Teleworking At NASA: Benefits Or Problems?
Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All, Wall Street Journal
“Four months ago, employees at many U.S. companies went home and did something incredible: They got their work done, seemingly without missing a beat. Executives were amazed at how well their workers performed remotely, even while juggling child care and the distractions of home. Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc., among others, quickly said they would embrace remote work long term. Some companies even vowed to give up their physical office spaces entirely. Now, as the work-from-home experiment stretches on, some cracks are starting to emerge. Projects take longer. Training is tougher. Hiring and integrating new employees, more complicated. Some employers say their workers appear less connected and bosses fear that younger professionals aren’t developing at the same rate as they would in offices, sitting next to colleagues and absorbing how they do their jobs.”
Keith’s note: I have teleworked from home for more than 24 years. I have teleworked for a month at a time from Everest Base Camp at 17,600 feet and Devon Island 800 miles from the north pole. If I have comms and my fingers are not frozen, then I can work. Astronauts telework from the ISS. Its not impossible – but management and personnel have to adjust – and workflow needs to be capable of being performed remotely.
The one positive thing I expect (hope) to see NASA embrace as it endures and then emerges from this pandemic is the ability to conduct meaningful work regardless of one’s physical location. Not everything is amenable to teleworking – but a lot of it is – much more than previously anticipated. Part of making teleworking happen is to redouble one’s focus on collaboration. But there is an equal need to function independently and self-motivate. Some people will adapt and thrive. Others will not. Either way, we’ll never become a spacefaring species if we can’t expand our collective workspace beyond our cubicles.
I’m not too surprised at this as a *real* second wave development.
I’m not surprised, because I’m an Aspie. My own lacks in this area emphasize the problem. I have observed, for the last 60 years, how little of the communications that takes place in schools, companies, and agencies, and other hierarchies, is intellectual communication. The *vast* majority of social communications is done through emotional cuing in us primates. All the written and textual information in the world does not tell most people how to function socially in these hierarchies.
*That* information comes from the emotional cues given by faces and voices, in full 3-d living presence. Even Zoom, even if it were a trustworthy communications tool without back doors, does not convey on a flatscreen all that a face-to-face meeting with another human does. It is this social information that is missing in:
“Training is tougher. Hiring and integrating new employees, more complicated. Some employers say their workers appear less connected and bosses fear that younger professionals aren’t developing at the same rate as they would in offices, sitting next to colleagues and absorbing how they do their jobs.”
There are 2 possible reactions to this:
1.) Dump work-at-home, along with most such internet cooperative work activities.
2.) Do as we did in the 1980s. We found that just plunking a desktop computer on each desk in the office *didn’t*increase*productivity*, at least not until we had re-organized workflow in order to take advantage of what those computers did for us. We must do that re-organization on a *much* larger scale, to take advantage of working through the internet, while actually *gaining* productivity from what it can give us access to. I suspect that many more will be uncomfortable with this, because it will make networks more productive, without the control exerted by hierarchies’ social communications.
I *suspect* that those constantly looking for control inputs from the social communications passed down the hierarchies of our old ways of working will opt for #1. I dunno how fast #2 goes from “laughable”, to “acceptable”, to “that’s the only way to really get things done!”
I *do* believe it will happen, though.
Just as with using the Internet for online learning, if you do it without training and procedures it won’t turn out well. And to think NASA invented working remotely with Mission Control serving the Astronauts with a global tracking network…
Professor: is it a fact that NASA invented remote working, as you have said? Perhaps it was a little hyperbole to make the point? It’s a serious inquiry-NASA‘s ability to manage, for example, the international space station remotely, is nothing short of marvelous. And certainly NASA brought much to the table. I am just wondering if anyone has ever actually researched the history of remote work. Being in academia perhaps you’re familiar with them issue.
I’ve worked “at home” for the past 28 years of a much longer career. My situation is different, for sure: I’ve always had a completely separate work space (and since 1999, a separate building, but on the same grounds as the house); and my situation never involved a transition from office environment to home environment.
That being said, the biggest issue I’ve always had is motivation. No, not motivation to get off my butt, go into the office, and work, but the exact opposite: tendency to work too much. Yes, some say that home provides distraction, but for me, it’ the opposite.
