Maybe it's me, but I have yet to experience 'innovation' result from a conversation held over coffee or a chance encounter. I've had better luck creating connections with other parts of the business and exchanging ideas over the infrequent cocktail party where it's a mission of the night. Say all you want about open floorplans and irrelevant quiet encounters.
I have worked in remote companies and companies that had butt in chair requirements, so far all the remote companies have been more innovative and had more cross talk between teams than the companies that required people to be in an office all day, every day.
Of course, that's just my experience but I do have a feeling that certain type of people feel that there's more innovation around coffee and chance encounter because it's a nice story to tell oneself but it doesn't really happen.
I'm interested in how you accomplish this. Everything has to be scheduled in a meeting these days, and meeting burn out over zoom is real.
Where as in the office it was just walking around and seeing someone in an elevator, the hall, "hey lets catch up" or "you have a minute" or "lets get lunch"
these types of interactions just don't happen anymore
In true remote companies everything happens on Slack channels and meetings are minimal. If you want to see what a team is up to, you just have to lurk their Slack channel. Basically almost everything becomes more visible because of Slack.
even slack is too much these days, I'm in so many channels. theres so much noise and if you're not part of the conversation you may miss it completely depending on if people are using threads or not.
these types of interactions just don't happen anymore
I frequently DM people on Slack with a "How was your weekend?", "Did you see <url> on HN?" or just "We haven't chatted in a while, fancy a catchup?" That works just as well, except it's much easier for people to say they're busy when they're busy than it is face to face.
I go to meetings for a living. Its been a huge productivity boost to not have to walk 15 minutes across campus to meet my clients. Plus I never have to worry about not having a projector.
Although you're right, I did go back to the office the other day and spent a good hour talking to a co-worker about their Caribbean vacation. I hadn't had one of those in years. Not sure how that boosted innovation and productivity tho.
I rarely found those kinds of interactions positive. They were often very one-sided where I felt like a captive audience with no easy out.
I really don't enjoy talking about my personal life, even benign stuff, with 99.99% of coworkers, and I've found that there are plenty of ways to have positive interactions without getting into anything remotely personal.
> Everything has to be scheduled in a meeting these days, and meeting burn out over zoom is real.
At my company, we obviously have to chat over zoom or meet, but it doesn't have to be scheduled. The way we do it is we might be chatting on slack, spitballing ideas, doing stuff in lucidchart or some other charting software, then if it seems good we talk about it over zoom. It doesn't have to be so robotic
Pre-scheduling is ONE way of getting people in sync, but not the only way.
For me and my team, there is a LOT of ad-hoc communication, preferrably in public slack channels, which leads to extremely productive conversations.
Furthermore, these are SEARCHABLE, which is a godsend; if an issue comes up once, it's very likely to come up again.
And, of course, there are times when we just jump on a zoom call quickly to review something that may be quicker than a bunch of slack back-and-forth.
There has never been a time where I felt "damn, it would be easier if I were there in person". If anything, in-person communication has always been hampered by the very need for co-location (including arranging meeting rooms or whiteboard, etc), and it's always been difficult to view someone else's screen unless they connect to a projector or large TV, whereas zoom has made pair-and -group programming almost inevitable.
I understand the social side of people wanting to be co-located, but from a pure productivity perspective, my team has been significantly more productive since WFH.
If you can't have a chat in some messaging software turn into a quick call, and that quick call finishes the instance it should, then I don't know what you're doing.
Frankly I do this even when I'm in the same office, because I can keep working while on a call.
Scheduled? Just have a group chat with the participants, if one person misses the call, no big deal. You should be syncing often enough that it shouldn't matter.
As for the informal meet-ups, if there's a need, you go chat then call. If there isn't a need, then there's no value lost.
> these types of interactions just don't happen anymore
And that's a good thing! I can't tell you how much of my day was wasted with pointless "lead in" conversation that ended up being just another business meeting. Or "lets get lunch" and it ends up being just talking about work. These are the "hello" slack messages of yesteryear. A frustrating waste of time. If you want my time schedule it, do not come up to my at my desk and ask me anything related to work. SCHEDULE IT. Otherwise once you let people into your work time they consume all of it and you end up working late every single day.
I have absolutely no interest in the personal lives of my co-workers and I strongly believe that if it can't be handled in an email, or a short meeting, then it's a problem that needs to be split up. I've carried this from junior to staff engineer and it's served me well. I zone out during long meetings and regularly work during other "important" meetings. There are very few meetings that matter to me because 99.9% of them are job justification on the part of PMs who want to hear themselves talk.
Remote has been a total life changer for me, and I've done it for the last 4 years. I am far more productive, I have a far tighter reign on my schedule, and the only thing I'm missing is those "little conversations" I couldn't care less about. I want to do my 8, clock out, and go home to do the things I actually enjoy. Remote has enabled me to do this WELL. I was miserable in the office and I enjoy life far more now. I even get the opportunity to pursue continuing education because I'm now rated based on my output rather than ass-in-seat metrics middle managers love.
