Remote vs In-Office: Finding the Right Fit for Your Business

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing and yes, we are almost wrapping up our season on building better businesses. This is the Building Better Developers podcast, also known as Develop-a-Nor. It actually starts in Develop-a-Nor and has worked its way into Building Better Developers. At any case, I have always been for the longest time, as I can remember my whole life, Rob Broadhead, one of the founders of Develop-a-Nor, also a founder of RV Consulting, where we help you figure out how to leverage technology to do business better. And not just in general, your business. We're going to sit down, we're going to talk to you about what do you do? What makes you special? This is going to feel very good because part of it is going to be us saying, wow, that is quite a value that you bring. Wow, that is something that I can see your customers loving. And that is exactly what we're going to do as part of that discussion. And then we're going to say, all right, let's figure out what you can do. What can technology do for you based on where you're currently at, what your team is at, where you want to go and then help you through that technology assessment. We're going to figure out, you know, do you have tech sprawl? Do you have integration? Do you have simplification? Do you have automation? Do you have innovation needs? And then we're going to build a roadmap and then we're going to help you implement that technical roadmap or show you how, whether it's we implement it for you, whether we help you build the right team. We're here to help you find the best path forward with technology or without technology, with us or without us. Our goal is to just make everybody better wherever we can, just like we do at this podcast. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing. I've got like a bunch of side projects that I've worked on for years and they're like, they're in varying states of a lot of them I use them, I scratch my own itch. I've got all these applications and things and solutions that I've built for myself. One of them I have not touched in a while because I've been in my business instead of on my business way too much for the last couple of years. And so as I'm like digging myself out of this, I'm refreshing one of these tools and it was basically dead. I hadn't looked at it in years and now there's very, and now I'm finally turning stuff on and activating connections and pulling data out and pushing data and things like that that didn't exist. It feels like one of those movies where you've got some old rusted technology that now is being brought back to life. And so it is very much a good thing to be like, oh, wow, this will actually still be useful to me. Bad thing is in general, old code is you're sitting there and it's something that you haven't touched for years or that your company hasn't touched for years. And I'm thinking about this not related to what I just said as my good thing, but actually a company that I, a customer or potential customer I just talked to that they are 10 years behind the curve. They've got something. And this is not the first time I've had one of these where it's a customer, potential customer that their stuff was built in or more years ago. Sometimes they still have the developers. Sometimes they don't. Usually they have zero or close to a documentation. And it's basically a matter of like, OK, we've got to figure out how to make this work, but make it work better. Because as we talked about in our prior episode, they basically let things grow to a point where now it's taking too long to do the most basic tasks and they need to do an upgrade. I am going to keep it quick and not have to upgrade myself, even though I am because I'm going to pass this over to Michael, the other host. Introduce yourself, please. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Milosz. I'm one of the co-founders and developer of Building Better Developers. I'm also the founder of a company called Envision QA, where we help businesses focus on the quality of their business. It can be helping them upgrade their current software stack, getting things working seamlessly, helping them fix current bugs in their current software. It could even be helping them understand that, hey, their software is outdated. We need to upgrade them or build a custom solution. Our whole business model is around the customer. We are focused on improving the quality of your business, be it through custom software or helping you figure out what it is that you actually need to run your business. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing this week. We're past allergy season. I'm feeling so much better. I can get off all the freaking algae meds, get rid of the medicine head. Bad side, still dealing with a little bit of bad weather around here and having to adjust vacation plans based on the weather. So I'm going to have to kick some things around. Back to you, Rob. So this episode I want to talk about, it's just like, this is one of those big hot topics right now, virtual versus physical employees, as in, are we in the office or are we going to be remote? And we can go a little further around this, but that's where I really want to focus in on because this is something that is near and dear to my heart and something I can argue both sides all day long. I can sit there and say that everybody needs to be in the office and here is the value of being in the office. I can also argue everybody needs to be remote and here's the value of being remote. Honestly though, I'm not going to argue everybody in either case because there are people that work, whatever your business is, whatever your employees are doing, there are going to be those in a lot of cases, if not most cases, there are going to be those that work better remote, assuming it's possible. Now there's some things