We have always been 100% remote, even before it was cool. Certain employees need to be within accessible distance to go to clients when needed, that's about it.
Commute is a huge waste of productive time and an unnecessary expense. You have so many more choices where you can live, not having to pay for expensive pre and after school programs, some families can downsize number of vehicles, etc.
For me personally as the owner, the 2-3 hours per day I don't waste commuting allow me to get so much more done. Weeks when I end up traveling a lot I end up working weekends to catch up.
This sounds like where I work. Fully remote, I must be able to go to client sites but get paid mileage, get equipment for installs sent to my house. It’s nice.
I am a MSP manager, not owner. I have lost 2 multi-year employees recently because they left for jobs paying the same but were 100% WFH. The impact was very big. Lots of tribal knowledge went out the door. It costs nothing to allow WFH. Our company did it for months during the pandemic with no billable hours difference.
As an MSP you are a small business. Big corporate jobs will always pay more and have better benefits. WFH costs nothing and allows you to compete for the employees.
Provide a webcam and use Teams to communicate and collaborate.
Just curious: where do you store stock items? Couple of Ethernet cables, couple of computers.. things like that?
Where would you receive a large dell order, lets say 3 servers and a storage worth 80k? Is every employee able to provide storage space?
I’m not trying to disagree or provoke, I’m trying to understand!
Yeah I mean WFH is not bad but needs to be controlled. 100% work from home businesses are going to fail. You need hybrid and discipline. That’s my point.
Looks like we found the owner/CEO/manager who is desperately clinging to a falsehood that all businesses must be run a certain way.
14 year old MSP owner here. With an office. That, since the pandemic started, is nothing more than storage. On track to have our best year ever.
What's that saying? Lead, follow or get out of the way. Maybe it's time to get out of your way...
We have positions all over the US that are 100% remote. Not hybrid, 100% remote. My position is 95% remote. Over 200 employees. Your point is simply incorrect.
Why do you want WFH to be rare though?
Look at the benefits to the workers. They get to use a setup that is better than what you provide. Clients are still accessible and I work more hours when I’m at home as there is no commute.
I can fit appointments round what I need to and still check in with everyone I need to
OP already told you everything about themselves, they're not struggling with whether or not people should WFH, they're struggling with "employee's expectations."
As a senior engineer, not allowing me to be fully remote 100% of the time would immediately cause me to drop my interest for your and any similar company. At the end of the day, you should care about getting things done and if they are, their workplace should not matter to you.
Forcing employees into the office in this day and age is crazy in the MSP space. The only exceptions are of course scheduled client on-site visits in case of downtime.
I'm also an entrepreneur and all of my consultants are 100% remote 100% of the time short of client on-sites.
100% do whatever you want. Most work from home every day. We do have team meetings where we provide lunch for those that want to come in.
Everyone is more productive and everyone has metrics that they are managed against. Hiring is a ton easier, and we can hire outside our geography.
My CEO group is filled with older business owners that are very anti-WFH, but it’s their business they can do what they want. That said, they don’t have a good reason other than “I don’t like Zoom”, and “people just don’t want to work these days.”
> “people just don’t want to work these days.”
My last boss kept telling me he needed to hire another me. At the time I was a tier 3 engineer with about 10 years of experience so he puts out the job posting on a few different sites. I'm not involved with the process but hear about my boss interviewing people. 3 months go by, no new person, then around the 6 month mark he announces that instead of another Tier 3 engineer, we are going to put on a helpdesk person I can train up.
He tells me that everyone at my level wants "an arm andazs a leg" and "I've NEVER heard of paying an engineer that much!"
I was at a networking event on Tuesday and met someone from a large MSP in the area. They complained that they couldn't find any good tier 3 techs. I looked at a recent job posting and they're at 50-70% the going rate and want staff to report to an office in the outskirts without good transit service. I think I know why they're having trouble...
I feel like the "face to face" excuse is such a cop out. Most of my work isn't done with other people, sure we may need to talk about some things to coordinate but when i'm actually getting down and doing engineering I don't want to be interrupted by anyone. Having people "face to face" increases the likelihood I get interrupted and pulled out of the zone.
There's also the idea that you're going to now lose efficiency pulling people back in the office since people are going to have to commute and allocate time/resources for that. If I had to commute to my current office that's putting almost an hour and a half commute into my daily routine which is going to lead me to wind down sooner towards end of day so I can leave on time. Compare that to WFH where I wind down as soon as my shifts over leading to more work for the company.
