this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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The CEO of Dropbox has a 90/10 rule for remote work (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 113 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This means 90% of the year is spent on remote work, and the remaining 10% is dedicated to employee off-site events.

I think that's about right. Maybe a couple days per quarter for a department, and then a few days a year with the whole company together. Enough to get a good rapport with your coworkers, but not so much you hate traveling for work.

"If you trust people and treat them like adults, they'll behave like adults. Trust over surveillance," said Houston.

If you give people good metrics to hit, they'll hit them. If you don't have good metrics then you rely on seeing asses in seats to know if people are working.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (4 children)

If you give people good metrics to hit, they'll hit them. If you don't have good metrics then you rely on seeing asses in seats to know if people are working.

By the same token, if you give them stupid-ass metrics you create your own turnover.

I worked for a call center that had metrics based on prior month performance. If you didn't match, you were out. Okay, fine, except this was retail. Oh, you didn't take as many calls in January as you did in December? You're out.

Welcome to corporate reality. It's all run by idiots.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Actually this makes sense from a corporate asshole perspective: the need for call center employees is seasonal. So you hire call center employees before the holiday season, and then the system auto-fires all the excess employees for missing their quota after the end of the season.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

The problem with that is it applies throughout the year. Those weren't the only unattainable metrics.

To give you an idea of what this place was like, I was shitcanned because I spent too much time in "UNAVAILABLE" status. For two whole days I was "UNAVAILABLE." It was on the last day of one month and the first day of the following month. When the next review came up I was auto-termed because I missed my "AVAILABLE" numbers two months in a row.

I was "UNAVAILABLE" because I had been promoted and was in training for two days. My trainer told me to be "UNAVAILABLE."

Apparently that wasn't a good enough reason for being "UNAVAILABLE." Rather than correcting it or even trying to stick up for me my manager gave me a "Sorry, nothing I can do."

Nordstrom, by the way. Garbage company. Do not work for them.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I work for a corporate retail store, I always tell new workers who start asking questions why we do things this way not that way that there's no point, there is no logic or thought put behind every decision this company makes.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I bet they had a huge amount of turnover in March because they couldn't hit February's numbers in January

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

MBA's are a plague

[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I'd say, 'your employees have options. They're not resources to control,'" Houston told Fortune when asked about what message he had for CEOs who believed in return-to-office mandates.

"You need a different social contract and to let go of control. But if you trust people and treat them like adults, they'll behave like adults. Trust over surveillance," he added.

“But but but you can’t just treat the servants like people who are capable of completing their responsibilities while managing their own time! What if they finish their work early or take an extra ten minutes at lunch?! Sweet lord, what if they aren’t jiggling their mouse enough??!! Time theft is the most heinous crime in human history!!!1!”

- Every other CEO and corporate media stooge for the last three years

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, honestly when I see people claim that CEOs just want people back for the tax benefits I call bullshit.

These are people who have to justify their own existence through control over whatever company they're a part of. They don't want you back in the office because they're afraid you're screwing them over, they want you back in because otherwise the veil is lifted on how worthless they are as a leader.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Another thing to keep in mind is that pretty much all the C levels spend the majority of their time doing in person stuff with other high level narcissists where they have to focus on body language to avoid being the victim of interface politics and they don't understand that most other people have positions that require long periods of focus on individual tasks.

Any time they say that people want to be in the office or that interpersonal communication only works in person they are projecting. They just have the ability to force it on everyone else.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, it can be both at the same time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Ok, fair enough, let's compromise on it not being the "primary motivator".

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly, it’s even stupider than that. Everyone who works for me or that o work with is a professional making 6 figures, ranging into the mid-six range. They’re great at their jobs, and prior to Covid we had all kinds of flexibility for who worked where. Now it’s a one size fits all, and I’d honestly be shocked if the company wasn’t losing more money in policing and attrition than it was gaining in some hypothetical bonus of being in the office.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I love working from home. But I do go in more because it's partly mandated but I take great flexibility with it. It genuinely helps me to be in a couple of days a week, but I'd like that to be my decision, not management. It isn't the same for everyone either. Many roles are better off remote tbh. Our employer assesses category of work done and applies some full wfh where it makes sense, but some I feel get mischaracterised.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like almost all of his rhetoric, but his 90/10 rule is only 90 percent of the way to being correct.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A few social events make sense. Working completely anonymously doesn't work IMO. Meeting someone in person is completely different from seeing them on a screen.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But why? Why can't that work for you?

So you can ensure that the person who is doing great work isn't one of "them"?

Work is professional. It's work. Social is informal. It's not work.

What exactly is it that makes you need to mix the two?