like, you know, if it's your checkout clerk, they remote probably isn't going to help or maybe it will. That's one of those things that maybe you should think about, but there are going to be those that just, it needs to be, it makes most sense for it to be in person, but there are going to be those that are actually better or more effective at least sometime, if not all the time being remote and vice versa. There are going to be some of the just, some people, as we saw during COVID, there are some people that just not good at working remote. They, they just, they don't have the drive. They don't have the focus. They got too much crap going on. They got kids bothering, whatever it happens to be. It's just not their cup of tea. Also, and this is where I want to get into a little deeper into this instead of just the straight up, like, you know, what's the cost of your office space versus in the time and the, you know, the commute times and what's the difference between somebody that, you know, gets dressed and goes to work versus they just sit around in their, you know, sit around in their boxers and a t-shirt all day, and then they put a developer shirt on at some point to do their little podcast or stuff like that. You know, there's a lot of ways that you can look at this and, and be cynical about it. But then there's also those, you can be very optimistic and say, well, hey, at least you're not going to get killed in a car accident or you're not going to waste your time talking to everybody in the office. There is like so many things. It is not black and white is not that cut and dry. There are, there are a lot of factors that are involved in remote versus in the office. And that's what I want you to think about, particularly if you're in a situation where two things, I guess, one is if you are chasing one or the other of those, and then the others, do you have employees or are they, are you considering what do I do with my employees? What do I do in this situation? How do I like, how do I address the remote versus in-person work kind of things, or do I do a hybrid, which is honestly a sort of like a, it's a little bit of a cop out, but I don't know that it necessarily is sometimes the hybrid is actually the best. You get the best of both worlds and you get to make things, you know, get to work things out that way. Now, one of the things I want to, I think that I want to focus on, and I think that is lost way too often in that whole, this whole discussion. And those that were particularly, I think those that went through the 2020, 2021 COVID stuff, I think they felt it, but I'm not sure if they remember it. So I'm going to like, you know, sort of brush some of that off and remind you. When everybody is in the office, particularly if you are in something that is, has intellectual banter or value, whether you're a developer, whether you're in sales, whether you're in marketing, because those are, you know, these creative types of things. Even honestly, depending on what you do, like if you're in accounting and definitely HR and things like that. When you are all in the office, there is a level of one osmosis that everybody gets because you're hearing these conversations, you get drawn into conversations that you probably will not get if you are remote because you're like walking down the hall and you have a conversation with somebody or you're, you're sitting next to somebody and you just throw some out to them and say, well, what do you think about this? What you wouldn't do if they're remote. Now, maybe you do, if you've got Slack or something like that, maybe you've got somebody, you've got very chatty chat people, but that, that really, I've seen that happen in some cases, but it's just too hard to follow. It is much easier to have like that conversation with somebody sitting next to you than it is to have a bunch of people entering stuff in like a Slack channel or something like that. The other thing is culture. Although we have, we have had conversations, we have had interviews. If you go back a couple of seasons, there have been times that we have talked at length about culture in a fully remote environment. How do you do that? How do you address that? How do you make that happen? And I've talked to some people that were phenomenal at doing that, that they realized that that is something that you want to take, you know, move forward with your company, but you're going to be remote. And so you have to, you have to solve that problem. That is a struggle that you're going to have to go through that you're going to have to win out on. And culture is, I think is huge. Particularly if you have any sort of, uh, partnering, teaming up, things like that. It's like, if you have a team and they are disparately across the world, you can be a very tight and very well functioning, well-oiled machine team, but there is a lot more work, I think, into doing that. And when I have worked with it, it almost always was required face to face at some point, there's some point where you need to be able to sit down with your coworkers and break bread together and have a meal or go out and have drinks if that's what you are, or go have like a team building activity where you go golf or laser tag or skydive or whatever it is that your team does, there is value in being together in community and having those social interactions, just as there is value in not being distracted by those very same things. This is why some people that are, you know, maybe you've gotten back to it where you're an office dweller and you get to work early or you stay at work late, because you know that either if I get there before everybody else, or if I stay after everybody else has left, I can get some serious work done because I don't have distractions, I can go heads down. I, you know, or maybe you're like, you're one of those, you put your headphones on and you can just focus and get some