> but I do have a feeling that certain type of people feel that there's more innovation around coffee and chance encounter because it's a nice story to tell oneself but it doesn't really happen.
It seems somewhat uncharitable to assume that there are different people who believe things about how innovation happens to them, but not that there may be differences between how people innovate.
A lot depends on culture and process. Usually companies which had remote on day 1 do better because they get to fine tune and evolve the process over time.
Would be really nice to see if this has held up, given it only looks at the first few months of the pandemic. I know my company has gotten much better at remote work over the past couple of years.
Yep. I loved WFH years ago as a contractor doing hired gun work where I didn't need to interact with many folks and just mostly fixed bugs. I also loved full time WFH during the panini for the most part, although doing it in a tiny SiValley apartment sucked. Now that I'm doing architectural work and going into the office twice a week I get it. Nothing beats in person discussion for certain critical discussions.
If you want to see how the communication differs do this small study:
Notice how much people were talking in the first day of the war in Slack. In my experience being in a couple of slack workspaces (one for work, a couple from co-working hubs, 3 professional groups) in some people shared something, in one they created a channel for this, in some other there was one or two threads.
Now think about what was the state of almost all employees: I think the invasion was the main focus of everybody and also I assess the amount of work done these days on average is less than normal.
Now think about what is happening going into an office in that day: Everybody will talk about this. Every conversation will start with this, every chit chat before any meeting will start with that news.
If you remote communication is reflecting this then congrats your organization managed to create a good remote culture.
I am not saying one is good and one is bad. I am saying there is a big difference between them.
Less mental overhead and friction in terms of setting it up. 1000s of years of evolution. The experience of people who post on HN and their comfort with digital interaction may not reflect how a majority of people feel.
I wonder if there is confirmation bias in the opinions of people who are voluntarily spending a large amount of time on forums already. They had a preference for written asynchronous communication already.
I send or get a “Can you zoom for 5min” SMS 4-5 times a week with my closest team members. I agree, this does establish a sense of immediacy and collaboration which the formality of scheduled meetings lack.
When we worked in the same office, the walk-in frequency was about the same.
The difference between the two is negligible though and not spending the extra 3h per day for commute and office lunch is night and day.
Really, do most employees contribute to innovation at all? Can they?
I certainly never have except in an explicit innovation job. The rest of the time I am an implementer. So keep me away from connections with the other parts of the business as that just becomes a sideways way to ask for feature requests I have no say in or other info/support requests.
The far majority of people do grunt work. Only a small group actually does anything both innovative and non-obvious, which is the "use case" presented for these small talks. Most devs who are not part of that small group and find something non-obvious have to fight through many layers of bureaucracy to even get their voice heard, let alone be given time to prove their idea without having to invest their own time. This also doesn't take into account the far majority of those select people have dedicated times where they research potential innovations, and getting into that small group is also difficult.
Even supposing FAANG, fortune 100s or whatever top percentile is likely to desire more innovation, the idea spontaneous talks one supposedly only could have in the office significantly impacting the rates of innovation is pretty far-fetched and mostly just an assumption.
I feel like not everyone works well remotely. Meanwhile if you can work well remote, you can probably work well at a desk. So the rest of us must suffer especially at these larger firms.
I guess it depends on the desk. These open office plans kill my concentration, to be completely honest. I get at least twice as much done in my home office =/
At the office, all I did was put on headphones with white noise and stare at the screen and hope that no one came and train wrecked my chain of thought, which happened all too often. My main form of communication was Slack anyways... and I'm not embarrassed to say, I wasn't the only one. It was this, plus a Seattle commute, which was an hour+ each way because I'm not going to raise my kid in an apartment downtown (personal preference).
Now, I will totally grant you, there were plenty that could juggle chatting and typing and hopping up to meetings and retaining what happened after Scrum and the flying Nerf darts and the smell of coffee and farts and B.O. and overpowering deodorant and cologne and perfume and hairsprays and hair product and people putting fish in the microwave, etc. etc. Bless the people who can super ultra multitask and keep a train of thought like that. I am so envious... I'm not that guy =[
> Meanwhile if you can work well remote, you can probably work well at a desk.
This is sadly not universal. I’d wagger there’s a decent number of people who could only barely work in an office.
I’ve memories of people who had issues keeping themselves and/or desk clean, and it wasn’t some cute story to laugh at, it had a direct impact on their performance and if their managers found any good excuse they’d be out pretty quick.
Then all the IRL office harrasment stuff, the one that looms at a level HR doesn’t give a fuck but you still deal with it every fucking day. Going remote makes it weirdly easier on both sides, I guess some people just couldn’t help it and now they have a private space where they can do what they need to calm down.
I’d say there’s a infinite number of circumstances, up until now we’d just think these people are just not fitted to work at any place. Working remote changes a lot of these pre-requisites.
Having said that, every situation is unique.