person with whom they have no relationship with by just removing a person on slack and zoom and your jira board. Do you let go the person you know that has 2 kids and you met their kids and they do ok work vs the solo ic who does not seem to want to talk about anything but their work and go home? Surprise surprise most managers would easily coach the ok person they feel closer to vs even the most productive person who they cant get a read on and assume they may even leave some day. Humans being humans.<p>Trust also forms camaraderie, your tribe in an office, the people you can gripe to with trust in their silence vs someone can easily record or back talk you with your manager via zoom. In office, you can see where people move and who they talk to and thus their relationships.<p>Therefore, you cannot solve building better relationships via more technological solutions. Humans grasp many small pieces of meta data via in person contact.<p>Small companies may want whatever your solution is, but large ones where divisions need to scale and trust needs to scale already know this truth and will not buy into it. They would rather wait for covid to be less fearful amongst their constituents and bring them in office which is already happening at banks and apple and soon to be many other orgs next year.<p>BUT! For the fully remote small companies where work is distributed amongst maybe 20 people in different geos, maybe some small tools will work.<p>Just remember, a bunch of startups tried to build products to address this at the start if the pandemic and failed learning this truth that human relationships need in person contact.<p>And as you solicit more advice, notice how the proponents of wfh typically are in roles that are more transactional in nature or accept the risks of or want a more transactional relationship with their work. Most people, especially young ones without enough background understanding how human orgs work, will think they want wfh but in fact want in office with some flexibility to get their outside work life tasks done more easily. And it is not until peoples heads are on chopping blocks or they are passed up for a promotion that they will realize the mistake of wanting 100% remote work.