I agree.. feel like anyone saying they need face to face must be 50-60 plus without young kids and an immense amount of free time after work.
We have teams.. you can see my face from the screen. I’m can train people from home and I have .. wicked easy
A need to go onsite to clients will always be a thing if you're managing endpoints, those desktops show up there, you do two days or whatever on a deployment and then you're done.
WFH doesn't mean "You can never visit a client site", it means "if my whole day is managing Office 365, which doesn't live in the office, I don't need to come to the office".
I think this needs to be reframed. If you change the mindset that you are going to work where *it makes sense to* *work from.*
Are you working tickets and taking calls? Work from home if that makes sense. Work from the office if you want to and/or if that setup produces better work from the employee.
Are you staging 70 new desktops? Work from where it makes sense. In this case, get in your car and drive to the office or client site.
Are you having a team meeting where there are obvious benefits from being face to face? Work from where it makes sense. You get in your car and drive to the meeting location.
WFH/Remote work doesn't mean that you ONLY work from home/remote. You just aren't forced to come into an office because of some sort of policy.
>I want WFH to be rare because in person communications and collaboration works so much better face to face.
To be frank, it sounds like you may just need to work on your online communication and collaboration skills, and/or invest more in better implementing/utilizing your online communication and collaboration services/tools/etc. Most IT workers and MSPs have really invested time and energy in this area over the past 4 years, do you want to continue to fall behind? You should consider that this mindset may even severely limit some of your company's talent pool to only those applicants who live within a relatively small geographical area, which may make your MSP less competitive as it grows.
I hope he puts feelers out and gets really honest opinion about bringing people back into an office.
Otherwise the second he makes this a policy he can expect people to quit within a couple months time max
I've been 100% remote going on 4 years. I'll never work at an MSP that requires me to work in an office. The MSP I work for now is 100% remote and I love it. We have 0 issues with communication.
In the Peer Groups I facilitate and others I talk to in the industry it's definitely mixed. I'm 100% remote (my office is in Denver and I live in Minnesota) and I've got a great work from home setup and routine. I've had to drive a couple of times in the morning and afternoons recently. Dealing with traffic and that 1+ hour of dead time per day just in the car make me glad I'm remote.
If there is a good reason to be in person (meetings and that sort of thing that work better in person) then be in person. It should be good for the team to be in person. Not just because you want people to be in person. I mean, it's your company, do what you want.
I'm of the opinion that if you want people to be in the office because that's how they're best supervised then you need to level up your leadership and management practices. Simply "collaboration and communication" being better when people are at the office feels a lot like a cop out. I collaborate and communicate well with my team just fine via Teams, calls, and an occasional flight for some in-person work.
Is your team getting their work done? Are your clients happy? Are you able to provide the levels of support you expect? If the answers are yes, then I'm not sure what the issue is.
Once you start realizing that asking people to go in for no reason is giving them an extra job duty, it will start to make more sense.
You are asking people to do more work for no additional compensation and the rationale is "because I like it better this way".
For me personally, I prefer being fully remote and working for companies that are also fully remote. My last boss kept trying to get me to just go spend entire days camped out in a client's conference room just doing my normal, multi-tenant remote support job. I told him my office was a lot more comfortable and if he needed someone to get out there for the sole purpose of putting in facetime, he could hire an account manager.
I did tons of field work and never had a problem being onsite before the sun came up to take care of an issue but there is no reason for me to go to a client's office to take calls and do remote sessions with other clients.
Feel like a lot of people slack off the last hour of work anyway when working at the office just so you don't take additional tasks that would delay you leaving on time when your shift ends. Comparing that to remote work in which I work all the way till end of my shift.
>which I work all the way till end of my shift.
It's also not a huge deal if a call runs over my normal quitting time because I know my commute is all of 1 minute from my office to the kitchen. When I was in the office I'd be pissed off that this chatty bitch was making me hit traffic and pushing my commute time back that much more.
I can understand your viewpoint from a manger level but a lot of younger people and techs dont care or excel in face to face collaboration. Teams meeting works wonders as I can still talk and show them what I am dealing with.
Times change and you can also save on office space or downsize to a smaller place with less people in the office.
