I am more productive but my team as a whole is less productive. Highly individual tasks are great for this whole setup but anything requiring high degrees of coordination seems to have suffered.
I think coordination was terrible in the beginning. But over time folks have worked out lots of things.
I've seen gradual, but sustained improvement in WFH skills.
For example, teleconferencing skills. People have learned to share their screens, then people gradually adapted to have an agenda on-screen to show and step through, people figured out how to send links and files during a meeting. Even silly stuff like how to contact someone who forgot about a meeting.
And some of it is more democratized. Regular folks are figuring out how to do peer-to-peer meetings, which were normally organized and driven by managers. This also goes for other tools like wiki, shared documents, teams, calendars, email, slack.
Another thing is a gradual spool up of WFH support. It took a while for people to figure out a webcam that works, or a microphone or headset. Or a chair, or a room setup, or just a rhythm.
I’ve experienced the opposite - as others have noted, making communication just a bit more structured and accessible to others in our org helped get clearer on what/how/why AND incorporate voices often left out because they are not the loudest in the room (or don’t want to speak up in a large public setting). Just on the merits of inclusion, video conferencing has been a big win for me.
Yes, there are adjustments and downsides, but net net, I feel a lot more confident that my team are being heard and no one is overlooked because of social tendencies, etc.
Agreed. It's very much dependent on managers shaping corporate culture to foster effective communication habits, but once established, it very much helps productivity. I work with several teams in any given week and I find myself most productive when we use a private channel for dedicated discussion (which I can scan through later very quickly as a form of documentation), while the few meetings I have are dragged out, ineffective, and extremely inefficient since they bottleneck communication to a single speaker at any given time, preventing parallel discussion in separate threads. Also in a meeting I can't just turn off my ears and look up something to check and if needed ask questions, I have to keep my attention on the speaker, which harms feedback and discussion even more.
