Sid Pandiya, a 22-year-old student at UCLA, has discovered that remote work "can get really isolating and boring.” His answer:
Pandiya came up with Kona, a software application aimed at making Slack more than a chatroom focused on tasks and
deadlines. Kona greets its users every day with a pop-up that asks a simple yet radical question: how are you feeling?
Employees select a red, yellow or green heart, and are encouraged to expand on their response with words that their teammates can see. Fellow workers can commiserate or offer one another help. Managers gain insight into the challenges that members of their team are facing. HR is able to review an anonymized, aggregated version of the data, ideally with the aim to provide solutions.
Well, that's it: the American workplace is now officially a hellscape. As if Slack weren't bad enough by itself, Kona now promises to turn it into a 24/7 bitch session about whether you really feel like working today. If your cat died or your roommate left a sink of dirty dishes for you to clean, your fellow workers can now spend the morning commiserating and trying to make you feel better.
I'm sure this will do wonders for everyone's mental health. Alternatively, of course, we could all dump Slack and make everyone come into the office in person, where work won't be isolating in the first place.
But nah. That's crazy talk.
Kevin, I think you're being overly reactionary here. I mean, I'm not a fan of this tool, but come on, the existence of this tool does not imply anything about remote work. You're being silly. 🙂
It feels like Kevin has had a pivot towards that sort of post lately, but perhaps it was always like this and I just didn't notice.
Snarky Kevin--usually associated with Evil Dex.
Though this is more of the "get off my lawn" genre.
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Or we could just use emails and phone calls when working remotely. Frankly I find chatting of any sort, whether online or in person, far more distracting than using slightly clunkier systems that add a bit of delay and require a bit of thought to use. Plus I can file and find things later with email. Chat just never stops and soon the important bits are long gone.
Yah, I and most of my coworkers are on 50% telework, and we don't use any special app for it. Email, phone, and text does the job.
I've been working remotely for going on 20 years and chat apps have been a major part of that the whole time. We went from MS "Link" (part of Outlook at the time) to Yahoo Instant Messenger (not kidding) to Hip Chat, and now Slack. For whatever reason I really prefer it to email. Yes things can get lost but the same is true for email. You need to put stuff into a task management system if you really expect to not forget about it.
And we have channels dedicated to goofy jokes, memes, or what have you. The video meeting/screen share feature works great. Honestly Slack was a godsend during the pandemic.
A hellscape office is one where cubicles are laid out in a grid, there's a water cooler where people gather to chat about last night's NBA game, a lunch room where someone always manages to use the microwave to reheat last night's salmon, and the boss hovers at the edge of your cubicle, looking over your shoulder while you perform the task he requested.
A chat application is just the passive means of letting people know you've quiet-quit your job months ago because you loathe the boss and his constant emails demanding progress updates because he doesn't understand how to use chat and wishes he could hover over your cubicle but can't because you WFH.
The recent "Ghosts" episode had one of their ghosts return from hell. His description, "Zoom meetings, Zoom meeting that should have been emails,..."
(or something like that)
Of course, going back to work does not end Zoom (or Slack or whatever). Indeed, they just seem to expand the talking in circles circle.
You can't want to solve climate change and be for working in the office. You can't be for better child out comes and be for working in the office. You can't be for solving the housing crises and be for working in the office. You can't be for lowering the cost of government and be for working in the office.
Yes! Imagine the wasted hours and the greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale. It is mind boggling that we put up with this horrendous waste of our lives and the planet for so long.
Working from home didn’t lower annual vehicle miles traveled on its own. Closing every possible destination did in 2020. Once everything was reopened again, VMT shot right back up to where it’s always been, even as some people still WFH more now than they did pre pandemic. It seems that when people WFH, instead of driving into the office, they drive to other places (Starbucks in the morning, Chipotle or whatever for lunch, etc) instead. And of course, they have more stuff delivered to the home than before, so other people are now driving miles from the airport or distribution center to offset the miles they themselves aren’t driving to the office every day. Point is: VMT is what drives air pollution, and WFH on its own (not accompanied by a closure of all possible destinations) doesn’t lead to a lowering of air pollution. It just redistributes it geographically within a metro area.
I have seen some of those reports that VMT just bounced back, but are they measuring specifically people who WFH? In my own case, the hours in the car dropped so much that I had to start running the car once a week or so just to top off the battery, and I would drive once around the block to get the rust off the brake rotors. There are so many other benefits to consider too, but wasting two hours every work day just to get back and forth to the office has to be a giant perk for many people. Happy employees are more productive employees!