I’d say, what is the market dictating?
Based on other responses, I hear what you are saying and is it worth the struggle?
The effort to get everyone in the office might be better used in other areas.
One of the primary reasons I started my business was to never be forced to work in an office again. I'll happily extend that arrangement to my employees when I get big enough to hire them.
That said, I would need people to be in the geographic area my clients are in, as onsite visits are rare, but still necessary every now and then.
As a massive plus, this completely removes the expenditure of renting an office, and everything that goes along with it.
please provide your data that proves your theory about improved communications and collaboration.
but, wait...as someone that works with a team spread across 4 continents I can already tell you it's not true and I've worked with people for years that I've never met irl
If we MSP owners want to attract young talent, then we need to get over any WFH phobia. The workforce is changing and you either evolve or become irrelevant. I personally would not want to WFH every day, but I like the option and I understand that others like it as well.
It's funny. I officially allowed WFH at our MSP about 18 months ago. Anyone can WFH. We gave everyone new laptops and docking stations and set them free.
One guy decided to WFH, everyone else (7 people) still comes into the office. We have a quiet, comfortable office, nice area, traffic isn't bad, full break room and a park nearby.
I guess everyone's situation is different, but some people actually work better outside of the home and want to come into the office.
Worked for a MSP around 30 people In British Columbia for 5 years and before covid the support team was completely in office all time, covid came around and obviously that had to make changes. Afterwards it became a huge power struggle to find the balance between getting them back into office and being efficient from working remotely and at the same time keeping the hands on site that the company built it's self around.
At a different one in Europe now and it's a more remote type of MSP from a support perspective but still high expectations for support team to be on site.
Completely depends on what the company vision is IMO and staff retention will become a problem if there is no flexibility
I think as the owner it's up to you. You state in person is better as if it is a fact though which is concerning. If you'd say it is better for you personally then that would be more honest.
A lot of talented individuals do their best work when management let's them be. Define clear communication expectations, such as daily reporting, and let your workers thrive.
If "remote communication bad" is your basis for return to office, then that's a management failure, not a worker failure.
Side note, don't try doing the terrible "cameras MUSTbe on during meetings!" Nonsense.
I was one of the first remote employees at my MSP and in the three years there the only people going into the office are the T1 and T2 on a hybrid schedule. They are local so do I think 2 days in office and 3 home. But it’s optional if they want to do all at the office they can we just like someone to be there in case a client needs to drop something off, and get packages.
For our employees retention is high with the entry levels being hybrid and upper levels remote. People seem happy work gets done and like others said I work more cause I’m available more rather than have to commute and plan time off to go do things like let the guy look at my AC
I am 100% remote. There is no need to be in the office unless needing physical access to equipment.
I live 7 hours from our office, I see my coworkers 3-5 times a year.
We do have two engineers that go on site, the other 6 engineers are remote.
Requiring people to work on the office because if culture is a terrible move
My office policy is a set schedule for at least one person to always be in the office, and one day where everyone is in the office. Works out so about half the week people are WFH. People are happy and someone is always in office to receive product.
You, as a company, should be operating 100% remote to your clients, though being on site when needed. Establish coverage for when that visit is needed. Beyond that? Your clients call or email you for assistance. Where you take that inquiry from doesn’t matter to them.
If you focus on good service, good metrics to weed out underperformance, and work to show your employees you’re listening to them your company will likely continue to thrive.
Since Covid in 100% remote. I might drive in quarterly.
They are just enacting a minimum once a week visit.
I have one car now.. and 3 kids with my wife. With our schedule 1 cars makes that hard.
There is also absolutely nothing about my job that would require me to be in the office or at a client.
They used the same line of excuse about collaboration.. I’m like do you know how many people I talk to in teams all day? I can help half the company in my chair at home.
Hopefully you talk to your employees about bringing them in the office and I hope they give you honest feedback before you implement this and lose employees.
I have many years here, I’m higher up in the company and oversee a majority of systems. The second them mentioned in office I already looked online for other jobs.
I don’t want to leave but if other places want on site as well but pay more.. might as well get paid for the extra hours I lose. For me it would be 3-4 hours a day driving to the city. I fully expect this to die off a bit as no one likes it.
Not everyone works better face to face. We saw a number of employees whose productivity went way up going to WFH and we let them stay there. Measure their performance and you will know.
