Career Notes #4: WFH and Remote Work - 30 January 2024

Someone said something on the radio and I am upset.  There is probably only one motive more stupid to write about than "someone said something on the Internet and I am upset", and that is the subject of my first sentence.  Someone said something stupid on the radio and I am upset.  However, I have always barged in where angels fear to tread, so I will share my thoughts on the recent resurgence of the RTO push for workers to return-to-office.  Since shortly after COVID began, there has been a vibrant discussion about the merits of working in an office compared to working from home (WFH).  It is the fodder for serious commentators as well as for the comics.  After hearing someone potificate on the radio this morning about managers who will have to learn how to support and encourage people who are WFH, I rather got to the end of my tether and -- I have thoughts.  I should say up-front that I retired as a senior manager in engineering at a high-tech company and I managed mostly highly educated people (nearly all had PhD degrees from major universities in the US).  These were (are) bright, educated, talented, and highly  motivated people eager to advance their careers and advance the fields of engineering.

When COVID began, there was a medical reason for everyone to avoid crowds and that included avoiding the shared office.  When I decided to close our local ABC Corporate office (a branch office of about 100 people and anonymized), I expected that it would be for 2-3 weeks until the pandemic abated.  I think it was pretty commonly understood that closing offices and sending people home was temporary and we would return to normalcy in a month or so.  As time went on and people continued to die from COVID, it became clear that our initial estimates were naively optimistic and that WFH (work from home) was a long-term state, verging on a year.  

While a high proportion of ABC Corporate workers could be sent home to work, there were key jobs that needed to continue on-site and in the office.  In our branch location, there were about 10 employees that needed to be in the office daily and 2-3 more that would come in occasionally.  The 10 folks needed access to labs and equipment that could only be on-site and could not be taken home.  The 2-3 folks varied each day from the 90 who were WFH - they were not usually the same individuals, but there were consistently 2-3 of them in the office.  

In our group (about a third of the 100 people in the branch), we had long-standing key metrics (KPI - Key Performance Indicator - is a common industry buzzword, but we did not use the phrase KPI).  The primary metric among these was the continued delivery of high-quality results as promised in the schedules and contracts.  As a general rule, the team was able to maintain successful delivery of all the group metrics.  From this, one might conclude that WFH was acceptable as a stable, long term strategy for the team.  After all, the overall team was spread across four primary sites already, so dispersing to homes was of marginal impact, right?  Wrong, but I have gone on too long in this posting and will reserve further thoughts for a second posting.

Although the key metrics, including consistent, timely, high-quality deliverables continued to be met, these are all "hard" metrics.  These are hard metrics because they are countable.  The deliverable was provided or it was not; the deliverable was on time or it was not; and the customer accepted the deliverable or they rejected it.  However, there were other, less countable metrics that were not always met, and many of these "soft" metrics are also on a scale, but hard to quantify.  Without covering all of the next post, consider "innovation".  There is no good measure of innovation.  There are simple measures (e.g., the number of patents authored) of these soft metrics, but simple measures can easily miscount or mislead (e.g., an idea can be patentable but it may be kept as a trade secret instead).  A more critical measure is readiness for promotion or other recognition, which is very hard to measure.

Until next time when I discuss soft metrics.