Exactly. The ultimate problem with carbon emissions is that our modern life revolves around them. We like stuff. We like to travel. We like animal proteins.
During the pandemic and even during the financial crisis we dropped emissions, but the economic damage was catastrophic and, frankly, no one is willing to countenance that economic damage to get the job done. Thus, we will barely dent climate change.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-changes-in-co2-emissions-since-1900/
DIDNT YOU WORK FROM HOME FOR MOJO?
No need to shout, but indeed, I rather doubt Mother Jones, or Washington Monthly, ever had offices in Irvine, California.
So, yes, the rules for thee and not for me is strong with Kevin in this one.
Dude, "back to the office" when the covid death rate is 350/day? Are you *mad*? And yeah yeah yeah you're gonna tell me about how it's all old people dying. But my rejoinder is: *LONG COVID*. That hits anybody, and the death rate is also a *signal* of the prevalence of covid in the environment.
I mean, sure back to the office makes sense if EVERYBODY is SCRUPULOUSLY wearing a mask indoors [and there are massive ventilation interventions, etc]. But we all know that that's not gonna happen.
Shitbirds gonna shit in the swimming pool, claim it wasn't shit but a Twix bar.
Wow… that’s some serious paranoia PTSD you’ve got (assuming you’re serious). The world has moved on. It’s fine to see strangers. You’ll be fine. The vaccines worked!
Fuck off, troll.
How is saying vaccines worked trolling exactly? 100% of what Justin said is accurate. If you are still cowering in a corner afraid of getting COVID you are in a paranoid minority at this point.
This is what AI does for you. It will comfort you when you post a red heart. ❤️
Unlike most of the commenters here, I have a real job. We don’t use slack and I don’t engage in this banter with my remote colleagues. Lots of fake jobs in tech these days.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-meta-staff-do-fake-work-says-vc-keith-rabois-2023-3
Some jobs just can't be done from home: construction, manufacturing, retail, a list of others.
But many jobs can be done remotely, at least part of the time, and employers should allow employees to take full advantage. Commuting is detrimental in every single aspect.
Also: fake jobs exist in the office, too. I used to have one.
Fuck off, troll.
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I'm glad to see Eve has a companion now.
Hate going into the office and I have no idea what Slack is.
I'm not sure what Kevin has against working from home. Hey my hi tech company wants everyone in the office to further collaboration but that doesn't mean we don't use slack. And email. And webex (also w/ chat feature). and Zoom. And Google chat. And a soft phone through my laptop. And a company cell phone. It's ridiculous. Oh and we have two different project and problem tracking systems .... that generate emails and text messages.
Part of the problem is that my team is spread around the globe. I work with 1 person who works from home, one person in North Carolina and most of my team is in Europe. People are making a lot of money off these products and I'm not sure they all enhance productivity. Oh and there is one other fellow geezer on my team in my office in Massachusetts. We talk to each other over the cubicle wall.
Just like when Clippy came along the obvious response was yell at all the darn kids, their new fangled computers and pull out the typewriter!
There is no Clippy on my trusty ole typewriter!
What ever became of Clippy anyway? …
Don't know; I spent time exploring the various Word options, preferences, and settings until I figured how to turn the damned thing OFF ... and haven't been bothered since.
I really don't understand your disdain for remote work. For us *knowledge workers*, at least, it's happening, whether you like it or not. Ignore the Wall Street Journal anecdotes and look at real data, like weekday business district cell phone tracking, and - even more telling - commercial real estate leases.
As far as this stupid Slack app, come on, what are you, Fox News? You know better than to promote something like this.
What a weird post. Slack isn't great but it's better than email for exchanging information about projects in an organized way. Going in to an office can have real advantages -- it does for me -- but carries real costs that vary depending on one's situation, which is why I don't do it all the time. (And yes, in the covid era working in an office does carry real risks.)
There is no glib point to be made here.
Slack IS better than email for conversations and "hey, everyone should read this latest industry think piece". Honestly, I liked Teams even better for group chats and collecting project materials. Slack takes up an enormous amount of my day catching up on 20 some-odd channels that I monitor.
What is perplexing is that the very companies that make and sell these systems that make working from home possible are forcing people to go back to the office. Do they believe in their products or not? Apparently Google is even having to force employees to share desks because they've cut back on office space, while at the same time promoting Workspace that is designed from the ground up to make remote work possible.