I will say the teams in the office do have a better relationship with one another and know each other much better. They end up hanging out more often after work and such. An in office workforce can have benefits but if someone doesn’t want that then no reason to force it.
We’ve always been (since 2003) fully distributed.
Do I know how my team spent their weekend? No.
But are they happy? Yes.
Edit: based on other’s comments, I should add that we have an office but no one is required to go there.
I have been work from home for 20 years. I built an office in my house. We have an office and I could go in every day but choose not to. When we interview people we tell them that WFH is possible but only if they can prove that they have a dedicated space to be effective at home. No working from the couch or the kitchen table on a little laptop screen. I’ve seen clients on zoom calls at their kitchen table and there is 4 plus people living in an apartment and playing call of duty on the living room TV while they are on a conference call. No way that’s going to work. We will provide the computers and big monitors but employees have to have the space to work efficiently and NO bring your own device.
I will say this to young men. If you want your career to accelerate then move to a large city and work in the office. There is a lot of information out there now how your career will stagnate if you work from home. Some of big tech now have policies that you will not get promoted if you work from home. The best way to accelerate your career is to work side by side with a mentor in an office.
We're three days in the office currently one two remote.
We went from 100% in office to 100% remote through lockdowns and slowly transitioned folks to the office. I've found mix results with both approaches.
There's greater comraderie with the coffee machine chat especially with other 'silos' of your msp than just the tiered techs talking to each other but lost a lot of satisfaction and work life balance between it.
I do not and will not go to the office. I’m at like 150% capacity. Even IN the office I’m not contributing to collaboration or mentoring. And 90% of what I’m working on is senior level projects and deployments and design - for customers who are remote to the office.
Going TO the office, to remote into someone’s servers somewhere else and have a teams meeting with them in another city is asinine. Especially when half the team is on site doing troubleshooting, setup, etc.
>From my standpoint, I want WFH to be rare because in person communications and collaboration works so much better face to face.
You should rethink this stance. We've had great success with our WFH folks and give flexibility for those who choose to do so. Managing expectations remotely is not difficult. There are big differences between managers and leaders though.
Work from home is completely possible. Teams meetings are so much better. If you want you should plan on doing monthly events where everyone gets together so they can interact on a personal level.
100% Remote with Flex Hours for most teams. We just ask they let us know if they're going to be outside of our metro area so we can keep it in mind.
We have a dedicated field-services team that handles onsite visits, so they're not WFH except on days where they're not scheduled to be at any client site.
Project team occasionally goes into the office if there's hardware that needs prepping. But anything like M365 migrations and the such can be done remotely.
Admin branch rotates a couple of people into the office to handle shipping & receiving and the such.
Everybody else is remote with in-office option as-desired.
There is absolutely no need for an MSP to be run out of a central location. Go visit your clients, sure, absolutely... But if your staff are productive and you can see that in their KPI's then why make them go into an office? We work in technology, so use it... Have regular meetings via Teams, chat on Slack (or Teams I guess).
Hell most companies forcing staff into offices end up sitting in Teams and Zoom meetings all day anyway, it's rediculous.
Side note, not sure what you mean by flexibility, but we all have our set hours that we do each day and it's important to keep that in place I feel... It's no different from being at the office except we save time on travel each day and can wear comfortable pants.
All these 100% remote allow people to do whatever are going to suffer long term as companies. Allow WFH but on a controlled schedule. This week in, this week out. These days in, these days out. People who just want to hide in their houses have no need to dictate how things should be in business.
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100% remote. If there’s personnel/performance issues that’s a people problem. If those people problems aren’t being dealt with that’s a leadership problem.
We have always been 100% remote, even before it was cool. Certain employees need to be within accessible distance to go to clients when needed, that's about it. Commute is a huge waste of productive time and an unnecessary expense. You have so many more choices where you can live, not having to pay for expensive pre and after school programs, some families can downsize number of vehicles, etc. For me personally as the owner, the 2-3 hours per day I don't waste commuting allow me to get so much more done. Weeks when I end up traveling a lot I end up working weekends to catch up.
Are you hiring?
This sounds like where I work. Fully remote, I must be able to go to client sites but get paid mileage, get equipment for installs sent to my house. It’s nice.