crap done instead of being distracted by listening to what Martha next to you is talking about for her weekend or something like that. I'm going to stop there and throw that over to you. Like, what are you talking about? I've kept this pretty broad, but let's see where you want to go with this one. So it's really funny because you and I have been virtual or working from home pre-COVID, like we have been in many situations where we've worked from home years before COVID. We've been in the office. We've been out of the office. I've worked for companies that during COVID where I had to be in an office environment, like once a quarter. The interesting thing about this whole conversation is virtual versus physical is a lot of times I feel management wants to see what's going on. They need to physically see people in desks doing things. But I've actually seen the counter to that. I see more time wasted being in an office and we're not getting done because people are socializing. People are in meetings. Whereas in a virtual environment, you're focused on productivity. You're focused on getting things done. One good example of this is a job I had a couple of years ago where I was the senior automation tester. And it, because of our infrastructure, I had to run our automation test on a Thursday night and it literally took 60 hours between Thursday night and Monday morning to complete all the automation tests because I had to run them on so many environments where it was mainly tasking for me to do it. Now I could be in the office that week, Monday through Wednesday, but by the time I hit Thursday, Thursday through Monday, I would work another 60 hours. So it made no sense for me to be in the office doing that or even to come in the office Monday through Wednesday. So we worked it out where, Hey, it was more productive for me to be virtual that week, not even come into the office. Kick off the test Thursday night, run them, manage them. And then by Monday morning, I'm already done with most of my week for the following week by Wednesday, the following week, I was done because I was able to do more work from home than physically being in the office. This is where the funny conversation, I think Tim Ferriss talked about this years ago, it's like, are you being busy or are you being productive? Are you running around the office with the phone in your head? Hey, I'm doing, Oh, you look busy. Hey, I'm up for a promotion, but are you actually doing anything? Are you able to actually do your job? And that's kind of the whole virtual versus physical. If you can do your work from home, if you can focus, sit down, get crap done. And not be distracted. Great. But not every position or every job kind of works with that. So there are times where being in the office is beneficial. And I have found where once a quarter, I am not totally against being in the office. I am more than happy to go in once a quarter every other week or once a month to sit down with the team, to build that culture, like Rob mentioned, but it is anti-productive to me to be in an office and be in meetings for 10 hours a day. And nothing gets accomplished. It is a waste of time. Um, so what are your thoughts on that Rob? Cause I saw you kind of. Well, and I think that's, that is the challenge is that you've got to, I've been in situations where I have been in meetings back to back to back to back. And there have been actually a couple of cases where I've been in those situations where they actually are all productive meetings for the most part, and it's always going to be a bad one here and there. But I think that's part of it is that when we, there's this tendency when we're in an office and it's like, okay, we're here. So we've got to do something. We've got to take advantage of the time. And you have to be aware of like, there is, you've got to have time to actually get the work done. This is sometimes you end up meeting to death and you end up in a situation where we're talking so much, pretty too much time talking about getting something done instead, you do the thing. And it's like, this is where you will get me on a soap box if you don't watch out. Because this is where things like agile manifesto and things like that start to come into play where it's like, yes, there are processes and procedures and documentation and all these things that we want to do, and these are not bad things, but if you count out of those, if you're worshiping at the altar of those things and those processes and procedures, then you probably are not going to get your work done enough. And now you can't just focus on getting your work done because then there's other things that need to be done, but you've got to find that balance. You've got to find the ability to balance those things out and make sure that there is time to get the stuff done. So when you're meeting, you can actually talk about things that were accomplished and not just say, why aren't we getting crap done? And the worst part is this is a problem in both virtual and physical environments. I have seen, I have been with companies where they literally had meetings scheduled for 10 hours with no bathroom breaks, no breaks in between. You can't physically run a company that way. Even if you're in the office, if you schedule meetings like that, people aren't doing their jobs. You have them tied up and they're busy. Are at the end of the day, this whole argument of virtual versus physical is, are you looking for busy work to make sure that your people are doing something or are you actually giving them work that is meaningful, that is moving the bar forward? That is like Rob mentioned with Scrum, that you're doing small tasks that you're always moving forward or are you stuck in the loop of meeting hell and nothing's getting done, meaning if you're virtual or physical, it's a waste of time period. And you need to revisit your business model. I think that's, this