Managers on HN, WFH as a Perk?

If you think good management is to make these distinctions between staff you will bleed staff.

People who work together as teams expect equity not equality sure, but converting WFH into a perk ignores social pressures on mothers, people with long commutes, you name it.

I've managed teams, I think my teams would have hated this and HR would have forbidden it.

you're going to be accused of using the wrong work control point to avoid pay rises.

If this is your SAAS model, I would not recommend it to my company basically.

> Basically, you can reward good perfomance with relaxed WFH policies

So, your less performant engineers would have to go to the office and work with other low performers? Do you think that will improve the situation for them? I bet that would rather make it worse. Also, your best engineers would be afraid of having "low performance seasons" because that would mean return to the office for them. I would definitely not like to work in such an environment.

It isn't a very good SaaS idea from my point of view, as it's more a feature than a product.

Maybe you could develop it on some HR platform as an extension.

And as if companies and teams will use it, that's a good question. I believe a good manager will hate it, so does a good company.

Good managers doesn't need to track employees nor tie this to performance, and instead want to do their own independent evaluation, related to impact of the worker in the company, projects & assignments.

The same applies to companies, sure, there'll be many companies willing to adopt such solution, but let's all admit that if they use it, it's a clear sign that the company sucks and can't properly manage itself.

So, I also question the need of that product, but anyways, as I've said before, there might be lots of clueless companies willing to use it. Try it?

Successfully working from home and getting things done is a binary thing, either the person is good at it or not. I don’t need a SaaS to track that since as a manager my role is to track performance anyhow. It’s obvious when someone isn’t doing their work.

WFH policy should probably be individual. If a company culture is everyone is remote and no office and someone can’t work like that then it’s not a good fit. Juniors and people starting out probably would benefit greatly from being in an office, provided there are other people there to collaborate with.

First, it's a horrendous management idea.

Second, it's a problem solved by a spreadsheet, not by a SAAS solution.

That would be based on a faulty kpi and result in more harm than good. Wfh isn’t a perk, it’s a right for an employee to choose if he/she likes, don’t mandate wfh just like you don’t mandate rto, how hard is that for employers to understand! “Oh, you are a good employee, go work from home!!”, “but who said that I want to?!”

Do you mandate your employees to buy a car and commute using it, or do you leave it to them to choose whatever they want? even if someone chooses to commute cycling for 1.5hrs, it isn’t your concern, wfh/rto should be ultimately an employee decision in most companies, unless the company is stating clearly before hiring, either fully remote or fully in office.

Terrible plan. Off the top of my head:

- If the company wants to do WFH successfully, it needs to be part of the org's DNA, otherwise it won't work. Making WFH conditional on performance is the complete wrong direction.

- Not having a firm WFH commitment from my employer removes most of the benefit of WFH (I'd still be geographically limited)

- This would create a huge divide between high performers and others which would not be good for morale (typical rewards like bonuses are not so visible)

Why does anyone need a SAAS product for this?

If you think you can make software that actually accurately measure performance like this then that's your business idea. I'm very skeptical that this is possible, but it's a great idea if you can pull it off.

The real end result is that you just PIP and fire the people who can't get above the acceptable line, you don't make them come into the office.

Aside from the many issues already pointed out, I think using office as punishment is a certain way to get everyone to hate it even more, and kill the mood in the office. There would really be no benefit for anyone to come to the office at all.

If you can figure out metrics that can't be gamed, you're wasting your talent on this and can apply it to solve much, much greater problems.

Much like communism, the idea is great in theory, but would degenerate into a nightmare once the rubber hits the road. The singular assumption underlying it is that performance reviews are objectively "fair" and personal (i.e., the rating is based on the individual rather than the team/group).

Speculating that if such a system was employed in many current tech companies, what you'd find is that some director/VP/higher-up would be a personal zealot for RTO because their commute is easy, and would gerrymander all performance reviews to ensure the vast majority of their reports wind up back in the office.