Kevin, I've been reading you for over a decade now but this blog is turning into Andy Rooney territory. More and more posts about you bitching about some random thing on the internets that doesn't affect or involve you in any way.
I read you for valuable information and a perspective that is relatively more moderate than I lean. A perspective that I don't always agree with but I usually respect and think about.
That has been happening progressively less and less since you left MoJo. I don't care for it. You are becoming the angry old privileged white man yelling at cloud.
“Alternatively, of course, we could all dump Slack and make everyone come into the office in person, where work won't be isolating in the first place.”
Yeah. Feelings of isolation never happened in the pre pandemic era of warehousing workers in massive sterile cubicle farms. Gotta rewatch Office Space now to reminisce about how employees used to all get along well and collectively be more productive during the pre pandemic era, when everyone was forced to physically be together in an office building day after day after day.
Kevin has gone over the top here, and “Office Space” may have had points of resonance, but it wasn’t actually a documentary.
A foot doctor likes to tell the story about firing one of his surgical nurses because she called in sick when her cat died.
He 'likes' to tell that story? What is he, a sadist? No doctor I go to would have retained me as a patient after telling me that story.
Heh. My first thought when seeing the query on "how are you feeling" is that Management would use it to cull the workforce. We see that Sam Homebody registered as less than "green" for six days in the last month. Lay him off.
Thursday, Kevin commented on his "already cynical view of human intelligence." Today's post points to a cynical view of human emotions.
Methinks he doesn't have high regard for humans at all.
We are both intelligent creatures and emotional beings. The two go together and that is what makes human beings the special creatures we are. Nothing else on our planet or in the known universe is quite as fascinating.
To pretend we are just one thing or the other is a fundamental mistake. You can't separate the two, whether you're a blogger or an employer, and as long as companies are still hiring people, not robots, to do work, I fail to see the problem with one little app that treats people like people instead of machines.
While technology is good at solving many problems, it also creates a host of new ones, including problems in the workplace. Tech tends to alienate and dehumanize people. Maybe it's OK to have a little bit of tech nudge the pendulum back in the other direction.
BTW, when you find yourself saying stuff like "people are so dumb," most of the time it's an emotional issue, not an intelligence issue. But that's not a flaw in our design. Emotions are a fundamental human strength. The solution comes through understanding human emotions, not by dismissing them.
OK, boomer . . .
The serial app-tization of complex emotions at discrete points in time will never lead to bad decisions. Never. In fact, we should welcome the expansion of the mental health industry with a franchise in each of our pockets.
I remember confiding my deepest and personal feelings only to family and close friends. If a coworker evolves into that, then sure. But otherwise you get, I'm fine, what's on the schedule? And if I'm sick with grief, sick, or mentally exhausted - I'll call in. I guess there's a sliver of a percentage of workers that need a near constant evaluation...but near constant EAP intervention is asking for trouble.
You should have seen the "22-year-old student" part and not gone on to extrapolate that to the entire American workplace. Slack is fine. The actual hellscape in the current American workplace is Microsoft Teams, or more accurately it is your coworkers and bosses and subordinates using Teams. In other words, the hellscape is the same as it's always been: people are messy and working with them is difficult, which is why it's called work.
Also, there's nothing innate about remote work that is "really isolating and boring." You know what else can be really isolating and boring? Working in an office. On top of that, being isolated and bored is not necessarily a problem with one's work but one's relationship to work. If work is one's identity and social life, then sure - maybe remote work isn't for you and you should find a job that isn't remote. Work is work, work isn't life. In this country's legal regime, companies (read: capitalists/executives at companies) don't care about people who work for them (with very few exceptions) because they don't have to. It's transactional for them. If a person is choosing to make it more than transactional on their end, that's something they have to fix.
See Ed Zitron for more on that topic.
The most refreshing thing I heard somebody say in a recent executive prep cohort was something to the effect of, "I'm one of those people who works so I can do the things I actually like to do." Working because you like the work is all well and good, and there are definitely lots of people like that, but there are lots more people who mostly just want a job that doesn't suck and doesn't pay like shit so that they can spend their time doing not-work things.
I don't view Slack and WFH as directly related. Slack is a communications tool, and is useful whether you are in the office or remote once your organization reaches a certain size (maybe 25 people or more).
This Kona thing, IMHO, is just a widget you can use with Slack. There are a lot of useless plug-ins for Slack, plenty of room for one more.
I'd like to see a Chat GPT integration for Slack. Maybe one that you can enable for queries directed at you. /s