I do think that my experience overlaps those office workers now Zooming from home, and it’s the deleterious effect on personal relationships; put a different way, perhaps too much of a good thing. My wife and I struggled mightily with this for the first five years, compounded by my wife also working from a home-based studio. There’s no answer to ‘how was your day?’, because you both know the answer!
And this: unless business volume supported larger staff, my firm was always small, and the lack of collegiality cannot be over stated. I didn’t have Zoom, but wonder just how effective it is as a substitute. Folks working from home can speak to this more directly but in my case I really needed input from others on projects.
I’ve teleworked years now, first a day a week, then two, then three the last couple of years. Going into this I felt the immediate allure, atop a psychologist probably saying I’m introverted, or as the meme goes, training for this my whole life. The second thought was how bad this would be for new employees, so many decadal relationships made after the meeting, during dinner, at the bar, over beer, when work receded (finally) in the chit chat.
May you live in interesting times, and all that.
I think those informal, over dinner or whatever, conversations are more important just the relationships they produce. A lot of good work comes out of talking shop over lunch or dinner at conferences, spontaneous conversations, and things like that. Email is very useful, and so is having meetings and talking to people over the internet. But they tend to be scheduled and with an agenda. The spontaneous conversations and unplanned discussions are missing. Well, there is the few minutes at the beginning of a meeting, where you’re killing time while waiting for everyone to call in. But that isn’t much. For me, I’d say working at home 75 to 90% of the time is fine, but once it gets closer to 100% there are a lot of things missing.
I found interactions at cafeteria with simply meeting people I would not normally meet (senior management, astronauts, visiting engineers). Or during social events i.e. chili cookoff, poster sessions but all these curtailed with covid-19 and most likely never to return. And cafeteria probably never open with many teleworking. Tom Billings wrote, “*vast* majority of social communications is done through emotional cuing in us primates” and I’m thinking new employees will no longer “connect” with experienced employees. Will have to see how this all comes about. I also see more disconnect with NASA and general public which there already was a widening.
A mix of telework and on-site work has served me well. I think if you are 100% on telework, you can’t rise in your organization as much or as fast as if have your butt in our seat at work at least some of the time. They don’t know who you are and you become a faceless cog to management. For some though, that may be enough and there are those who’s whole mission is to dodge management and hide in the weeds.
Maybe. As far as “becom[ing] a faceless cog to management,” that assumes other people are going to their offices simply to get noticed not to do useful work. If that’s what management looks for and promoting your career is your main goal, I guess being seen as much as possible is an effective strategy. But I’m not sure that’s a good idea, since you probably won’t end up promoting the best people. And, in terms of actually getting useful work done, there is quite a bit to be said for dodging management. I think of management as a necessary evil, and only useful in the minimum amount necessary. Past that, it becomes a drain on time and effort which could otherwise be used to do useful work. So, of course, many people interested in useful work want to dodge management.
People are people, they promote who they are comfortable with. They more they know you the more comfortable they are with you. It’s a fact of life whether looking for love or getting a job. It’s hard to relate to and thereby trust, a faceless voice on a telecon or a tiny image on MS Teams. Do you telework?
I actually work from home all the time (literally now, but mostly for over a decade.) That included working on the Cassini mission’s science planning and operations, which were primarily “remove operations”, i.e. done by people all over the country (and world) by email and teleconferences. With Cassini, I did not have any problems with the sort of personal relations and trust you’re describing. That’s probably because the majority of the people involved were working through emails and teleconferences (even half way through the mission, most of the people at JPL weren’t going to meetings in person; the scheduled conference rooms tended to be empty, with the JPL folks calling in from home, their car on the way to the lab, or their office.) The notable problem was the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t learn to work that way.
For the personal contact and from the point of view of a scientist, we typically had three, week long project science group meetings, one or two internal, topical science workshops and two or three science conferences many of us attended per year. That would be up to eight weeks per year of in person contact with each other or 15% of the time. Not counting side trips. Since at least two of those meetings per year were in Europe, my American colleagues and I often tacked on some vacation time and spending it together was fairly common. I think I said it was important to have something like 10 to 25% of the work time being in person. Working from home plus week long meetings every month or two, my experience from Cassini, was in that range.
