Return to office - your situation

[ATG]

super7 said:

fat80b said:

Deep Thought said:

Its not casual racism / stereotypes. Its a factual account of people's experiences.

It may be based on experiences but lumping together an entire group of people and saying “they are all the same” is literally the dictionary definition of a racial stereotype….

After 25 odd years working with IBM Mainframes and with offshore teams in India, I can probably count on one hand the number who stand up and are pro-active in their work. The rest are great at doing stuff if they are given guidance and an awful lot of micro-managing which is often more time consuming that doing it yourself. It seems to be a cultural thing where there is a big desire to not screw up.

This is the archetypal description of IT outsourcing to India, and it is complete baloney. But you hear it repeated so often that people never seem to wonder if the actual problem might be the UK half of the outsourcing arrangement.

The root of the problem is thinking that you can "out-source" or "off-shore" by just chucking work over the fence to some sort of cheap labour pool. If you took that approach with a team _anywhere_ it would fail, be it in Mumbai, Buenos Aires or Inverness. If you think of your business as having its "real" workers in one location and some peripheral grunts somewhere else, of course the "grunts" aren't going to be effective because you aren't engaging with them properly. The problem is incompetent management in the UK, not the grunts.

Funnily enough, if you actually make your remote workers (wherever they are) fully fledged members of your organisation ... reporting into the same managers, fully engaged in planning and decision making, same opportunities as anyone anywhere else, etc, etc ... then .. guess what? ... they perform just as well as anyone else. And this isn't makey-uppy fantasy. (a) it's bleeding obvious and (b) it's the daily experience of loads of us. Right now I am on a Zoom with 8 people in Peterborough, Mumbai, Glasgow, London and mid-Wales working together to diagnose and fix a system problem. Everyone pitching in, everyone engaged, location and nationality making absolutely no difference. My project's teams are each spread across multiple Indian, UK, and US locations, plus Buenos Aires. We have support people, developers, analysts, project managers at all levels of seniority in all locations. We have users in even more locations. This is nothing special. Loads of firms operate like this. And thank god they do, because they BRING loads of jobs to the UK. "You should be frightened of globalisation" ...no, you should look at the UK job market and recognise how many jobs are here BECAUSE of globalisation.

[ATG]

Deep Thought said:

Sporky said:

vulture1 said:

Well having just had a teams training session today, 2 facilitators and 6 of us in to learn. 3 said nothing the whole meeting and no camera on. no real ability to read the room and no personal interation or ability to read body language.

You need to manage people. You wouldn't let them turn up to an in-person training session and leave the room for most of it.

Remote training = camera on.

The company i was with previously was a "cameras on" for all meetings.

The one i'm with currently is cameras off. Quite disconcerting sitting looking at a black screen - hard to read your audience - and i definitely think they loose something by not having them on.

Any idea how they ended up being "cameras off" and why does no one suggest they get switched back on?

[Deep Thought]

ATG said:

Deep Thought said:

Sporky said:

vulture1 said:

Well having just had a teams training session today, 2 facilitators and 6 of us in to learn. 3 said nothing the whole meeting and no camera on. no real ability to read the room and no personal interation or ability to read body language.

You need to manage people. You wouldn't let them turn up to an in-person training session and leave the room for most of it.

Remote training = camera on.

The company i was with previously was a "cameras on" for all meetings.

The one i'm with currently is cameras off. Quite disconcerting sitting looking at a black screen - hard to read your audience - and i definitely think they loose something by not having them on.

Any idea how they ended up being "cameras off" and why does no one suggest they get switched back on?

No. It just seems to have evolved culturally. Its very odd. Goes right up to Director level and beyond.

[Sporky]

I had to do a tender interview with a company like that. Blank screen, no feedback, no discussion or conversation at all.

[Deep Thought]

Sporky said:

I had to do a tender interview with a company like that. Blank screen, no feedback, no discussion or conversation at all.

The conversation and engagement and discussion with them is good on the calls. Part of it is they all know each other very well so its not such an issue for them. They've also been very welcoming which helps.

I'm in in the area of Business Change and Improvement so i'm present some new concepts to them. Hard to read your audience if you cant see them.

I've had interviews like that - i'd one were i was on camera but they werent. They'd also put themselves on mute too. Its very disconcerting.

[ATG]

Deep Thought said:

Sporky said:

I had to do a tender interview with a company like that. Blank screen, no feedback, no discussion or conversation at all.

The conversation and engagement and discussion with them is good on the calls. Part of it is they all know each other very well so its not such an issue for them. They've also been very welcoming which helps.

I'm in in the area of Business Change and Improvement so i'm present some new concepts to them. Hard to read your audience if you cant see them.

I've had interviews like that - i'd one were i was on camera but they werent. They'd also put themselves on mute too. Its very disconcerting.

Business change and improvement? How about suggesting they could improve their business by switching their cameras on as it helps newcomers to get to know the old guard? You'd really hope you wouldn't need to point out the bleeding obvious, but ...

[RizzoTheRat]

Deep Thought said:

ATG said:

Any idea how they ended up being "cameras off" and why does no one suggest they get switched back on?

No. It just seems to have evolved culturally. Its very odd. Goes right up to Director level and beyond.

Could be down to IT limitations, video takes more bandwidth. I've been in quite a few meetings and conferences where only the person talking has thier camera on. Also common for everyone not talking to be on mute to prevent background noise. We do have fairly rubbish conferencing software though (Skype for Business and Polycom)

[Candellara]

PurpleTurtle said:

Let us know how they get on when Vlad's missiles are hitting the building, yeah?

Slightly tongue-in-cheek but perhaps not. Time will tell.

The UK is a popular place for people to be based as it is generally stable.

Yep, that'll be interesting but far more so for the plethora of US Tech companies that use them. It seems alot of software companies offshore to Eastern Europe & Ukraine for customer service & inside sales roles.

[Deep Thought]

ATG said:

Deep Thought said:

Sporky said:

I had to do a tender interview with a company like that. Blank screen, no feedback, no discussion or conversation at all.

The conversation and engagement and discussion with them is good on the calls. Part of it is they all know each other very well so its not such an issue for them. They've also been very welcoming which helps.

I'm in in the area of Business Change and Improvement so i'm present some new concepts to them. Hard to read your audience if you cant see them.

I've had interviews like that - i'd one were i was on camera but they werent. They'd also put themselves on mute too. Its very disconcerting.

Business change and improvement? How about suggesting they could improve their business by switching their cameras on as it helps newcomers to get to know the old guard? You'd really hope you wouldn't need to point out the bleeding obvious, but ...

Yeah i'm looking at some fairly fundamental stuff for them right now that they're missing. Quite shocking given the size of the organisation. In many ways they're very good but in others, shockingly bad.

I've only just started so loads to be done

[Deep Thought]

RizzoTheRat said:

Deep Thought said:

ATG said:

Any idea how they ended up being "cameras off" and why does no one suggest they get switched back on?

No. It just seems to have evolved culturally. Its very odd. Goes right up to Director level and beyond.

Could be down to IT limitations, video takes more bandwidth. I've been in quite a few meetings and conferences where only the person talking has thier camera on. Also common for everyone not talking to be on mute to prevent background noise. We do have fairly rubbish conferencing software though (Skype for Business and Polycom)

They did have Skype and i think thats maybe were the problems manifested. They're on Teams now. Also everyones working from home and bandwidth may not be great for some.

Yes, totally get the going on mute. Common practice. Not seeing people even when its a 1 on 1 call is a bit disconcerting though when you're presenting back findings and proposed changes.

Its not insurmountable, it just feels like a rutt they've got in to.