is something that gets into, gets in areas and really go beyond the whole, as you mentioned, they do go beyond remote versus in person. Cause you can, as I said, I can argue both sides. You can pretty much argue whatever your argument is in defense of either side of it. So you could say that, you know, well, if you're in an office, you're always going to have meetings, but then you can say, well, well, no, if you're in remote, then you have to have more meetings because you have to keep up with people. And I, I have lived this as part of my company is that I have been virtual for a long time. I've been remote for a long time. I have, even when I was not full-time remote, I was pushing remote. I had employees that remote, we had certain days a week that we would show up and it's like, okay, we're going to meet this day a week. We're going to show up in the office and then the rest of the time we're going to go away and we're going to get some crap done. And I have done this and I have hired employees and I have worked with them in varying schedules and things like that to say, okay, you know, and it goes to everything that's like, how much freedom do you give versus how much do you, you know, do you need to like make sure that you're like poking people and saying, Hey, are you getting that done? Or are you the accountability side of it? You want to say something. Yeah. But it, to me, it only makes sense to physically be in an office. If everyone is able to be in the office, if your whole point of bringing your com your employees into the office is to have them sit at a desk and be on zoom calls all day because there are people are all over the country. That is a waste of time. In my opinion. It's actually funny because that's something that I just have experienced in a place that I was at where, um, it was part-time remote. It was a, it was one of these hybrid kind of things. So on any given day, somebody was working remote. It wasn't like, you know, you come in Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then you can go, it was you, your adults, your, you know, you get your crap done the way you get your stuff done. And that actually worked out really well because what could happen is you can have somebody that is like, I need to just go focus on this thing, but I also need to like be part of the team and I need to give back so you could have days where you're just like, okay, I'm going to go do this. It also allows your life to intrude a little bit more. You're like, you know what? I'm going to be sitting at home today because I've got a delivery coming in or I've got to take a go to a doctor's or whatever it is. So it is actually more effective use of my time to be home, to go do this stuff and then be able to be a work. And then there's the whole, whole like you're, you end up being more connected and things like that from it to the work side of it a lot of times because. Everybody does it. Everybody's just used to it. And we did have zoom calls where you would have, you know, half the team would be, or half the meeting people would be sitting in the room and then you'd have a screen up and you'd have some people on a zoom call. There is definitely, there are definitely ways to approach those things that you need to be, you need to learn how to do them the right way for your team. A lot of times it's just simple as just there needs to be camera on. There are some things like, you know, I, the first time I saw somebody, this was about years ago, we were sitting there and it was a, it was a big call. And this was like with customers and there was a developer type person and one of the like five or six little zoom boxes that were there. And this guy's sitting here vaping while we're all talking. And it's like, you're sitting there and it's like a little vein, there's like smoke blowing into the screen and you're like, actually, I remember like being a, the manager that I worked for, we're like, is that cool? Or like, is that something, is that a thing now? We're not even sure. Like this is back, you know, closer into the, the, the whole COVID things, but it's like, I don't know that that's quite right. And it is, it's like, you need to make sure that you're employees understand that if you're on a meeting, then you should expect to be camera ready and that you should like, look like you didn't just crawl out of bed and some things like that. Which kind of falls into the fact that, you know, if you're virtual as a business, you need to make sure you have rules defined as to how you need to act. And a lot of companies, I think don't have that. So it's like more, it's easier for them to say everyone back to the office because we don't want to deal with the virtual because we don't want to establish policies or protocols for being in virtual meetings. That is, that is actually a pretty good point is that if you do, like I said, that, you know, maybe you want to do hybrid because you get the best of both worlds, but if you do, then it actually adds more rules and regulation or potential for rules and regulations than if you are both now I am like just laying it out. Just as opening my company, my employees are a hundred percent virtual, but we, generally speaking, we, we actually meet face to face. We have a lunch, even though there are some people that drive a couple hours, you know, every couple of weeks. And then we do have, now we have some important, there are customers that we have never met face to face. There are some that we have never seen a picture of that customer, but we will, you know, depending on what they do, we will be cameras on. We will, you know, we have talked to our employees about things like, Hey, make sure you dress appropriately, make sure that you blur the background so that you don't have some like, you know, gaming system that you're playing while you're sitting there supposedly on a call or whatever, you