But your comment that, “People are people, they promote who they are comfortable with.” is a little disturbing. I won’t dispute the fact that it’s true, but it’s also at the core of inherent bias and the discrimination that causes. It’s not just people you spend your time with; people are biased towards others with the same background, experience, and (let’s be honest) the same religion and ethnic background. That’s part of an almost universal tendency for people to prefer people who are like themselves. That’s a tendency I think we need to limit not one we should just accept and cater to.
Wow, way off track. The only “inherent bias” is to people that have become relatable and sociable on a personal level through face-to-face communication. This is part of the reason telecons and web conferences can be so awkward, there is more to communication than voice and 2D video. When it comes to promotion withing an organization, it matters as far as I have observed. Also, it’s important to be on the floor in the action. There is no remote teleworking that can replace that. There are other that are happy to keep working the same job until retirement, and I am sure telecons work for them.
I don’t think it’s way off track, but I have ended up hearing lectures on the subject once or twice a year for the past half decade. So the connection may be more obvious to me.
As a starting point, people do have inherent, unconscious biases. They do tend to like people who are like themselves. And a large part of discrimination is a result of that. People who honestly say they are not biased are, based on numerous studies, just lying to themselves.
So when people talk about how to avoid discrimination and increase diversity, a big issue is how to avoid that. How to make things like hiring and promotions _in_sensitive to subjective things like who you like. I’ve even been told that it’s a problem, when pulling together a team, to pick the first person with the right skills you think of. Because that “first person you think of” will be subjectively biased by your own unconscious preference for people like yourself.
You are saying that a bias towards “people that have become relatable and sociable on a personal level” is necessary and normal for one’s career. That’s something I’ve been convinced is bad and should be minimized. Those warm, comfortable feelings are inherently biased in favor people who are like each other. To be blunt, and as just one example, it’s easier for a white, agnostic with a upper middle class background to forge that sort of relationship with other white, agnostic people with an upper middle class background. To me, if working remotely rather than in person interferes with that, it’s a good thing. You are describing it as just how things would about remote working and saying that remote working is a problem because it interferes with that.
To my mind, and also to be blunt, that’s as bad as saying people have to kiss ass to get promoted and advance your career, and that since you can only do that in person, remote working is a problem. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who puts serious effort into making the boss like him should not be promoted, and a competent boss would notice and wouldn’t do so.
And, as a footnote, this isn’t really a contradiction to my earlier comments about personal contact and the need to get to know the people you’re working with. It might seem that way, but I think _knowing_ people is important but _liking_ them should not be. I know and work with several people who are not very likable, and the only way work with them is to know when they are just being jerks (and ignore it) and when they are saying something constructive.
Was it the case that you already had an in-Person relationship with those myriad other folks on the Cassini team? Does that matter in your experience?
For the most part, I didn’t have in person relationships with the people involved. But, now that you mention it, I think one thing that mattered were not only the in person meetings every few months, but the fact that they involved travel. That made having lunch and dinner together vastly more common than with the people I worked with back home. If we’d all lived in the same city, we might or might not have had dinner together a dozen times a year. If you’re away from home, it’s natural to have dinner with the people at the same meeting, and that might mean several dozen times a year when the meetings happen once or twice a month.
“Out of sight, out of mind” is a problem for any remote personnel. I was never concerned with “rising” in any organization, but rather with being as entrepreneurial as an employee of a large, bureaucratic organization could be (an interesting challenge). The group of ~ 10 contractors I ran was zeroed out in the Smilin’ Dan Goldin Red Team-Blue Team exercise back in 1992, while I was in France working on a joint mission for six months. The six-hour time difference didn’t make for great communications, and email was not a thing for all managers at the time.
No really serious harm done. It was time to “right-size” the group anyway, and I managed to get funding for four contractors put back in the budget when I returned to the US. (My very apologetic management hadn’t realized they were throwing the baby out with the bath water. My fault for not keeping them better informed, but my model of entrepreneurship in those days was to keep as few people in the know as possible, until it was time to ask for big bucks.) The other folks were all headed to other jobs anyway, except for one guy, who needed to find a job he could grow in, and he did. I did wonder what would have happened if I’d been working remotely for a full year, though.
