Re: She has no clue
"Remote workers in distributed teams tend to spend less time goofing off around the coffee machine and can be more productive than a team that is all in one place, when properly encouraged and managed."
I think that identifies a couple of reasons against remote working:
"goofing off around the coffee machine" can be translated as exchanging ideas, getting updates and building relationships. A very important part of office life, particularly for creative areas whether marketing or deisgning software.
"when properly encouraged and managed." Managing teams in person is not always easy. Managing remote teams can massively add to difficulty. Having partnered with IBM for 7-8 years ( and with some previous companies) we have suffered from inefficiencies with communication between IBM'ers and some remote workers going off-grid.
There is a place for remote working, maybe standard coding requiring little interaction or someone making lots of outbound calls.
I am under impression that the big tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook etc are\have been investing in big offices for precisely this reason, Am I wrong?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