know, there's just, or just really tasteless posters or something like that. Who knows what you could have, but it's the basics of this is how you work in a remote world and it's just like an office. There are, there's a dress code. There's things like that. You do need to do that for remote as well. And you have to be a little more, depending on how you do it, you probably have to be a little more intentional about it is understand like where people going to maybe think, okay, this isn't a big deal, like coming to office. When do you show up at the office? How do you denote that you are at work? How do you denote that you are where you need to be? Um, you know, without, when you're not in an office, there's things like, you know, is there a status on your Slack or something like that, that you need to keep up with? So, um, all of those things are major considerations. I think when you do it, I'll give you sort of some, uh, some closing thoughts. We jump into the, uh, the challenge for this one. Yeah. So my final thoughts are if you're virtual or physical, regardless of your dynamics, look at what makes sense for your business. If you are more like, if you're a bank, if you need tellers, if you need to make sure someone's physically there to talk to a customer, which makes sense, uh, when there's a problem, then yes, you need to have people on premise. Now, if you have people building the backend systems that have no customer interaction, why do you need them to be in a branch or in a business to talk to the customer? That is to me when you need to be virtual versus physical. Yeah. I think there's a, it really is. It's like, and sometimes it's going to be, we're only, we are virtual until we don't need to be, until we can't be virtual, you know, at things like that. And like salespeople, it may be that salespeople are going on sales calls. They don't really need to have an office or anything like that. Um, and then you have office hours. You have all these other things that come into play. The challenge I want to dive into is think about you and your job. And maybe this is like, this is probably a good one to have like a little list of pros and cons. Why are, where is there value in you being in the office with your coworkers? And where is there value in you being at home working in a, you know, especially as assumes that your home office is effective, an effective place to work. If you're sitting there and you've got your laptop on the kitchen table and you've got kids and pets running around all over the place, that is not very effective. There's going to be a lot of distractions and things like that. They, now granted your workplace may be completely full of distractions as well, but these are the things that consider is I, the challenge is like go through and figure out just whether your boss, you know, agrees or not, whether you are your boss and whether you agree or not. It's like, just sit down and like sort of tally out what are the pros and cons for me, my job, what I do. Am I likely more off, you know, more productive if I am in an office in the office or if I work remote and this could, I'll throw it out. There's some like little, you know, curve balls at you as well, cause this could be something that is going to be seasonal or like regular seasonal or seasonal in life. It may be something it's like, you know what, I'm far better working at home during the summer because otherwise I leave work early so I can go hang out at the pool. It could be something I went through for a while where I was actually in an office because it was easier. I had to take my, had to take my daughter to school and it was easier to get an office, a remote office is like right across the street from the school. So I could drop her off, then work, pick her up. And so I didn't have as much back and forth time. There's things like that, that may be a life situations that are very specific to you, but I think it's whether you have the option or not, I think it is very useful to know what truly is the value of you working remote. We're working in an office because when you get to the point of having that choice, it's good to have like, you know, have that in the back of your mind. It's like, really, what is it? You don't want to be like the person that's sitting there in a restaurant and they say, well, what do you want to eat? And you're like, ah, give me five more minutes. I want to think about it. You, this is something where it's, I think worthwhile for you to say, you know, this is what, and I, this is what I want and this is why, and this is, you know, the reasons for it so that you can, if you need to choose and defend that position. That being said, when you give me one more, cause it looks like you had something else you wanted to say. Yeah. Within that challenge, are you busy or you're productive? Think of that within that challenge. Bonus material. I'll go to that one. I was going to go deeper, but we're going to wait. So if you're here, if you see these bugs, then, um, yes, you will be able to talk about that in just a minute. The best of you go check out development or on YouTube and the developer channel and you'll be able to see maybe some of the bonus material here. That being said, uh, as always, we would love feedback from you in any way, form or fashion, I'm not even going to go through all this stuff info at develop and word.com and all of the. Myriad of ways that you can reach out to us because we are virtual. We are not sitting there in your living room or anything like that. Unless you want us to, if you want us to come there and do a live recording, then we'll figure that crap out because, Hey, why not go up there until then. Don't look for us behind your shoulder. We're not going to be sneaking up. God, they're never stuff. A great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts, we are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.