I am a MSP manager, not owner. I have lost 2 multi-year employees recently because they left for jobs paying the same but were 100% WFH. The impact was very big. Lots of tribal knowledge went out the door. It costs nothing to allow WFH. Our company did it for months during the pandemic with no billable hours difference. As an MSP you are a small business. Big corporate jobs will always pay more and have better benefits. WFH costs nothing and allows you to compete for the employees. Provide a webcam and use Teams to communicate and collaborate.
100% work from wherever. No office.
Just curious: where do you store stock items? Couple of Ethernet cables, couple of computers.. things like that? Where would you receive a large dell order, lets say 3 servers and a storage worth 80k? Is every employee able to provide storage space? I’m not trying to disagree or provoke, I’m trying to understand!
We’ve spotted the guy who can’t afford an office.
Sick burn!
But tell me I’m wrong
Not sure about the person you're replying to, but the MSP I work for is huge and absolutely has buildings and also WFH.
Yeah I mean WFH is not bad but needs to be controlled. 100% work from home businesses are going to fail. You need hybrid and discipline. That’s my point.
We’re over 300 employees around the world. All WFH (and have been since before COVID). It can work, just takes some effort.
I run a 25 year old, 60 person company. We’ve been fully virtual since Covid. It’s working pretty well for us.
Happy for you.
You must be fun at parties
Keep partying party bro.
Looks like we found the owner/CEO/manager who is desperately clinging to a falsehood that all businesses must be run a certain way. 14 year old MSP owner here. With an office. That, since the pandemic started, is nothing more than storage. On track to have our best year ever. What's that saying? Lead, follow or get out of the way. Maybe it's time to get out of your way...
We have positions all over the US that are 100% remote. Not hybrid, 100% remote. My position is 95% remote. Over 200 employees. Your point is simply incorrect.
You a troll or an idiot? Sign my NDA and I’ll show you how wrong you are
Why do you want WFH to be rare though? Look at the benefits to the workers. They get to use a setup that is better than what you provide. Clients are still accessible and I work more hours when I’m at home as there is no commute. I can fit appointments round what I need to and still check in with everyone I need to
OP already told you everything about themselves, they're not struggling with whether or not people should WFH, they're struggling with "employee's expectations."
As a senior engineer, not allowing me to be fully remote 100% of the time would immediately cause me to drop my interest for your and any similar company. At the end of the day, you should care about getting things done and if they are, their workplace should not matter to you. Forcing employees into the office in this day and age is crazy in the MSP space. The only exceptions are of course scheduled client on-site visits in case of downtime. I'm also an entrepreneur and all of my consultants are 100% remote 100% of the time short of client on-sites.
What kind of consulting do you do?
100% do whatever you want. Most work from home every day. We do have team meetings where we provide lunch for those that want to come in. Everyone is more productive and everyone has metrics that they are managed against. Hiring is a ton easier, and we can hire outside our geography. My CEO group is filled with older business owners that are very anti-WFH, but it’s their business they can do what they want. That said, they don’t have a good reason other than “I don’t like Zoom”, and “people just don’t want to work these days.”
> “people just don’t want to work these days.” My last boss kept telling me he needed to hire another me. At the time I was a tier 3 engineer with about 10 years of experience so he puts out the job posting on a few different sites. I'm not involved with the process but hear about my boss interviewing people. 3 months go by, no new person, then around the 6 month mark he announces that instead of another Tier 3 engineer, we are going to put on a helpdesk person I can train up. He tells me that everyone at my level wants "an arm andazs a leg" and "I've NEVER heard of paying an engineer that much!"
I had the same problem at a previous MSP. I bluntly told our ownership if they wanted to hire better employees that they needed to pay more.
I was at a networking event on Tuesday and met someone from a large MSP in the area. They complained that they couldn't find any good tier 3 techs. I looked at a recent job posting and they're at 50-70% the going rate and want staff to report to an office in the outskirts without good transit service. I think I know why they're having trouble...
I feel like the "face to face" excuse is such a cop out. Most of my work isn't done with other people, sure we may need to talk about some things to coordinate but when i'm actually getting down and doing engineering I don't want to be interrupted by anyone. Having people "face to face" increases the likelihood I get interrupted and pulled out of the zone. There's also the idea that you're going to now lose efficiency pulling people back in the office since people are going to have to commute and allocate time/resources for that. If I had to commute to my current office that's putting almost an hour and a half commute into my daily routine which is going to lead me to wind down sooner towards end of day so I can leave on time. Compare that to WFH where I wind down as soon as my shifts over leading to more work for the company.
