<story><title>Why Do We Still Commute?</title><url>https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/11/why-do-we-still-commute/544733/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BjoernKW</author><text>I think that the &amp;#x27;importance of face-to-face interaction&amp;#x27; argument is a helplessly contrived one, an attempt to avoid the elephant in the room.&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of examples that show that working remotely without daily face-to-face interaction can work very well.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s markedly different about environments that successfully adopted remote work are aspects like:&lt;p&gt;- a lack of cargo cult work organisation and office politics&lt;p&gt;- an atmosphere of trust rather than petty control freaks who need to constantly keep an eye on their subordinates in order to know they&amp;#x27;re still &amp;#x27;working&amp;#x27;&lt;p&gt;- adapting to different forms of communication&lt;p&gt;When people say that they can&amp;#x27;t communicate as well with someone who isn&amp;#x27;t in the same room that doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily mean that a remote setup doesn&amp;#x27;t work. It could simply mean they&amp;#x27;re just lazy and not willing to adjust to a different kind of work environment.&lt;p&gt;Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn&amp;#x27;t just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tbrownaw</author><text>&lt;i&gt;When people say that they can&amp;#x27;t communicate as well with someone who isn&amp;#x27;t in the same room that doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily mean that a remote setup doesn&amp;#x27;t work. It could simply mean they&amp;#x27;re just lazy and not willing to adjust to a different kind of work environment.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It could also mean they actually have sufficient social skills that they&amp;#x27;re able to make full use of the higher bandwidth available face-to-face, and aren&amp;#x27;t willing to suffer thru the markedly inferior communications that are all that&amp;#x27;s possible over the &amp;#x27;net.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Do We Still Commute?</title><url>https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/11/why-do-we-still-commute/544733/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BjoernKW</author><text>I think that the &amp;#x27;importance of face-to-face interaction&amp;#x27; argument is a helplessly contrived one, an attempt to avoid the elephant in the room.&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of examples that show that working remotely without daily face-to-face interaction can work very well.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s markedly different about environments that successfully adopted remote work are aspects like:&lt;p&gt;- a lack of cargo cult work organisation and office politics&lt;p&gt;- an atmosphere of trust rather than petty control freaks who need to constantly keep an eye on their subordinates in order to know they&amp;#x27;re still &amp;#x27;working&amp;#x27;&lt;p&gt;- adapting to different forms of communication&lt;p&gt;When people say that they can&amp;#x27;t communicate as well with someone who isn&amp;#x27;t in the same room that doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily mean that a remote setup doesn&amp;#x27;t work. It could simply mean they&amp;#x27;re just lazy and not willing to adjust to a different kind of work environment.&lt;p&gt;Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn&amp;#x27;t just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>majewsky</author><text>Another huge problem is the transition path from &amp;quot;everyone in the same office&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;everyone working remote&amp;quot;. If you have 60% of your team sitting in the office, and 40% remote, you can be absolutely certain that those 40% will be out of touch on all those important decisions that just emerge during a watercooler conversation. (The watercooler also provides a way for different teams to get to know each other, even if they do not work with each other directly, thus forging bonds that might later turn out helpful.)&lt;p&gt;With all that (plus what you said), most individual employees will prefer the office over remote access. So remote would only work if you moved &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt; from the office to remote access at a single point in time.</text></comment>