It's obvious that Nike won't ever promote remote work and their excuse is that we're a team as in sports teams. However, we've moved away from sport products to leisure apparel. That doesn't add up to the reality. My point? Why not allow for more flexibility when you're already turning every space into freestyle. Let everyone choose where they want to work (home, office, wherever). Thoughts? I would personally want to work from home, but have no issue with the hybrid, just seems like a waste of time for the commute. Zoom worked just fine during the pandemic. That saved money on travel etc., Seems to me, Zoom is the ultimate cross functional global connection. Why is there a push for travel? Zoom is cheaper and safer than in person. Save the money! That money could be spent on greater improvements on our infrastructure or elsewhere. Seem like a waste to me. My opinion, you in person people probably enjoy a-s kissing, feeling large and in charge, and all the ego things. You likely cost the company more financially . I wish we had an audit team on that.
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Thank you for your honest and clarifying responses. That detail is needed for all of us to understand.
Who would have thought an honest and open conversation could happen here.
Well done.
It isn’t a binary issue where remote work is “good” or “bad”. It’s more nuanced where sometimes remote work makes a lot of sense and sometimes it doesn’t. This depends on a number of factors including your particular role at Nike, your org, the culture & people within your org, tenure, and several other factors.
As an example my team hired three people during the pandemic. Two of those three people left within 10 months and 14 months, respectively. Why? It was too difficult to learn their jobs being 100% remote. Not everything can be learned remotely; to say nothing of making personal relationships with people that are important in allowing you to get your own work done. That was a serious barrier for these two people and both understandably quit in frustration.
I know of certain other functions at Nike where literally, physically being there can and often does make a huge difference between success and failure. Because again, not every skill can be effectively transmitted and learned remotely.
With the remote work debate this aspect is something I usually don’t see people acknowledge. Instead the base assumption is that everyone can at all times effectively do their jobs 100% remotely. I’m telling you from personal experience that isn’t always true.
Ideally Nike would recognize this important nuance and allow org managers to determine what makes the most sense for their particular org. With the understanding that some people will have wide latitude to work remotely and some won’t. Instead Nike is mostly going with a “one size fits all” policy that is guaranteed to not please everyone.
When discussing this topic it would be useful for people to remember that Nike is a large company with a lot of roles that are night and day different from each other. Some of those roles are perfectly suited for remote work and some aren’t. Even within those roles some people are perfectly suited for remote work and some aren’t.
I also wouldn’t totally discount the culture aspect. If Nike had always been a remote work company would it be as successful as it is today? While we can’t know for certain my guess would be “No”. A lot of good ‘stuff’ happens for no other reason than you have the right group of people literally sitting in the same room together. Can that dynamic be replicated in a remote environment? Sometimes. But certainly not always. Thinking of my own experiences here over a decade, the biggest wins I’ve had and the best times I’ve had involved and even necessitated people being physically present with each other. Here too it’s difficult to say with any degree of certainty how those same things would have panned out if every stakeholder was remote. My gut tells me some of the magic that created those successes would have been lost.
In other words the issue of remote work isn’t the black and white issue many attempt to make it. My own hope is that Nike allows more delegation of these decisions so that we can ultimately arrive at a place that makes the most sense for the greatest number of people.
The push is for "culture" and to justify an expensive campus. Everyone I work with is remote with only a few people close enough to come into the office, but I am required to go into the office. That means I go into the office to jump on Zoom meetings all day, and if more people come on campus, the limited meeting rooms means a lot of people in open spaces on Zoom meetings to reach teammates outside of the office. This will be super disruptive. I could also see it being used as a reason to force everyone back on campus, but we don't have the local talent to fulfill all the roles we need and a lot of the best talent is being taken by companies allowing fully remote work.
Certain individuals thrive in remote and others thrive in-person, and while remote employees can more easily abuse privileges, I've known plenty of people who come into an office and still manage to get little to nothing done. A lot of companies are moving back into the office but doing "trial runs" and surveys to make it seem like they are taking into account if people are really more productive and how employees really feel about it. They have no intention of letting the majority be remote even if there is data showing more productivity (and lower costs) and employees as wanting it, though I think they will be more open to remote work for those roles they struggle to hire locally. If they weren't worried about backlash, most of these companies would require everyone back tomorrow, and I think Nike falls under that group. In my area of Nike there is a ton of turnover, so I'm guessing the push away from remote work will cause high performers to leave and make it harder to hire them in the first place.
I would prefer to work from home and only come in for certain quarterly meetings or larger gatherings that aren't great when incorporating remote employees (sound issues, picture issues, forgetting to invite people who aren't physically on campus...). If my teams were on campus I'd better understand being on campus all the time, but requiring certain roles on campus while every other team member is remotely located? Zero logic.