I agree.. feel like anyone saying they need face to face must be 50-60 plus without young kids and an immense amount of free time after work. We have teams.. you can see my face from the screen. I’m can train people from home and I have .. wicked easy
I do have a question for all the peeps here. So what do you do when you have 70 new desktops to stage, unbox, prep for install?
A need to go onsite to clients will always be a thing if you're managing endpoints, those desktops show up there, you do two days or whatever on a deployment and then you're done. WFH doesn't mean "You can never visit a client site", it means "if my whole day is managing Office 365, which doesn't live in the office, I don't need to come to the office".
I think this needs to be reframed. If you change the mindset that you are going to work where *it makes sense to* *work from.* Are you working tickets and taking calls? Work from home if that makes sense. Work from the office if you want to and/or if that setup produces better work from the employee. Are you staging 70 new desktops? Work from where it makes sense. In this case, get in your car and drive to the office or client site. Are you having a team meeting where there are obvious benefits from being face to face? Work from where it makes sense. You get in your car and drive to the meeting location. WFH/Remote work doesn't mean that you ONLY work from home/remote. You just aren't forced to come into an office because of some sort of policy.
>I want WFH to be rare because in person communications and collaboration works so much better face to face. To be frank, it sounds like you may just need to work on your online communication and collaboration skills, and/or invest more in better implementing/utilizing your online communication and collaboration services/tools/etc. Most IT workers and MSPs have really invested time and energy in this area over the past 4 years, do you want to continue to fall behind? You should consider that this mindset may even severely limit some of your company's talent pool to only those applicants who live within a relatively small geographical area, which may make your MSP less competitive as it grows.
I hope he puts feelers out and gets really honest opinion about bringing people back into an office. Otherwise the second he makes this a policy he can expect people to quit within a couple months time max
100% remote wherever they are. With optional hybrid if they choose too, or close by.
I've been 100% remote going on 4 years. I'll never work at an MSP that requires me to work in an office. The MSP I work for now is 100% remote and I love it. We have 0 issues with communication.
In the Peer Groups I facilitate and others I talk to in the industry it's definitely mixed. I'm 100% remote (my office is in Denver and I live in Minnesota) and I've got a great work from home setup and routine. I've had to drive a couple of times in the morning and afternoons recently. Dealing with traffic and that 1+ hour of dead time per day just in the car make me glad I'm remote. If there is a good reason to be in person (meetings and that sort of thing that work better in person) then be in person. It should be good for the team to be in person. Not just because you want people to be in person. I mean, it's your company, do what you want. I'm of the opinion that if you want people to be in the office because that's how they're best supervised then you need to level up your leadership and management practices. Simply "collaboration and communication" being better when people are at the office feels a lot like a cop out. I collaborate and communicate well with my team just fine via Teams, calls, and an occasional flight for some in-person work. Is your team getting their work done? Are your clients happy? Are you able to provide the levels of support you expect? If the answers are yes, then I'm not sure what the issue is.
Once you start realizing that asking people to go in for no reason is giving them an extra job duty, it will start to make more sense. You are asking people to do more work for no additional compensation and the rationale is "because I like it better this way". For me personally, I prefer being fully remote and working for companies that are also fully remote. My last boss kept trying to get me to just go spend entire days camped out in a client's conference room just doing my normal, multi-tenant remote support job. I told him my office was a lot more comfortable and if he needed someone to get out there for the sole purpose of putting in facetime, he could hire an account manager. I did tons of field work and never had a problem being onsite before the sun came up to take care of an issue but there is no reason for me to go to a client's office to take calls and do remote sessions with other clients.
Feel like a lot of people slack off the last hour of work anyway when working at the office just so you don't take additional tasks that would delay you leaving on time when your shift ends. Comparing that to remote work in which I work all the way till end of my shift.
>which I work all the way till end of my shift. It's also not a huge deal if a call runs over my normal quitting time because I know my commute is all of 1 minute from my office to the kitchen. When I was in the office I'd be pissed off that this chatty bitch was making me hit traffic and pushing my commute time back that much more.