No one should take any lessons about the effectiveness of remote work from performance during the pandemic. I’ve been largely remote work for the better part of a decade now, and done my best work during this period. However my performance during the pandemic has been absolutely atrocious–even though nothing changed in terms of my remote work situation!
Turns out, it’s very hard to focus and get work done in high-stress situations, who knew! And normally when I’m working from home the kids are at school, we’re able to take a break and get out of the house in the evenings, we still have a social life, and we’re not scared for our lives every time we go into a grocery store to pick up essentials. All of that takes a huge mental toll that makes productivity very difficult to achive for knowledge workers.
24 years for me. I have worked remotely from Everest Base Camp and Devon Island. If I have comms and my fingers are not frozen, then I can work.
Keith- I’ve ben reading you since long before Devon//Everest. Are you sure your experience can be broadly applied ?’I’m not. You’re a very capable, and driven person, who thrives setting his own goals.
During my own life, I have been mistaken flying my own sensibilities more broadly. Others, unlike you, and me, thrive in a more structured environment. This fact is neither positive nor negative; it is simply the way individuals are built.
And, while again you and I are fully comfortable working alone in a self-guided manner, the truth is that human nature mostly favors a more companionable social interaction. The way we eat group ourselves, and the way we work, are the result of millennia, developed over centuries.
I believe that this newfangled ‘zoom society’ is convenient for now, but is very far from perfect or desirable.
Good observation. Also Zoom is not the best or even a good system for teleworking.
Blackboard, a online learning system, is far better. In addition to a great video conferencing system that is far more secured it includes the ability to set up “rooms” where threaded discussions, file sharing and video recorded posts are available to allow working together before and after the video meetings. And you are able to keep everything secured on your own servers, a Dept. of Education requirement due to federal privacy laws in education. If NASA and the aerospace industry was really computer savvy they would be using it, instead of a third party commercial conferencing system. Unlike Zoom which is new, Blackboard has been around nearly 20 years and benefits from generations of iterative improvements. You aren’t going to be productive in a virtual environment without the right tools to use.
Could you say a little more about those DoE requirements and laws over privacy in education? The University of Colorado has adopted Zoom, basically to the point of making in mandatory, and they are usually very careful about things like protecting students’ and employees’ privacy. I know about the issues with Zoom and things involving cloud storage, but wasn’t aware they were big enough to raise legal concerns.
I am not able to find the DOE link now, but here is the story from CNET that addressed the issue.
https://www.cnet.com/news/s…
And the FBI warning on it.
https://news.clearancejobs….
And one on Zoom and FERPA
https://medium.com/@ryanfan…
There is also the cost involved with Zoom. I was able to point out to my university that we were wasting tens of thousands of dollars on a zoom license only to poorly duplication a capability we already had in Blackboard. The IT department and administratuion was actually surprised to learn numerous faculty committees had been using Blackboard Collaborate to work virtually for years.
As I see it the basic problem is that Administrators and traditional on ground faculty just had no idea of the capabilities of a Course Manage System (CMS) like Blackboard for working in a virtual environment and so just grasped the first fad solution, Zoom, that was offered to them instead of asking folks who actually had experience working in virtual teams how todo it.
It was just like the move to all online learning using faculty who didn’t have a clue, nor any training, of how ro teach online. The poor results didn’t surprise any of us who have been working online for years. It is like giving some kid you never drove a car the keys to a Porche, with the predictable results…
Just read your post: Teleworking at NASA: Benefits or Problems? Another perspective… R&D agencies like mine, NASA, rely heavily on results from physics laboratories, large-scale simulators, testing rocket engines, biology experiments, and human-in-the-loop studies. Some of these kinds of activities are basically dead-in-the-water in the current COVID-19 isolation environment. Other R&D entities in the Silicon Valley face this same dilemma. A number of workflows simply can’t be performed remotely. What does “meaningful work” for NASA truly mean when certain kinds of hands-on physical stuff can’t be done via so-called “virtual collaborative environments’ – as much as such benefits are heavily touted? Distanced “collaboration” can accomplish only so much when one can’t be physically present with one’s colleagues in a lab environment. Maybe this is part of the identity crisis we face. Sigh… Functioning independently, self-motivation, and “thriving” can certainly be part of the synergistic effects of physical presence with 3-D humans. Similarly, space faring species need to be physically present in the cosmos (or at Everest Base Camp or on Devon Island); virtual presence/working from home only goes so far.
