Leaked Zoom all-hands: CEO says employees must return to offices because they can’t be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom::Zoom CEO Eric Yuan discussed the benefits of in-person work in a leaked meeting.
Leaked Zoom all-hands: CEO says employees must return to offices because they can’t be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom::Zoom CEO Eric Yuan discussed the benefits of in-person work in a leaked meeting.
I’ll get downvoted to hell for this, but the CEO is at least partially right. It is really hard to get to know people and build trust remotely.
I started my first post-college job in August of 2020. Most people were remote, but I was not due to the nature of my work. It is extremely hard to get to know people exclusively over email, phone calls, and video calls. It’s frustrating not being able to get to know people even at the surface level. Knowing a little bit about your coworkers allows you to build rapport with them. Video and voice calls can be unreliable, and people can be very difficult to understand without in person cues and the ability to read lips. I say all of this as a very introverted person with social anxiety.
That may be true for some people individually, but I believe if no one at a company is able to build any connection (even on a professional level of base rapport ), that’s much more an indicator of the company’s failures to build a proper company culture that supports that.
People have been making close friends over the Internet with zero in-person interactions for decades now. And that’s even without video chat being the primary way of doing it. I work 100% remote at a company with ~2500 employees. I’m pretty introverted, but I’ve managed to make a few friends mostly over slack that I would ask if they wanted to grab a drink or something if I were traveling through their area. There’s no pressure or expectation of that from the company, there’s no “we’re family” nonsense, they’ve just created a company culture where that can happen.
I disagree completely. I love the word terroir. It’s a good metaphor. A good wine comes from a grapes in a specific place, with specific soil conditions, with specific weather conditions that can’t be predicted or replicated. Even if you could replicate the controllable variables again, the variables are too great to replicate. Sometimes terroir happens at work, and it requires all these things to come together in a place and time. I was lucky to have that in my career. But with remote work I don’t think that will ever happen again and remote work will prohibit that. I love working from home 2 days a week. But I wish we could figure out a 3 days a week in office that makes sense.
I agree. In the old days I was coming in only 3 days a week. But for those 3 days everyone was there. And the weekly end of day knowledge share and training where buckets of beer were passed around that turned into happy hour were natural and organic team building. Also, being able to white board off the cuff when needed to train folks on random topics during on boarding when you discovered a knowledge gap or had to field an off the cuff question with a 20 minute mini lecture…
Video conferencing killed all of that or at best made it way more painfull than it should be.
Also remote work killed the office. Even if I was going in 3 days a week I’m still video conferencing 75% of the time and no conference room is available.
Not downvoted, appreciate you sharing your perspective.
I’ve been successful building trust in remote work settings but it’s a very much about building a narrative that’s much more explicit and communicated in an active way.
But ignoring that bullshit I just typed, I think “building trust” in a professional environment is largely a trap. Not because you can’t trust anyone but that, if you’re building a good team, trust should be implicit. I was hired to do a job, you were hired to do a job, let’s trust that each other to do it.
I think it’s also worth bearing in mind that high trust teams can still build trust, I’m simply advocating for not starting from zero.
Unfortunately so many of the tools and workflows are built explicitly for low trust teams.
I wish people would move away from the will be downvoted for this statement before saying something. It’s just meaningless votes, and message is stronger without it than giving the impression of caring about karma or a willingness to stand by it regardless of reaction by not even acknowledging it.
Upvoted because you’ve definitely touched on a very real problem that needs to be addressed.
But you’re completely wrong about the cause. The problem is companies with a bad culture. @[email protected] said it brilliantly in a comment further up the thread, and I did my best (less elegant) job of explaining it above that. The company needs to take steps to encourage a good relationships between people, for example with casual and non-work-related chats in the chat app of choice, or by having people frequently working on problems in pairs instead of solo, especially when first starting out.
I had better relationships with my coworkers fully remotely at my last job than I do at my current job despite being in the office frequently. And that’s all down to how the company manages its culture.
I disagree. Good culture is sometimes an accident. And folks in charge like to take credit for that accident working out
Sure, that’s absolutely the case.
But that wasn’t my point. My point was that the experience with WFH comes down entirely to the culture, and if you’re feeling isolated when WFH it’s not a fault of WFH, it’s a problem with your company’s work culture.
Maybe if companies actually tried offering affordable employment housing so people aren’t having to do long commute times or losing a chunk of their salary living closer people would not be against working in the office.
There’s too much personal monetary and time inconveniences of working in the office over remote on an individual level that it’s hard to care about wanting to get to know someone being enough of a draw to work in the office.