Item — HN Reader

When in office, I typically spend 70% of my time helping coworkers with their issues, since they feel like it's ok to just walk by and ask for help. When I work from home, my output skyrockets.

In essence, I'm a mentor, but have expectations to deliver high quality and reach tight deadlines.

I hate going to the office, since my commute is 45+45 minutes.

The moment I get forced to go to the office full time is the moment I take another offer where WFH is on the table.

Hire expencive, qualified workers who don't require hand-holding, and you won't have to care where they work from. Guaranteed.

1 comments

> Hire expencive, qualified workers

> who don't require hand-holding,

> and you won't have to care where

> they work from.

But employees only get to that level of capability through early, engaged mentoring. WFH destroys that personal connection. So then you have new, or inexperienced, employees trawling through SharePoint trying to find some nugget of information about how and why X integrates with Y. Hours and hours are lost, I've seen it first-hand.

Whereas 15 minutes of face-time doodling on a page with an experienced analyst will accelerate the newbie's capability out of proportion to the time spent.

The person above said they spend 70% of their time helping others. That's great if that is their actual job and they are only supposed to spend 30% of their time on other things. But that's probably not the case at most companies. Employees don't stay around long enough for most companies to be able to afford paying senior level people to spend most of their time training inexperienced people when there is a good chance that many of those inexperienced people will use that experience to get hired somewhere else.

What companies that want everyone to be in the office should be doing is providing actual offices to the senior workers. Then when a senior worker is working on something that they need to focus on they can close their door and people can be told when the door is closed do not interrupt unless it is urgent. When they are doing less demanding stuff they can have their door open and inexperienced workers can come and ask questions.

In your particular example optimal would be to teach the new or inexperienced employees how to update the information in SharePoint so when they do learn how and why X integrates with Y (whether by spending hours digging around to find it or by getting someone more experienced to explain it to them) they can then make it so the next new or inexperienced employee will be able to find that on their own.

Someone more experienced can review their changes to make sure they are OK, but that doesn't have to be done right away so can be done at a time when the more experienced person does not have some higher priority senior level work they need to be concentrating on.