I am an extremely introverted person with pretty extreme social anxiety.

The only reasons I can come up with for NEEDING to force social situations into work are nefarious.

And notice, I'm not saying work anonymously. Zoom makes sense when the processes are that lacking.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because it has been repeatedly shown that better social connections help get the right stuff done.

Trust, empathy, and liking each other allows for a generosity in dealings that is very conducive to communication, to problem solving, to finding ways to affect change in the organisation, to train/socialise workers into effective practices, to notice when the work is unbalanced or unaligned with the employee, to correct poor behaviour, and many more reasons.

A competent event organiser could plan to accommodate your introvert preference, and still achieve the prosocial goals.

You could have interactions in smaller groups at a time, have activities/breaks with social recovery (like solo or silent activities, spa/massage/meditation, simulators/noisy activities/activities in heavy gear), have solo parts of group activities (like solo brainstorms or reflective walks), have planned recovery time, etc.

If your social anxiety is that bad, you might need an exemption for health reasons, in the same way a ski trip could exempt someone with a broken leg.

But at least healthy people, including introverts, seemingly benefit immensely from prosocial activities at a workplace.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I dont know, just sounds like a extrovert saying a bunch of touchy feely shit that amounts to "I might suck at the job but I have great people skills!"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Then you should work on your reading comprehension - that's not what I'm saying, and that's not what the science says.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

And you should gargle my ballsack.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've worked in many projects where I met people only over phone and WebEx or similar. It was always pretty "dry" and tensions rose quickly whenever shit on one end hit the fan. Typically after just one personal meeting (kick-off, war-room, whatever) that changed completely. You start to joke together, you let your guard down more easily. You talk differently, even on the phone and in virtual meetings then.

I also often enough witnessed people bitch at each other over some formulation in a pull request or a comment in a chat room. In person they completely behaved differently and were able to talk it through.

Not everyone ticks the same, but in a large team you can be sure to have at least some people who have an easier time reading body language than hearing nuances in a voice filtered through a microphone. And for these people it's then less stressful to work stuff out in person.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So from this I hear "stress out the introverts to bully them into silence and it's so much easier for the extroverts scheduling the meetings to figure out where they can claim credit having only scheduled meetings".

Gotcha.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Well, welcome to society, which consists of different types of personalities all mixed together. You want to stress-out everyone else too. That isn't better. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. As others said: the solution is to have individual exemptions, not preventing everyone from get-togethers in the first place.

Edit: btw. not even "introvert" is a good-enough category. I am also introvert and am completely depleted of energy after a day in the office or a team event. But I still enjoy it. You need to force me to attend, but afterwards I am typically glad I did.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

I have said nowhere to prohibit social people from being social outside of work.

This entire thread is about forcing everyone to socialize with their coworkers for 10 percent of their time on the clock.

Stop goal post moving.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

I got called back in after “essential employees” became a thing during Covid. I’d been out for 3 days remote work. A month later everyone got called back.

When they found out I’d been back nearly a month before them they asked why I had to come back in.

“How do you know you have slaves if you can’t see them?”

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Company before COVID: "We have 32 buildings across 5 campuses in 3 cities" After Covid: "We have 32 empty buildings no one will buy from us for enough to even break even. If we sell them no we lose millions, but they just sit empty"

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Company probably doesn't own the buildings. Company is leasing the office space from the building owner(s) ... who are probably executives and/or board members.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your last sentence contradicts your first sentence.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No it doesn't.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The company doesn't own the buildings, but the owners of the company, the ones that would see the bonus money for selling the buildings (company savings on rent and a terminated lease), own the buildings.

So there are a lot of mental gymnastics, but the punchline is that the company does own the buildings with a lot of rotten little pockets in the irs filings...

Your initial and final statement, while both true, do very much contradict eachother.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I get what you're saying - yes, the owners of the company also own the buildings - but that is different from the company owning the buildings.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If you look at their Glassdoor you'll see many complaints about their reorgs. Wonder if that's related at all

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's most tech corporate jobs tbf. Lots of middle managers with nothing much better to do than play musical chairs once a quarter. It's like that XKCD meme about there being the standard that will clean up the mess of there being so many standards. Surely my way of working will solve all our problems of underinvestment and losing key talent...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Wow, the Lord's truth right here. I never saw it that way, but it absolutely explains why the last company I left put me through 4 reorgs in 3 years. So many middle managers with nothing better to do while an increasingly smaller handful of people kept the place from burning down.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Telling people to return to the office is gives them an excuse to fire people for not listening to directions.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I'm glad to be in a union.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

90% drool on keyboard, 10% scramble to catch up