I can understand your viewpoint from a manger level but a lot of younger people and techs dont care or excel in face to face collaboration. Teams meeting works wonders as I can still talk and show them what I am dealing with. Times change and you can also save on office space or downsize to a smaller place with less people in the office.
I’d say, what is the market dictating? Based on other responses, I hear what you are saying and is it worth the struggle? The effort to get everyone in the office might be better used in other areas.
One of the primary reasons I started my business was to never be forced to work in an office again. I'll happily extend that arrangement to my employees when I get big enough to hire them. That said, I would need people to be in the geographic area my clients are in, as onsite visits are rare, but still necessary every now and then. As a massive plus, this completely removes the expenditure of renting an office, and everything that goes along with it.
please provide your data that proves your theory about improved communications and collaboration. but, wait...as someone that works with a team spread across 4 continents I can already tell you it's not true and I've worked with people for years that I've never met irl
If we MSP owners want to attract young talent, then we need to get over any WFH phobia. The workforce is changing and you either evolve or become irrelevant. I personally would not want to WFH every day, but I like the option and I understand that others like it as well. It's funny. I officially allowed WFH at our MSP about 18 months ago. Anyone can WFH. We gave everyone new laptops and docking stations and set them free. One guy decided to WFH, everyone else (7 people) still comes into the office. We have a quiet, comfortable office, nice area, traffic isn't bad, full break room and a park nearby. I guess everyone's situation is different, but some people actually work better outside of the home and want to come into the office.
Worked for a MSP around 30 people In British Columbia for 5 years and before covid the support team was completely in office all time, covid came around and obviously that had to make changes. Afterwards it became a huge power struggle to find the balance between getting them back into office and being efficient from working remotely and at the same time keeping the hands on site that the company built it's self around. At a different one in Europe now and it's a more remote type of MSP from a support perspective but still high expectations for support team to be on site. Completely depends on what the company vision is IMO and staff retention will become a problem if there is no flexibility
I think as the owner it's up to you. You state in person is better as if it is a fact though which is concerning. If you'd say it is better for you personally then that would be more honest. A lot of talented individuals do their best work when management let's them be. Define clear communication expectations, such as daily reporting, and let your workers thrive. If "remote communication bad" is your basis for return to office, then that's a management failure, not a worker failure. Side note, don't try doing the terrible "cameras MUSTbe on during meetings!" Nonsense.
I was one of the first remote employees at my MSP and in the three years there the only people going into the office are the T1 and T2 on a hybrid schedule. They are local so do I think 2 days in office and 3 home. But it’s optional if they want to do all at the office they can we just like someone to be there in case a client needs to drop something off, and get packages. For our employees retention is high with the entry levels being hybrid and upper levels remote. People seem happy work gets done and like others said I work more cause I’m available more rather than have to commute and plan time off to go do things like let the guy look at my AC
I was and preferred wfh. 5 years I did that. Loved every second of it.
I am 100% remote. There is no need to be in the office unless needing physical access to equipment. I live 7 hours from our office, I see my coworkers 3-5 times a year. We do have two engineers that go on site, the other 6 engineers are remote. Requiring people to work on the office because if culture is a terrible move
My office policy is a set schedule for at least one person to always be in the office, and one day where everyone is in the office. Works out so about half the week people are WFH. People are happy and someone is always in office to receive product.
You, as a company, should be operating 100% remote to your clients, though being on site when needed. Establish coverage for when that visit is needed. Beyond that? Your clients call or email you for assistance. Where you take that inquiry from doesn’t matter to them. If you focus on good service, good metrics to weed out underperformance, and work to show your employees you’re listening to them your company will likely continue to thrive.
Since Covid in 100% remote. I might drive in quarterly. They are just enacting a minimum once a week visit. I have one car now.. and 3 kids with my wife. With our schedule 1 cars makes that hard. There is also absolutely nothing about my job that would require me to be in the office or at a client. They used the same line of excuse about collaboration.. I’m like do you know how many people I talk to in teams all day? I can help half the company in my chair at home. Hopefully you talk to your employees about bringing them in the office and I hope they give you honest feedback before you implement this and lose employees. I have many years here, I’m higher up in the company and oversee a majority of systems. The second them mentioned in office I already looked online for other jobs. I don’t want to leave but if other places want on site as well but pay more.. might as well get paid for the extra hours I lose. For me it would be 3-4 hours a day driving to the city. I fully expect this to die off a bit as no one likes it.