It depends on the nature of the work and the capability and quality of the management. If you are working on and responsible for real hardware then you have to have access. If you are an information worker , reviewing, modifying, pr oducing information then teleworking can be better and more conducive to production and there is no need to go back to hardware. I observe fewer NASA people involved in hardware. And I see fewer and fewer NASA people involved in Information production. I see more NASA people trying to keep up with contractors they hav e a role with. From personal experience of you are an information worker and you know what it is you need to produce them teleworking can be beneficial. On the other hand if you’re an information worker and you depend on management for direction, review, then teleworking could be a real issue.
It is a blessings and a curse.
The largest problem is that when everybody in the neighborhood is at home (workers, students, etc), the local ISP cannot handle the traffic. Especially when working with large amounts of data.
I haven’t had that problem (except once as described in another comment), but other people at my institution have. The real problem is that it isn’t clear who to complain to. Is it a person’s local service at home, the lab’s internet, the University’s (which was initially very stressed out trying to do many hundred-plus student lectures with Zoom), or the University’s link to the rest of the world? The COVID-19 crisis has really stress tested our infrastructure, and it hasn’t always passed the test. That’s a solvable problem, but I’m not sure if it will be solved, or if it will be solved by stopgap fixes which are intended to be good enough until things “get back to normal.”
I mostly agree with you. But there can be huge distractions working from home. Not everyone has a home office that has a door, so distractions from other family members/housemates can’t be blocked out.
And I agree with the comment below that, “The spontaneous conversations and unplanned discussions are missing.” It’s these sorts of interactions that often lead to solutions or breakthroughs.
My team is currently being run using the Agile method. The daily scrum can help replace some of those spontaneous conversations. But, Agile teams also run the risk of becoming siloed. In the office, I often talk with many coworkers not on my Agile team. Because of COVID-19, these conversations aren’t happening much, if at all. Becoming siloed is a real detriment to a large organization over the long run.
One thing that is difficult to do from home is stop by someone’s office when they’re taking too long to do something. Also, working on building actual product and with a large team is difficult to do remotely.
Another thing to consider is what if the power goes down? That happened in my area a Friday night about month ago. I figured no problem, use a laptop, throw together something to power the cable modem. But the internet feed/ISP node/whatever went down about an hour later. Though can do plenty of stuff on the laptop (but just ain’t the same as a desktop). Of course some will say get one of those standby generators though not practical for a condo or apt. So to working remotely need a good infrastructure back home, and some just don’t have that. Just saying.
If Starlink lives up to its promises of fast assured Internet access independent of local infrastructure Elon Musk could have a gold mine better than Amazon to bankroll SpaceX with. ?
It’s usually possible to find a work around, although it isn’t ideal. I did something along these lines a week and a half ago. I needed to download about 6 GB of data and my internet connections at home couldn’t handle it. I tried walking to my lab (a 20 minute walk from home) and, without entering (closed to me due to the work at home policy) sit down outside and in range of the lab’s wireless. That didn’t help, since being just outside the door didn’t give me a good enough signal. When the estimated download time came up as two hours, I gave up. On the way back home, I stopped by a recently opened brewpub, and had a late lunch and a drink. On the pub’s free wireless, that 6 GB of data downloaded in about five minutes. I’ve also had good results using my smartphone as a wireless hotspot, when I couldn’t get wireless for my laptop any other way. That’s usually not as fast and can be expensive (which means I think some compensation for work-related use should be in order), but it does work.
It might also be worth repeating a story about a very embarrassed waitress at a restaurant in Uppsala, Sweden. Sweden is essentially a cash-free country these days; they even use credit cards for one dollar (well, ten Krona) bus fares. When we had to pay our bill, the waitress had to apologize, tell us their internet was down, and that they couldn’t process credit cards as a result. She was very embarrassed about that, and gave the impression that the idea of asking for cash implied she and her restaurant were incompetent. So, yes, we are living in a world where technological infrastructure is a necessity not just a convenience. COVID-19 and working from home are a reminder of that. With luck, it will mean people pay more attention to that infrastructure and making sure it’s reliable. But somehow, I’m not feeling optimistic.