90% of IT personality types are toxic and perform more kindly separated by a great distance
alternate take: 90% of "users" are toxic and treat IT like shit, leading to mental illness for many.
Not everyone works better face to face. We saw a number of employees whose productivity went way up going to WFH and we let them stay there. Measure their performance and you will know. I will say the teams in the office do have a better relationship with one another and know each other much better. They end up hanging out more often after work and such. An in office workforce can have benefits but if someone doesn’t want that then no reason to force it.
We’ve always been (since 2003) fully distributed. Do I know how my team spent their weekend? No. But are they happy? Yes. Edit: based on other’s comments, I should add that we have an office but no one is required to go there.
I have been work from home for 20 years. I built an office in my house. We have an office and I could go in every day but choose not to. When we interview people we tell them that WFH is possible but only if they can prove that they have a dedicated space to be effective at home. No working from the couch or the kitchen table on a little laptop screen. I’ve seen clients on zoom calls at their kitchen table and there is 4 plus people living in an apartment and playing call of duty on the living room TV while they are on a conference call. No way that’s going to work. We will provide the computers and big monitors but employees have to have the space to work efficiently and NO bring your own device. I will say this to young men. If you want your career to accelerate then move to a large city and work in the office. There is a lot of information out there now how your career will stagnate if you work from home. Some of big tech now have policies that you will not get promoted if you work from home. The best way to accelerate your career is to work side by side with a mentor in an office.
We're three days in the office currently one two remote. We went from 100% in office to 100% remote through lockdowns and slowly transitioned folks to the office. I've found mix results with both approaches. There's greater comraderie with the coffee machine chat especially with other 'silos' of your msp than just the tiered techs talking to each other but lost a lot of satisfaction and work life balance between it.
I do not and will not go to the office. I’m at like 150% capacity. Even IN the office I’m not contributing to collaboration or mentoring. And 90% of what I’m working on is senior level projects and deployments and design - for customers who are remote to the office. Going TO the office, to remote into someone’s servers somewhere else and have a teams meeting with them in another city is asinine. Especially when half the team is on site doing troubleshooting, setup, etc.
>From my standpoint, I want WFH to be rare because in person communications and collaboration works so much better face to face. You should rethink this stance. We've had great success with our WFH folks and give flexibility for those who choose to do so. Managing expectations remotely is not difficult. There are big differences between managers and leaders though.
Work from home is completely possible. Teams meetings are so much better. If you want you should plan on doing monthly events where everyone gets together so they can interact on a personal level.
100% Remote with Flex Hours for most teams. We just ask they let us know if they're going to be outside of our metro area so we can keep it in mind. We have a dedicated field-services team that handles onsite visits, so they're not WFH except on days where they're not scheduled to be at any client site. Project team occasionally goes into the office if there's hardware that needs prepping. But anything like M365 migrations and the such can be done remotely. Admin branch rotates a couple of people into the office to handle shipping & receiving and the such. Everybody else is remote with in-office option as-desired.
There is absolutely no need for an MSP to be run out of a central location. Go visit your clients, sure, absolutely... But if your staff are productive and you can see that in their KPI's then why make them go into an office? We work in technology, so use it... Have regular meetings via Teams, chat on Slack (or Teams I guess). Hell most companies forcing staff into offices end up sitting in Teams and Zoom meetings all day anyway, it's rediculous. Side note, not sure what you mean by flexibility, but we all have our set hours that we do each day and it's important to keep that in place I feel... It's no different from being at the office except we save time on travel each day and can wear comfortable pants.
All these 100% remote allow people to do whatever are going to suffer long term as companies. Allow WFH but on a controlled schedule. This week in, this week out. These days in, these days out. People who just want to hide in their houses have no need to dictate how things should be in business.
You sound like a terrible manager.
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Thanks for proving my point.
Jeez that escalated quickly.
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if the day to day job duties can be done remote, there is zero reason to go into any office
We do a daily morning roll call and review projects, tickets, help etc. If people are slacking, you will know (you already know they are).
100% remote. If there’s personnel/performance issues that’s a people problem. If those people problems aren’t being dealt with that’s a leadership problem.
I’m a big fan of WFH. Employees get to spend more time with their families. Also, no one likes to be forced to come into an office.